Thursday 30 May 2019

Winter could pose solar farm 'ramping' snag for power grid

By adding utility-scale solar farms throughout New York state, summer electricity demand from conventional sources could be reduced by up to 9.6% in some places.

* This article was originally published here

Sensor-packed glove learns signatures of the human grasp

Wearing a sensor-packed glove while handling a variety of objects, MIT researchers have compiled a massive dataset that enables an AI system to recognize objects through touch alone. The information could be leveraged to help robots identify and manipulate objects, and may aid in prosthetics design.

* This article was originally published here

Human contact plays big role in spread of some hospital infections, but not others

An observational study conducted in a French hospital showed that human contact was responsible for 90 percent of the spread of one species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to new patients, but less than 60 percent of the spread of a different species. Audrey Duval of the Versailles Saint Quentin University and Institut Pasteur in Paris, France, and colleagues present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers discover a new way to protect against high-dose radiation damage

Radiotherapy is one of the most effective ways to destroy cancer cells and shrink tumors. Around 50 percent of patients with tumors located in the gastrointestinal cavity (liver, pancreas, colon, prostate, etc) receive this type of treatment, which has increased cancer survival rates in recent decades. However, intensive radiation therapy not only damages tumor cells, but also healthy intestinal cells, leading to toxicity in 60 percent of treated patients. Whereas reversal of toxicity is observed after radiotherapy has concluded, 10 percent of treated patients develop gastrointestinal syndrome, a disease characterized by intestinal cell death, resulting in the destruction of the entire intestine and patient death.

* This article was originally published here

REPLAB: A low-cost benchmark platform for robotic learning

Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed a reproducible, low-cost and compact benchmark platform to evaluate robotic learning approaches, which they called REPLAB. Their recent study, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, was supported by Berkeley DeepDrive, the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Google, NVIDIA and Amazon.

* This article was originally published here

The most complete study of battery failure sees the light

An international team of researchers just published in Advanced Energy Materials the widest study on what happens during battery failure, focusing on the different parts of a battery at the same time. The role of the ESRF, the European Synchrotron, in France, was crucial for its success.

* This article was originally published here

Researchers finds new RX target for common STD

Research led by Ashok Aiyar, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology at LSU Health New Orleans School of Medicine, has identified a target that may lead to the development of new treatments for the most common sexually transmitted infection in the US. The results are published this month online in PNAS, available here.

* This article was originally published here