Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology offer a new method to disrupt spiral waves that uses less energy and that may be less painful than traditional defibrillation.

biodegradable nanomaterials that will take pictures and deliver medicine to combat peripheral arterial disease (PAD). Kytai Nguyen, a UT Arlington bioengineering professor, is the principal investigator in the four-year, $2.1 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant.

Cocrystal engineering is an ingenious strategy for assembling organic molecules through the non-covalent interaction force, avoiding harsh experimental conditions (i.e., high temperature and high pressure). By selecting the appropriate components, the donor-acceptor (D-A) molecules can be assembled like the jigsaw puzzle. Under the intermolecular interaction, such as π–π interactions, hydrogen bonds, and halogen bonds, cocrystal can not only display the intrinsic properties of its components but also show some novel properties, which can realize the “1+1>2” effect. So cocrystal strategy has the advantage in designing multifunctional materials.

Brazilian researchers have designed a new low-cost anaerobic reactor that uses a bacterial biofilm on a sheet of polyurethane foam. The goal is to enable more wastewater treatment plants in Brazil to achieve nitrogen removal and reduce water body contamination.

In the largest epidemiologic study of arsenic and birth outcomes to date, researchers estimated arsenic levels in U.S. private well water sources by county and compared estimates to documented birth outcomes. They found an association between estimated groundwater arsenic concentration and risk of low birth weight.

A research team around Peter Turchin from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (CSH) tests various theories on what drove human socio-cultural evolution in the Holocene. The scientists analyze a vast body of data from Seshat: Global History Databank. They find the best explanation to be a combination of increasing agricultural productivity and the invention, or adoption, of military technologies (most notably, the invention of iron weapons and cavalry in the first millennium BCE).