Connecting forests to the internet. This was the purpose with which Treevia was born, as one of a new generation of startups that specialise in developing digital solutions for agribusiness, known as 'agritechs'. Since its creation in 2016, the firm has been developing a remote forest monitoring system with the support of FAPESP’s Innovative Research in Small Business Program (PIPE).

In addition to remembering to take the medication prescribed by their cardiologists at the right times and going to the trouble of making healthy lifestyle changes, patients with high blood pressure (hypertension) can include a pleasing beneficial activity in routine treatment of the disease thanks to the discovery that listening to music significantly enhances the effect of anti-hypertensive drugs.

A study published in the journal Science shows how the presence in the atmosphere of ultrafine aerosol particles (less than 50 nm in diameter) can intensify the cloud formation process and rainfall in the Amazon region. According to the authors of the article, these nanoparticles have always been thought too small to play a significant role in regulating the hydrologic cycle. While this is indeed the case in polluted areas such as ...

  Thyroid cancer is a disease with good cure rates in most cases. In 5% of patients, however, the tumour becomes refractory to the available therapies and may spread all over the body, causing death.

Researchers supported by FAPESP participated in three of the “Top Ten Breakthroughs in 2017” listed by the journal Physics World. The ten breakthroughs were chosen by Physics World editors from a shortlist based on popularity with the journal’s readers. Its Breakthrough of the Year Award went to the first-ever multimessenger observation of a merger of two neutron stars involving gravitational waves.

Chemotherapy has limited success for patients with glioma – the most common kind of brain cancer – and melanoma – the most aggressive form of skin cancer – owing mainly to the resistance of tumour cells to the drugs currently available for such treatment. Although this resistance is generally associated with the mechanisms by which tumour cells repair the damage to their DNA caused by chemotherapy drugs, accordin...

Can a 'thermometer' consist of a thin film or tiny (micrometer or even nanometer scale) particles, operate in real time and in very well-defined regions with a spatial resolution ranging from a centimeter to a micrometer, and be capable of measuring temperatures with exceptional sensitivity in a wide band between 80 kelvin (minus 193°C) and 750 kelvin (476 °C)? The answer is yes.

One of the key challenges of proteomics, the study of all proteins expressed by a cell or organism, is managing to distinguish between molecules that are structurally different yet have the same mass. This is hard because a mass spectrometer, the main apparatus used in this type of study, works like a weighing scale, sorting the molecules analysed according to their mass.

The automotive industry’s demand for high-performance alloys known as advanced high-strength (AHS) steels has increased in recent years owing to increasingly tough passenger safety, vehicle performance and fuel economy requirements. Characterised by improved formability and collision resilience compared to conventional steel grades, high-strength steels have been used in critical safety locations in car body structures to absorb energy...

FAPESP and the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (EMBRAPA) are partners in the Center for Research in Genomics Applied to Climate Change, hosted by the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and formally established on December 13, 2017, during an event held at FAPESP's headquarters, in São Paulo. The research center’s mission is to create biotechnological assets that increase plant resistance to drought and heat, and to tra...

Expansion of sugarcane cultivation in Brazil for ethanol production in areas not under environmental protection or reserved for food production could potentially replace up to 13.7% of world crude oil consumption and reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) by as much as 5.6% by 2045. These estimates come from an international study with Brazilian participation, whose results were published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Artificial intelligence can be of great assistance in urban planning, urban design and architecture. AI drives predictive tools and computational modeling to improve the quality of city living via complex adaptive systems, which is part of a methodology that is still incipient in architecture and urbanism but that, in Brazil, is already in use for an initial urban volumetric modeling project.

Equipped with Newton’s law of universal gravitation (published in Principia 330 years ago) and powerful computational resources (used to apply the law to more than 10,000 interacting bodies), a young Brazilian researcher and his former postdoctoral supervisor have just proposed a new physical model to explain the origin of water on Earth and the other Earth-like objects in the Solar System.

A group of Brazilian astronomers observed a pair of celestial objects rarely seen in the Milky Way: a very low-mass white dwarf and a brown dwarf. A white dwarf is the endpoint of the evolution of an intermediate- or low-mass star, with a mass between 0.5 and 8 times that of our Sun. A brown dwarf is a substellar object with mass intermediate between those of a star and a planet.

  In an article published in Nature Communications, a group of scientists from Brazil and France describe a new strategy to kill bacilli, rod-shaped or cylindrical bacteria that include several species that cause diseases in humans, such as Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Helicobacter pylori.

Researchers participating in the Pierre Auger Collaboration, which runs the world’s largest cosmic ray observatory located in Mendoza Province, Argentina, have discovered that, above a certain energy level, these particles are of extragalactic origin. Cosmic rays include some of the most energetic particles in the universe and constantly collide with the Earth’s atmosphere.

Is glass a solid or a liquid? This question, which has been vigorously discussed by specialists in the field for some decades, has just been answered anew: “Glass is a non-equilibrium, non-crystalline state of matter that appears solid on a short time scale but continuously relaxes toward the liquid state.” A more elaborate alternative definition is this: “Glass is a non-equilibrium, non-crystalline condensed state of matte...

Founded in 2006 in the city of Campinas, São Paulo State, Brazil, BR Labs began by developing lasers for universities and research institutions. The startup was a spinoff from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) and the Center for Research into Optics and Photonics (CePOF), one of FAPESP’s Research, Innovation and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs).

Over the past decade, when investigating the factors associated with the growing epidemic of obesity in the world, scientists have identified two events that greatly contribute to weight gain. One of them is the alteration in the profile of bacteria that make up the intestinal flora. Studies published from 2005 to 2007 showed that obese people generally present a set of microorganisms that stimulate the absorption of nutrients from food.

  Chickenpox is a typical childhood illness. In most cases, it is benign, and the symptoms disappear within ten days. However, its causative agent, Varicella zoster virus (VZV), remains in the organism forever. In some cases, the virus can be reactivated years later, causing a different disease known as herpes zoster, or shingles.