PITTSBURGH—Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute have converted a 2001 Scion xB into an electric commuter vehicle that will serve as a test bed for a new community-based approach to electric vehicle design, conversion and operations.
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SALT LAKE CITY, Nov. 16, 2009 – Small amounts of oil leave a fluorescent sheen on polluted water. Oil sheen is hard to remove, even when the water is aerated with ozone or filtered through sand. Now, a University of Utah engineer has developed an inexpensive new method to remove oil sheen by repeatedly pressurizing and depressurizing ozone gas, creating microscopic bubbles that attack the oil so it can be removed by sand filters.
BOULDER, Colo.— Physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated the first "universal" programmable quantum informationprocessor able to run any program allowed by quantum mechanics—the rules governing the submicroscopic world—using two quantum bits (qubits) of information. The processor could be a module in a future quantum computer, which theoretically could solve some importantproblems that are intractable today.
Researchers in MIT's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering believe they have pinpointed a pathway by which arsenic may be contaminating the drinking water in Bangladesh, a phenomenon that has puzzled scientists, world health agencies and the Bangladeshi government for nearly 30 years. The research suggests that human alteration to the landscape, the construction of villages with ponds, and the adoption of irrigated agriculture are responsible for the current pattern of arsenic concentration underground.
Satellite imagery and weather ground station readings today along the Mid-Atlantic indicate "Ida the coastal low pressure area" is finally moving away from the U.S. east coast.
Coral reefs support some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet, yet they thrive in a marine desert. So how do reefs sustain their thriving populations?
Survival among patients in intensive care units in England has improved significantly since the implementation of the NHS Plan in 2000, finds new research published on bmj.com today.
Changes under the NHS Plan included increased funding for additional beds, the introduction of critical care outreach services in hospitals, the adoption of clinical guidelines, and the establishment of regional networks of hospitals to enhance cooperation.
WASHINGTON, Nov. 12, 2009—Scientists and curiosity seekers who want to know what a partially or completely cloaked object would look like in real life can now get their wish -- virtually. A team of researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany has created a new visualization tool that can render a room containing such an object, showing the visual effects of such a cloaking mechanism and its imperfections.
CHICAGO (November 12, 2009) – New research published in the November issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons shows that African-American patients with colorectal cancer are more likely to be diagnosed with advanced disease and are less likely to undergo surgical procedures compared with Caucasians, suggesting that improvements in screening and rates of operation may reduce differences in colorectal cancer outcomes for African-Americans.
Designers of high-speed silicon chips have often had to compromise on performance levels for their integrated circuit designs because of physical weaknesses appearing during design verification or even in production. This has necessitated building redundancy into chip designs to allow for the imperfect environments of production and use that vary from the ideal of the design workbench. Issues such as voltage variations, thermal heat effects, electrostatic discharge, internal radiation and crosstalk can all downgrade the performance and reliability of a perfect design.
Continued improvement of climate forecasts is resulting in better information about what rainfall and streamflow may look like months in advance. A researcher from North Carolina State University has developed an innovative water management framework that would take advantage of these forecasts to plan for droughts or excess rain in order to make the most efficient use of an area's water resources.
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Children who eat fish more than 3 times per week show a worse performance in the general cognitive, executive and perceptual-manipulative areas. Those with higher levels of exposure to mercury show a generalised delay in cognitive, memory and verbal areas. Mercury is a contaminant found especially in oily fish and canned fish and to a lesser extent in white fish.
Ida is one stubborn girl. Her remnants have moved out to sea and reformed as a powerful coastal low pressure system that's been raining on the mid-Atlantic since Tuesday night, November 10. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-12 captures images of the low's cloud cover several times every hour, and shows its cloud cover stretching from North Carolina up to Maine. Rains are currently confined to the Mid-Atlantic from North Carolina to New Jersey, but will creep north with the progression of the low.
The calculation of variations in the sea level is relatively simple. It is by far more complicated to then determine the change in the water mass. A team of geodesists and oceanographers from the University of Bonn, as well as from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and the Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Sciences, two centres of the Helmholtz Association, have now, for the first time succeeded in doing this. The researchers were able to observe short-term fluctuations in the spatial distribution of the ocean water masses.
KNOXVILLE -- In the quest to make hydrogen as a clean alternative fuel source, researchers have been stymied about how to create usable hydrogen that is clean and sustainable without relying on an intensive, high-energy process that outweighs the benefits of not using petroleum to power vehicles.
New findings from a team of researchers from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, however, show that photosynthesis – the process by which plants regenerate using energy from the sun – may function as that clean, sustainable source of hydrogen.