Tech

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 5 - Before eating your next meal, pause for a moment to thank the humble honeybee. Farmers of almonds, broccoli, cantaloupe and many other nuts, vegetables and fruits rely heavily on managed honeybees to pollinate their crops each year.

Are you less happy than your parents were at the same age? It may not be all in your head. Researchers led by San Diego State University professor Jean M. Twenge found adults over age 30 are not as happy as they used to be, but teens and young adults are happier than ever.

Researchers -- including Ryne A. Sherman of Florida Atlantic University and Sonja Lyubomirsky of University of California, Riverside -- analyzed data from four nationally representative samples of 1.3 million Americans ages 13 to 96 taken from 1972 to 2014.

COLUMBIA, Mo. (Nov. 5, 2015) -- Previous research has found lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youths are four times more likely to commit suicide compared to their straight peers. Members of this community usually are more stressed and depressed than the general population. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri School of Medicine are exploring the role resilience plays in off-setting stress and depression among LGBT adults and youths, and found that LGBT youths have a lower levels of resilience than LGBT adults.

Conventional particle accelerators are typically big machines that occupy a lot of space. Even at more modest energies, such as that used for cancer therapy and medical imaging, accelerators need large rooms to accommodate the required hardware, power supplies and radiation shielding.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have found that lithium ion batteries operate longer and faster when their electrodes are treated with hydrogen.

Lithium ion batteries (LIBs) are a class of rechargeable battery types in which lithium ions move from the negative electrode to the positive electrode during discharge and back when charging.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Despite government regulations, ground-level ozone -- an odorless gas that forms as polluting nitrogen oxides drift in sunlight across the countryside -- continues to threaten crop quality and yield. In a new study, researchers quantify this loss from historical yield data for the first time. They show that over the last 30 years, ozone emissions have reduced soybean and corn yields by 5 percent and 10 percent, respectively.

The findings are reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) teamed up with colleagues from the Swiss Materials Science Lab Empa to study a degenerative sign of ageing in concrete: the so-called alkali-aggregate reaction (AAR). In the course of AAR, a material forms that takes up more space than the original concrete and thus gradually cracks the concrete from within as the decades go by.

Vector network analyzers (VNA) are among the most precise high-frequency measurement devices available today. Due to continuous development within the last decades VNAs are usable up to frequencies of 1 terahertz (1012 Hz) and complex error correction algorithms exist. However, VNAs are very expensive and require multiple frequency extenders in order to cover a wide frequency range. At the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) a VNA has been developed which utilizes optoelectronic techniques based on femtosecond lasers.

High-quality (high-Q) whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) microresonators can efficiently confine light in a very small volume via total internal reflection, leading to dramatically enhanced interaction of light with matter. The WGM microresonators have benefitted various applications including nonlinear optics, cavity quantum electrodynamics, quantum optics, and biosensing, etc.

Soda, candy, and fast food are often painted as the prime culprits in the national discussion of obesity in the United States. While a diet of chocolate bars and cheese burgers washed down with a Coke is inadvisable from a nutritional standpoint, these foods are not likely to be a leading cause of obesity in the United States according to a new Cornell University Food and Brand Lab study conducted by the Lab co-directors David Just, PhD, and Brian Wansink, PhD.

A team of UConn biomedical engineers, working with colleagues from Yale, MIT, and Harvard, has developed a simple, inexpensive, and quick technique for the diagnosis and monitoring of sickle cell disease that can be used in regions where advanced medical technology and training are scarce.

If you travel by plane in the coming months, you might witness a wintry aviation ritual in which ice and snow are cleared off the wings with a special liquid. That is necessary since tiny water droplets in the air may freeze to ice in certain weather conditions when settling on the aircraft's wings. That, in turn, can lead to turbulent airflow during take-off and hence to reduced lift -- a potentially dangerous situation. Even better than this de-icing procedure, of course, would be wings that don't allow the icy drops to stick or even actively repel them.

A NOAA-led team of scientists is reporting a high rate of reproductive failure in dolphins exposed to oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill. The team has monitored these bottlenose dolphins in heavily-oiled Barataria Bay for five years following the spill. Their findings, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society today, suggest that the effects of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill will be long-lasting.

Wind and solar energy projects are growing at a respectable clip. But storing electric power for days when the air is still or when the sun goes down remains a challenge, largely due to cost. Now researchers are developing a new battery that could bring the price of storage to more affordable levels. They report their new battery that uses low-cost materials -- sodium and magnesium -- in ACS' journal Chemistry of Materials.

By exploiting the graphics-rendering software that powers sports video games, researchers at MIT and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have developed a system that automatically converts 2-D video of soccer games into 3-D.

The converted video can be played back over any 3-D device -- a commercial 3-D TV, Google's new Cardboard system, which turns smartphones into 3-D displays, or special-purpose displays such as Oculus Rift.

The researchers presented the new system last week at the Association for Computing Machinery's Multimedia conference.