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33 articles from ScienceDaily

Thirsty wheat needed new water management strategy in ancient China

Research shows that a practice of purposeful water management, or irrigation, was adopted in northern China about 4,000 years ago as part of an effort to grow new grains that had been introduced from southwest Asia. But the story gets more complex from there. Wheat and barley arrived on the scene at about the same time, but early farmers only used water management techniques for wheat. The results...

A dual boost for optical delay scanning

Various applications of pulsed laser sources rely on the ability to produce a series of pulse pairs with a stepwise increasing delay between them. Implementing such optical delay scanning with high precision is demanding, in particular for long delays. Addressing this challenge, physicists have developed a versatile 'dual-comb' laser that combines a wide scanning range with high power, low noise,...

Mimicking life: Breakthrough in non-living materials

Researchers have discovered a new process that uses fuel to control non-living materials, similar to what living cells do. The reaction cycle can easily be applied to a wide range of materials and its rate can be controlled -- a breakthrough in the emerging field of such reactions. The discovery is a step towards soft robotics; soft machines that can sense what is happening in their environment...

Death of a star reveals midsize black hole lurking in a dwarf galaxy

An intermediate-mass black hole lurking undetected in a dwarf galaxy revealed itself to astronomers when it gobbled up an unlucky star that strayed too close. The shredding of the star, known as a 'tidal disruption event' or TDE, produced a flare of radiation that briefly outshone the combined stellar light of the host dwarf galaxy and could help scientists better understand the relationships...

Automated system to detect compressed air leaks on trains

Researchers have developed a proof-of-concept system to autonomously detect compressed air leaks on trains and relay the location of the leaks to mechanical personnel for repair. The automated system could reduce the time, costs and labor needed to find and repair air leaks, and it could lower the locomotive industry's overall fuel consumption and exhaust emissions.

En route to human-environment interaction technology with soft microfingers

Human-robot interactions not only allow robots to interact with humans but also with the environment. Microrobots, for instance, can interact with insects and measure the force exerted by them during flight or walking. However, this interaction is not direct, with the microrobots measuring insect behavior primarily. Now, researchers have developed a soft micro-robotic finger that allows humans to...

Immune system reboot in MS patients

Blood stem cell transplantation is a radical but highly effective therapy for multiple sclerosis. A study has now examined in detail the way in which the treatment curbs the autoimmune disease and how the immune system regenerates afterwards. A better understanding of these mechanisms should help the treatment approach, currently approved in only a few countries, to gain wider acceptance.

Copper a clue in the fight against cancer

For cancer cells to grow and spread around the human body, they need proteins that bind copper ions. New research about how cancer-related proteins bind the metal and how they interact with other proteins, opens up potential new drug targets in the fight against cancer.