Progress in developing nanophotonic devices capable of withstanding high temperatures and harsh conditions for applications including data storage, sensing, health care and energy will depend on the research community and industry adopting new "plasmonic ceramic" materials, according to a commentary this week in the journal Science.

Steve Gundrum was grinning on Thursday when he climbed out of a Toyota some might call a cross between a zippy scooter and an eco-friendly electric car.

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers at China's University of Science and Technology has found that lines drawn on paper by an ordinary pencil can be used as a simple sensor. In their paper published in Advanced Functional Materials, the team describes how they tested the paper and pencil sensor idea and suggest applications for which it might be useful. Newscientist offers some background on the work done by the team.

A message for you on Thursday from Andrew Flynn, software engineer, on the official Android blog: Android Device Manager, which was launched in 2013 to help find your Android phone, has a new twist. The Android blog said thus far the Android Device Manager has helped reunite almost 30 million users with their phones and tablets and has just become even more useful. Keep "watch" on your phone. In short, they announced support for Android Wear.

Japanese electronics giant Sony on Friday launched its PlayStation gaming console in China, where authorities impose strict controls on content, but some popular titles including "Grand Theft Auto" and "Call of Duty" were not available.

A broken arm as a boy led Cosmin Mihaiu and some inventive colleagues to turn tedious physical rehabilitation exercises into a game that they hope can make it easier for people to recover from injuries.

What has been so frustrating throughout the metadata "debate" is that we have been kept in ignorance as to what it was that the law enforcement agencies actually wanted to retain.

There are claims that Microsoft is to retire its Internet Explorer web browser and replace it with an all-new browser called Spartan with the upcoming release of Windows 10.

Our fast-approaching future of driverless cars and "smart" electrical grids will depend on billions of linked devices making decisions and communicating with split-second precision to prevent highway collisions and power outages. But a new report released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) warns that this future could be stalled by our lack of effective methods to marry computers and networks with timing systems.

Commercial air travel safety could see significant improvements thanks to a breakthrough in aircraft flight control technology from researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Taxi drivers in California must submit to fingerprinting for criminal background checks. UberX drivers don't have to. Yet Uber Technologies advertises itself as "the safest rides on the road" and executives tout Uber as "safer than a taxi."

I love options. Most of us are familiar with external batteries that can be used to charge up a cellphone or tablet when a plug is not handy. I have several, and most of them get their power by plugging into a USB port. They're great until you use up the power. Then they're dead weight until you plug them in to recharge.

Apple's ambition to be a dominant player in television is expected to accelerate the unraveling of the pay-TV bundle.

Sharon Ly was in the fifth grade when a computer programming class at a community center in Vietnam sparked her interest in technology.

Developer Curtis Herbert worries that a winter's worth of work on an Apple Watch app will come to nothing.

You will soon be able to participate in cutting-edge medical research - from the comfort of your iPhone.

Get ready to replace your computer cables and buy some new adapters - the ports and plugs you use with your computers, tablets and smartphones are about to start changing.

Tired of trying to remember a different password for each of your online accounts? Or worried about re-using the same password too many times? You're not alone. Tech experts agree that traditional passwords are annoying, outmoded and too easily hacked.

As the 2016 presidential race comes into view, social media app-of-the-moment Meerkat offers American candidates a promising but perhaps risky way to reach out to the masses.

Researchers in Japan have jointly developed a robot with four arms and four crawlers which can perform multiple tasks simultaneously to help clean up the rubble left after the 2011 quake-tsunami disasters in Minamisoma, Fukushima.

The House of Representatives has finally passed the third tranche of national security legislation, concerning the mandatory retention of all Australians' data when they use telecommunications services.

The role that schools play in nurturing creative talent was at the centre of an audience-led digital debate in Birmingham this week.

Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) is developing an entirely new kind of welding system, one which solves quality and productivity problems related to automated and mechanised welding. The system is self-adjusting, flexible and adaptable, such that it can be integrated as part of different robotic systems and different manufacturers' power supplies.

