One of the most efficient means of transporting freight is by ship. However, many of the ships sailing today are powered by ageing diesel motors fitted with neither exhaust cleaning equipment nor or modern control systems. Three years ago the University of Birmingham initiated an ambitious trial, converting an old canal barge to use hydrogen fuel. The old diesel motor, drive system and fuel tank were removed and replaced with a high efficiency electric motor, a battery pack for short-term energy supply and a fuel cell with a hydrogen storage system to charge the batteries.
Tech
An article in the current issue of Global Change Biology Bioenergy examines the carbon sequestration potential of Miscanthus plantations on commercial farms.
Scientists today reported development of new tests to help curb deaths, emergency room visits and other problems from a new genre of designer drugs sold legally in stores and online that mimic the effects of cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana.
The reports focus on drugs sold as "bath salts," "plant food," "incense" and other products with colorful names, such as "Ivory Wave," "Red Dove" and "legal marijuana." They provide users with a high, but many have not yet been made illegal and are undetectable with current drug tests.
Scientists from the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville have determined that an inexpensive semiconductor material can be tweaked to generate hydrogen from water using sunlight.
The researchers say their findings are a triumph for computational sciences, one that could potentially have profound implications for the future of solar energy.
Hydrogen will be a great fuel because it can easily be converted to electricity in a fuel cell and because it is carbon free. The downside of hydrogen is that, because it is a gas, it can only be stored in high pressure or cryogenic tanks.
In a vehicle with a tank full of hydrogen, "if you got into a wreck, you'd have a problem," said Travis Williams, assistant professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College, part of a team of USC scientists that is developing a robust, efficient method of using hydrogen as a fuel source.
Studies by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists indicate that organic farmers who need to periodically amend their soils with compost after planting can still control weeds--and hold down costs--by using fabric ground covers. This will be welcome news to organic farmers who till composted manure into their crop fields after planting.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 30—To serve remote areas of the world, doctors, nurses and field workers need equipment that is portable, versatile, and relatively inexpensive. Now researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) have built a compact, light-weight, dual-mode microscope that uses holograms instead of lenses. The team describes the new device in a paper published today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Biomedical Optics Express.
A current research project of the Austrian Science Fund FWF focuses on the motion safety and efficiency of robots. The objective of the research is to improve the control of robot movements with the help of new mathematical approaches. For this purpose, the primary focus lies on the identification of situations in which a collision may occur and the planning of an optimal motion path.
While Hurricane Irene had officials along the East Coast preparing for mass evacuations, scientists at the Stroud Water Research Center and the University of Delaware were grabbing their best data collection tools and heading straight for the storm's path.
It was a rare opportunity for the scientists to learn more about climate change and water quality, as Irene threatened to be the biggest hurricane to hit the Northeastern United States since 1985.
Depending on the age of asthmatic children, on their exposure to molds or dampness in their bedroom, and on the severity of their asthma, vitamin C has greater or smaller beneficial effect against asthma, according to a study published in the Clinical and Translational Allergy.
Proposals that vitamin C might be beneficial in the treatment of asthma date back to the 1940s, but the findings from controlled trials have been conflicting.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — When Kathryn Orzech attended the College of William and Mary in Virginia, she participated in drama and choir. Rehearsals that would have ended at 10 p.m. in high school now went much later. Social opportunities around the dorm — card games, trips to late-night snack hangout spots — beckoned but without parents around to wield the cudgel of a curfew.
From SARS to swine flu, virus outbreaks can be unpredictable — and devastating. But now a new application through the ubiquitous social networking site Facebook, developed in a Tel Aviv University lab, is poised to serve as a better indicator of how infections spread among populations.
A century-old food preservation technology is finding a new life amid 21st century concerns about food safety and nutrition, because it more than doubles the levels of certain healthful natural antioxidants in fruit. That's in addition to its effects in killing harmful bacteria, viruses and mold in food.
URBANA – University of Illinois scientists have engineered a new strain of yeast that converts seaweed into biofuel in half the time it took just months ago. That's a process that's important outside the Corn Belt, said Yong-Su Jin, a University of Illinois assistant professor of microbial genomics and a faculty member in its Institute for Genomic Biology.
"The key is the strain's ability to ferment cellobiose and galactose simultaneously, which makes the process much more efficient," Jin said.
Sending information by varying the properties of electromagnetic waves has served humanity well for more than a century, but as our electronic chips steadily shrink, the signals they carry can bleed across wires and interfere with each other, presenting a barrier to further size reductions. A possible solution could be to encode ones and zeros, not with voltage, but with electron spin, and researchers have now quantified some of the benefits this fresh approach might yield.