HANOVER, N.H. - Robots do many things formerly done only by humans - from bartending and farming to driving cars - but a Dartmouth researcher and his colleagues have invented a "smart" paint spray can that robotically reproduces photographs as large-scale murals.
The computerized technique, which basically spray paints a photo, isn't likely to spawn a wave of giant graffiti, but it can be used in digital fabrication, digital and visual arts, artistic stylization and other applications.
COLUMBIA, Mo. - Unconventional oil and gas (UOG) operations combine directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," to release natural gas and oil from underground rock. Recent studies have centered on potential water pollution from this process that may increase endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) in surface and ground water and whether populations living near these operations have an increased risk of disease.
The transistor is the most fundamental building block of electronics, used to build circuits capable of amplifying electrical signals or switching them between the 0s and 1s at the heart of digital computation. Transistor fabrication is a highly complex process, however, requiring high-temperature, high-vacuum equipment.
Now, University of Pennsylvania engineers have shown a new approach for making these devices: sequentially depositing their components in the form of liquid nanocrystal "inks."
COLUMBUS, Ohio--Harmful algal blooms dangerous to human health and the Lake Erie ecosystem--such as the one that shut down Toledo's water supply for two days in 2014--could become a problem of the past.
RUSTON, La - Renata Minullina and Abhishek Panchal, biomedical engineering graduate students from Louisiana Tech University and the Institute for Micromanufacturing (IfM), have won the prestigious Poster Presentation Award at the Polymer Materials Science and Engineering Division of the 251st National American Chemical Society (ACS) Meeting held recently in San Diego, California.
Moss growing on urban trees is a useful bio-indicator of cadmium air pollution in Portland, Oregon, a U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station-led study has found. The work--the first to use moss to generate a rigorous and detailed map of air pollution in a U.S. city--is published online in the journal Science of the Total Environment.
Sickle cell disease (SCD) is characterized by abnormal hemoglobin, which alters the shape of red blood cells, resulting in poor blood flow and eventual death. In developed countries, the survival rate in children with SCD is high due to early medical intervention. However, the risk of adverse effects dramatically increases in SCD patients during early adulthood, and the factors that underlie adult progression of the disease are poorly understood.
Food should be labelled with the equivalent exercise to expend its calories to help people change their behaviour, argues an expert in The BMJ today.
Shirley Cramer, Chief Executive at the Royal Society of Public Health, says giving consumers an immediate link between foods' energy content and physical activity might help to reduce obesity.
It's been known for some time that the immune system can produce antibodies capable of "neutralizing" HIV, and stopping the AIDS-causing virus dead in its tracks.
The problem is, less than a third of people produce "broadly neutralizing" antibodies in response to HIV infection and it takes a year or more before production gets into full swing. Efforts to develop a vaccine that can jumpstart an effective immune response to HIV so far have been unsuccessful.
WOODS HOLE, Mass. -- One of the startling discoveries about life on Earth in the past 25 years is that it can - and does - flourish beneath the ocean floor, in the planet's dark, dense, rocky crust.
The only way to get there is by drilling through meters of sediment until you hit rock, so information on this ubiquitous but buried marine biosphere is still scarce.
The world's soils could store an extra 8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases, helping to limit the impacts of climate change, research suggests.
Adopting the latest technologies and sustainable land use practices on a global scale could allow more emissions to be stored in farmland and natural wild spaces, the study shows.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., April 6, 2016 -- Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have found a potential path to further improve solar cell efficiency by understanding the competition among halogen atoms during the synthesis of sunlight-absorbing crystals.
Berkeley, CA --State renewables portfolio standards, known as RPS policies, have contributed to more than half of all renewable electricity growth in the United States since 2000. Most state RPS requirements will continue to rise through at least 2020, if not beyond, and collectively these policies will require substantial further growth in U.S. renewable electricity supplies. These findings are part of a new annual status report on state RPS policies, from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Solar cells made of artificial metallic crystalline structures called perovskites have shown great promise in recent years. Now Stanford University scientists have found that applying pressure can change the properties of these inexpensive materials and how they respond to light.
"Our results suggest that we can increase the voltages of perovskite solar cells by applying external pressure," said Hemamala Karunadasa, an assistant professor of chemistry at Stanford. "We also observed a dramatic increase in the electronic conductivity of these promising materials at high pressures."
As renewable energy sources grow, so does the demand for new ways to store the resulting energy at low-cost and in environmentally friendly ways. Now scientists report in ACS' journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters a first-of-its-kind development toward that goal: a rechargeable battery driven by bacteria.