During re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, temperatures on the surface of NASA’s space shuttle would reach a searing 1,650 degrees Celsius. Yet, inside the orbiter, astronauts sat safe and sound, protected from the fiery descent by special tiles that also preserved the shuttle’s critical components.

Engineers spent months developing those tiles, subjecting them to a process called materials characterization, in which the mechanical and microstructural properties of substances such as metals and composites are tested and examined under extreme conditions.

University of Miami researchers James Coakley and Giacomo Po know the process better than anyone. And now, their research—which ranges

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from Russia and Israel have come up with a new, simple and inexpensive method of testing liquid biological samples that can be further developed to work in clinical settings, including real-time testing during surgery. The paper was published in the journal Light: Science & Applications.

Image credit: Pixabay (Free Pixabay license)

The most common method of real-time diagnostic testing for biological samples (such as urine or saliva) that is used in the healthcare system, optical label-free sensors, are highly sensitive, but that sensitivity comes at a cost in terms of time and resources. Looking for

You might have observed plants competing for sunlight — the way they stretch upwards and outwards to block each other’s access to the sun’s rays — but out of sight, another type of competition is happening underground. In the same way that you might change the way you forage for free snacks in the break room when your colleagues are present, plants change their use of underground resources when they’re planted alongside other plants.

In a paper published in Science (and featured on the cover), an international team of researchers led by Princeton graduate student Ciro Cabal sheds light

Researchers from Skoltech and the University of Texas at Austin have presented a proof-of-concept for a wearable sensor that can track healing in sores, ulcers and other kinds of chronic skin wounds, even without the need to remove the bandages. The paper was published in the journal ACS Sensors.

Image credit: Pixabay (Free Pixabay license)

Chronic wounds that fail to heal quickly, such as diabetic foot ulcers or pressure ulcers, can be very tricky to manage for healthcare professionals and a nightmare for patients. To monitor the healing process and assess the need for treatment, doctors and nurses normally

Teaching robots to paint in a manner similar to a human painter is an important task in computer vision. A recent paper on arXiv.org proposes a novel approach to this problem, which tackles several limitations of current algorithms.

Image credit: Plinio Nomellini via Wikimedia (Public Domain)

Like in other methods, reinforcement learning is used to predict a sequence of brush strokes from a given image. However, instead of depicting one single image, the novel method employs a semantic guidance pipeline to learn the distinction between foreground and background brush strokes. Also, a neural alignment model is used to zoom in