Tech

There are different possible causes for famine and malnutrition--not all of which are easy to foresee. Drought and crop failure can often be predicted by monitoring the weather and measuring soil moisture. But other risk factors, such as socio-economic problems or violent conflicts, can endanger food security too. For organizations such as Doctors without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), it is crucial to obtain information about vulnerable regions as soon as possible, so that they have a chance to provide help before it is too late.

University of Washington engineers have developed a novel technology that uses a Wi-Fi router -- a source of ubiquitous but untapped energy in indoor environments -- to power devices.

The Power Over Wi-Fi (PoWiFi) system is one of the most innovative and game-changing technologies of the year, according to Popular Science, which included it in the magazine's annual "Best of What's New" awards announced Wednesday.

Deciding whether to cook or toss a steak that's been in the fridge for a few days calls for a sniff test. This generally works well for home cooks. But food manufacturers that supply tons of meats to consumers require more reliable measures. In a new journal called ACS Sensors, scientists report a simple method that uses nanotubes to quickly detect spoilage. It could help make sure meats are safe when they hit store shelves.

The world has a carbon dioxide problem, and to fix it, much attention has been paid to renewable energy sources, which don't emit the greenhouse gas. But what if we could turn waste CO2 into marketable chemicals and fuels before it escaped to the atmosphere? Would this help alter the climate change narrative? The cover story in Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society, parses this possibility.

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health have found a link between higher levels of a specific kind of air pollution in major urban areas and an increase in cardiovascular-related hospitalizations such as for heart attacks in people 65 and older.

Noise is an issue in optical telecommunications. And findings means of controlling noise is key to physicists investigating light-emitting diodes or lasers. Now, an Italo-Iraqi team has worked on a particular type of light source, called the quantum dot light-emitting diode (QDLED). In a study published in EPJ D, Kais Al Namee from the National Institute of Optics, in Florence, Italy and colleagues, demonstrate that modulating bias current of the QDLED could lead to countering the noise.

PITTSBURGH--Trips and stumbles too often lead to falls for amputees using leg prosthetics, but a robotic leg prosthesis being developed at Carnegie Mellon University promises to help users recover their balance by using techniques based on the way human legs are controlled.

Hartmut Geyer, assistant professor of robotics, said a control strategy devised by studying human reflexes and other neuromuscular control systems has shown promise in simulation and in laboratory testing, producing stable walking gaits over uneven terrain and better recovery from trips and shoves.

In a randomized clinical trial of more than 300 participants, researchers from Johns Hopkins and elsewhere have found that ranibizumab -- a drug most commonly used to treat retinal swelling in people with diabetes -- is an effective alternative to laser therapy for treating the most severe, potentially blinding form of diabetic retinal disease. Results of the government-sponsored study also show that the drug therapy carries fewer side effects than the currently used laser treatment.

Many recently developed pneumococcal serotyping methods detect the dominant serotype in a laboratory or field sample, but several fail to detect minor serotypes, according to a study published this week in PLOS Medicine. This investigation of 20 current methods, conducted by Catherine Satzke of the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute, Royal Children's Hospital, Parkville, Victoria, Australia, and colleagues, indicates that a microarray analysis with culture amplification is a top-performing method, but a cheaper culture and latex sweep method represents a viable alternative.

Athens, Ga. - A University of Georgia researcher has found that low levels of vitamin D may limit the effectiveness of HIV treatment in adults.

Those with human immunodeficiency virus--commonly known as HIV--often struggle with declining health because their immune systems can't effectively respond to common pathogens. Their immune statuses, usually measured by CD4+T cells, normally improve when given HIV treatment.

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When corn prices increase, corn yield also increases. The response is one-third from better management practices and intensive use of land and two-thirds from additional planted acreage.

Changes in climate can lead to 7 to 12 percent reduction in corn yields under slow-warming scenarios to as much as 40 percent reduction under the rapid-warming scenarios.

Jülich, 17 November 2015 - The overheating of computer chips is a major obstacle to the development of faster and more efficient computers and mobile phones. One promising remedy for this problem could be a class of materials first discovered just a few years ago: topological insulators, which conduct electricity with less resistance and heat generation than conventional materials. Research on these materials is still in its early stages.

Scientists at the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have demonstrated a way to significantly increase the efficiency of perovskite solar cells by reducing the amount of energy lost to heat.

A paper on the discovery, "Observation of a hot-phonon bottleneck in lead-iodide perovskites," was published online this week in the journal Nature Photonics. The research also will appear in the January print edition of the journal.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Even in an age of affluence and abundance in which round-the-clock consumerism and overspending are the norm, limits and constraints can still serve a purpose. According to new research co-written by a University of Illinois expert in new product development and marketing, resource scarcity actually translates into enhanced consumer product-use creativity.

A key issue with lithium ion batteries is aging. It significantly reduces their potential storage capacity. To date, very little is known about the causes of the aging effects. Scientists from the Department of Technical Electrochemistry and the Research Neutron Source FRM II at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now come a step closer to identifying the causes in their latest experiments.