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Science tank

Welcome to our “Science Tank” section. In this area of ​​the website, we deal with relevant discoveries from the world of science (physics, mathematics, computer science, medicine and many more) in an interdisciplinary manner. We publish important achievements from around the world with a special focus on the scientific environment in Göttingen. Have fun and stay curious.     

It is thinner than a hair and can be glued to the heart. A new type of cardiac pacemaker was developed in Korea

Pacemaker have been saving people's lives for decades. However, these are large devices that are complicated and risky to implant. The solution of the future could lie in a device developed and tested at Yonsei University in Seoul. There, an ultra-thin device was developed that monitors the heart and, if necessary, electrical Signal gives. It has a special coating that makes it stick to a moist organ, like the heart.

Korean scientists tested it on a live rabbit and an artificial heart. The research results give cause for optimism. In your opinion, the device could one day be conventional Pacemaker replace.

Yonsei scientists focused on solving the problem of cardiac arrhythmias. This is a situation in which the heart beats too fast, too slow, or irregularly. Sometimes the arrhythmias are subtle or not a major problem, but sometimes they can be life-threatening. In the latter cases, the implantation of a pacemaker be the only way to save the patient's life.

Image Source: Science.org ; Which

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"Green" hydrogen can be extracted from the air

The most desirable method of hydrogen production - the production of hydrogen from water by electrolysis - consumes a lot of energy. The optimal solution would be to use energy from so-called renewable sources. Professor Gang Kevin Li from the University of Melbourne has a method for making Hydrogen made of air with a humidity of only 4%. This paves the way for them hydrogen production in semi-arid areas where there is the greatest potential for so-called renewable energy, but there is no access to sufficient water.

Currently, most of the hydrogen produced is derived from natural gas or coal. Greener methods of making it are being developed around the world.

Li and his team decided hydrogen from the air to win. At any point in time there is about 13 trillion tons of water in the atmosphere. It occurs even in semi-arid areas. The Australian scientists obtained hydrogen from the air with a high purity of 99 percent. Their prototype plant was in operation for 12 days. In that time they could, on average, almost 750 liters Hydrogen per day and square meter electrolyser.

Image source: Pixabay; Which

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New system regenerates the protective layer of the tokamak interior without turning it off

Researchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have shown that a system they developed to deliver boron powder to a fusion reactor reactor walls continuously protect and prevent plasma degradation. Its gradual contamination by tungsten is detrimental to the overall reaction and presents an obstacle to the construction of a practical one fusion reactor period.

The Nuclear fusion is a way to generate cheap, clean and safe energy. However, due to numerous technical difficulties, mankind has not yet managed to build a fusion reactor that produces more energy than is fed into it and sustain the reaction process for a long period of time.

In fusion reactors - the most common type is the tokamak - is increasing tungsten used. This is because this element is very resistant to high temperatures. That Plasma however, can damage the tungsten walls of the reactor, resulting in tungsten entering and contaminating the plasma. Boron protects the tungsten from negative effects and prevents it from entering the plasma. In addition, it absorbs unwanted elements such as Oxygen, which can enter the plasma from other sources. These elements can cool down the Plasmas and lead to a termination of the reaction.

Image Source: Wikipedia ; Which

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Chinese remotely control immune cells. Natural microbots will help medicine

The neutrophils are part of the non-specific immune system, our body's first line of defense against pathogens. Their advantages are their rapid responsiveness, ability to eliminate various threats, and ability to penetrate from blood vessels into infected tissue. They are therefore excellent candidates for use as micro robot. However, most previous strategies for targeting them rely on their natural mode of action, which often lacks speed and precision.

Chinese researchers at Jinan University have set out to change this. They reported on the deployment in ACS Central Science optical tweezers for manipulating neutrophils in a living organism. The scientists decided when the neutrophils Granulocytes be activated and what route they would take to their destination. This allowed them to get drugs exactly where they wanted them and cleanse the body without having to alter the neutrophils themselves. In this way, they used the neutrophils naturally present in the body as micro robotthat they could control.

The Chinese are not the first to try micro robot use for medical purposes. However, with most current techniques micro robot generated outside the body and introduced into the body. However, this comes with a number of problems, from causing inflammation to removing the micro robot through the body before they can serve their purpose. 

Image source: Pixabay; Which

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Artificial synapses 10.000 times faster than biological synapses

A team of scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has developed a resistor that is a natural one brain synapse which, according to the authors, is a thousand times smaller and ten thousand times faster than its biological counterpart. The researchers described their approach, particularly the idea, when designing artificial neural networks Balancing memory persistence and processing speed, in a publication in Science.

They designed an element whose conductivity was determined by the introduction or removal of Protons into a phosphosilicate glass (PSG) channel. In a way, this mimics the behavior of biological synapses that ions for transmitting signals across the gap between two Neurons use. The device is equipped with three connectors, two of which are the input and the output of the Synapse represent, while the third serves to apply an electric field that excites protons to move from the reservoir to the PSG channel or vice versa, depending on the direction of the electric field. More protons in the channel increase its resistance.

