Tech

BETHLEHEM, PA—A team of electrical engineers and chemists at Lehigh University have experimentally verified the "rainbow" trapping effect, demonstrating that plasmonic structures can slow down light waves over a broad range of wavelengths.

A faster, better and cheaper desalination process enhanced by carbon nanotubes has been developed by NJIT Professor Somenath Mitra. The process creates a unique new architecture for the membrane distillation process by immobilizing carbon nanotubes in the membrane pores. Conventional approaches to desalination are thermal distillation and reverse osmosis.

Electric cars are the future, say some in the government and the automotive industry alike. The German federal government aims to establish Germany as the lead market for electromobility.

By 2020, a million passenger cars with an electric drive should be on the roads in Germany. The prospects of achieving that aim look good: As the ADAC, the German motoring organization, found out in a survey, 74 percent of those surveyed would buy an electric car if they did not have to compromise in terms of cost, comfort and safety.

Read the comments on any website and you may despair at Americans' inability to argue well. Thankfully, educators now name argumentive reasoning as one of the basics students should leave school with.

A revolutionary type of personal power pack now in development could help our troops when they are engaged on the battlefield.

With the aim of being up to fifty per cent lighter than conventional chemical battery packs used by British infantry, the solar and thermoelectric-powered system could make an important contribution to future military operations.

Sex and violence, or at least death, are the key to reproduction for the orchid Satyrium pumilum. Research led by Timotheüs van der Niet at the University of KwaZulu-Natal shows that the orchid lures flies into its flowers by mimicking the smell of rotting flesh. A new study comparing the scent of the orchids with that of roadkill is to be published in the Annals of Botany http://dx.doi.org10.1093/aob/mcr048 .

A study at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid analyzing the capacity of a society to deal with maritime disasters such as the Prestige concludes that in Spain public measures still have not been taken to coordinate reaction when confronting this type of spills.

Potsdam/Bremerhaven, March 14th, 2011. Unusually low temperatures in the Arctic ozone layer have recently initiated massive ozone depletion. The Arctic appears to be heading for a record loss of this trace gas that protects the Earth's surface against ultraviolet radiation from the sun.

Alum is an adjuvant (immune booster) used in many common vaccines, and Canadian researchers have now discovered how it works. The research by scientists from the University of Calgary's Faculty of Medicine is published in the March 13 online edition of Nature Medicine. The new findings will help the medical community produce more effective vaccines and may open the doors for creating new vaccines for diseases such as HIV or tuberculosis.

Since the 1970s, hydrogen has been touted as a promising alternative to fossil fuels due to its clean combustion —unlike hydrocarbon-based fuels, which spew greenhouse gases and harmful pollutants, hydrogen's only combustion by-product is water. Compared to gasoline, hydrogen is lightweight, can provide a higher energy density and is readily available. But there's a reason we're not already living in a hydrogen economy: to replace gasoline as a fuel, hydrogen must be safely and densely stored, yet easily accessed.

Nanoscale whiskers from sea creatures could grow human muscle tissue

Minute whiskers of nanoscale dimensions taken from sea creatures could hold the key to creating working human muscle tissue, University of Manchester researchers have discovered.

Scientists have found that cellulose from tunicates, commonly known as sea squirts, can influence the behaviour of skeletal muscle cells in the laboratory.

These nanostructures are several thousand times smaller than muscle cells and are the smallest physical feature found to cause cell alignment.

Montreal, March 11, 2011 – A Concordia graduate student has designed a promising computer program that could serve as a new tool in missing-child investigations and matters of national security. Khoa Luu has developed a more effective computer-based technique to age photographic images of people's faces – an advance that could help to indentify missing kids and criminals on the lam.