Tech

A University of Alaska Fairbanks-led research project has provided the first modern evidence of a landscape-level permafrost carbon feedback, in which thawing permafrost releases ancient carbon as climate-warming greenhouse gases.

The study was published today in the journal Nature Geoscience.

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 21, 2016 -- Although rechargeable batteries in smartphones, cars and tablets can be charged again and again, they don't last forever. Old batteries often wind up in landfills or incinerators, potentially harming the environment. And valuable materials remain locked inside. Now, a team of researchers is turning to naturally occurring fungi to drive an environmentally friendly recycling process to extract cobalt and lithium from tons of waste batteries.

PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 21, 2016 --The developing world is awash in substandard, degraded or falsified medications, which can either directly harm users or deprive them of needed treatment. And with internet sales of medications on the rise, people everywhere are increasingly at risk. So, a team of researchers has developed a simple, inexpensive paper-based device to screen suspicious medications.

SEATTLE -- For heterosexual couples, most Americans still believe in the traditional division of household labor between husbands and wives, while for same-sex couples, they think the "more masculine" partner and the "more feminine" partner should generally be responsible for stereotypically male and female chores, respectively, suggests a new study that will be presented at the 111th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA).

Laser pointers bought legally for less than $AU30 are a threat to eyesight - with one pointer found to be 127 times over the Australian legal limit.

RMIT University researchers in Melbourne, Australia, found that green lasers were most dangerous, with all four models tested failing Australian standards.

Now they are calling on government to consider banning green lasers. In the meantime, they are recommending authorities to implement stringent testing and quality control.

In a study from Uppsala University, published in the American journal JAMA Cardiology, the fatty acid linoleic acid (Omega 6) in subcutaneous adipose tissue was linked to lower mortality among older men followed over a 15-year period.

Researchers at the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw, using the liquid crystal elastomer technology, originally developed in the LENS Institute in Florence, demonstrated a bioinspired micro-robot capable of mimicking caterpillar gaits in natural scale. The 15-millimeter long soft robot harvests energy from green light and is controlled by spatially modulated laser beam. Apart from travelling on flat surfaces, it can also climb slopes, squeeze through narrow slits and transport loads.

Waveguides are widely used for filtering, confining, guiding, coupling or splitting beams of visible light. However, creating waveguides that could do the same for X-rays has posed tremendous challenges in fabrication, so they are still only in an early stage of development.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 18, 2016 -- There's not much that can top a big bowl of spaghetti and meatballs -- except, of course, for what belongs on top: parmesan cheese. But, it turns out, what we're eating might not be parmesan at all -- the Food and Drug Administration recently found that several sellers in the U.S. were filling their batches with lower-cost cheeses or even cellulose, also known as wood pulp. Food authentication helps ensure that our cheese, olive oil and other foods are the real deal, and that they don't contain unwanted adulterants.

TUCSON, Ariz. - Large reductions in the numbers of cocaine users and methamphetamine users in the United States--so far lasting approximately eight years--occurred in association with government efforts that limited access to two commercially produced chemicals, according to a University of Arizona-led study.

In December 2006, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration implemented federal regulations restricting access to sodium permanganate, a chemical essential to the manufacture of cocaine.

Last year, dozens of major oil companies and oil-producing nations agreed to end the routine flaring of natural gas from wells by 2030. This burning off of uncaptured methane in addition to simply letting it escape into the air -- a process called venting -- releases pollutants and the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. Now in ACS' journal Energy & Fuels, researchers report a strategy that could help producers work toward this goal.

If you've never had the plumber to your house, you've been lucky. Pipes can burst due to a catastrophic event, like subzero temperatures, or time and use can take a toll, wearing away at the materials with small dings and dents that aren't evident until it's too late.

But what if there were a way to identify those small, often microscopic failures before you had to call for help?

Most theories of motivation have championed the pleasure principle, where our choices of daily activities aim to minimize the negative effects and maximize the positive effects. However, it is currently not clear to researchers how to reconcile this idea with the fact that we all have to engage routinely in unpleasant, yet necessary activities.

To address this question, a team of researchers, led by Maxime Taquet, a research fellow at the Boston Children's Hospital, developed a smartphone application to monitor in real-time the activities and moods of over 28,000 people.

COLUMBIA, Mo. - Soil water infiltration, or the ability of soil to absorb water and allow it to move through different soil layers, is an important environmental factor in forests, especially forests undergoing logging operations. This property can affect how quickly those forests can regenerate after being logged. Now, University of Missouri researchers have found that logging operations can negatively affect soil density and water infiltration within forests, particularly along makeshift logging roads and landing areas where logs are stored before being trucked to sawmills.