Precision agriculture promises to make farming more efficient and should have an important impact on the serious issue of food security, according to a new study published in Significance, the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association. In an article about the study in the magazine's May issue, University of Reading Professor Margaret A. Oliver, BSc, PhD, assesses how there is potential to manage land more effectively to improve the farming economy and crop quality, and to ensure food security.
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Scientists at the Arkansas Children's Nutrition Center, a U.S. Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service Human Nutrition Research Center at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, led by Dr. Martin Ronis have determined that dietary substitution of saturated fats enriched in medium chain triglycerides (MCT) for polyunsaturated fat prevents the development of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD). NAFLD occurs in patients with obesity and type II diabetes and is being seen at younger ages in association with the obesity epidemic.
Because solar and wind power are not 'always on' they need a better storage solution than exists today. Researchers from Stanford Linear Accelerator have designed a low-cost, long-life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid.
WOODS HOLE, Mass.—The often damaging impacts of intensive agriculture on nearby streams, rivers, and their wildlife has been well documented in temperate zones, such as North America and Europe.
Yet a new study in an important tropical zone—the fast-changing southern Amazon, a region marked by widespread replacement of native forest by cattle ranches and more recently croplands—suggests that at least some of those damaging impacts may be buffered by the very deep and highly permeable soils that characterize large areas of the expanding cropland.
WASHINGTON, April 24, 2013—Streetlights illuminate the night, shining upon roadways and sidewalks across the world, but these ubiquitous elements of the urban environment are notoriously inefficient and major contributors to light pollution that washes out the night sky. Recent innovations in light emitting diodes (LEDs) have improved the energy efficiency of streetlights, but, until now, their glow still wastefully radiated beyond the intended area.
New research from the University of Southampton has found that working or travelling on an underground railway for a sustained period of time could have health implications.
Resistive memory cells (ReRAM) are regarded as a promising solution for future generations of computer memories. They will dramatically reduce the energy consumption of modern IT systems while significantly increasing their performance. Unlike the building blocks of conventional hard disk drives and memories, these novel memory cells are not purely passive components but must be regarded as tiny batteries. This has been demonstrated by researchers of Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA), whose findings have now been published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.
For sea turtle hatchlings struggling to reach the ocean, success may depend on having flexible wrists that allow them to move without disturbing too much sand. A similar wrist also helps a robot known as "FlipperBot" move through a test bed, demonstrating how animals and bio-inspired robots can together provide new information on the principles governing locomotion on granular surfaces.
A sea turtle-inspired robot has been created by a group of researchers in the US to help understand the mechanics of walking and crawling on complex surfaces.
Dubbed "Flipperbot", the robot has been presented today, 24 April, in IOP Publishing's journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, and was designed to test how real-life organisms, such as seals, sea turtles and mudskippers use flippers and fins to move on surfaces such as sand.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When a team of University of Illinois engineers set out to grow nanowires of a compound semiconductor on top of a sheet of graphene, they did not expect to discover a new paradigm of epitaxy.
The self-assembled wires have a core of one composition and an outer layer of another, a desired trait for many advanced electronics applications. Led by professor Xiuling Li, in collaboration with professors Eric Pop and Joseph Lyding, all professors of electrical and computer engineering, the team published its findings in the journal Nano Letters.
"When designing next generation solar energy conversion systems, we must first develop ways to more efficiently utilize the solar spectrum," explained Lane Martin, whose research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has done just that.
"This is a fundamentally new way of approaching these matters," said Martin, who is an assistant professor of materials science and engineering (MatSE) at Illinois. "From these materials we can imagine carbon-neutral energy production of clean-burning fuels, waste water purification and remediation, and much more."
ITHACA, N.Y. – A research team led by Cornell University's Creative Machines Lab has created a computer algorithm that can be used to witness virtual creatures evolving their squishy, muscle-like features in order to teach themselves to walk.
The team incorporated concepts from developmental biology and how nature builds complex animals – from jellyfish to jaguars. The result is an array of bizarre, simulated robots that evolve a diverse series of gaits and gallops.
WASHINGTON - When scientists torched an entire 22-acre watershed in Portugal in a recentexperiment, their research yielded a counterintuitive result: Large, hot fires do not necessarilybeget hot, scorched soil.
The photo-sharing application Instagram is used by millions of people around the world daily. In the media, the social media phenomenon is sometimes dismissed as trivial pastime. However, according to a fresh study at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, a lot of effort often goes into a picture before it is shared.
(Santa Barbara, Calif. –) Researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara, in collaboration with colleagues at the École Polytechnique in France, have conclusively identified Auger recombination as the mechanism that causes light emitting diodes (LEDs) to be less efficient at high drive currents.