Best of Last Week: Observing the Pauli principle, a human battery and a drug that fights obesity
It was a good week for physics as a team at Heidelberg University's Physics Institute found a way to directly observe the Pauli principle in action. Also, a group led by a team at Delft University of Technology devised a way to control a magnet's state by optically shaking its atomic lattice—a feat that could lead to lead to faster and more energy-efficient data processing technologies. And a team led by a group at the University of Cambridge developed "magnetic graphene" that they claimed represented a new kind of magnetism—one that could lead toward a better understanding of superconductivity in rare materials.
In technology news, a team at the University of Colorado Boulder developed a wearable device that turns the human body into a biological battery—the device is worn like a ring or bracelet and works by harnessing body heat. Also, Romanian threat researcher Alex Birsan made headlines when he announced that he had been able to hack his way into 35 major technology firms. And a combined team from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ETH Zürich announced the debut of their latest iteration of HuggieBot—a soft and human-size robot that hugs users upon request. Also, a team at the Yale School of Engineering and Applied Science developed a new coating that they claimed was a breakthrough for hydrogen fuel.
In other news, reporters with the AFP newswire spoke with several airborne disease transmission experts and for the most part, they all suggested that it is time for everyone to start wearing a better mask—such as the N95—due to the development pace of new SARS-CoV-2 variants. And a team at the University of Toronto discovered how the coelacanth recently evolved dozens of new genes. The fish was thought to have gone extinct millions of years ago, but its rediscovery led to its nickname: the living fossil.
And finally, people struggling with obesity might want to check out the results of a recent study—an international team of researchers found that the drug semaglutide, when used for treating obesity, cut body weight by 20 percent.
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