Tech

According to legend, it was The Fountain of Youth that the famed Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon was seeking when he landed on the Floridian coast in 1513. It has long been said that he who drinks from the Fountain will have his youth restored. Without a doubt, the quest for eternal youth is as ancient as any pursuit. However, although we are now living longer than ever, there is now growing concern that quantity of years is not nearly as important as quality of those years.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Wettability — the degree to which a liquid either spreads out over a surface or forms into droplets — is crucial to a wide variety of processes. It influences, for example, how easily a car's windshield fogs up, and also affects the functioning of advanced batteries and fuel-cell systems.

They paved paradise and, it turns out, actually did put up a parking lot. A big one. Some 700 feet deep in the waters off California's jewel of a coastal resort, Santa Barbara, sits a group of football-field-sized asphalt domes unlike any other underwater features known to exist.

About 35,000 years ago, a series of apparent undersea volcanoes deposited massive flows of petroleum 10 miles offshore. The deposits hardened into domes that were discovered recently by scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and UC Santa Barbara (UCSB).

A team of telecommunications engineers from the University of Jaen (UJA) has created a new method to automatically detect and identify the musical notes in an audio file and generate sheet music. The system identifies the notes even when the type of instrument, musician, type of music or recording studio conditions vary.

Writing in the International Journal of Electronic Marketing and Retailing, researchers from the US and Germany point out an inherent flaw in the financial industry adopting biometric logins to boost security in that the advent of mobile devices, such as netbooks, PDAs, and smart phones might make biometric logins impossible when one is on the move.

Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientists are helping U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) experts model the movement of radioactive materials in the soil. Their findings can be used to fine-tune the risk assessment studies that are an essential component in the development of commercial nuclear facilities.

A new study links nicotine poisoning with weight gain, and concludes that active smokers, not only those who stop, put on more weight than non-smokers. After four years of analysis in the University of Navarra, those who put on least weight were those who had never smoked.

In a major breakthrough for wheat farmers in salt-affected areas, CSIRO researchers have developed a salt tolerant durum wheat that yields 25 per cent more grain than the parent variety in saline soils.Recent field trials in northern New South Wales proved that durum wheat varieties containing new salt tolerant genes outperformed the other varieties in saline soils.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.---As a way to simplify lab-on-a-chip devices that could offer quicker, cheaper and more portable medical tests, University of Michigan researchers have created microfluidic integrated circuits.

Just as electronic circuits intelligently route the flow of electricity on computer chips without external controls, these microfluidic circuits regulate the flow of fluid through their devices without instructions from outside systems.

A paper on the technology is newly published online in Nature Physics.

African farmers risk being forced from their lands by investors or government projects as global demand for biofuels encourages changes in crop cultivation.

Research from the University of Edinburgh has found that livelihoods may be put at risk if African farmland is turned over to growing crops for biofuel.

A new study links nicotine poisoning with weight gain, and concludes that active smokers, not only those who stop, put on more weight than non-smokers. After four years of analysis in the University of Navarra, those who put on least weight were those who had never smoked.

INDIANAPOLIS – Less than a quarter of Americans want no changes to the health care legislation signed into law by the president last month but there may be more common ground with other Americans than many think, according to the latest national survey by researchers from Indiana University's Center for Health Policy and Professionalism Research (CHPPR).

When survey respondents were asked how they viewed the new law:

Estimating crop yields based on available water in semi-arid regions has been made easier for several hundred farmers who are using a special calculator computer program developed by an Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist.

Several hundred farmers in the Central Great Plains have picked up a copy of the device, called the MultiCalculator CD, at field days and other outreach meetings, according to David Nielsen, the agronomist who developed it at the ARS Central Great Plains Research Station in Akron, Colo.

Family members who provide care to relatives with dementia, but do not have formal training, frequently experience overwhelming stress that sometimes leads to breakdowns or depression, according to Penn State and Benjamin Rose Institute researchers. Interventions to alleviate this stress are not always effective, leaving caregivers isolated to deal with their stresses.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., April 22, 2010 -- Mimicking the human nervous system for bionic applications could become a reality with the help of a method developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to process carbon nanotubes.