Tech

The world economic crisis has hit investment in clean energy and means its growth is no longer on track for the world to avert the worst impact of climate change, according to leading clean energy and carbon market analysts, New Energy Finance.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Despite the increased popularity of geek culture – movies based on comic books, videogames, virtual worlds – and the ubiquity of computers, the geek's close cousin, the nerd, still suffers from a negative stereotype in popular culture. This may help explain why women and minorities are increasingly shying away from careers in information technology, says Lori Kendall, a professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Mitochondria are restless, continually merging and splitting. But contrary to conventional wisdom, the size of these organelles depends on more than fusion and fission, as Berman et al. show. Mitochondrial growth and degradation are also part of the equation.

The study will appear online March 2, 2009 (www.jcb.org) and in the March 9, 2009 print issue of The Journal of Cell Biology (JCB).

Telecommuting has freed many to work far from the confines of the office via laptop, but the price of working while sipping a latte at that sunny café is the danger that a public network will not keep the data that passes through it safe. Now, to combat the risk inherent in remote access, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has updated its guide on maintaining data security while teleworking.

Neutral atoms—having no net electric charge—usually don’t act very dramatically around a magnetic field. But by “dressing them up” with light, researchers at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), a collaborative venture of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland at College Park, have caused ultracold rubidium atoms to undergo a startling transformation. They force neutral atoms to act like pointlike charged particles that can undergo merry-go-round-like “cyclotron” motions just as electrons do when subjected to a suitable magnetic field.

ARGONNE, Ill. (February 25, 2008) — When squeezed, electrons increase their ability to move around. In compounds such as semiconductors and electrical insulators, such squeezing can dramatically change the electrical- and magnetic- properties.

CHESTNUT HILL, MA (February 24, 2009) – An engineered metamaterial proved it can function as a state-of-the-art device in the complex terahertz range of the electromagnetic spectrum, setting a standard of performance for modulating tiny waves of radiation, according to a team of researchers from Boston College, the Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories, and Boston University.

Scientists from Queen Mary, University of London and the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) have found evidence that magnetism is involved in the mechanism behind high temperature superconductivity.

PITTSBURGH—University of Pittsburgh researchers have created a nanoscale one-stop shop, a single platform for creating electronics at a nearly single-atom scale that could yield advanced forms of such technologically important devices as high-density memory devices and—most importantly—transistors and computer processors. This multitude of uses stems from a technique previously developed by the same team to fashion rewritable nanostructures at the interface between two insulating materials. In the Feb.

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Physicists at Rutgers University have discovered unusual electronic properties in a material that has potential to improve solar cell efficiency and computer chip design.

The cadherin superfamily has a correlate relationship with the invasion and metastasis of carcinoma. It has been suggested that, unlike E-cadherin, N-cadherin may promote motility and invasion in carcinoma cells. To explore clinical pathological significance of E-cadherin and N-cadherin expressions in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC), a research team led by Prof.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — A new imaging technique developed by researchers at the University of Illinois overcomes the limit of diffraction and can reveal the atomic structure of a single nanocrystal with a resolution of less than one angstrom (less than one hundredth-millionth of a centimeter).

People debating politics are well-advised to shed more light than heat. Engineers working in optical technologies have the same aspiration.

An international team of scientists led by a Princeton University group recently discovered that on the surface of certain materials collective arrangements of electrons move in ways that mimic the presence of a magnetic field where none is present. The finding represents one of the most exotic macroscopic quantum phenomena in condensed-matter physics: a topological Quantum Spin Hall effect.

STRENGTHENING THE FORENSIC SCIENCE SYSTEM IN THE UNITED STATES: A PATH FORWARD, a new congressionally mandated report from the National Research Council, takes a broad look at the needs of the nation's crime labs and medical examiner system, discusses the scientific status of many forensic methods, and recommends steps policymakers and practitioners should take to improve the U.S. forensic science system. The report will be released at a one-hour public briefing on Wednesday, Feb. 18.