Nearly two-thirds of the Indian population depends on agriculture for their livelihood.  Disruptions in rainfall pattern affect them all as most of the agricultural land is rain-fed. Over  the second half of the 20 th century, levels of grain production have fallen due to deficiencies  in rainfall. Are the errant monsoon rains linked to the rising levels of pollution? A study  from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay says so. The researchers, Mr Prashant Dave,  Prof. Mani Bhushan and Prof. Chandra Venkatraman have discovered that aerosols cause  aggravated breaks in the monsoon, which could significantly influence drought and impact  agriculture.

When spraying paint or coatings onto a surface, or fertilizers or pesticides onto crops, the size of the droplets makes a big difference. Bigger drops will drift less in the wind, allowing them to strike their intended targets more accurately, but smaller droplets are more likely to stick when they land instead of bouncing off.

Now, a team of MIT researchers has found a way to balance those properties and get the best of both — sprays that don’t drift too far but provide tiny droplets to stick to the surface. The team accomplished this in a surprisingly simple way, by placing a fine mesh in between the spray and the intended target to break up droplets into ones that are only one-thousandth as big.

Low-tech ways of improving soil quality on farms and rangelands worldwide could pull significant amounts of carbon out of the atmosphere and slow the pace of climate change, according to a new UC  Berkeley study.

The researchers found that well-established agricultural management practices such as planting cover crops, optimizing grazing and sowing legumes on rangelands, if instituted globally, could capture enough carbon from the atmosphere and store it in the soil to make a significant contribution to international global warming targets.

Chronic rhinosinusitis is distinct from your average case of seasonal allergies. It causes the sinuses to become inflamed and swollen for months to years at a time, leading to difficulty breathing and other symptoms that make patients feel miserable. In some people, this condition also produces tissue outgrowths known as nasal polyps, which, when severe enough, have to be removed surgically.

By performing a genome-wide analysis of thousands of single cells from human patients, MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital researchers have created the first global cellular map of a human barrier tissue during inflammation. Analysis of this data led them to propose a novel mechanism that may explain what sustains chronic rhinosinusitis.

Ageing in worms mainly results from the direct action of genes and not from random wear and tear or loss of function, and the same is likely to be true in humans, according to research by UCL, Lancaster University and Queen Mary University of London scientists.

The study, published in Current Biology and funded by Wellcome, shows that normal biological processes which are useful early on in life, continue to ‘run-on’ pointlessly in later life causing age-related diseases.

In a new study in cells, University of Illinois researchers have adapted CRISPR gene-editing technology to cause the cell’s internal machinery to skip over a small portion of a gene when transcribing it into a template for protein building. This gives researchers a way not only to eliminate a mutated gene sequence, but to influence how the gene is expressed and regulated.

Such targeted editing could one day be useful for treating genetic diseases caused by mutations in the genome, such as Duchenne’s muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s disease or some cancers.

Tiny balls of nano-sized cellulose fibres added to food reduced fat absorption by up to half in laboratory and animal experiments, report scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and Harvard University, United States. 

This discovery could aid in the global battle against obesity, as experiments done in a simulated gastrointestinal tract showed that nanocellulose fibres 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair could cut fat absorption by up to 48 per cent.

In animal experiments, rats fed with heavy cream containing nanocellulose absorbed 36 per cent less fats than rats fed with heavy cream alone. 

MIT researchers have designed an optical filter on a chip that can process optical signals from across an extremely wide spectrum of light at once, something never before available to integrated optics systems that process data using light. The technology may offer greater precision and flexibility for designing optical communication and sensor systems, studying photons and other particles through ultrafast techniques, and in other applications.

The latest development in textiles and fibers is a kind of soft hardware that you can wear: cloth that has electronic devices built right into it.

Researchers at MIT have now embedded high speed optoelectronic semiconductor devices, including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and diode photodetectors, within fibers that were then woven at Inman Mills, in South Carolina, into soft, washable fabrics and made into communication systems. This marks the achievement of a long-sought goal of creating “smart” fabrics by incorporating semiconductor devices — the key ingredient of modern electronics — which until now was the missing piece for making fabrics with sophisticated functionality.

The image recognition technology that underlies today’s autonomous cars and aerial drones depends on artificial intelligence: the computers essentially teach themselves to recognize objects like a dog, a pedestrian crossing the street or a stopped car. The problem is that the computers running the artificial intelligence algorithms are currently too large and slow for future applications like handheld medical devices.

Now, researchers at Stanford University have devised a new type of artificially intelligent camera system that can classify images faster and more energy efficiently, and that could one day be built small enough to be embedded in the devices themselves, something that is not possible today. The work was published Aug. 17 in Nature Scientific Reports.

Relief may be on the horizon for anyone who has ever jumped around a room like a jack-in-the-box to get motion-sensing lights to turn back on. A new motion sensor based on metamaterials is sensitive enough to monitor a person’s breathing.

In a pair of new studies, researchers from Duke University and Institut Langevin, France, have shown that patterns made by radio waves can detect a person’s presence and location anywhere inside a room.

The findings appeared recently in Scientific Reports and Aug. 6 in the Physics Review Letters.

Harvard University researchers have developed a new printing method that uses soundwaves to generate droplets from liquids with an unprecedented range of composition and viscosity. This technique could enable the manufacture of many new biopharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and food, and expand the possibilities of optical and conductive materials.

