Researchers in Shanghai have developed a high-efficiency cryomodule with high quality factors, promising enhanced performance and accessibility for particle accelerator applications in healthcare, industry, and scientific research.

QUT researchers have identified a new material which could be used as a flexible semiconductor in wearable devices by using a technique that focuses on the manipulation of spaces between atoms in crystals.

One of the challenges of fighting pancreatic cancer is finding ways to penetrate the organ’s dense tissue to define the margins between malignant and normal tissue. A new study uses DNA origami structures to selectively deliver fluorescent imaging agents to pancreatic cancer cells without affecting normal cells. The study, led by University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign mechanical science and engineering professor Bumsoo Han and professor Jong Hyun Choi at Purdue University, found that specially engineered DNA origami structures carrying imaging dye packets can specifically target human KRAS mutant cancer cells, which are present in 95% of pancreatic cancer cases.

A research team led by Dr. TANAKA Toshiko and Dr. HARUNO Masahiko at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT), investigated how avatar-mediated communication affects human decision-making. They discovered that participants were more likely to take risks when facial expressions (such as admiration or contempt) were displayed by avatars than when the same expressions were shown on real human faces. This increase in risk-taking was found to result from a more favorable valuation of the "uncertainty" of facial feedback in the avatar condition. Furthermore, fMRI analysis revealed that this valuation of uncertainty depends on activity in the amygdala.

Expecting feedback from an avatar compared to a real human facilitates risk-taking behavior in a gambling task, and a brain region called the amygdala is central to this facilitation, according to a study published April 22^nd in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Toshiko Tanaka and Masahiko Haruno from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan.