A new discovery: How our memories stabilize while we sleep

Scientists have shown that delta waves emitted while we sleep are not generalized periods of silence during which the cortex rests, as has been described for decades in the scientific literature. Instead, they isolate assemblies of neurons that play an essential role in long-term memory formation.

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Candidate Ebola vaccine still effective when highly diluted, macaque study finds

A single dose of a highly diluted VSV-Ebola virus (EBOV) vaccine — approximately one-millionth of what is in the vaccine being used to help control the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo — remains fully protective against disease in experimentally infected monkeys, according to scientists. The investigators completed the dosage study using cynomolgus macaques and an updated vaccine component to match the EBOV Makona strain that circulated in West Africa from 2014-16.

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Cutting-edge neuroethics with ground-breaking neurotechnologies

Scientists are developing powerful new devices and technologies to monitor and regulate brain activity. To ensure NIH keeps pace with rapid technological development and help clinicians and researchers ethically fit these new tools into practice, a new article highlights potential issues around and offers recommendations about clinical research with both invasive and noninvasive neural devices.

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Flexible, wearable supercapacitors based on porous nanocarbon nanocomposites

Evening gowns with interwoven LEDs may look extravagant, but the light sources need a constant power supply from devices that are as well wearable, durable, and lightweight. Chinese scientists have manufactured fibrous electrodes for wearable devices that are flexible and excel by their high energy density. A microfluidic technology was key for the preparation of the electrode material was a microfluidic technology, as shown in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

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All plastic waste could become new, high-quality plastic through advanced steam cracking

A research group has developed an efficient process for breaking down any plastic waste to a molecular level. The resulting gases can then be transformed back into new plastics – of the same quality as the original. The new process could transform today's plastic factories into recycling refineries, within the framework of their existing infrastructure.

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