Tokyo, Japan - Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have studied the properties of mixtures of silicone-coated "magic sand", a popular kid's toy, and normal sand. Silicone-coated sand particles were found to interact with each other only, and not with other sand particles. The team discovered that adding silicone-coated sand beyond a certain threshold leads to an abrupt change in...
A research group led by KAUST Associate Professor Andrea Fratalocchi has discovered that silicon nanoshapes act as feed-forward neural networks with the ability to be trained in a supervised learning model to perform user-defined tasks at lightspeed. The new flat optics opens the door to a major technological revolution by offering small, cheap, flexible alternatives to current processors and to...
After 'trying on' three placebo methods for the delivery of a rectal microbicide, study participants said they could see all of them - a douche, rectal suppository and fast-dissolving rectal insert - fitting into their daily lives. These results, which also identified the product attributes most important to participants, underscore the importance of developing a range of HIV prevention products...
Understanding cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying brain "plasticity" is crucial for explaining many illnesses and conditions. Neurocientists from Göttingen University and University Medical Center Göttingen (UMG) managed to repeatedly image synapses, tiny contact sites between neurons, in awake adult mice. They are the first to discover that adult neurons in the primary visual...