Tech

TORONTO (July 21, 2016) - More than one in three - an estimated 328,000 -- Ontario students in grades seven to 12 report moderate-to-serious psychological distress, according to new survey results from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). Girls are twice as likely as boys to experience psychological distress.

Soft robots do a lot of things well but they're not exactly known for their speed. The artificial muscles that move soft robots, called actuators, tend to rely on hydraulics or pneumatics, which are slow to respond and difficult to store.

Dielectric elastomers, soft materials that have good insulating properties, could offer an alternative to pneumatic actuators but they currently require complex and inefficient circuitry to deliver high voltage as well as rigid components to maintain their form -- both of which defeat the purpose of a soft robot.

Iron Man's suit. Captain America's shield. The Batmobile. These all could look a lot more realistic thanks to a new algorithm developed by a team of U.S. computer graphics experts.

The researchers, led by Professor Ravi Ramamoorthi at the University of California San Diego, have created a method to improve how computer graphics software reproduces the way light interacts with extremely small details, called glints, on the surface of a wide range of materials, including metallic car paints, metal finishes for electronics and injection-molded plastic finishes.

Land used for palm oil production could be nearly doubled without expanding into protected or high-biodiversity forests, according to a new study published in the journal Global Environmental Change. The study is the first to map land suitable for palm oil production on a global scale, while taking into account environmental and climate considerations.

"There is room to expand palm oil production and to do it in a sustainable way," says IIASA researcher Johannes Pirker, who led the study.

Researchers from North Carolina State University and the U.S. Army Research Office have developed a way to integrate novel functional materials onto a computer chip, allowing the creation of new smart devices and systems.

Rechargeable all-solid-state lithium batteries are expected to be one of the next-generation energy storage devices because of their high energy density, safety, and excellent cycle stability. The materials used for the solid electrolyte must not only have a high lithium-ion conductivity above 1 mS/cm at room temperature, but also possess chemical stability.

Disney Research has developed a new method to improve the rendering of high-quality images from 3-D models by drastically reducing the noise, or discolored pixels, contained in the animated images, while preserving fine detail.

The researchers found that they could improve the performance of Monte Carlo ray tracing - a popular technique for producing photo-realistic animations - by varying the polynomial functions used to control image reconstruction based on the complexity of each region of the image.

Four percent of all pregnant women in Germany develop gestational diabetes before the birth of their child. Although their blood sugar levels initially return to normal after delivery, one in two of the mothers affected develops type 2 diabetes within the next ten years. While it has been shown that lactation can lower this risk by 40 percent, the reasons for this are not yet understood.

Scientists from MIPT and their colleagues have developed a novel compact and powerful ceramic-based laser - it will be used as a minimally traumatic and inexpensive laser scalpel for surgical operations, and also for cutting and engraving composite materials. The results of the study have been published in Optics Letters.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - A rapid heating and cooling of milk significantly reduces the amount of harmful bacteria present, extending by several weeks the shelf life of one of the most common refrigerator staples in the world, according to a Purdue University study.

Software developed by Disney Research enables users to readily program industrial knitting machines, giving them the same flexibility to control the complex machine's output that already is commonplace for computer-controlled machine tools and for 3-D printers.

The compiler software allows users to specify designs based on simple shapes such as sheets and tubes and then translates those specifications into the needle-level instructions necessary to operate the machines.

Designing acoustic filters that can block out a certain sound or produce a certain pitch can be hit or miss, but researchers have discovered a way to predict acoustic qualities 70,000 times faster than current algorithms, paving the way for new, computationally driven designs.

The researchers from Disney Research, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University opted to use a simple shape - a hollow cube with holes on some of its six faces - that could be produced with a 3-D printer as their base module.

It looks like a small piece of transparent film with tiny engravings on it, and is flexible enough to be bent into a tube. Yet, this piece of "smart" plastic demonstrates excellent performance in terms of data storage and processing capabilities. This novel invention, developed by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS), hails a breakthrough in the flexible electronics revolution, and brings researchers a step closer towards making flexible, wearable electronics a reality in the near future.

Oleic acid plus a constellation of minor constituents as a natural antihypertensive.

Consumption of virgin olive oil is good for you, but why? Scientific evidence on this issue has been accumulating for a quarter century. Epidemiological, clinical, and animal studies support that the consumption of virgin olive oil, instead of other sources of dietary fats, has antihypertensive effects.

Many households in impoverished regions around the world are starting to shift away from inefficient and polluting fuel-based lighting--such as candles, firewood, and kerosene lanterns--to solar-LED systems. While this trend has tremendous environmental benefits, a new study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has found that it spurs economic development as well, to the tune of 2 million potential new jobs.