“By harnessing acoustic forces, we have created a new technology that enables myriad materials to be printed in a drop-on-demand manner,” said Jennifer Lewis, the Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the senior author of the paper. Lewis is also a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the Jianming Yu Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard.

The research is published in Science Advances.

The discovery of buckyballs surprised and delighted chemists in the 1980s, nanotubes jazzed physicists in the 1990s, and graphene charged up materials scientists in the 2000s, but one nanoscale carbon structure – a negatively curved surface called a schwarzite – has eluded everyone. Until now.

UC Berkeley chemists have proved that three carbon structures recently created by scientists in South Korea and Japan are in fact the long-sought schwarzites, which researchers predict will have unique electrical and storage properties like those now being discovered in buckminsterfullerenes (buckyballs or fullerenes for short), nanotubes and graphene.

Roboticists are envisioning a future in which soft, animal-inspired robots could be safely deployed in difficult-to-access environments, such as in delicate surgical procedures in the human body.

Although centimeter-sized soft robots have been created, thus far it has not been possible to fabricate multifunctional, flexible robots that can move and operate at smaller size scales.

A team of researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Boston University now has overcome this challenge by developing an integrated fabrication process that enables the design of soft robots on the millimeter scale with micrometer-scale features. To demonstrate the capabilities of their new technology, they created a robotic soft spider — inspired by the millimeter-sized colorful Australian peacock spider — from a single elastic material with body-shaping, motion, and color features.

The study is published in Advanced Materials.

A rechargeable battery technology developed at the University of Michigan could double the output of today’s lithium ion cells—drastically extending electric vehicle ranges and time between cell phone charges—without taking up any added space.

By using a ceramic, solid-state electrolyte, engineers can harness the power of lithium metal batteries without the historic issues of poor durability and short-circuiting. The result is a roadmap to what could be the next generation of rechargeable batteries.

“This could be a game-changer—a paradigm shift in how a battery operates,” said Jeff Sakamoto, a U-M associate professor of mechanical engineering who leads the work.

After a 24-hour delay, the Parker Solar Probe, earth’s first spacecraft to venture inside the orbits of Venus and Mercury to touch the very edge of the sun’s fiery corona, was launched at 3:31 a.m. EDT on Aug. 12.2018

Outfitted with instruments designed and built at the University of California, Berkeley, the Parker Solar Probe will achieve a goal that space scientists have dreamed about for decades: to get close enough to the sun to learn how the turbulent surface we see from Earth dumps its energy into the corona and heats it to nearly 2 million degrees Fahrenheit, spawning the solar wind that continually bombards our planet.

A decade ago, just three of the 2,500 students enrolled in leadership and organizational change professor Brian Uzzi’s classes knew about machine learning. Five years ago, three became 10%, and now, this topic is “the number one thing all students want to learn about,” Uzzi says.

Machine learning is definitely a hot topic these days, and both Uzzi and management and organizations professor Adam Pah (left), who together have been studying machine learning for more than two decades, have some ideas about its benefits, pitfalls and vast potential.

Engineers at Caltech have developed a new control algorithm that enables a single drone to herd an entire flock of birds away from the airspace of an airport. The algorithm is presented in a study in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

The project was inspired by the 2009 "Miracle on the Hudson," when US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of geese shortly after takeoff and pilots Chesley Sullenberger and Jeffrey Skiles were forced to land in the Hudson River off Manhattan.

A novel encryption method devised by MIT researchers secures data used in online neural networks, without dramatically slowing their runtimes. This approach holds promise for using cloud-based neural networks for medical-image analysis and other applications that use sensitive data.

Outsourcing machine learning is a rising trend in industry. Major tech firms have launched cloud platforms that conduct computation-heavy tasks, such as, say, running data through a convolutional neural network (CNN) for image classification. Resource-strapped small businesses and other users can upload data to those services for a fee and get back results in several hours.

Machine learning – a form of artificial intelligence in which computers use data to learn on their own – is rapidly growing and poised to transform the world. But current models are vulnerable to privacy leaks and other malicious attacks, Cornell Tech researchers have found.

Used for everything from predicting what customers want to buy to identifying people at risk for a certain disease, machine learning models are “trained,” or taught to perform specific tasks, by processing large sets of data.

Vitaly Shmatikov, professor of computer science at Cornell Tech, developed models that determined with more than 90 percent accuracy whether a certain piece of information was used to train a machine learning system. This could potentially expose sensitive genetic or medical information, detailed data about people’s habits or whereabouts, and more.

To diagnose depression, clinicians interview patients, asking specific questions — about, say, past mental illnesses, lifestyle, and mood — and identify the condition based on the patient’s responses.

In recent years, machine learning has been championed as a useful aid for diagnostics. Machine-learning models, for instance, have been developed that can detect words and intonations of speech that may indicate depression. But these models tend to predict that a person is depressed or not, based on the person’s specific answers to specific questions. These methods are accurate, but their reliance on the type of question being asked limits how and where they can be used.

How basic academic research in the country can help in realizing the dream of designing a reusable hypersonic aircraft

What if you could fly from Mumbai to New York in just 2.5 hours? If manned hypersonic flights were a reality, you wouldn’t have to spend about 18 long hours in a cramped aeroplane! Research works led by Prof. Shripad P. Mahulikar from the Aerospace Department, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB) are contributing to setting up a foundation to make hypersonic aeroplane design a reality. The researchers have proposed changes to the aircraft geometry to address the problem of heating of the body at the extremely high speed.