Tech

Computers do not spell the demise of literacy -- in fact, they may help to create one of the most literate and engaged generations the world has seen.

Carl Whithaus, associate professor of writing at UC Davis, will make that argument during a 2-3:15 p.m. session on Saturday, June 20, in room 106 of Wellman Hall at UC Davis, part of a four-day Computers & Writing 2009 conference sponsored by the University Writing Program at UC Davis.

"When the human eye searches for an object it looks globally for the rough location, size and orientation of the object. Then it zeros in on the details," said Jiang, an assistant professor of computer science. "Our method behaves in a similar fashion, using a linear approximation to explore the search space globally and quickly; then it works to identify the moving object by frequently updating trust search regions."

Washington, DC – June 12, 2009 -- The Association for Molecular Pathology (AMP) today released the text of a comment letter it has provided to the Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER) in which AMP sets forth its recommendations for priority areas on which to focus CER activities.

Electronic devices of the future could be smaller, faster, more powerful and consume less energy because of a discovery by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The most popular type of gastric bypass surgery appears to nearly double the chance that a patient will develop kidney stones, despite earlier assumptions that it would not, Johns Hopkins doctors report in a new study. The overall risk, however, remains fairly small at about 8 percent.

University of Oregon physicists have successfully landed a one-two punch on a tiny glass sphere, refrigerating it in liquid helium and then dosing its perimeter with a laser beam, to bring its naturally occurring mechanical vibrations to a near standstill.

MADISON — Satellite observation of cloud temperatures may be able to accurately predict severe thunderstorms up to 45 minutes earlier than relying on traditional radar alone, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center.

Scientists from the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) have developed a way to measure temperature changes in the tops of clouds to improve forecast times for rapidly growing storms.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have discovered that a reduction in mechanical strain at the boundaries of crystal grains can significantly improve the performance of high-temperature superconductors (HTS). Their results* could lead to lower cost and significantly improved performance of superconductors in a wide variety of applications, such as power transmission, power grid reliability and advanced physics research.

It was an idea born out of curiosity in the physics lab, but now a new type of 'laser' for generating ultra-high frequency sound waves instead of light has taken a major step towards becoming a unique and highly useful 21st century technology.

A unique and innovative telemedicine project is providing distant nursing home patients with Parkinson's disease access to neurologists at the University of Rochester Medical Center. A pilot study of the project – the results of which were released this month at the International Congress of Parkinson's Disease and Movement Disorders in Paris – demonstrates that the system can improve the quality of life and motor function of patients.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — From balloons to rubber bands, things always break faster when stretched. Or do they? University of Illinois scientists studying chemical bonds now have shown this isn't always the case, and their results may have profound implications for the stability of proteins to mechanical stress and the design of new high-tech polymers.

A wildfire rages across southern California wildlands towards residential communities, endangering residents and firefighters and sending property up in smoke. This is an increasingly common story, occurring several times a summer. To better understand these Wildland-Urban Interface (WUI) fires and how best to prevent or fight them, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have issued an in-depth study on fire behavior and defensive actions taken in a community during a such a fire.

Shape is turning out to be a particularly important feature of some commercially important nanoparticles—but in subtle ways. New studies* by scientists at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) show that changing the shape of cobalt nanoparticles from spherical to cubic can fundamentally change their behavior.

Better predictions of how many valuable materials behave under stress could be on the way from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where scientists have recently found evidence* of an important similarity between the behavior of polycrystalline materials—such as metals and ceramics—and glasses.

PITTSBURGH—Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science have developed two new tools to help computer programmers select from among thousands of options within the application programming interfaces (APIs) that are used to write applications in Java, today's most popular programming language.