Tech

In a paper titled Using complementary remote detection methods for retrofitted eco-passages: a case study for monitoring individual koalas in south-east Queensland published by the CSIRO on Tuesday (July 26), the Environmental Futures Research Institute team verified 130 crossings by koalas involving a retrofitted structure or a road surface over a 30-month period.

Professor Darryl Jones said nobody knew whether the structures would actually keep koalas safe from being hit by cars or if they would work.

Science fiction is inching closer to reality with the development of revolutionary self-propelling liquid metals -- a critical step towards future elastic electronics.

While building a shape-shifting liquid metal T-1000 Terminator may still be far on the horizon, the pioneering work by researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, is setting the foundation for moving beyond solid state electronics towards flexible and dynamically reconfigurable soft circuit systems.

One- and two-year-old children are at the highest risk of burning their eyes with chemicals, despite the long held belief that working-age adults were the most at risk from this type of severe eye injury, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health-led research suggests.

Camp Century, a U.S. military base built within the Greenland Ice Sheet in 1959, doubled as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War. When the camp was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were abandoned under the assumption they would be entombed forever by perpetual snowfall.

TORONTO, Aug. 4, 2016 - Climate change is threatening to expose hazardous waste at an abandoned camp thought to be buried forever in the Greenland Ice Sheet, new research out of York University has found.

Camp Century, a United States military base built within the Greenland ice sheet in 1959, doubled as a top-secret site for testing the feasibility of deploying nuclear missiles from the Arctic during the Cold War. When the camp was decommissioned in 1967, its infrastructure and waste were abandoned under the assumption they would be entombed forever by perpetual snowfall.

You may have heard of plans to use drones for delivering packages, monitoring wildlife, or tracking storms. But painting murals?

That's the idea behind a project in Paul Kry's laboratory at McGill University's School of Computer Science. Prof. Kry and a few of his students have teamed up to program tiny drones to create dot drawings - an artistic technique known as stippling.

Sampath Vengate, who graduated in May with a master of science degree in aerospace engineering, used existing UTA research to design, build and test a UAV that uses mass actuation - weights that move back and forth within the wings to change the center of gravity from side to side - to turn while airborne.

He presented his findings in a paper at one of the two annual American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conferences, held in July in Washington, DC.

We learn a lot about objects by manipulating them: poking, pushing, prodding, and then seeing how they react.

We obviously can't do that with videos -- just try touching that cat video on your phone and see what happens. But is it crazy to think that we could take that video and simulate how the cat moves, without ever interacting with the real one?

BELLINGHAM, Washington, USA -- Space debris from completed missions -- inactive satellites, lens covers, fragments from spaceship disengagements -- pose a serious and ongoing threat to active communication and navigation satellites used by billions of people on Earth. An article published today by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, in Optical Engineering describes a new approach whereby debris orbiting in space could be pushed into the Earth's atmosphere by laser impulses, causing it to burn up.

Quantum computers promise speedy solutions to some difficult problems, but building large-scale, general-purpose quantum devices is a problem fraught with technical challenges.

To date, many research groups have created small but functional quantum computers. By combining a handful of atoms, electrons or superconducting junctions, researchers now regularly demonstrate quantum effects and run simple quantum algorithms--small programs dedicated to solving particular problems.

Turning carbon dioxide into stored energy sounds like science fiction: researchers have long tried to find simple ways to convert this greenhouse gas into fuels and other useful chemicals. Now, a group of researchers led by Professor Ted Sargent of the University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering have found a more efficient way, through the wonders of nanoengineering.

A proof-of-concept study from North Carolina State University finds that the density of bones in the skull affects the size of bullet holes in the skull. The finding is useful for law enforcement officials and medical examiners seeking to identify the caliber of firearms that have been used to commit murder.

Researchers at the University of California, Riverside have created a new silicon-tin nanocomposite anode that could lead to lithium-ion batteries that can be charged and discharged more times before they reach the end of their useful lives. The longer-lasting batteries could be used in everything from handheld electronic devices to electric vehicles.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Aug. 3, 2016 - Solar cells based on cadmium and tellurium could move closer to theoretical levels of efficiency because of some sleuthing by researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Facility-based deliveries were reduced by approximately 8% during the Ebola epidemic in rural Liberia, according to a study by John Kraemer from the Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA, and colleagues, published in PLOS Medicine.