Research faculty members in the Center for Micro-Engineered Materials and Chemical and Biological Engineering Alexey Serov, Plamen Atanassov, Kateryna Artyushkova and Ivana Gonzales will spend the next two years working to develop materials for a cheaper, more durable and stable electrocatalyst for fuel cells.

Researchers are on the verge of a breakthrough that will allow for the wide-scale use of thermoplastic composites in the automotive industry. These 'futuristic materials' are ultra-light, while being strong and rigid and also sustainable and recyclable. Researchers at the ThermoPlastic Composite Research Center (TPRC) in Enschede (Netherlands) were recently successful in overcoming the last hurdle, which was to design practically faultless components and to make the process for doing so predictable. This makes it possible to determine at an early stage of the design process whether a component can be manufactured at all. This means that the two biggest requirements made by the automotive industry, namely weight reduction and reduced costs, can be satisfied.

When a pair of filmmakers first approached video game publisher Capcom about crafting a live-action movie based on their popular zombie series "Dead Rising," they were asked to prove themselves in a very specific way: The creators behind such video game franchises as "Street Fighter" and "Resident Evil" handed the movie producers a game controller.

Turkey's parliament has approved legislation to tighten the government's control over the Internet by allowing it to block websites without prior judicial authorisation, official media said Friday.

(Medical Xpress)—If you meet someone who speaks another language that you do not understand, you may not just miss what is being said but what is being perceived. Prof. Panos Athanasopoulos of Lancaster University works in areas of experimental psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics, bilingual cognition, linguistic and cultural relativity, first, second and additional language learning—all of which indicate that language learning today is being studied and measured by scientists in ways that go beyond handling vocabulary and sentence structure.

A cancer drug could be made 50 times more effective by a chemical found in stinging nettles and ants, new research finds.

Having a strong sense that your life has meaning and direction may make you less likely to develop areas of brain damage caused by blockages in blood flow as you age. This research is reported in the American Heart Association's journal Stroke.

The functional differences between autistic and non-autistic brains have been isolated for the first time, following the development of a new methodology for analysing MRI scans.

One of the world's most popular weed-killers—and the most widely used kind in the U.S.—has been labeled a probable carcinogen by the International Agency for Research on Cancer.

Penn Medicine researchers have discovered that hypermethylation - the epigenetic ability to turn down or turn off a bad gene implicated in 10 to 30 percent of patients with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and Frontotemporal Degeneration (FTD) - serves as a protective barrier inhibiting the development of these diseases. Their work, published this month in Neurology, may suggest a neuroprotective target for drug discovery efforts.

By 2030, chronic subdural hemorrhage (SDH) will be the most common adult brain condition requiring neurosurgical intervention in the U.S., according to a new study conducted by researchers at NYU Langone Medical Center. And hospitals and neurosurgeons may be under-manned to handle the projected onslaught of patients.

Government health advisers say a once-a-day respiratory inhaler from GlaxoSmithKline appears safe and effective for adults with asthma, but not for adolescents.

New research is changing long-held ideas of how our minds age, painting a richer picture of different cognitive skills peaking across a lifetime, with at least one—vocabulary—peaking at a time when many are considering retirement.

You probably already have it in your diaries, but just in case you don't, 20 March is the International Day of Happiness. You know it's real because there's an official website and everything (www.dayofhappiness.net/about/).

Suspending kids from school for using marijuana is likely to lead to more—not less—pot use among their classmates, a new study finds.

More than a third (35%) of 12-year-olds and 28% of 15-year-olds say they have been embarrassed to smile or laugh due to how they felt about their teeth, finds a new UCL-led report commissioned by the Health and Social Care Information Centre.

A new study published in the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) suggests the link between aspirin and colon cancer prevention may depend on a person's individual genetics.

If every new car made in the United States had a built-in blood alcohol level tester that prevented impaired drivers from driving the vehicle, how many lives could be saved, injuries prevented, and injury-related dollars left unspent?

Deadly familial stomach and lobular breast cancers could be successfully treated at their earliest stages, or even prevented, by existing drugs that have been newly identified by University of Otago cancer genetics researchers.

