Tag: #14

Spicy food makes us sweat. It’s the capsaicin that does it. Since sweating is about converting energy, researchers at the East China Normal University decided to transpose the effect to something completely different. Solar cells. An ultra-thin lead-based cell is more proficient than its silicon-based counterpart at absorbing sunlight, but less good at converting it into energy. Add a...

Standing in a darkened room, we perceive someone’s presence without seeing them. The same is true for the elephant-nose fish, whose special organs discharge small voltages into the water around it, creating electric fields. If these electric fields are disturbed by an intruder, electroreceptors on the fish’s skin raise the alarm. By swimming around the intruder, the fish can...

They say birds of a feather flock together. And nowhere is this more apparent than in the field of US medicine, where only 2.9% of those studying to be a doctor are black men. The reasons for this discrepancy are complex. Equally complex is how the established system of white men has been maintained for so long. A documentary...

Some days we awake with a spring in our step. Nerve fibers in our spinal cord transmit messages between our brain and muscles. For those living with paraplegia restoring such communication was thought impossible. However, a new kind of gene therapy tested on mice has delivered astonishing results. Scientists at the Ruhr-Universität in Bochum had already discovered that a...

When we are robbed of strength we need support. Role-models, fictional or not, have an important function here. They spur us on. Take, for example, the Black professor and engineer inspired by the late Black Panther actor who fought for the rights of black men working in science. Motivated by the film hero’s superpowers, he developed an exoskeleton with...

It doesn’t matter whether we’re at home or on the road. Once we’ve made ourselves comfortable, we don’t like to move. But what if we could move from boat to beach without dipping a toe in the sand? Now that is luxury… Well, that’s what the design firm responsible for the first solar-powered amphibious superyacht thought too. With space...