Tech

The team has so far identified 14 vulnerable HTML5-based apps from three types of mobile systems, including Android, iOS and Blackberry. Developers of those vulnerable apps have been informed and in an effort to give them time to fix the problem, researchers have decided not to disclose the names of the vulnerable apps.

Growing agave and other carefully chosen plants amid photovoltaic panels could allow solar farms not only to collect sunlight for electricity but also to produce crops for biofuels, according to new computer models by Stanford scientists.

Stanford University scientists have found a new, highly efficient way to produce liquid ethanol from carbon monoxide gas. This promising discovery could provide an eco-friendly alternative to conventional ethanol production from corn and other crops, say the scientists. Their results are published in the April 9 advanced online edition of the journal Nature.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., April 9, 2014 – People who pack their cars and drive like Clark Griswold in National Lampoon's "Vacation" pay a steep penalty when it comes to fuel economy, according to a report by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Singapore, 9 April 2014 – Assistant Professor Christian A.

The expansion of health insurance accomplished under the Affordable Care Act may alter costs for several major types of liability insurance, although any such changes are likely to be modest, according to a new RAND Corporation report.

Automobile, workers' compensation and general business liability insurance costs may fall under the Affordable Care Act, while costs for medical malpractice coverage could be higher, according to the study.

A digging robot inspired by the unique mechanisms employed by the Atlantic razor clam has been created by a group of researchers in the US.

The robot, dubbed RoboClam, is able to dig with extreme efficiency by transforming the surrounding soil from a solid into a liquid, and could have a variety of applications from anchoring underwater robots to subsea cable installation and mine neutralization.

Access to improved drinking water and sanitation is highly variable within individual countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), according to a study published in this week's PLOS Medicine. Dr Rachel Pullan and colleagues, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, identified marked geographic inequalities, estimating that coverage of improved drinking water supply varied from as low as 3.2% in some districts of Somalia to as high as 99.0% in urban populations in Namibia, while access to improved sanitation ranged from 0.2% in parts of Chad to close to 100% in Gambia.

WASHINGTON D.C., April 8, 2014 -- If a research team in Japan gets its wish, "normally off" computers may one day soon be replacing present computers in a move that would both eliminate volatile memory, which requires power to maintain stored data, and reduce the gigantic energy losses associated with it.

Most parts of present computers are made with volatile devices such as transistors and dynamic random access memory (DRAM), which loses information when powered off. So computers are designed on the premise that power is "normally on."

A team of researchers at UCLA has transformed Google Glass into powerful, wearable medical testing laboratory. Aydogan Ozcan and his team developed an application that reads dozens of different types of diagnostic tests for malaria, prostate cancer and HIV, to name a few.

Glass uploads the results to secure servers and provides anonymous data to epidemiologists.

In the American Chemical Society's (ACS') newest Breakthrough Science video, Ozcan demonstrates how the app works, and explains the broad impact it could have on medicine.

University of Cincinnati researchers are at work tracking drought patterns across the United States. Qiusheng Wu, a doctoral student and research assistant for the UC Department of Geography, and Hongxing Liu, a UC professor and head of the Department of Geography, will present details this week at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Tampa, Fla.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, overturns a long-held theory in plant science [see:http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom/news.php?a=11631]. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory who are co-authors on this paper conducted critical radiotracer studies that support the new theory that plant sugars play a dominant role in regulating branching at plant stems.

Human bones are remarkably plastic and respond surprisingly quickly to change. Put under stress through physical exertion – such as long-distance walking or running – they gain in strength as the fibres are added or redistributed according to where strains are highest. The ability of bone to adapt to loading is shown by analysis of the skeletons of modern athletes, whose bones show remarkably rapid adaptation to both the intensity and direction of strains.

TORONTO, April 7, 2014 – According to researchers at St. Michael's Hospital, there are two significant reasons why Peel has one of the highest rates of diabetes in Ontario: neighbourhood design that discourages walking and a population with many residents whose ethnic backgrounds predispose them to diabetes.

Diabetes is a growing concern in Peel. That is why Peel Public Health partnered with researchers at St. Michael's Centre for Research on Inner City Health to develop an atlas of Peel that maps rates of diabetes in neighbourhoods across Brampton, Caledon and Mississauga.

Carbon nanotubes are reinforcing bars that make two-dimensional graphene much easier to handle in a new hybrid material grown by researchers at Rice University.

The Rice lab of chemist James Tour set nanotubes into graphene in a way that not only mimics how steel rebar is used in concrete but also preserves and even improves the electrical and mechanical qualities of both.