Tech
Posted On: February 7, 2012 - 4:30pm
Visitors to Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building may have experienced a curious acoustic feature that allows a person to whisper softly at one side of the cavernous, half-domed room and for another on the other side to hear every syllable. Sound is whisked around the semi-circular perimeter of the room almost without flaw. The phenomenon is known as a whispering gallery.
Posted On: February 6, 2012 - 8:01pm
In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama praised the potential of the country's tremendous supply of natural gas buried in shale. He echoed the recommendations for safe extraction made by an advisory panel that included Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback. The panel made 20 recommendations for regulatory reform, some of which go well beyond what the president mentioned in his address.
Posted On: February 6, 2012 - 2:30pm
The great paradox of global health efforts is that regions of the world most plagued by poverty, poor infrastructure and rampant disease are often the most difficult to deliver care to. In addition, when development and public health agencies focus their efforts on one individual disease or another, instead of taking a unified approach, their programs can work at cross-purposes, contributing to rising costs and lost lives.
Posted On: February 6, 2012 - 2:30pm
One area of intensive research at the nanoscale is the creation of electrically conductive meshes made of metal nanowires. Promising exceptional electrical throughput, low cost and easy processing, engineers foresee a day when such meshes are common in new generations of touch-screens, video displays, light-emitting diodes and thin-film solar cells.
Standing in the way, however, is a major engineering hurdle: In processing, these delicate meshes must be heated or pressed to unite the crisscross pattern of nanowires that form the mesh, damaging them in the process.
Posted On: February 5, 2012 - 6:30pm
Posted On: February 7, 2012 - 3:30pm
To make a silicon solar cell, you start with a slice of highly purified silicon crystal, and then process it through several stages involving gradual heating and cooling. But figuring out the tradeoffs involved in selecting the purity level of the starting silicon wafer — and then exactly how much to heat it, how fast, for how long, and so on through each of several steps — has largely been a matter of trial and error, guided by intuition and experience.
Now, MIT researchers think they have found a better way.
Posted On: February 7, 2012 - 3:00pm
Posted On: February 6, 2012 - 4:30pm
MANHATTAN, KAN. -- Think of it as cooking with carbon spaghetti: A Kansas State University researcher is developing new ways to create and work with carbon nanotubes -- ultrasmall tubes that look like pieces of spaghetti or string.
Posted On: February 5, 2012 - 6:30pm
Scientists at the University of Southampton, in collaboration with Penn State University have, for the first time, embedded the high level of performance normally associated with chip-based semiconductors into an optical fibre, creating high-speed optoelectronic function.
The potential applications of such optical fibres include improved telecommunications and other hybrid optical/electronic technologies. This transatlantic team will publish its findings in the journal Nature Photonics this month.
Posted On: February 5, 2012 - 6:30pm
University of British Columbia researchers have discovered the molecular pathway that enables receptors inside immune cells to find, and flag, fragments of pathogens trying to invade a host.
The discovery of the role played by the molecule CD74 could help immunologists investigate treatments that offer better immune responses against cancers, viruses and bacteria, and lead to more efficient vaccines.
The findings are published in this week's edition of Nature Immunology.
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