Tech

Modern day soldiers who mutilate enemy corpses or take body-parts as trophies are usually thought to be suffering from the extreme stresses of battle. But, research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) shows that this sort of misconduct has most often been carried out by fighters who viewed the enemy as racially different from themselves and used images of the hunt to describe their actions.

Vacuum tubes have been retro for decades. They almost completely disappeared from the electronics scene when consumers exchanged their old cathode ray tube monitors for flat screen TVs. Their replacement – the semiconductor – is generally the cheaper, lighter, more efficient, and easier to manufacture of the two technologies.

But vacuum tubes are more robust in high-radiation environments such as outer space. And since electrons travel faster in a vacuum than through a semiconductor, vacuum tubes are an intrinsically better medium for electricity.

When manufacturing products, the coating technology is a key innovation driver for almost all areas of daily life – for example, for making scratch-proof displays for smart phones or anti-bacterial surfaces in refrigerators. Other coatings protect components from corrosion or aging, for example in a solar cell module or a car engine, without the end user noticing their existence. In industry today, wet chemical processes or vacuum plasma processes are primarily used for coating applications. Both have drawbacks.

Laser systems can be used to implement highly precise and ultra-fast measuring processes. Railway measuring technology has a huge worldwide need here. One prerequisite for its use is that nobody is damaged or suffers irritations by the laser. Dr. Heinrich Höfler and Dipl.-Ing. Harald Wölfelschneider from the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM in Freiburg have worked with their team to develop a 3D laser scanner. It can be used outdoors without hesitation.

Flat computers, powerful cell phones and tablets – the integrated circuits, our computers' power centers, are becoming increasingly smaller and more complex. The microchips in today's computers already contain some two billion transistors. To get the chip density right, the structures are exposed onto the chips by means of lithography. To be able to meet future requirements, the semi-conductor industry is planning to convert the exposure using a wavelength of 193 nm to a wavelength of just 13.5 nm. This can be achieved only with completely new radiation sources.

New research from Kennedy Krieger finds that a simple pull-to-sit task at six months of age may predict risk of an autism spectrum disorder. Researchers at Kennedy Krieger identified weak head and neck control as a red flag for autism and language and/or social developmental delays. This video is an example of the weak head and neck control; the infant is unable to maintain head alignment when being carefully, yet firmly, pulled by the arms from lying flat on his/her back to a sitting position.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Returning extra medicine to the pharmacy for disposal might not be worth the extra time, money or greenhouse gas emissions, according to a University of Michigan study that is the first to look at the net effects of so-called take-back programs.

The new evidence suggests that discarding unused drugs in the trash is a better option to limit the risk of poisoning and at the same time curb pollution of both water and air.