News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Know that sickening feeling when you find your car banged up by a runaway shopping cart? It may become just a bad memory if auto body manufacturers make use of a new suite of tests developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and three industry partners. Data from these tests could eventually help your vehicle's exterior better defend itself against dings, dents, scratches and things that go bump on the highway.

New 3D maps of water distribution during cellular membrane fusion are accelerating scientific understanding of cell development, which could lead to new treatments for diseases associated with cell fusion. Using neutron diffraction at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, researchers have made the first direct observations of water in lipid bilayers used to model cell membrane fusion.

At NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. data was used to create a map of rainfall generated by Super Typhoon Mangkhut.

Using a bioinformatics approach, University of California San Diego School of Medicine researchers found that CD4+ T cell's binding partner, a molecule called MHC-II, may have even more influence on emerging tumors than MHC-I, the better known partner of CD8+ T cells. The finding, published September 20 in Cell, may help researchers improve cancer immunotherapies and predict which patients will respond best.

The University of Texas at Arlington has patented a smart seat cushion that uses changes in air pressure to redistribute body weight and help prevent the painful ulcers caused by sitting for long periods of time in a wheelchair. The same technology can be used to create prosthetic liners that adapt their shape to accommodate changes in body volume.

There's quite a story behind calaverite. Apart from its marked impact on the Gold Rush, the mineral has been a headache and a great paradox for crystallographers for decades. The deeper researchers dug into it, the more new questions came up. Scientists from Russia and Germany have succeeded in interlacing all the oddities of calaverite within a simple model, so experimenters can now hunt for the new compound they predicted, AuTe, unknown until now.