 Image Source: Pixabay ; Science

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Innovative ultrasound patch allows 48-hour monitoring of the body

The Ultrasound examination (USG) is a safe, non-invasive method that allows a physician to obtain valuable information about a patient's internal organs. However, it currently requires the use of large, bulky and expensive equipment that is only available in doctor's offices. Engineers at MIT have created a miniature ultrasound systemdeveloped that can be stuck to the skin like a band-aid and for 48 hours provides images.

Tests on volunteers have shown that the device adheres well to the skin and provides good quality images of large blood vessels and deeper organs. In addition, it was possible to change the organs recorded during various activities when subjects were sitting, standing, walking, or cycling.

At this stage, the prototype needs a wired connection to a device that converts the reflected waves into images. However, as the developers assure us, it could be useful even now. For example, it could be used in a hospital to continuously monitor a patient without a doctor having to perform the examination.

 Image source: MIT ; Which

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An important step was taken at Harvard to produce human hearts for transplant

The Heart is unable to regenerate after damage. Therefore, the efforts of tissue engineering specialists trying to develop techniques for the regeneration of the cardiac muscle to develop and in the future to create a whole heart from scratch is of great importance for cardiology and cardiac surgery. This is a difficult task, however, as unique structures must be modeled, most notably the spiral arrangement of the cells. It has long been suspected that this type of cell organization is necessary to pump sufficiently large volumes of blood.


Bioengineers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences have succeeded in creating the first biohybrid model of a human heart chamber spirally arranged cardiac cells to create and thereby prove that the assumption was correct. This spiral arrangement of the cells significantly increases the amount of blood that is pumped with each heartbeat. This is an important step that brings us closer to the goal of building a transplantable heart from scratch," says Professor Kit Parker, one of the lead authors of the study. We can read the results on the pages of Science ...

 Image source: Pixabay; Which

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AI predicts crimes with 90 percent accuracy

An AI model has managed to correctly predict crimes in eight US cities a week before they occur with 90 percent accuracy, reports Ishanu Chattopadhyay of the University of Chicago, who and his team created a virtual "twin city" surveillance model using crime data in Chicago created from 2014 to late 2016.

The model, which has produced similar results in seven other cities, focuses on the types of crimes committed and where they were committed. Ninety percent of the predictions were accurate for geographic areas up to two-quarters in size, delineated by intersecting streets.

 Image source: Pixabay; Which

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Blood cells are made a little differently than you might think. This could have implications for the fight against cancer

blood cells form differently than previously thought, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital report in Nature. In studies on mice, they have shown that such cells are not made of one, but of two kinds of progenitor cells are formed. This in turn can be of enormous importance for the treatment of Blood cancer, for bone marrow transplants and for the development of immunology.

So far it has been assumed that most of our blood originates from a small number of cells that become blood stem cells, also known as hematopoietic stem cells. To our astonishment, we discovered that there is a second group of progenitor cells that are not derived from stem cells. It is they who make up most of the blood in our body from fetus to early adulthood, after which their contribution to blood formation decreases," says senior physician Fernando Camargo.

The newly discovered cells are embryonic multipotent progenitor cells. The researchers are now examining whether their discovery, which they made in mice, can also be applied to humans. If this is the case, it could help develop methods of boosting the immune system in older people, new insights into blood cancers, especially in children, gain or improved methods for bone marrow transplant to allow.

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Knowing how information is transmitted in the brain will help treat neurodegenerative diseases

When scientists began in the early 20th century, the Brain activity using electrodes, they noticed signals they called "brain waves." Since then they have been the subject of intensive research. We know that waves are a manifestation of synchronized neuronal activity and that changes in wave intensity indicate decreasing or increasing activity of groups of Neurons represent. The question is whether and how these waves are involved in the transmission of information.

That question was answered by Tal Dalal, a PhD student at Bar-Ilan University's Multidisciplinary Brain Research Center. From a paper published in Cell Reports, researchers found that the degree of synchronization of brainwaves in the field of information transmission have changed. They then examined how this affected the transmission of the information and how it was understood by the area of ​​the brain that it reached.

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Detect cancer in a drop of blood

A group of researchers led by Ms. Cho Yoon-kyoung from the Institute of Basic Research (IBS) in Korea has one biosensor developed by analyzing a drop of blood Cancer can recognize. The chip consists of nanoporous gold electrodes. The researchers named the development process SEEDING, which is an English acronym for the technique - "surfactant electrochemical etching and deposition process for the growth of nanostructures and nanopores".


Tests of the new biosensor have confirmed that it enables rapid detection of prostate cancer in patients by analyzing blood and urine samples. This is made possible by detecting a specific type of protein associated with cancer-causing exosomes. The method is much faster and more convenient than previously known methods of sample analysis, which require separation and dilution of biomarkers, which is usually done in large medical facilities or laboratories.

 Image source: The Korea Herald

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