PASADENA, Calif. -- Identifying the composition of the earth's core is key to understanding how our planet formed and the current behavior of its interior. While it has been known for many years that iron is the main element in the core, many questions have remained about just how iron behaves under the conditions found deep in the earth. Now, a team led by mineral-physics researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has honed in on those behaviors by conducting extremely high-pressure experiments on the element.
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Atomic force microscope cantilever tips with integrated heaters are widely used to characterize polymer films in electronics and optical devices, pharmaceuticals, paints, and coatings. These heated tips are also used in research labs to explore new ideas in nanolithography and data storage, and to study fundamentals of nanometer-scale heat flow. Until now, however, no one has used a heated nano-tip for electronic measurements.
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. ╨ Engineers have discovered details about the behavior of ultrafast laser pulses that may lead to new applications in manufacturing, diagnostics and other research.
Copenhagen, Denmark – A new German-based project is setting out to rescue biodiversity data at risk of being lost, because they are not integrated in institutional databases, are kept in outdated digital storage systems, or are not properly documented.
The project, run by the Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin-Dahlem, provides a good example for a GBIF recommendation to establish hosting centres for biodiversity data. This is one of a set of data management recommendations just published by GBIF.
Intensive agriculture practices developed during the past century have helped improve food security for many people but have also added to nitrate pollution in surface and groundwaters. New research has looked at water quality measurement over the last 140 years to track this problem in the Thames River basin.
Most commonly used raw materials in butanol production have so far been starch and cane sugar. In contrast to this, the starting point in the Aalto University study was to use only lignocellulose, otherwise known as wood biomass, which does not compete with food production.
Another new breakthrough in the study is to successfully combine modern pulp - and biotechnology. Finland's advanced forest industry provides particularly good opportunities to develop this type of bioprocesses.
However, large-scale clinical trials have highlighted the beneficial effect of cardiac resynchronisation therapy (CRT) in the improvement of symptoms and reduction of mortality, and CRT is now recommended in the major European and American guidelines for the treatment and prevention of heart failure.(1)
In this meeting of the JWG - the work group made up of European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) - the last revision of the text was carried out that will make up norm EN 45545, which affects the entire railroad industry, the operators, fire-testing laboratories and standardization entities. This meeting took place on the Leganés campus of the UC3M, under the auspices of the Master's in Fire Safety Engineering Program, from the Pedro Juan de Lastanosa Institute.
Are wage differences between men and women decreasing as more women attain managerial positions? A new Swedish report from the Uppsala Center for Labor Studies (UCLS) at Uppsala University and the Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation (IFAU) concludes that they are not. Manager gender is tied to neither wages nor, accordingly, wage differences on the labour market.
AUSTIN, Texas — The efficiency of conventional solar cells could be significantly increased, according to new research on the mechanisms of solar energy conversion led by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at The University of Texas at Austin.
Zhu and his team have discovered that it's possible to double the number of electrons harvested from one photon of sunlight using an organic plastic semiconductor material.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The number of sugar maples in Upper Great Lakes forests is likely to decline in coming decades, according to University of Michigan ecologists and their colleagues, due to a previously unrecognized threat from a familiar enemy: acid rain.
Over the past four decades, sugar maple abundance has declined in some regions of the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada, due largely to acidification of calcium-poor granitic soils in response to acid rain.
Endoscopes — small cameras or optic fibres that are usually attached to flexible tubing designed to investigate the interior of the body — can be dangerously invasive. Procedures often require sedative medications and some recovery time. Now a researcher at Tel Aviv University is developing a "capsule endoscope" that can move through the digestive tract to detect problems independent of any attachments.
NEW YORK -- Research conducted by Columbia Business School Professor Frank Lichtenberg, Courtney C. Brown Professor of Business, Finance and Economics, Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Management Program, and Bhaven Sampat, Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University, identifies the respective contributions of direct and indirect government support in research and development of new pharmaceutical drugs.
Physicists in Aalto University, Finland, have shown how a nanomechanical oscillator can be used for detection and amplification of feeble radio waves or microwaves. A measurement using such a tiny device, resembling a miniaturized guitar string, can be performed with the least possible disturbance. The results were recently published in the most prestigious scientific arena, the British journal Nature.
Less and less of today's computing is done on desktop computers; cloud computing, in which operations are carried out on a network of shared, remote servers, is expected to rise as the demand for computing power increases. This raises some crucial questions about security: Can we, for instance, perform computations on data stored in 'the cloud' without letting anyone else see our information? Research carried out at the Weizmann Institute and MIT is moving us closer to the ability to work on data while it is still encrypted, giving an encrypted result that can later be securely deciphered.