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This study compares the voltage output of two potential alternative energy sources: water drops hitting a piezoelectric surface and water flowing through a hydroelectric turbine. The findings of this study suggest that harnessing kinetic energy from falling raindrops may be a viable alternative energy source.

During transfer of organs from a donor to a patient, the organs deteriorate in part due to damage by free radicals. Application of antioxidant solutions could extend organ preservation times. The authors found that vitamin E and butylated hydroxytoluene seemed to be most effective in arresting cell damage of a bovine lung.

Many of us take our vision for granted, but rarely do we measure how well we can see. In this study, the authors investigate the ability of people of different ages to read progressively fainter letters in dark light. They find that the ability to see in dim light drops drastically after age 30. The ability to read fainter letters worsens after age 30 as well. These findings should help inform lighting decisions everywhere from restaurants to road signs.

Climate change is one of the most controversial challenges humans face. Here the authors investigate the dual role of clouds - to reflect incoming light away from the Earth and to reflect heat energy back toward the Earth's surface. They find that the amount of incident light energy and surface temperature decreases as the sky becomes cloudier. These results will inform longer-term studies that may compare against the amount of energy clouds reflect back toward the Earth.

The authors here investigate the absorbency of two leading brands of diapers. They find that Huggies Little Snugglers absorb over 50% more salt water than Pampers Swaddlers, although both absorb significantly more fluid than what an average newborn can produce.

Environmental disasters such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill can be devastating to ecosystems for long periods of time. Safer, cheaper, and more effective methods of oil clean-up are needed to clean up oil spills in the future. Here, the authors investigate the ability of natural ocean algae to process crude oil into less toxic chemicals. They identify Coccochloris elabens as a particularly promising algae for future bioremediation efforts.

Different songs can seem to evoke different emotions. Here the authors demonstrate that different songs can have a significant effect on the heart rate of listeners. A slower song slows heart rate, and a faster song increases it.

Microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi live everywhere in the world around us. The authors here demonstrate that these predominantly harmless microbes can be isolated from many household locations that appear "clean." Further, they test the cleaning power of 70% ethanol and suggest that many "clean" surfaces are not in fact "sterile."

In many cultures and for many centuries, the implications of birth order have been examined. Birth order has been shown to affect personality, accomplishments, and even career choice. This study investigated the impact of birth order and ethnicity on two measures of academic success in high school: a student’s grade point average (GPA) and the number of Advanced Placement (AP) classes he or she took.

Machine translation remains a challenging area in artificial intelligence, with neural machine translation (NMT) making significant strides over the past decade but still facing hurdles, particularly in translation quality due to the reliance on expensive bilingual training data. This study explores whether large language models (LLMs), like GPT-4, can be effectively adapted for translation tasks and outperform traditional NMT systems.