Tech

University of Houston researchers have developed a method for creating single-crystal arrays of the material graphene, an advance that opens the possibility of a replacement for silicon in high-performance computers and electronics. The work by UH researchers and their collaborators is featured on the cover of the June issue of Nature Materials.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Unwed mothers face poorer health at midlife than do women who have children after marriage, according to a new nationwide study.

Researchers found that women who had their first child outside of marriage described their health as poorer at age 40 than did other moms.

This is the first U.S. study to document long-term negative health consequences for unwed mothers, and it has major implications for our society, said Kristi Williams, lead author of the study and associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University.

WASHINGTON, DC, May 26, 2011 — Unwed mothers face poorer health at midlife than do women who have children after marriage, according to a new nationwide study, which appears in the June 2011 issue of the American Sociological Review.

Researchers found that women who had their first child outside of marriage described their health as poorer at age 40 than did other moms.

Washington, DC, June 1, 2011 – MRSA transmission may be occurring in fire stations, according to a study published in the June issue of the American Journal of Infection Control, the official publication of APIC – the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology.

It seems perfectly natural to expect that two motorists who depart from the same location and follow the same directions will end up at the same destination. But according to a Johns Hopkins University mathematical physicist, this is not true when the "directions" are provided by a turbulent fluid flow, such as you find in a churning river or stream.

University of Adelaide acoustics researchers are investigating the causes of wind turbine noise with the aim of making them quieter and solving 'wind turbine syndrome'.

They are also developing a computer model to predict the noise output from wind farms so they can accurately and quickly assess the effectiveness of potential noise-reducing designs and control methods.

Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have found a way to cut the amount of fuel consumed by non-road mobile machinery by half. This new technology captures energy, which up to now has been lost by the machinery when working, and uses it instead of fuel. The fuel consumption of construction and mining machines, agricultural machines and material handling machines is reduced significantly.

An article published in the June issue of BioScience describes the early scale-up stage of a new biotechnology with environmental benefits and possible commercial potential. Algal turf scrubbers are field-sized, water-treatment systems that can extract excess nutrients from streams, canals, and lakes polluted by agricultural, domestic, and some industrial runoff. They use sunlight as their principal source of energy and simultaneously restore oxygen levels. The devices work by pulsing contaminated water across algae that are allowed to grow on screens.

Overweight and obese people looking to drop some pounds and considering one of the popular low-carbohydrate diets, along with moderate exercise, need not worry that the higher proportion of fat in such a program compared to a low-fat, high-carb diet may harm their arteries, suggests a pair of new studies by heart and vascular researchers at Johns Hopkins.

A simple technique for stamping patterns invisible to the human eye onto a special class of nanomaterials provides a new, cost-effective way to produce novel devices in areas ranging from drug delivery to solar cells.

The technique was developed by Vanderbilt University engineers and described in the cover article of the May issue of the journal Nano Letters.

Soaring energy consumption by ever more powerful computers, data centers and mobile devices has many experts looking to reduce the energy use of these devices. Most projects so far focus on more efficient cooling systems or energy-saving power modes.

The creation of a new quasiparticle called the "hybrid plasmon polariton" may throw open the doors to integrated photonic circuits and optical computing for the 21st century. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have demonstrated the first true nanoscale waveguides for next generation on-chip optical communication systems.

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- What causes a magnet to be a magnet, and how can we control a magnet's behavior? These are the questions that University at Buffalo researcher Igor Zutic, a theoretical physicist, has been exploring over many years.

He is one of many scientists who believe that magnets could revolutionize computing, forming the basis of high-capacity and low-energy memory, data storage and data transfer devices.

Developing drugs to combat or cure human disease often involves a phase of testing with mice, so being able to peer clearly into a living mouse's innards has real value.

But with the fluorescent dyes currently used to image the interior of laboratory mice, the view becomes so murky several millimeters under the skin that researchers might have more success divining the future from the rodent's entrails than they do extracting usable data.

It might not seem like scraping the top of a cold stick of butter with a knife could be a scientific test, but engineers at MIT say the process is very similar to the "scratch test," which is perhaps the oldest known way to assess a material's hardness and strength — or, in scientific language, its resistance to deformation.