Tech

Gold had long been considered a non-magnetic metal. But researchers at Tohoku University recently discovered that gold can in fact be magnetized by applying heat.

They discovered that an electron spin - the origin of magnetism - plays an important role in a material's functionality at a non-constant temperature, where the magnetization and the heat flow interact. A subsequent experiment confirmed, for the first time, that magnetization in gold can be induced by the heat flow driven by a temperature change.

A team of researchers in Italy has used the location of confirmed debris from MH370 to determine where the airliner might have crashed, and where further debris could be found. The study is published today (27 July) in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).

While previous studies have found that electronic cigarettes emit toxic compounds, a new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has pinpointed the source of these emissions and shown how factors such as the temperature, type, and age of the device play a role in emission levels, information that could be valuable to both manufacturers and regulators seeking to minimize the health impacts of these increasingly popular devices.

Montreal homes are the most sustainable in the country, and Edmonton's the least, according to a new University of British Columbia study that compares average household greenhouse gas emissions in major cities across Canada.

Using census data over a 12-year span, researchers ranked cities on how much carbon dioxide the average Canadian family (two to three people) with an annual income of $81,000 in each city produced in a year from the combined use of electricity, gasoline and natural gas.

The "Industry 4.0" concept, first introduced by the German government, has recently extended the scope of compact high-power laser applications to, for instance, laser manufacturing, vehicle engine development, or thruster systems for space exploration.

However, integration of a controllable Q-switch into compact solid-state lasers has been challenging because of the mechanisms of EO and AO effects. In addition, previous Q-switches needed a large-sized power supply, which prevented downscaling of the entire system.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill.-- Smaller and faster has been the trend for electronic devices since the inception of the computer chip, but flat transistors have gotten about as small as physically possible. For researchers pushing for even faster speeds and higher performance, the only way to go is up.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - What's good for crops is not always good for the environment. Nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants, can cause problems when it leaches into water supplies. University of Illinois engineers developed a model to calculate the age of nitrogen in corn and soybean fields, which could lead to improved fertilizer application techniques to promote crop growth while reducing leaching.

Civil and environmental engineering professor Praveen Kumar and graduate student Dong Kook Woo published their work in the journal Water Resources Research.

WASHINGTON, D.C., July 26, 2016 -- Researchers have nearly doubled the continuous output power of a type of laser, called a terahertz quantum cascade laser, with potential applications in medical imaging, airport security and more. Increasing the continuous output power of these lasers is an important step toward increasing the range of practical applications. The researchers report their results in the journal AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing.

Our desire for indulgent meals may be over 500 years old. A new analysis of European paintings shows that meat and bread were among the most commonly depicted foods in paintings of meals from the 16th century.

"Crazy meals involving less-than-healthy foods aren't a modern craving," explains lead author Brian Wansink, PhD, Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and author of Slim by Design. "Paintings from what's sometimes called the Renaissance Period were loaded with the foods modern diets warn us about - salt, sausages, bread and more bread."

Solar cells have been manufactured already for a long from inexpensive materials with different printing techniques. Especially organic solar cells and dye-sensitized solar cells are suitable for printing.

-We wanted to take the idea of printed solar cells even further, and see if their materials could be inkjet-printed as pictures and text like traditional printing inks, tells University Lecturer Janne Halme.

WASHINGTON - To improve and ensure the efficacy of restoration efforts in the Gulf of Mexico following Deepwater Horizon - the largest oil spill in U.S. history - a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends a set of best practices for monitoring and evaluating ecological restoration activities.

With a growing number of people connecting to the Internet everyday, Internet cables are under the threat of a "bandwidth explosion."

Free-space optical (FSO) communication is a promising candidate to lighten the load. FSO uses visible or infrared light to wirelessly transmit data through open air as opposed to using cables, which have limited bandwidth. The new technology provides a low-cost and low-power alternative to traditional radio-frequency wireless data links.

WASHINGTON -- The primary source of infrared radiation is heat -- the radiation produced by the thermal motion of charged particles in matter, including the motion of the atoms and molecules in an object. The higher the temperature of an object, the more its atoms and molecules vibrate, rotate, twist through their vibrational modes, the more infrared radiation they radiate. Because infrared detectors can be "blinded" by their own heat, high-quality infrared sensing and imaging devices are usually cooled down, sometimes to just a few degrees above absolute zero.

Graphene oxide has been hailed as a veritable wonder material; when incorporated into nanocellulose foam, the lab-created substance is light, strong and flexible, conducting heat and electricity quickly and efficiently.

Now, a team of engineers at Washington University in St. Louis has found a way to use graphene oxide sheets to transform dirty water into drinking water, and it could be a global game-changer.

Engineers from the University of Utah and the University of Minnesota have discovered that interfacing two particular oxide-based materials makes them highly conductive, a boon for future electronics that could result in much more power-efficient laptops, electric cars and home appliances that also don't need cumbersome power supplies.

Their findings were published this month in the scientific journal, APL Materials, from the American Institute of Physics.