NTU College of Science

Detecting Disease Through the Interplay of Light and Sound

In modern medicine, doctors can use a variety of technologies to peer inside their patients to detect and monitor the signs of disease. Methods such as X-ray imaging and ultrasound imaging are well known to the public, but researchers are also developing new imaging methods of unprecedented speed and sensitivity, by creatively combining ideas from…

The Role of Gravity in Connecting Microscopic and Macroscopic World

The laws of physics, as we understand them, can be divided into two realms: classical physics, which describes objects at human size scales or larger, and quantum physics, which describes objects at the atomic scale. These two sets of laws are very different. Classical physics states that an object like a ball has a position…

The Chemical Midas Touch – Combining Gold with Natural Products to Create Novel Antimalarial Drugs

Malaria is one of the worst scourges ever known to mankind. The deadly disease, which is caused by plasmodium parasites transmitted by the female anopheles mosquito, remains a global public health threat despite concerted efforts to eradicate it. In 2016 alone, it infected 194 million people in Africa and caused 445,000 deaths. Worryingly, increasing numbers…

SHA-1 collision attacks are now actually practical and a looming danger

Hash functions play important roles in information security, serving as the basic building blocks for many security protocols. They must possess one vital feature: it has to be mathematically hard for an attacker to find two inputs that map to the same output (called a “collision”). Now, a new paper by Thomas Peyrin (School of…

More childhood nature experiences could make Singaporeans more tolerant towards local wildlife

Left photo: credit of Singapore Forest School, right photo by Anna Lagerström. “I could climb trees like a young chimp and if challenged, could even swing upside down from branches.” The quote is from the book Kampong Spirit Gotong Royong. Life in Potong Pasir, 1955 – 1965 by Josephine Chia, (pp. 62), depicting life in a Singapore…

The evolution of skyrmions in Ir/Fe/Co/Pt multilayers and their topological Hall signature

Magnetic skyrmions are tiny entities, manifesting in magnetic materials, that consist of localized twists in the magnetization direction of the medium. Each skyrmion is highly stable because eliminating it requires untwisting the magnetization direction of the material, just as a knot on a string can only be untied by pulling the rest of the string…

NTU scientists discover sustainable way to increase seed oil yield in crops

Scientists have developed a sustainable way to demonstrate a new genetic modification that can increase the yield of natural oil in seeds by up to 15 per cent in laboratory conditions. The new method can be applied to crops such as canola, soybean and sunflower, which are in a multi-billion dollar industry that continues to…

Singapore and Australian Scientists Build a Machine to See All Possible Futures

Unlike classical particles, quantum particles can travel in a quantum superposition of different directions. Mile Gu, together with researchers from Griffith harnessed this phenomena to design quantum devices that can generate a quantum superposition of all possible futures. Credit: NTU In the 2018 movie Infinity War, a scene featured Dr. Strange looking into 14 million possible…

NTU Professors Win International Cryptography Competition

The winners of CAESAR, a major international cryptography competition co-founded by the US National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST), was announced on 20 February 2019. Of the six winning cryptography schemes, three were designed by researchers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore), led by Associate Professor Hongjun Wu and Associate Professor Thomas Peyrin. CAESAR, which stands for “Competition for…

Surprisingly high consumption of “antelope horn” products from critically endangered saiga antelope in Singapore

A recent study by ASE’s Asst Prof Janice Lee and colleagues found that traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) products containing horn from the critically endangered saiga antelope are consumed by as much as 19% of Singapore’s Chinese population. However, most of these consumers are unaware of the link between products marketed as ‘ling yang’ (羚羊), or…