A new analysis co-written by a University of Illinois expert in health care economics concludes that increases in the pace of medical innovation reduce overall physical risks to health, and thus function in a manner similar to an expansion of or improvement in the efficiency of health insurance markets.

Measuring the concentration of leukemia cells in patient bone marrow during the first 46 days of chemotherapy should help boost survival of young leukemia patients by better matching patients with the right intensity of chemotherapy. St. Jude Children's Research Hospital investigators led the research, which appears in the March 20 edition of the journal Lancet Oncology.

A team of researchers at Saarland University headed by Professor Axel Mecklinger have shown that a short nap lasting about an hour can significantly improve memory performance. The study, which was coordinated by graduate research student Sara Studte, involved examination of memory recall in 41 participants. The volunteers had to learn single words and word pairs. Once the learning phase was over, the participants were tested to determine how much information they could remember. About half of the participants were then allowed to sleep, while the others watched a DVD. After that, the participants were re-tested and those who had taken a nap were shown to have retained substantially more word pairs in memory than the participants in the control group who had watched a DVD. The results of the study have been published in the respected academic journal Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

The first blood test for osteoarthritis could soon be developed, thanks to research by the University of Warwick.

Experts are calling for a global review of guidelines used to diagnose sepsis, after a study found one in eight patients with infections severe enough to need admission to an Intensive Care Unit in Australia and New Zealand, did not meet current criteria.

Breastfeeding could help reduce the risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children, according to a WA-led study.

(HealthDay)—Public reporting of outcomes may be tied to lower rates of percutaneous revascularization and higher in-hospital mortality among acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients in reporting states, compared to nonreporting states, according to a study published in the March 24 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Every day, patients around the country get IV devices placed in their arms, to make it easier to receive medicines or have blood drawn over the course of days or weeks. But these PICC lines, as they're called, also raise the risk of potentially dangerous blood clots.

Scientists should reduce antibiotic use in lab experiments - according to a researcher at the University of East Anglia.

When a nursing home patient is dying, aggressive interventions such as inserting a feeding tube or sending the patient to the emergency room can futilely exacerbate, rather than relieve, their distress. Palliative care focuses nursing home resources on providing comfort at the end of life, but nursing directors vary widely in their knowledge of it. A new large national study found that the more nursing directors knew about palliative care, the lower the likelihood that their patients would experience aggressive end-of-life care.

(HealthDay)—Handheld echocardiography (HAND) and auscultation improves detection of rheumatic heart disease (RHD) compared with auscultation alone, according to a study published online March 16 in Pediatrics.

(HealthDay)—While most white people who develop skin cancer are older men, the reverse is true in Asian and Hispanic populations, a new study suggests.

(HealthDay)—As health officials in Kansas struggle with an outbreak of tuberculosis (TB) at a local high school, federal officials reported Thursday that the annual decline in U.S. cases is slowing. The report was published in the March 20 issue of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

A new study provides the first evidence that the mediator complex subunit 15 (MED15) may play a crucial role in the pathophysiology of head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC). MED15 overexpression was found to be associated with higher mortality rates in HNSCC patients with cancer recurrence, particularly in oral cavity/oropharyngeal tumors, according to the study published in The American Journal of Pathology. MED15 overexpression was also associated with heavy alcohol consumption, which is an HNSCC risk factor.

Medicine obviously can't do much good if it sits on a pharmacy shelf. Yet more than one-quarter of the acne patients surveyed by Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center researchers didn't get medications prescribed by their dermatologists.

Scientists from Montana State University and Sweden have discovered an antioxidant system that helps sustain the liver when other systems are missing or compromised.

A study reported in this week's Science Translational Medicine found that qualified investigators are more likely to respond to opportunities for clinical trials if they are contacted by an institution-specific point person, or navigator.

Banning sodas from school vending machines, building walking paths and playgrounds, adding supermarkets to food deserts and requiring nutritional labels on restaurant menus: Such changes to the environments where people live and work are among the growing number of solutions that have been proposed and attempted in efforts to stem the rising obesity epidemic with viable, population-based solutions. But which of these changes actually make an impact?

