Tech
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, a category 5 hurricane that made landfall in September 2017, flooding and power outages caused some wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to discharge raw sewage into waterways in Puerto Rico. Six months later, researchers monitored antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) in three Puerto Rican watersheds, finding that the abundance and diversity of ARGs were highest downstream of WWTPs. They report their results in ACS' Environmental Science & Technology.
An analysis published in Fish and Fisheries notes that marine fisheries are increasingly exposed to external drivers of social and ecological change, and recent changes have had different impacts upon the livelihood strategies favored by fishermen based on the size of their boats.
Just a handful of rice and beans - a part of our world is starved. Hawaiian Pizza and ice-cream - another part of our world is stuffed, throwing away food every day. This gap is likely to worsen, while food waste will increase and pressure on the environment will go up, a new study shows.
The gateway to more informed water use and better urban planning in your city could already be bookmarked on your computer. A new Stanford University study identifies residential water use and conservation trends by analyzing housing information available from the prominent real estate website Zillow.
The research, published Nov. 18 in Environmental Research Letters, is the first to demonstrate how new real estate data platforms can be used to provide valuable water use insights for city housing and infrastructure planning, drought management and sustainability.
At the heart of many past scientific breakthroughs lies the discovery of novel materials. However, the cycle of synthesizing, testing, and optimizing new materials routinely takes scientists long hours of hard work. Because of this, lots of potentially useful materials with exotic properties remain undiscovered. But what if we could automate the entire novel material development process using robotics and artificial intelligence, making it much faster?
When Hurricane Maria made landfall, devastating Dominica, St. Croix, and Puerto Rico in September 2017, flooding and power outages wreaked havoc on the debilitated land, resulting in the contamination of waterways with untreated human waste and pathogenic microorganisms.
Six months after the deadly Category 5 hurricane, Virginia Tech civil and environmental engineering Professor Amy Pruden led a team of Virginia Tech researchers, including Maria Virginia Riquelme and William Rhoads, then post-doctoral researchers, who packed their bags and lab supplies and headed to Puerto Rico.
Currently, the majority of energy consumed by the world's population is derived from oil and other non-renewable resources which are in danger of running out in the near future. Consequently the development of artificial photosynthesis methods using photocatalysts to produce chemical energy (hydrogen fuel) from sunlight and water has received much attention and various research projects are being conducted in this area.
"Put your phone away!" "No more video games!" "Ten more minutes of YouTube and you're done!"
Kids growing up in the mobile internet era have heard them all, often uttered by well-meaning parents fearing long-term problems from overuse.
But new University of Colorado Boulder research suggests such restrictions have little effect on technology use later in life, and that fears of widespread and long-lasting "tech addiction" may be overblown.
Three physicists in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, together with their colleagues from the Southern University of Science and Technology and Sun Yat-sen University in China, have successfully modified a semiconductor to create a superconductor.
Professor and Department Head Hanno Weitering, Associate Professor Steve Johnston, and PhD candidate Tyler Smith were part of the team that made the breakthrough in fundamental research, which may lead to unforeseen advancements in technology.
The automotive industry has become increasingly interested in the use of high-Ni (nickel) batteries for electric vehicles. However high-Ni cathodes, which make the batteries, are prone to reactivity and instability when exposed to humidity
Researchers from WMG, University of Warwick have researched the best way to store Ni cathodes to mitigate degradation and improve performance
Humid or ambient conditions for batteries result in premature capacity fade of the battery, whereas the best condition are dry storage at dew points of around -45oC.
It is the bacterial changes in the gut that increase the levels of imidazole propionate, the molecule that makes the body's cells resistant to insulin in type 2 diabetes. This result emerges from a European study, MetaCardis.
Hydrogen gas and methanol for fuel cells or as raw materials for the chemicals industry, for example, could be produced more sustainably using sunlight, a new Uppsala University study shows. In this study, researchers have developed a new coating material for semiconductors that may create new opportunities to produce fuels in processes that combine direct sunlight with electricity. The study is published in Nature Communications.
The prestigious journal Chem (Cell Press, impact factor: 19.735) publishes the first mechanosynthesis of a molecular crystal with a Borromean topology. The research has been carried out by an international team led by Prof. Pierangelo Metrangolo, Giuseppe Resnati, and Giancarlo Terraneo at the Department of Chemistry, Materials and Chemical Engineering "Giulio Natta" of the Politecnico di Milano.
The introduction of the fifth generation mobile network, or 5G, will change the way we communicate, multiply the capacity of the information highways, and allow everyday objects to connect to each other in real time. Its deployment constitutes a true technological revolution not without some security hazards. Until 5G technology has definitively expanded, some challenges remain to be resolved, including those concerning possible eavesdropping, interference and identity theft.
The publication is the result of many months of observations of radiation coming from the plane of the Milky Way, namely from the spiral arms of our galaxy, where a lot of matter, dust and gas accumulate. It is under such conditions that massive stars are born.
Complex process