Post Scientist

Google on Thursday said it is shutting down Stadia, the cloud video game service it launched three years ago to let people access console-quality play as easily as they do email. Listen this article in our  podcast . "It hasn't gained the traction with users that we expected so we've made the difficult decision to begin winding down our Stadia streaming service," Google vice president Phil Harrison said in a blog post. Google said it will refund purchases of Stadia hardware, such as controllers, as well as game content bought through its online store, and that players will have access to the service through January 18 of next year, he added. "They had a great idea and a bad business model," Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said of Stadia. "They tried to offer the servi...

One of the world's biggest climate challenges is decarbonizing fossil energy uses that cannot be directly electrified using renewable power. Among so-called "hard-to-abate" (HTA) sectors are major industries that rely on fossil fuels, either for high-temperature energy or for chemical feedstocks. These include iron and steel, cement, chemicals, and building materials, together responsible for approximately 30% of the world's annual CO 2 emissions. Listen this article in our  podcast . Another HTA sector is heavy-duty transportation such as trucking and shipping, which is harder to electrify than passenger transport because it would require enormous batteries that add to vehicle weight and take a long time to charge. As countries examine pathways towards decarbonization, relatively wealthy...

Researchers have used a novel near-infrared light imaging technique to capture the first cross-sectional images of carbon dioxide in the exhaust plume of a commercial jet engine. This new state-of-the-art technology could help accelerate turbine combustion research aimed at developing engines and aviation fuels that are more environmentally friendly. Listen this article in our  podcast . "This approach, which we call chemical species tomography, provides real-time spatially resolved information for carbon dioxide emissions from a large-scale commercial engine," said research team leader Michael Lengden from the University of Strathclyde in the U.K. "This information has not been available before at this industrial scale and is a big improvement over the current industry-standard emissions measu...

Uruguay was a pioneer in the legalization of recreational cannabis use, a move that helped to push many drug traffickers out of the domestic market. Listen this article in our  podcast . But a bland and insufficient state supply has meant most consumers still prefer the diversity of the black market. In 2013, Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize recreational marijuana use—which came into effect four years later—even permitting its sale in pharmacies. There are three legal ways for registered users to get hold of marijuana: purchasing it at pharmacies, through home growing for personal use, and by belonging to an official cannabis-producing club. The most sought after legal method is membership of one of the 249 consumer clubs, which offer a greater variety to their 7...

Prof. Ehud Pines is an iconoclast. What else can you call a scientist who spent 17 years doggedly pursuing the solution to an over 200-year-old chemistry problem which he felt never received a satisfying answer using methods no other scientist thought could lead to the truth? Now, he is vindicated as Angewandte Chemie published a cover article detailing how his experiment was replicated by another research group while being X-rayed to reveal the solution Prof. Pines has argued for all along. Listen this article in our  podcast . The question at hand is: How does a proton move through water? In 1806, Theodor Grotthuss proposed his theory, which became known as the Grotthuss Mechanism. Over the years, many others a...

Microprocessors in smartphones, computers, and data centers process information by manipulating electrons through solid semiconductors, but our brains have a different system. They rely on the manipulation of ions in liquid to process information. Listen this article in our  podcast . Inspired by the brain, researchers have long been seeking to develop "ionics" in an aqueous solution. While ions in water move slower than electrons in semiconductors, scientists think the diversity of ionic species with different physical and chemical properties could be harnessed for richer and more diverse information processing. Ionic computing, however, is still in its early days. To date, labs have only developed individua...

Two milliseconds—or two thousandths of a second—is an extraordinarily long time in the world of quantum computing. On these timescales the blink of an eye—at one 10th of a second—is like an eternity. Listen this article in our  podcast . Now a team of researchers at UNSW Sydney has broken new ground in proving that 'spin qubits'—properties of electrons representing the basic units of information in quantum computers—can hold information for up to two milliseconds. Known as 'coherence time', the duration of time that qubits can be manipulated in increasingly complicated calculations, the achievement is 100 times longer than previous benchmarks in the same quantum processor. "Longer coherence time me...

Stem cells overflow with potential. Their ability to become other cell types is crucial to our bodies, both during development and throughout life. But this potential can be our very downfall if it goes wrong, turning some of our most useful cells into malignant cancers. Listen this article in our  podcast . While investigating a pathway involved in stem cell differentiation, researchers at UC Santa Barbara found that rather than forming an assembly line or rigid structure, all the proteins involved coalesce into a liquid droplet. Through modeling and manipulation, the team began to reveal how cells use this droplet to process and relay information, and how it might malfunction in cancers. Their results appear in t...

It's not uncommon in the scientific world for a process to have many unique applications. For example, Idaho National Laboratory researchers have taken a water treatment technology and adapted it for another environmentally important function—selectively separating rare earth elements and transition metals. This chemical process, recently described in a Nature Communications article, significantly reduces both the energy and product consumption involved with rare earth element recovery. Listen this article in our  podcast . Rare earth metals are a collection of chemically similar metallic elements that tend to occur at low concentrations in nature and can be difficult to separate from one another. They are valuable ...

The neurohormone oxytocin is well-known for promoting social bonds and generating pleasurable feelings, for example from art, exercise, or sex. But the hormone has many other functions, such as the regulation of lactation and uterine contractions in females, and the regulation of ejaculation, sperm transport, and testosterone production in males. Listen this article in our  podcast . Now, researchers from Michigan State University show that in zebrafish and human cell cultures, oxytocin has yet another unsuspected function: It stimulates stem cells derived from the heart's outer layer (epicardium) to migrate into its middle layer (myocardium) and there develop into cardiomyocytes, muscle cells that generate heart c...

Non-invasive sensors laid on the skin's surface to measure bioelectrical activity could offer a better alternative for patients suffering with poor gut health. Listen this article in our  podcast . Stefan Calder, a recent Ph.D. graduate at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI), at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland is the lead and joint-first author for two papers published in prestigious scientific journals this month on gut health. Stefan says gastric disorders are increasingly prevalent in humans, but reliable non-invasive tools to objectively assess gastric function are lacking. "Many people suffering with chronic gut issues are on a constant diagnostic treadmill of antibiotics or proton pump inhibitors until they are sent for an endoscopy. A reliable surface-bas...

While illegal for recreational use, psychedelic drugs are showing great promise as treatments for severe depression and anxiety, as well as alcohol addiction and other conditions. Some advocates and scientists believe the actual psychedelic trip—hallucinations and profound emotional experiences—is what leads to long-lasting therapeutic effects. Other scientists speculate that if the "trip" could be eliminated from such drugs, then only the therapeutic effects might remain. Researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill, UC San Francisco, Yale, Duke, and Stanford have taken a major step toward answering that question. Listen this article in our  podcast . Published in Nature , this research in animal models show it's possi...