Health experts at an anti-tobacco conference in Abu Dhabi defended e-cigarettes on Friday, dismissing widespread concerns that the devices could lure adolescents into nicotine addiction.

A new technique to create tissue-engineered bladders has been shown to decrease scarring and significantly increase tissue growth. The bladders are produced using scaffolds coated with anti-inflammatory peptides. Tissue-engineered organs such as supplemental bladders, small arteries, skin grafts, cartilage, and even a full trachea have been implanted in patients, but the procedures are still experimental, very costly, and often fail.

Health officials say they found no active tuberculosis cases among infants possibly exposed to a TB-infected El Paso hospital worker.

Trauma is responsible for more global deaths annually than HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined. Yet healthcare systems in many countries are missing out on life-saving treatments learnt on the battlefield, according to a review by King's College London and published today in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

The baby's condition, tetralogy of Fallot, was complicated by the fact that he was also missing his pulmonary valve and one of his pulmonary arteries was detached. But a doctor gave the distraught parents a glimmer of hope.

European scientists recently discovered a novel therapy to treat a subgroup of patients with hereditary breast/ovarian cancer. Both the EU and the US have approved an accelerated procedure to market this promising new treatment with few side effects. On the web portal HorizonHealth.eu, the researchers reveal that they have now also developed a special technique to keep tumour tissue alive outside the human body. They can use this to identify patients that are likely to respond to the new therapy. The first results suggest that more than a thousand patients in the Netherlands alone may benefit from the new treatment every year.

Sipuleucel-T (trade name Provenge) has been approved since September 2014 for men with metastatic prostate cancer who have few or no symptoms and do not yet require chemotherapy. In the dossier assessment conducted by the German Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care (IQWiG) in January 2015, no added benefit could be derived for sipuleucel-T.

In a delay that some say may have cost lives, the World Health Organization resisted calling the Ebola outbreak in West Africa a public health emergency until last summer, two months after staff raised the possibility and long after a senior manager called for a drastic change in strategy, The Associated Press has learned.

In 1971 there were 139,000 Canadians aged 85 and over. By 2013 their numbers had risen to 702,000. The Oldest Old as they have become known today represent 2% of the total Canadian population. "They are a demographic reality which has to be taken into account in formulating public policy", according to Jacques Légaré, a demographer at the University of Montreal, who is presenting a report on this phenomenon this week to more than a hundred experts meeting at the Population Change and Lifecourse Strategic Knowledge Cluster in Ottawa.

Florida International University scientists are battling prostate cancer at the cellular level. Researchers from FIU's Biomolecular Sciences Institute (BSI) believe they can eradicate prostate cancer that returns in patients who were previously treated by castration. Castration-resistant prostate cancer has no known cure, with 75 percent of patients dying within the first five years of onset.

A patient has tested positive for Ebola in Liberia's capital, officials said Friday, deflating hopes that the West African nation had beaten the disease after weeks with no new cases.

More than two dozen California vintners are facing a lawsuit claiming their wines contain dangerously high levels of arsenic.

Children's growth disorders can be detected earlier and more efficiently with the help of new growth monitoring tools, according to research from the University of Eastern Finland. These tools include up-to-date growth reference curves, evidence-based screening cut-off values for abnormal growth and automated growth monitoring based on electronic health records.

A single-drop DNA test invented by University of Queensland scientists could revolutionise the detection of diseases in humans, livestock and crops.

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers working at the University of Bristol in the U.K. has found a way to build supermicelles from simple polymers. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes their 3-step process and the types of supermicells they were able to build. In-Hwan Lee, Suyong Shin and Tae-Lim Choi with Seoul National University in South Korea offer a Perspective piece describing the work done by the team and their results, in the same journal issue

Researchers at the University of Stavanger have taken on a nearly impossible task. With support from Total E&P Norge AS, they will attempt to develop new chemicals that combat scaling better than any substance we know today.