Imagine wearing a device that continuously analyzes your sweat or blood for different types of biomarkers, such as proteins that show you may have breast cancer or lung cancer. 

Rutgers engineers have invented biosensor technology – known as a lab on a chip – that could be used in hand-held or wearable devices to monitor your health and exposure to dangerous bacteria, viruses and pollutants.

“This is really important in the context of personalized medicine or personalized health monitoring,” said Mehdi Javanmard, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “Our technology enables true labs on chips. We’re talking about platforms the size of a USB flash drive or something that can be integrated onto an Apple Watch, for example, or a Fitbit.”

In a classic tale of science taking twists and turns before coming to a conclusion, two teams of researchers—one a group of theorists and the other, experimentalists—have worked together to solve a chemical puzzle that may one day lead to cleaner air and renewable fuel. The scientists' ultimate goal is to convert harmful carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere into beneficial liquid fuel. Currently, it is possible to make fuels out of CO2—plants do it all the time—but researchers are still trying to crack the problem of artificially producing the fuels at large enough scales to be useful.

In a new study published the week of June 12 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers report the mechanics behind an early key step in artificially activating CO2 so that it can rearrange itself to become the liquid fuel ethanol. Theorists at Caltech used quantum mechanics to predict what was happening at atomic scales, while experimentalists at the Department of Energy's (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) used X-ray studies to analyze the steps of the chemical reaction.

In developing countries, more than three million children are at high risk for permanent blindness due to severe vitamin A deficiency.

Researchers at Dartmouth College have developed a new material that scrubs iodine from water for the first time. The breakthrough could hold the key to cleaning radioactive waste in nuclear reactors and after nuclear accidents like the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

The new-generation microporous material designed at Dartmouth is the result of chemically stitching small organic molecules to form a framework that scrubs the isotope from water.

NASA scientists have found a wide diversity of minerals in the initial samples of rocks collected by the Curiosity rover in the lowermost layers of Mount Sharp on Mars, suggesting that conditions changed in the water environments on the planet over time.

Curiosity landed near Mount Sharp in Gale Crater in August 2012. It reached the base of the mountain in 2014. Layers of rocks at the base of Mount Sharp accumulated as sediment within ancient lakes around 3.5 billion years ago. Orbital infrared spectroscopy had shown that the mountain's lowermost layers have variations in minerals that suggest changes in the area have occurred.

While working for an environmental nonprofit organization in India, Namrata Sengupta investigated how poor waste management and sanitation practices can impact the environment and public health. Her work sparked an interest in environmental toxicology and led her to Clemson University in 2011 as a doctoral student in the field.

Wind turbines rise into the sky on enormous feet. To ensure these giants can reliably generate electricity for many years to come, the iron processing industry must manufacture their massive components in a stable, resource-saving and yet cost-effective way. However, material inclusions such as dross are often unavoidable while casting. Fraunhofer researchers are currently working to detect and analyze such material defects.

Wind turbines should be environmentally friendly, highly efficient, cost-effective, and able to function reliably for at least 20 years. However, as turbines become increasingly powerful, the demands on the components used are growing, and so is the risk of material fatigue. Material defects such as inclusions from slag, known as dross, are considered undesirable because they greatly reduce the load-bearing capacity of cast iron components with spheroidal graphite. This special kind of cast iron is also used to make a wind turbine’s mainframe and rotor hubs. Manufacturing such components is difficult due to the build-up of dross that often occurs despite tricks in casting techniques.

Scientists and engineers from the University of Bath have developed biodegradable cellulose microbeads from a sustainable source that could potentially replace harmful plastic ones that contribute to ocean pollution.

Microbeads are little spheres of plastic less than 0.5 mm in size that are added to personal care and cleaning products including cosmetics, sunscreens and fillers to give them a smooth texture. However they are too small to be removed by sewage filtration systems and so end up in rivers and oceans, where they are ingested by birds, fish and other marine life.

Researchers from the University of Zurich have simulated the formation of our entire Universe with a large supercomputer. A gigantic catalogue of about 25 billion virtual galaxies has been generated from 2 trillion digital particles. This catalogue is being used to calibrate the experiments on board the Euclid satellite, that will be launched in 2020 with the objective of investigating the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

When you think of turbulence, you might think of a bumpy plane ride. Turbulence, however, is far more ubiquitous to our lives than just air travel. Ocean waves, smoke from fire, even noise coming from jet engines or wind turbines are all related to turbulence.