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A new report from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, suggests that many people who track health-related data with wearable devices and smartphone apps are interested in sharing that data with researchers in medical and public health—provided adequate privacy controls exist.

NXP Semiconductors today announced the release of the KMA215, a programmable angle sensor with digital output, which is compliant with the most recent Single Edge Nibble Transmission (SAE J2716 JAN2010 SENT) standard. The KMA215 is also prepared for the future, already supporting 12bit High-Speed transmission with doubled frame rate, which is under consideration for future SENT releases.

Anthropologists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and geneticists at University College London, working in collaboration with archaeologists from Berlin and Kiev, have analyzed ancient DNA from skeletons and found that selection has had a significant effect on the human genome even in the past 5,000 years, resulting in sustained changes to the appearance of people.

Soybean improvement through plant breeding has been critical over the years for the success of the crop. In a new study that traces the genetic changes in varieties over the last 80 years of soybean breeding, researchers concluded that increases in yield gains and an increased rate of gains over the years are largely due to the continual release of greater-yielding cultivars by breeders.

(Phys.org) —Astronomers have used NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) XMM-Newton to show a supermassive black hole six billion light years from Earth is spinning extremely rapidly. This first direct measurement of the spin of such a distant black hole is an important advance for understanding how black holes grow over time.

As science and technology go nano, scientists search for new tools to manipulate, observe and modify the “building blocks” of matter at the nanometer scale. With this in mind, the recent publication in Nature Nanotechnology in which ICFO researchers demonstrate for the first time the ability to use near-field optical tweezers to trap a nano-size object and manipulate it in the 3 dimensions of space, is an exciting achievement.

Researchers at Columbia University have made a significant step toward visualizing small biomolecules inside living biological systems with minimum disturbance, a longstanding goal in the scientific community. In a study published March 2nd in Nature Methods, Assistant Professor of Chemistry Wei Min’s research team has developed a general method to image a broad spectrum of small biomolecules, such as small molecular drugs and nucleic acids, amino acids, lipids for determining where they are localized and how they function inside cells.

At the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), now under construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Hard X-ray Nanoprobe beamline (HXN) will enable scientists to image structures at ever-smaller spatial scales. HXN’s long-range goal is to achieve a resolution of 1 nanometer (nm), or a billionth of a meter, completely eliminating the long-standing resolution gap between x-ray and electron microscopes

Scientists studying the sexual transformation of the malaria parasite have solved a long-standing mystery in parasite biology. Two research teams have independently discovered that a single protein acts as the master genetic switch that triggers the development of male and female sexual forms of the malaria parasite.

Researchers at the San Diego Supercomputer Center at the University of California, San Diego, have developed software that greatly expands the types of multi-scale QM/MM (mixed quantum and molecular mechanical) simulations of complex chemical systems that scientists can use to design new drugs, better chemicals, or improved enzymes for biofuels production.