It’s estimated that about 788,000 people worldwide died of liver cancer in 2015, the second-leading cause of cancer deaths, according to the latest statistics from the World Health Organization. One of the major challenges in combatting this disease is detecting it early because symptoms often don’t appear until later stages.

A University of Utah-led team has discovered that a class of materials called organic-inorganic hybrid perovskites could be a game changer for future spintronic devices. Spintronics uses the direction of the electron spin - either up or down - to carry information in ones and zeros. A spintronic device can process exponentially more data than traditional electronics that use the ebb and flow of electrical current to generate digital instruct...

A team of researchers led by University of Utah bioengineering professors Jeffrey Weiss and Michael Yu has discovered that damage to collagen, the main building block of all human tissue, can occur much earlier at a molecular level from too much physical stress, alerting doctors and scientists that a patient is on the path to major tissue damage and pain.

For millions of sufferers, there is nothing more debilitating than chronic back or joint pain. It can feel like a lifetime of misery. But researchers led by University of Utah bioengineering assistant professor Robby Bowles have discovered a way to curb chronic pain by modulating genes that reduce tissue- and cell-damaging inflammation. "This has applications for many inflammatory-driven diseases," Bowles says.

The days of wearing bifocals or constantly swapping out reading glasses might soon come to an end. A team led by University of Utah electrical and computer engineering professor Carlos Mastrangelo and doctoral student Nazmul Hasan has created "smart glasses" with liquid-based lenses that can automatically adjust the focus on what a person is seeing, whether it is far away or close up.

Engineers from the University of Utah and the University of Minnesota have discovered that interfacing two particular oxide-based materials makes them highly conductive, a boon for future electronics that could result in much more power-efficient laptops, electric cars and home appliances that also don't need cumbersome power supplies. Their findings were published in the scientific journal, APL Materials, from the American Institute of Phys...

University of Utah materials science and engineering associate professor Mike Scarpulla wants to shed light on semiconductors—literally. Scarpulla and senior scientist Kirstin Alberi of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, have developed a theory that adding light during the manufacturing of semiconductors—the materials that make up the essential parts of computer chips, solar cells and LEDs—can red...

Three teams of scientists are using glass in research projects that could bring graphene into the mainstream, allow windows to function as screens and produce ultra-slimline smartphone cameras. Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed a simple and powerful method for creating resilient, customised and high-performing graphene by layering it on top of common glass.