’Mini earthquakes’ turn tiny chips into radio signal powerhouses

People who witness a street conflict also experience tension and stress themselves. At the same time, they actively seek contact with others in order to feel a sense of closeness. This contact, in turn, reduces the tension experienced by bystanders, according to new research by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NSCR and the University of Turin.

Chemists at Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and Utrecht University have developed a new method to produce a promising chemical building block from biomass.

Some materials behave unexpectedly. They crack differently than expected, or react in ways that are hard to explain. The answer often lies in their atomic structure. Is it neatly arranged, as in a crystal, or disordered, as in glass? Researchers at the University of Twente have now created a material that is both simultaneously. In two directions it is disordered; in the third, perfectly ordered. Their findings have been published in Nature Communications .

An estimated 500 million to 1 billion people worldwide are affected by selenium deficiency, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Researchers at Wageningen University & Research (WUR), working with the University of Turin in Italy, have developed a metabolic map describing how plants take up and process selenium.