Tech

VERNON – Wile E. Coyote might not have been able to catch up with the roadrunner on the Saturday morning cartoons, but one Texas AgriLife Research scientist has had no problems.

Dr. Dean Ransom, AgriLife Research wildlife ecologist in Vernon, has conducted a study of the roadrunner's ecology and habitat for the past four years. Using radio telemetry and studying more than 50 nests, he and his staff have researched home range, habitat use, nesting ecology and dispersal of young since 2006.

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Some people who are serious about wanting to reduce their "carbon footprint" on the Earth have one choice available to them that may yield a large long-term benefit – have one less child.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA---This month's Ophthalmology, the journal of the American Academy of Ophthalmology, reports on use of bevacizumab (Avastin), to benefit diabetic patients with macular edema as well as people who develop cystoid macular edema after cataract surgery. Bevacizumab is also used to treat some cancers. Another study describes methods that could make cataract surgery safer for diabetic retinopathy (DR) patients. DR is the major threat to vision in working-age people, a problem that will only intensify if cases triple by 2050 as predicted.

Current methods for estimating greenhouse gas emissions have limitations that make it difficult to monitor CO2 emissions and verify an international climate treaty, says a new National Research Council letter report to the administrator of NASA, Charles F. Bolden Jr.

A system that allows biometric data to be used to create a secret key for data encryption has been developed by researchers in South Africa. They describe details of the new technology in the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics.

If a user, such as web customer say, wishes to send a message or other data to another user, an online shop, over an unsecured network, the message must be encrypted to avoid interception of sensitive information such as passwords and credit card information.

Ever since graphene was discovered in 2004, this one-atom thick, super strong, carbon-based electrical conductor has been billed as a "wonder material" that some physicists think could one day replace silicon in computer chips.

But graphene, which consists of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice, has a major drawback when it comes to applications in electronics – it conducts electricity almost too well, making it hard to create graphene-based transistors that are suitable for integrated circuits.

Johns Hopkins experts in applied physics, computer engineering, infectious diseases, emergency medicine, microbiology, pathology and surgery have unveiled a 7-foot-tall, $10,000 shower-cubicle-shaped device that automatically sanitizes in 30 minutes all sorts of hard-to-clean equipment in the highly trafficked hospital emergency department. The novel device can sanitize and disinfect equipment of all shapes and sizes, from intravenous line poles and blood pressure cuffs, to pulse oximeter wires and electrocardiogram (EKG) wires, to computer keyboards and cellphones.

Engineers have developed a new method for creating high-performance membranes from crystal sieves called zeolites. The method could increase the energy efficiency of chemical separations up to 50 times over conventional methods and enable higher production rates.

The ability to separate and purify specific molecules in a chemical mixture is essential to chemical manufacturing. Many industrial separations rely on distillation, a process that is easy to design and implement but consumes a lot of energy.

A well-established physical law describes the transfer of heat between two objects, but some physicists have long predicted that the law should break down when the objects are very close together. Scientists had never been able to confirm, or measure, this breakdown in practice. However, MIT researchers have now achieved this feat, and determined that the heat transfer can be 1,000 times greater than the law predicts.

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – An innovative laser imaging technique, developed with funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), could cut more than 7,700 man hours from the manufacturing cycle of the VIRGINA-Class Submarine (VCS).

Per submarine, the savings could reach $500K per hull, translating in a projected savings of $15.5M over a 31-hull construction program.

The first desktop computers changed the way we managed data forever. Three decades after their introduction, we rely on them to manage our time, social life and finances ― and to keep this information safe from prying eyes and online predators.

Ultraviolet (UV) radiation from sunlight may be associated with the development of certain autoimmune diseases, particularly in women, according to a study by researchers at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health.

An international research team has developed a mathematical and cartographical model that make it possible to view how Mediterranean landscapes evolve in the aftermath of forest fires. In order to carry out this research study, published recently in the journal Environmental Modelling & Software, the authors studied a Special Protection Area for Birds to the south west of Madrid.

"When you think about it, our cultural view of robots has always been anti-people, pro-robot," explained David Woods, professor of integrated systems engineering at Ohio State University. "The philosophy has been, 'sure, people make mistakes, but robots will be better -- a perfect version of ourselves.' We wanted to write three new laws to get people thinking about the human-robot relationship in more realistic, grounded ways."

In the current issue of journal IEEE Intelligent Systems, two engineers propose alternative laws to rewrite our future with robots.

Researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) and Geosemble Technologies are improving Air Force situational awareness with software that presents vast amounts of map data in a more manageable format

Using funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Dr. Craig Knoblock and his team developed a computerized method for aligning maps with satellite imagery. The result combined the visual appeal of photographs with the attribution information found on maps.