Tag: #64

Skin cancer can be detected early using mobile phones. Though sun-cream and clothing help with prevention, the latter are often treated with potentially hazardous chemicals. Enter a Finnish research team, which has spun a new yarn. They isolated fibres from a fast-growing species of willow by using sodium bicarbonate and mixed them with the same amount of cellulose. Materials...

A pulsating bed can ensure newborns have the best start to life. Now, a Nigerian startup is using technology to treat babies with jaundice. Working with a paediatrician and her husband, the female founder has developed a solar-powered bed that emits blue LED light in a special wavelength. The rays help the liver break down excess bilirubin in the...

Converting salt water into drinking water, and accelerating plant growth with coloured light can help provide for more people. But according to a team based at Cambridge University, it would make more sense to reimagine the global agricultural map. Their research shows where to situate arable land areas to maximise worldwide yield and minimise environmental impact. Growing wheat, barley...

Urine can be made into fertiliser. Like beer waste mixed with cow dung which also reduces parasite infestation. Potatoes discharge a substance into the soil from their roots which attracts harmful worms. In some parts of Africa, these have reduced harvests to 40%. A science team in North Carolina discovered that banana ‘paper’ can protect against such pathogens if...

Space debris could be cleaned and radioactive uranium removed from water. Solar modules - especially in the desert - need to be dusted regularly in order to generate as much electricity as possible. Over 100 billion litres of water may be needed to clean them each year. Which is why a resourceful research team at MIT is looking at...

Electric energy can be retained in air or by heating carbon blocks. Data, meanwhile, can be stored in DNA. Natural DNA strands consist of 4 components, named nucleotides, denoted by the letters A, G, T and C respectively. When translated into the 1s and 0s of binary, the billions of potentially available combinations result in an extremely high storage...