Science Trends

Skating on frozen lake (stock image). The answer to the question of why ice is slippery lies in a film of water that is generated by friction, one that is far thinner than expected and much more viscous than usual water through its resemblance to the "snow cones" of crushed ice we drink during the summer. This phenomenon was recently demonstrated by researchers from the CNRS and ENS-PSL, with support from the École polytechnique, in a study that appeared in  Physical Review X  on 2019, November 4. The "slippery" nature of ice is generally attributed to the formation of a thin layer of liquid water generated by friction, which for instance allows an ice skater to "surf" on top of this liquid film. The properties of this thin layer of water had never been measured: its thickness remained largely unknown, while its properties, and even its very existence, were the subject of debate. What's more, since liquid water is known to be a poor lu...

Cystic fibrosis concept illustration (stock image). A phase three clinical trial that UT Southwestern participated in determined that a three-drug combination improved lung function and reduced symptoms in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients who have a single copy of the most common genetic mutation for the disease. Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration approved the therapy based on the results of this international study, published today in the  New England Journal of Medicine . A companion investigation appearing simultaneously in The Lancet reported on people with one or two copies of the mutation. Dr. Raksha Jain, Associate Professor of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, is corresponding author of the  NEJM  article and an investigator on The Lancet study. Dr. Jain is presenting both studies at the North American Cystic Fibrosis Conference in Nashville this week. CF is a chronic, progressive, and frequently fatal genetic...

A new way of removing carbon dioxide from a stream of air could provide a significant tool in the battle against climate change. The new system can work on the gas at virtually any concentration level, even down to the roughly 400 parts per million currently found in the atmosphere. Most methods of removing carbon dioxide from a stream of gas require higher concentrations, such as those found in the flue emissions from fossil fuel-based power plants. A few variations have been developed that can work with the low concentrations found in air, but the new method is significantly less energy-intensive and expensive, the researchers say. The technique, based on passing air through a stack of charged electrochemical plates, is described in a new paper in the journal  Energy and Environmental Science , by MIT postdoc Sahag Voskian, who developed the work during his PhD, and T. Alan Hatton, the Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering. The device is essentially a large, sp...