To win the battle against heart disease, cardiologists need better ways to identify the composition of plaque most likely to rupture and cause a heart attack. Angiography allows them to examine blood vessels for constricted regions by injecting them with a contrast agent before X-raying them. But because plaque does not always result in constricted vessels, angiography can miss dangerous buildups of plaque.

Electric fields can be used to guide neural stem cells transplanted into the brain towards a specific location. The research, published in the journal Stem Cell Reports, opens possibilities for effectively guiding stem cells to repair brain damage. Professor Min Zhao at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine's Institute for Regenerative Cures studies how electric fields can guide wound healing.

Cage-like compounds called clathrates could be used for harvesting waste heat and turning it into electricity. UC Davis chemists just discovered a whole new class of clathrates, potentially opening new ways to make and apply these materials. A clathrate is basically a cage of atoms with another atom trapped inside, said Kirill Kovnir, assistant professor of chemistry at UC Davis, who led the work, published recently in the journal Angew...

A microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The energy-efficient KiloCore chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.