Latest News Releases 14 September

The idea of biodegradable plastics sounds good at first. However, very little is known about how they are degraded in the soil and how this is influenced by climate change. In two recent studies, soil ecologists at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) have shown which microbial community is responsible for degradation, what role the climate plays in this process, and why biodegradable plastics could still be problematic.

The sea slug has taught neuroscientists the most basic intelligence features that any creature in the animal kingdom needs to survive. Now, researchers have mimicked these strategies in a quantum material, a step toward figuring out how to build artificial intelligence directly into hardware.

Robot-assisted exercise therapy is effective for stroke rehabilitation. But the design of rehabilitation robots is complicated by a peculiar problem related to “inverse kinematics,” where the angles of the robot’s joints have to be back-calculated from their desired final positions; often, the calculated angles are unnatural for the human body. Now, scientists from Japan have developed a faster, less resource-intensive method to provide naturally feasible solutions to inverse kinematics in upper arm rehabilitation robots.

Sometimes research emerges from the strangest turns of events. In this case, an online video created by an amateur videographer on life under the sea ice in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica, resulted in a unique taxonomic study on Antarctic jellyfish and an image-based training set for machine learning. This study was published in the open-access Biodiversity Data Journal.

Skoltech researchers have investigated a promising type of composite materials in terms of their shape memory behavior: how they resume their original shape following deformation if exposed to the right temperature or other conditions. The materials studied were glass fiber-reinforced epoxy-based flat laminates, produced with a technique called pultrusion. While it has considerable potential for manufacturing composites with shape memory for electronics, biomedicine, and more, the method’s application to such materials is examined for the first time in the Skoltech-led study

A newly developed, low-cost sensor can detect and accurately measure the amount of the widely used and controversial herbicide, glyphosate, in droplets of liquid in a laboratory test. Engineers developed the low-cost sensor, which uses nano-sized tubes, and tested it on orange juice and rice beverage samples they spiked with the herbicide for the study. The glyphosate sensor uses technology that is similar to that used in glucose tests that can quickly measure blood sugar levels from a pinprick of blood.

By combining all available data on the coronavirus’s 3D shape, researchers have revealed new clues on how it evades human immune detection and replicates. Their new resource may help researchers stay ahead of new variants.

Many species will become extinct as a consequence of global warming. This is the prediction of a mathematical model developed at Linköping University, Sweden, presented in Nature Communications. The simulations show that climate change will have a particularly large impact on ecosystems in polar regions, mirroring changes that can already be seen in the natural world.