The first scoop of soil analyzed by the analytical suite in the belly of NASA's Curiosity rover reveals that fine materials on the surface of the planet contain several percent water by weight. The results were published today in Science as one article in a five-paper special section on the Curiosity mission.
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LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Sept. 26, 2013 — Within its first three months on Mars, NASA's Curiosity Rover saw a surprising diversity of soils and sediments along a half-kilometer route that tell a complex story about the gradual desiccation of the Red Planet.
Perhaps most notable among findings from the ChemCam team is that all of the dust and fine soil contains small amounts of water.
WASHINGTON, Sept. 26, 2013—Tracking blood flow in the laboratory is an important tool for studying ailments like migraines or strokes and designing new ways to address them. Blood flow is also routinely measured in the clinic, and laser speckle contrast imaging (LSCI) is one way of measuring these changes; however, this technique requires professional-grade imaging equipment, which limits its use.
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Ceramics are not known for their flexibility: they tend to crack under stress. But researchers from MIT and Singapore have just found a way around that problem -- for very tiny objects, at least.
A good painter uses simple strokes of a brush to bring texture, contrast and depth to a blank canvas. In comparison, computer programs can have difficulty reproducing the complex and varied forms of brushstrokes, and often require painstaking effort to mimic a brief sweep of paint.
HUNTSVILLE, TX -- While research consistently estimates that one in every four women in higher education will experience rape or attempted rape during their college careers, limited proactive approaches to address the issue are found on Texas college campuses, according to the Crime Victims' Institute at Sam Houston State University.
URBANA, Ill. – Veterinarians and women's shelters can make it easier for abused women to decide to leave their homes, particularly when the abuser is using a beloved pet as part of a campaign to control his partner, reports a new University of Illinois study.
He made me stand there and . . . watch [him kill my cat]. And he was like: That could happen to you, one woman in the study said.
URBANA, Ill. – Many families struggle to afford basic non-food household goods, such as personal care, household, and baby-care products, according to a new nationwide Feed America study that benefited from assistance from the University of Illinois Family Resiliency Center (FRC).
"The study found that these families often make trade-offs with other living expenses and employ coping strategies in an effort to secure such essential household items as toilet paper, toothpaste, soap, or disposable diapers," said Barbara H. Fiese, FRC director and Pampered Chef Endowed Chair.
A team of Stanford engineers has built a basic computer using carbon nanotubes, a semiconductor material that has the potential to launch a new generation of electronic devices that run faster, while using less energy, than those made from silicon chips.
This unprecedented feat culminates years of efforts by scientists around the world to harness this promising material.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign researchers have developed arrays of tiny nano-antennas that can enable sensing of molecules that resonate in the infrared (IR) spectrum.
"The identification of molecules by sensing their unique absorption resonances is very important for environmental monitoring, industrial process control and military applications," said team leader Daniel Wasserman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Wasserman is also a part of the Micro and Nano Technology Laboratory at Illinois.
Most materials show one function, for example, a material can be a metal, a semiconductor, or an insulator. Metals such as copper are used as conducting wires with only low resistance and energy loss. Superconductors are metals which can conduct current even without any resistance, although only far below room temperature. Semiconductors, the foundation of current computer technology, show only low conduction of current, while insulators show no conductivity at all. Physicists have recently been excited about a new exotic type of materials, so-called topological insulators.
Researchers at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) are showing the way toward low-cost, industrial-scale manufacturing of a new family of electronic devices. A leading example is a gas sensor that could be integrated into food packaging to gauge freshness, or into compact wireless air-quality monitors. New types of solar cells and flexible transistors are also in the works, as well as pressure and temperature sensors that could be built into electronic skin for robotic or bionic applications.
The deep-sea soft-sediment ecosystem in the immediate area of the 2010's Deepwater Horizon well head blowout and subsequent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico will likely take decades to recover from the spill's impacts, according to a scientific paper reported in the online scientific journal PLoS One.
The paper is the first to give comprehensive results of the spill's effect on deep-water communities at the base of the Gulf's food chain, in its soft-bottom muddy habitats, specifically looking at biological composition and chemicals at the same time at the same location.
Clinicians should be extra vigilant when prescribing antidepressants as they could pose a risk of type 2 diabetes, researchers at the University of Southampton have warned.
A systematic review, carried out by the University, showed that people taking antidepressants are at a higher risk of type 2 diabetes; however it is not certain whether the medication is responsible.
The use of antidepressant medication has risen sharply over recent years reaching 46.7 million prescriptions issued in the UK in 2011.
An intriguing study led by the University of Colorado Boulder may provide a powerful new tool in the quiver of forensic scientists attempting to determine the time of death in cases involving human corpses: a microbial clock.