We rarely think about the electricity impact of something like a conveyor belt at an airport.   When our luggage goes on , or we step on one, numerous gears with ball- and slide-bearings go to work.

The power consumption is tremendous, in the range of several gigawatt hours per annum. A substantial amount of this is lost through friction. In wind turbines and in cars, too, a percentage of the energy is spent on friction – reducing the efficiency factor accordingly. Novel lubricants that almost eliminate the effect of friction could be the answer. Once they have been set in motion, the bearings run and run and run.

About 10 million people in the United States alone—from troops returning from war to students with music blasting through headphones—are suffering from impairing noise-induced hearing loss. 

The rising trend is something that researchers and physicians at the University of Michigan Kresge Hearing Research Institute are hoping to reverse, with a cocktail of vitamins and the mineral magnesium that has shown promise as a possible way to prevent hearing loss caused by loud noises. The nutrients were successful in laboratory tests, and now researchers are testing whether humans will benefit as well.

Ewing sarcoma is the second most common type of primary bone cancer seen in children and young adults. Patients with relapsed or refractory Ewing sarcoma have a poor outcome with conventional therapies.

Cytarabine decreases the levels of a certain key protein in Ewing sarcoma cells and has demonstrated preclinical activity against Ewing sarcoma cell lines in the laboratory.   A new study published in Pediatric Blood&Cancer evaluated a phase II clinical trial of a potential new treatment approach for relapsed Ewing sarcoma using cytarabine.

Chandrayaan-1, the Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) lunar orbiter, was captured into orbit around the Moon on 8 November. One day later, the spacecraft performed a manoeuvre that lowered the closest point of its orbit down to 200 km from the Moon.
 
The spacecraft’s liquid-fuel propelled engine was fired at 12:21 CET (16:51 Indian Standard Time) when it was at a distance of about 500 km from the Moon. This reduced the spacecraft’s velocity, enabling the Moon’s gravitational field to capture Chandrayaan-1 into lunar orbit. In this configuration, the orbit’s point closest to the lunar surface was at 504 km and the spacecraft circled the Moon in 11 hours. 

Researchers have developed a new type of small-scale electric power generator able to produce alternating current through the cyclical stretching and releasing of zinc oxide wires encapsulated in a flexible plastic substrate with two ends bonded. 

The new "flexible charge pump" generator is the fourth generation of devices designed to produce electrical current by using the piezoelectric properties of zinc oxide structures to harvest mechanical energy from the environment, the authors write in Nature Nanotechnology.

HIV is a master of disguise, able to rapidly change its identity and hide undetected in infected cells. But now, in a long-standing collaborative research effort partially-funded by the Wellcome Trust, scientists from Oxford-based Adaptimmune Limited, in partnership with the Universities of Cardiff and Pennsylvania have engineered immune cells to act as "bionic assassins" that see through HIV's many disguises.