Tech

James Cook University researchers have shown a way to potentially halve the amount of fertiliser dairy farmers use while maintaining pasture yields, providing improved protection for the Great Barrier Reef.

JCU's Dr Paul Nelson said nitrogen from fertiliser spread on fields can have significant environmental effects on creeks and coastal waters.

"Ensuring plants have sufficient nitrogen is important for profitable farming, but it must be balanced with the potential for losses to the environment.

HOUSTON - (July 25, 2016) - The old rules don't necessarily apply when building electronic components out of two-dimensional materials, according to scientists at Rice University.

The Rice lab of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson analyzed hybrids that put 2-D materials like graphene and boron nitride side by side to see what happens at the border. They found that the electronic characteristics of such "co-planar" hybrids differ from bulkier components.

Their results appear this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.

HOUSTON - (July 25, 2016) - New discoveries about spider silk could inspire novel materials to manipulate sound and heat in the same way semiconducting circuits manipulate electrons, according to scientists at Rice University, in Europe and in Singapore.

A paper in Nature Materials today looks at the microscopic structure of spider silk and reveals unique characteristics in the way it transmits phonons, quasiparticles of sound.

In 2014, an international trio won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, a technique that made it possible to study molecular processes in living cells.

Now a Northwestern Engineering team has improved this groundbreaking technology by making it faster, simpler, less expensive, and increasing its resolution by four fold.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- Lithium-air batteries are considered highly promising technologies for electric cars and portable electronic devices because of their potential for delivering a high energy output in proportion to their weight. But such batteries have some pretty serious drawbacks: They waste much of the injected energy as heat and degrade relatively quickly. They also require expensive extra components to pump oxygen gas in and out, in an open-cell configuration that is very different from conventional sealed batteries.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) in Switzerland have created a microneedle drug monitoring system that could one day replace costly, invasive blood draws and improve patient comfort.

The new system consists of a small, thin patch that is pressed against a patient's arm during medical treatment and measures drugs in their bloodstream painlessly without drawing any blood. The tiny needle-like projection, less than half a milimetre long, resembles a hollow cone and doesn't pierce the skin like a standard hypodermic needle.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames Laboratory have discovered an unusual property of purple bronze that may point to new ways to achieve high temperature superconductivity.

While studying purple bronze, a molybdenum oxide, researchers discovered an unconventional charge density wave on its surface.

Kyoto, Japan -- Centipedes move quickly. And when one is coming directly at you, you might not care to spend a moment pondering its agility.

So perhaps our lack of understanding about just why centipedes move with such dexterity, even over obstacles, has been related to fear. But undeterred, researchers at Kyoto University have asked precisely this question, and have turned to computer simulations and ultimately robotics to find an answer.

BOSTON (July 22, 2016)--A new "food-print" model that measures the per-person land requirements of different diets suggests that, with dietary changes, the U.S. could feed significantly more people from existing agricultural land. Using ten different scenarios ranging from the average American diet to a purely vegan one, a team led by scientists from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University estimated that agricultural land in the contiguous U.S.

Munich physicists have developed a novel electron microscope that can visualize electromagnetic fields oscillating at frequencies of billions of cycles per second.

For the past few years, scientists around the world have been studying ways to use miniature robots to better treat a variety of diseases. The robots are designed to enter the human body, where they can deliver drugs at specific locations or perform precise operations like clearing clogged-up arteries. By replacing invasive, often complicated surgery, they could optimize medicine.

A process that is largely overlooked in earth system models may shape large-scale soil evaporation and plant transpiration more than scientists thought, a new study suggests, helping quantify the global water cycle. The results provide insights that current approaches into complex water cycle interactions are lacking. Evapotranspiration, or ET, is the sum of evaporation from the soil (E) and transpiration (T) from plants - and it represents a critical part of the water cycle on Earth.

GOLDEN, Colo., July 21, 2016 ? Groundbreaking research on global water supply co-authored by Colorado School of Mines Hydrology Professor Reed Maxwell and alumna Laura Condon, now assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Syracuse University, appears in the July 22 issue of Science Magazine.

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Even though American consumers throw away about 80 billion pounds of food a year, only about half are aware that food waste is a problem. Even more, researchers have identified that most people perceive benefits to throwing food away, some of which have limited basis in fact.

A study published today in PLOS ONE is just the second peer-reviewed large-scale consumer survey about food waste and is the first in the U.S. to identify patterns regarding how Americans form attitudes on food waste.

ITHACA, N.Y. - Social scientists have known for several years that kids enrolled in run-down schools miss more classes and have lower test scores than students at well-maintained schools. But they haven't been able to pin down why.

A Cornell University environmental psychologist has an answer.