Best of Last Week – No sterile neutrino found, predicting how clothes will look, reducing diabetic organ failure

November 1, 2021 • by Bob Yirka

It was a good week for space research as a team with members from several institutions in the U.S. and one in China found evidence of what might be the first planet discovered outside of the Milky Way galaxy. Also, an international team of researchers used the Gemini Observatory telescope to measure the atmosphere of a planet in a stellar system 340 light-years away. And a team working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory running the MicroBooNE experiment, reported finding no hint of the theoretical particle called the sterile neutrino.

In technology news, a team from the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics, working with a startup called SEMRON GmbH, announced the development of memcapacitor devices for neuromorphic computing applications. Also, a team at TCS Research announced the creation of a deep-learning technique that can predict how a set of clothes would look on different people. And a trio of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University conducted a study in their CyLab that showed how 'normal' internet browsing looks today—Kyle Crichton, Nicolas Christin and Lorrie Faith Crano found that most users spend most of their time on a small number of websites. Also, a team led by a group at X–Alphabet's 'moonshot factory' created a model that suggested that a billion people could get safe drinking water from a hypothetical harvesting device.

In other news, Clalit Research Institute working with a team at Harvard University conducted the largest real-world study of a third dose of COVID-19 vaccine and found it effective in reducing severe COVID-19-related outcomes. And a team at Sandia National Laboratories developed a device that could usher in GPS-free navigation. The technology is based on a cloud of atoms held under just the right conditions.

And finally, if you have type 2 diabetes, you may want to check out the work by a combined team from the Steno Diabetes Center Aarhus and Aarhus University—they announced a new discovery about diabetes that may reduce the risk of organ failure.