A new, comprehensive study by an international team of scientists, including scientists at Boston University in the US and the Universities of Viçosa and Campinas in Brazil, has been published in the current issue of Science (August 26, 2011) refuting earlier alarmist claims that drought has induced a decline in global plant productivity during the past decade and posed a threat to global food security.
Tech
The expression "beauty's only skin-deep" has often been applied to the chemistry of materials because so much action takes place at the surface. However, for many of the materials in today's high technologies, such as semiconductors and superconductors, once a device is fabricated it is the electronic structures below the surface, in the bulk of the material or in buried layers, that determine its effectiveness. For the past 30 years, one of the most valuable and widely used techniques for studying electronic structures has been ARPES – Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy.
Oil well control is one of the most important processes during drilling operations. In deepwater drilling, controlling pressure in the oil well is crucial, as excessive pressures in the drilled hole can result in blowouts, leading to disastrous events like the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.
Here's one way that old-fashioned newsprint beats the Internet. Tulane University scientists have discovered a novel bacterial strain, dubbed "TU-103," that can use paper to produce butanol, a biofuel that can serve as a substitute for gasoline. They are currently experimenting with old editions of the Times Picayune, New Orleans' venerable daily newspaper, with great success.
TU-103 is the first bacterial strain from nature that produces butanol directly from cellulose, an organic compound.
Reducing the risks of catching E. coli O157 in the countryside is everyone's problem. That means we should all take responsibility - individual residents and visitors, as well as farmers and government - according to researchers working on the Research Councils UK Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU).
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Aug. 25, 2011- In a long-running randomized study of over 3,000 preterm infants, those whose care included the Heart Rate Observation System, or HeRO® monitor, experienced greater than 20 percent reduced mortality, effectively saving one infant's life for every 48 who were monitored. The results of this multicenter study of the HeRO monitor, co-sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and Medical Predictive Science Corporation (MPSC), appear in The Journal of Pediatrics.
Researchers at the University of Southampton have developed a new way to generate music and control computers.
"Grab a block and add a base beat, turn a block to speed up the high hat and we have a new way to generate music through controlling the computer," said Dr Enrico Costanza at the University's ECS - Electronics and Computer Science, who is launching Audio d-touch (Thursday 25 August).
The new discovery by Aalto University can have major impact on future nanoscale device design, such as ultraviolet photo detectors and drug delivery.
In bulk size, many materials like silicon are as brittle as glass. In nanoparticle size, the same material can be compressed into half their size without breaking them. The new discovery was made by an international research group led by Professor Roman Nowak.
Coral Gables, FL (August 23, 2011) – As firms begin the 2011 annual report process, which many do at this time of year, they may want to pay closer attention to the way those reports look. A recent study out of the University of Miami School of Business Administration found that investors, regardless of their experience, place a higher value on firms with attractive annual reports than they do on those that produce less attractive reports.
LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, August 23, 2011—Researchers at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory's Pulsed Field Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory have set a new world record for the strongest magnetic field produced by a nondestructive magnet.
If the vision of Tom Krupenkin and J. Ashley Taylor comes to fruition, one day soon your cellphone (or just about any other portable electronic device) could be powered by simply taking a walk.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, Krupenkin and Taylor, engineering researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, describe a new energy-harvesting technology that promises to dramatically reduce our dependence on batteries and instead capture the energy of human motion to power portable electronics.
MADISON, WI, AUGUST 19, 2011 -- In the Mid-South, twin-row soybean production is becoming a popular growing technique for soybean producers. An estimated 80% of the total hectares grown in the Mississippi Delta are planted in this configuration. While growers report this method increases seed yields, especially when used with specific cultivars planted in April or early May, there is no research data to support their claims.
Rice University researchers have created a solid-state, nanotube-based supercapacitor that promises to combine the best qualities of high-energy batteries and fast-charging capacitors in a device suitable for extreme environments.
A paper from the Rice lab of chemist Robert Hauge, to be published in the journal Carbon, reported the creation of robust, versatile energy storage that can be deeply integrated into the manufacture of devices. Potential uses span on-chip nanocircuitry to entire power plants.
Laser plasma accelerators offer the potential to create powerful electron beams within a fraction of the space required by conventional accelerators – and at a fraction of the cost. Their promise for the future includes not only compact high-energy colliders for fundamental physics but diminutive sources of intensely bright beams of light, spanning the spectrum from microwaves to gamma rays – a new kind of ultrafast light source for investigating new materials, biological structures, and green chemistry.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In early August, at the Def Con conference, a major annual gathering of computer hackers, someone apparently hacked into many of the attendees' cell phones, in what may have been the first successful breach of a 4G cellular network. If early reports are correct, the incident was a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack, so called because the attacker interposes himself between two other wireless devices.