An international collaboration, including Northwestern University, has reached a critical milestone in the search for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up about 85% of all matter in the universe. Located two kilometers below ground in Canada, the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search (SuperCDMS) at SNOLAB has cooled to its operating temperature, the collaboration announced on March 17.
A new study from the University of British Columbia has found that artificial turf fields across Metro Vancouver leach 6PPD-quinone, a chemical known to kill coho salmon, into municipal stormwater systems—and the contamination persists long after the fields are installed.
Green investors often boast that they can support sustainability without sacrificing returns. But new research from Texas McCombs suggests otherwise. It also offers governments opportunities to raise more money from those investors for sustainable projects. The work is published in the Journal of Financial Economics.
Engineers at the University of Pennsylvania have developed a new type of lipid nanoparticle (LNP) that could one day serve as a universal immunotherapy for cancers that form solid tumors, including common variants such as cancers of the breast, liver, and colon.
Proteins, one of the smallest building blocks of life on Earth, hold promise for answering some of biology's biggest questions. Consisting of amino acids strung together into peptide chains, these molecules perform much of the work inside living cells. While they execute life's most essential functions with apparent ease, decoding their precise sequence and structure has long been one of biology's hardest challenges.
Plastic trash has reached the world's most remote locations, from the bottom of the Mariana Trench to the summit of Everest. Hundreds of plastic-eating microbes that could help us clean up have been discovered over the past quarter of a century, but there is a long way to go before they can be put to work in natural environments: Microbial digestion of plastic is still slow, requires high temperatures, and only proceeds efficiently in bioreactors. Moreover, most plastic-eating microbes discovered so far can only digest a single kind of plastic.
ORNL is a leader both in developing advanced radiotherapies and in providing the radioisotopes needed for those therapies. According to Karen Sikes, director of the National Isotope Development Center, the lab is home to more than 300 isotopes that are available to researchers and others. Besides actinium-225, medical radioisotopes on the list include lead-212, an in vivo alpha emitter generator going through clinical trials for the treatment of liver, prostate, skin and other cancers, and actinium-227, which decays to the alpha emitter radium-223, found in the approved drug Xofigo used to treat prostate cancers that have spread to bone.
Dallas-Fort Worth has all the right ingredients to be a national powerhouse for innovation—from a robust economy, world-class research universities to a diverse, dynamic workforce—yet an SMU-led study found the region isn't fully realizing that potential. The study, published in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, found that DFW's innovation productivity is lower than expected based on its assets and strengths. The metroplex was one of 65 U.S. regions measured in patent activity after adjusting for income, education, unemployment, and startup activity.
Climate change, population growth, conflict and humanitarian crises are putting increasing pressure on the world's water resources. That is why Norwegian researchers are looking into whether atmospheric water generators can become part of the solution. This type of water generator extracts moisture from the air using moisture-absorbing materials and converts it into drinking water. But they need to become more efficient.
