By: Julie Chao, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory | May 18, 2021 Sunlight-reflecting “cool walls” have been shown to reduce energy costs by lowering heat gain in buildings. But they do more – reflective walls can also cool cities, fighting the urban heat island effect. The concept has new support from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which has issued a pilot ... Continue Reading »
Engineering + Technology
The Sensitive Brain at Rest
By: Sonia Fernandez, UC Santa Barbara | May 4, 2021 You know that raw overwhelm people have been reporting after months of a pandemic, compounded by economic issues and social unrest? Does fatigue and compulsive social media scrolling strike a familiar chord? Those brittle feelings offer us a glimpse into what regular life can be like for individuals with sensory ... Continue Reading »
Century-old problem solved with first-ever 3D atomic imaging of an amorphous solid
By Wayne Lewis, UC Los Angeles | March 31, 2021 Glass, rubber and plastics all belong to a class of matter called amorphous solids. And in spite of how common they are in our everyday lives, amorphous solids have long posed a challenge to scientists. Since the 1910s, scientists have been able to map in 3D the atomic structures of crystals, the other major class of solids, ... Continue Reading »
Freshwater outflow from Beaufort Sea could alter global climate patterns
Nancy Ambrosiano, Los Alamos National Laboratory | February 24, 2021 The Beaufort Sea, the Arctic Ocean’s largest freshwater reservoir, has increased its freshwater content by 40 percent over the last two decades, putting global climate patterns at risk. A rapid release of this freshwater into the Atlantic Ocean could wreak havoc on the delicate climate balance that dictates ... Continue Reading »
Three-layered masks most effective against large respiratory droplets
Katherine Connor, UC San Diego | March 5, 2021 If you are going to buy a face mask to protect yourself and others from COVID-19, make sure it’s a three-layered mask. You might have already heard this recommendation, but researchers have now found an additional reason why three-layered masks are safer than single or double-layered alternatives. While this advice was ... Continue Reading »
Light unbound: Data limits could vanish with new optical antennas
Sarah Yang, UC Berkeley | February 25, 2021 Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have found a new way to harness properties of light waves that can radically increase the amount of data they carry. They demonstrated the emission of discrete twisting laser beams from antennas made up of concentric rings roughly equal to the diameter of a human hair, small ... Continue Reading »
Doubling creation of antimatter using same laser energy
By Anne M. Stark, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | March 3, 2021 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists have achieved a near-100 percent increase in the amount of antimatter created in the laboratory. Using targets with micro-structures on the laser interface, the team shot a high-intensity laser through them and saw a 100 percent increase in the ... Continue Reading »
‘Self-trained’ deep learning to improve disease diagnosis
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory | March 4, 2021 Work by computer scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and IBM Research on deep learning models to accurately diagnose diseases from X-ray images with less labeled data won the Best Paper award for Computer-Aided Diagnosis at the SPIE Medical Imaging Conference on Feb. 19. The technique, which ... Continue Reading »
Computer analyses of cough sounds reveal infection by COVID
By Doug Ramsey, Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego | February 5, 2021 Millions of people already use Fitbit and other devices to monitor and track a variety of personal health metrics. Now, a researcher at the University of California San Diego has published data indicating that analyzing voice signals can detect COVID-19 infection when compared with sample audio ... Continue Reading »
Eavesdropping on cellular conversations
By Brian Bell, UC Irvine | February 17, 2021 An interdisciplinary team of biologists and mathematicians at the University of California, Irvine has developed a new tool to help decipher the language cells use to communicate with one another. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, the researchers introduce CellChat, a computational platform that enables ... Continue Reading »