Tech

Continued improvement of climate forecasts is resulting in better information about what rainfall and streamflow may look like months in advance. A researcher from North Carolina State University has developed an innovative water management framework that would take advantage of these forecasts to plan for droughts or excess rain in order to make the most efficient use of an area's water resources.

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Children who eat fish more than 3 times per week show a worse performance in the general cognitive, executive and perceptual-manipulative areas. Those with higher levels of exposure to mercury show a generalised delay in cognitive, memory and verbal areas. Mercury is a contaminant found especially in oily fish and canned fish and to a lesser extent in white fish.

Ida is one stubborn girl. Her remnants have moved out to sea and reformed as a powerful coastal low pressure system that's been raining on the mid-Atlantic since Tuesday night, November 10. The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, GOES-12 captures images of the low's cloud cover several times every hour, and shows its cloud cover stretching from North Carolina up to Maine. Rains are currently confined to the Mid-Atlantic from North Carolina to New Jersey, but will creep north with the progression of the low.

The calculation of variations in the sea level is relatively simple. It is by far more complicated to then determine the change in the water mass. A team of geodesists and oceanographers from the University of Bonn, as well as from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and the Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Sciences, two centres of the Helmholtz Association, have now, for the first time succeeded in doing this. The researchers were able to observe short-term fluctuations in the spatial distribution of the ocean water masses.

KNOXVILLE -- In the quest to make hydrogen as a clean alternative fuel source, researchers have been stymied about how to create usable hydrogen that is clean and sustainable without relying on an intensive, high-energy process that outweighs the benefits of not using petroleum to power vehicles.

New findings from a team of researchers from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, however, show that photosynthesis – the process by which plants regenerate using energy from the sun – may function as that clean, sustainable source of hydrogen.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. ― Bausch & Lomb today announced that the company's Lo-Torque® lens design demonstrates significantly better rotational recovery, which can lead to more consistent vision, compared with Acuvue's accelerated stabilization design. These findings from two clinical studies were presented at Academy 2009, the American Academy of Optometry annual meeting in Orlando, Fla.

Looking sharp and looking for light - Berkeley Lab researchers have engineered a new class of bowtie-shaped devices that capture, filter and steer light at the nanoscale. These "nano-colorsorter" devices act as antennae to focus and sort light in tiny spaces, a useful technique for harvesting broadband light for color-sensitive filters and detectors.

Slowing the growth in U.S. health care spending will most likely require adoption of an array of strategies as well as an improved approach to moving promising strategies into widespread use, according to a new analysis by the RAND Corporation.

The most-promising option for curbing health care spending is changing the way doctors and hospitals are paid to provide care, but implementing such a system must overcome significant obstacles in order to be successful, according to the study published online by the New England Journal of Medicine.

DALLAS – Nov. 11, 2009 – A new national initiative involving UT Southwestern Medical Center will match volunteers who want to take part in medical research studies with the scientists who are leading those studies.

ResearchMatch is a national partnership that will provide a free meeting place – via the Web – where volunteers can be matched to a scientific research project, or clinical trial, for which they might qualify.

Pediatricians and pediatric oncologists express differing views on religion and spirituality, largely based on the types of patients they treat, according to a survey that will appear in the current edition of the journal Social Problems.

Silicon nanowires are attracting significant attention from the electronics industry due to the drive for ever-smaller electronic devices, from cell phones to computers. The operation of these future devices, and a wide array of additional applications, will depend on the mechanical properties of these nanowires. New research from North Carolina State University shows that silicon nanowires are far more resilient than their larger counterparts, a finding that could pave the way for smaller, sturdier nanoelectronics, nanosensors, light-emitting diodes and other applications.

NOAA deployed the seventh in a series of "smart buoys" to monitor weather conditions and water quality in the Chesapeake Bay today. The buoy, located at the mouth of Severn River near Annapolis, Md., will be used by commercial and recreational boaters to navigate safely and provide data for educators and scientists to monitor the Bay's changing conditions.

The Congo Basin — with its massive, lush tropical rain forest — was far different 150 million to 200 million years ago. At that time Africa and South America were part of the single continent Gondwana. The Congo Basin was arid, with a small amount of seasonal rainfall, and few bushes or trees populated the landscape, according to a new geochemical analysis of rare ancient soils.

Zoo Atlanta recently became the first zoological institution in the world to obtain voluntary blood pressure readings from a gorilla. This groundbreaking stride was made possible by the Gorilla Tough Cuff, a blood pressure reading system devised through partnership with the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.