CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- There is a story about how the modern golf ball, with its dimpled surface, came to be: In the mid-1800s, it is said, new golf balls were smooth, but became dimpled over time as impacts left permanent dents. Smooth new balls were typically used for tournament play, but in one match, a player ran short, had to use an old, dented one, and realized that he could drive this dimpled ball much further than a smooth one.
Tech
CHICAGO, IL—Researchers have developed a device that uses any smartphone to measure the cortisol concentration in saliva. The device was presented Tuesday, June 24, at ICE/ENDO 2014, the joint meeting of the International Society of Endocrinology and the Endocrine Society in Chicago.
Bottom Line: Cardiac resynchronization therapy plus defibrillator implantation (CRT-D) sometimes helps women with heart failure more than men, although women are less likely to receive CRT-D than men.
Author: Robbert Zusterzeel, M.D., and colleagues at the Center for Devices and Radiological Health at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, Md.
LAS CRUCES, NM – High-profile marketing campaigns for nuts such as pistachios and almonds have become familiar to consumers throughout the United States. Shining a spotlight on these products has increased public awareness and boosted sales. For example, domestic per-capita almond consumption has increased five-fold since 1976, thanks in part to savvy marketing efforts. In contrast, the pecan industry been successful in focusing their efforts on expanding pecan export markets, but pecan consumption in the U.S. has remained relatively flat over the past 35 years.
QUEBEC – In Canada, where outdoor growing seasons are limited, sales from greenhouse fruit and vegetable production operations still surpass $1.1 billion annually. Finding more efficient methods for providing lighting in greenhouse production is a key component to support these high levels of production and increase revenues. "Light irradiance is the limiting factor for increasing production in greenhouses, when all other factors (temperature, nutrient levels, and water availability) are adequately maintained," said the authors of a new study.
The D-Wave computer is currently the latest link of a long chain of computers designed for the solution of optimization problems. In what sense does it realize quantum computation? We describe the evolution of such computers and confront the different views concerning the quantum properties of the D-wave computer.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The more cores — or processing units — a computer chip has, the bigger the problem of communication between cores becomes. For years, Li-Shiuan Peh, the Singapore Research Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, has argued that the massively multicore chips of the future will need to resemble little Internets, where each core has an associated router, and data travels between cores in packets of fixed size.
Press the start button, switch on the monitor, grab a cup of coffee and off you go. That is pretty much how most us experience booting up a computer. But with a quantum computer the situation is very different. So far, researchers have had to spend hours making dozens of adjustments and fine calibrations in order to set up a chip with just five quantum bits so that it can be used for experimental work. (One quantum bit or 'qubit' is the quantum physical equivalent of a single bit in a conventional computer).
NEW YORK — With everyone from the federal government to corporate America working to encourage more women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, you would think the doors would be wide open to women of all backgrounds. A new study from Columbia Business School shows that this could not be further from the truth and that gender bias among hiring managers in STEM fields is extraordinarily prevalent.
Chemists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have developed a novel type of red phosphor material, which significantly enhances the performance of white-emitting LEDs.
CHICAGO, IL—Almost 70 percent of adults with Type 1 diabetes never use their blood glucose self-monitoring devices or insulin pumps to download historical data about their blood sugar levels and insulin doses—information that likely would help them manage their disease better. These new survey results, which were presented Sunday at the joint meeting of the International Society of Endocrinology and the Endocrine Society: ICE/ENDO 2014 in Chicago, also show that only 12 percent of patients regularly review their past glucose and insulin pump data at home.
ITHACA, N.Y. – Robots are getting smarter, but they still need step-by-step instructions for tasks they haven't performed before. Before you can tell your household robot "Make me a bowl of ramen noodles," you'll have to teach it how to do that. Since we're not all computer programmers, we'd prefer to give those instructions in English, just as we'd lay out a task for a child.
In the past years, invisibility cloaks were developed for various senses. Objects can be hidden from light, heat or sound. However, hiding of an object from being touched still remained to be accomplished. KIT scientists have now succeeded in creating a volume in which an object can be hidden from touching similar to a pea under the mattress of a princess. The results are now presented in the renowned Nature Communications journal.
Georgia Tech researchers have identified a weakness in one of Android's security features and will present their work at Black Hat USA 2014, which will be held August 6-7 in Las Vegas.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- What's the difference between the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument?
Both structures soar to impressive heights, and each was the world's tallest building when completed. But the Washington Monument is a massive stone structure, while the Eiffel Tower achieves similar strength using a lattice of steel beams and struts that is mostly open air, gaining its strength from the geometric arrangement of those elements.