New Atlas

Health & Wellbeing Audio available

Selective hearing: AI-powered listening device picks a voice out of a crowd

Nick Lavars May 16, 2019

Hearing aids can have trouble separating a voice a listener wants to hear from all the background noise. Through a new form of artificial intelligence scientists believe they have come up with a solution that could be of huge benefit to those with hearing impairments.

How we pick out single voices from noisy environments is referred to by scientists as the ...

Medical

Pig lungs live and breathe outside the body for 36 hours in organ transplant breakthrough

Michael Irving May 7, 2019

Transplanting any organ is a complicated process, but lungs are particularly vulnerable to damage. Now, researchers have developed a way to repair that damage, keeping the lungs of pigs alive outside the body for up to 36 hours and allowing them to bring the organ up to a transplantable quality.

Researchers have developed a way to rehabilitate damaged lungs so they're suitable for transplant

Medical

Dual studies offer incredible insights into connection between depression and the gut

Rich Haridy May 7, 2019

Two new studies build on a growing body of evidence linking depression with mechanisms in our gut. While one team has uncovered a connection between serotonin and gut dysfunction, another team found microbiome transplants can transfer symptoms of depression from one animal to another.

One study has described a connection between serotonin and gut dysfunction, while another has revealed how ...

Science Audio available

New desalination method could get industry – and the environment – out of a very salty pickle

Matt Kennedy May 7, 2019

"Hypersaline brine" is industrial waste-water with salt levels that exceed even that of seawater. It’s a big, expensive, destructive problem which a team of engineers at Columbia University in New York City hope to solve with their solvent-based method of desalination.

The researchers believe that the temperature swing solvent extraction desalination method could be transformational for the ...

Science Audio available

Ancient pee helps archaeologists track the rise of farming

Michael Irving April 17, 2019

One of the most important transitions in human history was when we stopped hunting and gathering for food and settled down to become farmers. Now, to reconstruct the history of one particular archaeological site in Turkey, scientists have examined the salts left behind from human and animal pee.

The Aşıklı Höyük site in Turkey, where researchers have studied urine salts to estimate human and ...

Robotics Audio available

Robotic "particles" swarm together to move towards the light

Michael Irving March 20, 2019

Most robots are usually made to do one particular job, so they’re not very adaptable to new situations. But researchers at MIT, Harvard, Columbia and Cornell Universities have developed particle robots – simple circular devices that can connect to each other magnetically to move and work as a swarm.

A new system of "particle robots" can swarm together to achieve things that individual units can't ...

Health & Wellbeing Audio available

Flexible, high-performance transistors pave the way for mini medical sensors and implants

Dario Borghino February 28, 2019

Scientists at Columbia University have developed flexible, functional, waterproof transistors. These could find use in building miniaturized medical sensors, brain-machine interfaces, or long-term implants.

A high-performance, biocompatible, flexible transistor developed at Columbia University could serve as the building block for ...

Robotics Audio available

Engineers build robot arm with rudimentary self-awareness

Michael Irving January 31, 2019

Researchers from Columbia Engineering have gone and done it, giving a robot arm some form of self-awareness – at least in a rudimentary sense, which allows it to better adapt to changing conditions.

Researchers have given a robot arm a rudimentary form of self-awareness, to help it adapt to ...

Space Audio available

New moon rising? Astronomers spot evidence of first exomoon

Michael Irving October 3, 2018

Although it’s basically a sure thing that exomoons are out there, astronomers haven’t been able to spot any – until now. Scientists using NASA’s Hubble and Kepler space telescopes have found evidence of a large moon orbiting a gas giant planet some 8,000 light-years away.

An artist's impression of the exomoon which may have been discovered orbiting the distant planet Kepler ...

Science

Polymer coating uses tiny bubbles to cool buildings

Ben Coxworth September 28, 2018

In many parts of the world, particularly developing nations, people paint buildings' roofs white in order to reflect sunlight and thus keep those buildings cooler. A new paint-like polymer could make that approach more effective than ever.

The bright-white coating gets put to the test