87 articles from FRIDAY 18.10.2019

Atmospheric pressure impacts greenhouse gas emissions from leaky oil and gas wells

Fluctuations in atmospheric pressure can heavily influence how much natural gas leaks from wells below the ground surface at oil and gas sites, according to new University of British Columbia research. However, current monitoring strategies do not take this phenomenon into account, and therefore may be under- or over-estimating the true magnitude of gas emissions.

The Guardian view on creativity in schools: a missing ingredient | Editorial

Imagination should infuse teaching of science as well as the arts. Children are not pitchers to be filled with factsYou can’t see it, smell it, hear it. People disagree on how, precisely, to define it, or where, exactly, it comes from. It isn’t a school subject or an academic discipline, but it can be learned. It is a quality that is required by artists. But it is also present in the lives of...

Why modified carbon nanotubes can help the reproducibility problem

Scientists have conducted an in-depth study on how carbon nanotubes with oxygen-containing groups can be used to greatly enhance the performance of perovskite solar cells. The newly discovered self-recrystallization ability of perovskite could lead to improvement of low-cost and efficient perovskite solar cells.

Tennessee researchers join call for responsible development of synthetic biology

Engineering biology is already transforming technology and science, and a consortium of researchers across many disciplines in the international Genome Project-write is calling for more discussion among scientists, policy makers and the general public to shepherd future development. In a policy forum article published in the October 18 issue of Science, the authors outline the technological...

All plastic waste could become new, high-quality plastic through advanced steam cracking

A research group at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, has developed an efficient process for breaking down any plastic waste to a molecular level. The resulting gases can then be transformed back into new plastics—of the same quality as the original. The new process could transform today's plastic factories into recycling refineries, within the framework of their existing...

Deep learning method transforms shapes

Called LOGAN, the deep neural network, i.e., a machine of sorts, can learn to transform the shapes of two different objects, for example, a chair and a table, in a natural way, without seeing any paired transforms between the shapes.

A new discovery: How our memories stabilize while we sleep

Scientists have shown that delta waves emitted while we sleep are not generalized periods of silence during which the cortex rests, as has been described for decades in the scientific literature. Instead, they isolate assemblies of neurons that play an essential role in long-term memory formation.

Candidate Ebola vaccine still effective when highly diluted, macaque study finds

A single dose of a highly diluted VSV-Ebola virus (EBOV) vaccine -- approximately one-millionth of what is in the vaccine being used to help control the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo -- remains fully protective against disease in experimentally infected monkeys, according to scientists. The investigators completed the dosage study using cynomolgus macaques and an...

Cutting-edge neuroethics with ground-breaking neurotechnologies

Scientists are developing powerful new devices and technologies to monitor and regulate brain activity. To ensure NIH keeps pace with rapid technological development and help clinicians and researchers ethically fit these new tools into practice, a new article highlights potential issues around and offers recommendations about clinical research with both invasive and noninvasive neural devices.