Tech

From the production of tougher, more durable smart phones and other electronic devices, to a wider variety of longer lasting biomedical implants, bulk metallic glasses are poised to be mainstay materials for the 21st Century. Featuring a non-crystalline amorphous structure, bulk metallic glasses can be as strong or even stronger than steel, as malleable as plastics, conduct electricity and resist corrosion. These materials would seem to have it all save for one problem: they are often brittle, with a poor and uneven resistance to fatigue that makes their reliability questionable.

But new research from the University of Washington Information School and Harvard University, closely studying 20 years of student creative writing and visual artworks, hints that the dynamics of creativity may not break down as simply as that.

Instead, it may be that some aspects of creativity — such as those employed in visual arts — are gently rising over the years, while other aspects, such as the nuances of creative writing, could be declining.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — It's a common perception portrayed in movies from "The Breakfast Club" to "Mean Girls." Teenage friendships are formed by joining cliques such as jocks, geeks and goths.

But a national study led by a Michigan State University scholar finds that the courses students take have powerful effects on the friendships they make. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Micro- and nano-electromechanical devices, referred to as MEMS and NEMS, are ubiquitous. These nanoscale machines with movable parts are used, for example, to trigger cars' airbags following a shock. They can also be found in smartphones, allowing them to detect how to adequately display the screen for the viewer. The trouble is that, as their size decreases, forces typically experienced at the quantum level start to matter in these nanodevices.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind.

Stanford University scientists have created a silicon-based water splitter that is both low-cost and corrosion-free. The novel device – a silicon semiconductor coated in an ultrathin layer of nickel – could help pave the way for large-scale production of clean hydrogen fuel from sunlight, according to the scientists. Their results are published in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Science.

A normally fragile quantum state has been shown to survive at room temperature for a world record 39 minutes, overcoming a key barrier towards building ultrafast quantum computers.

WASHINGTON D.C. Nov. 14, 2013 -- Back in 1991, Nature published a picture from the IMAX movie Antarctica, along with the caption: "Emperor penguins may be waddling jokes on land, but underwater they can turn into regular rockets…accelerating from 0 to 7 m/s in less than a second."

Lower doses of the antimalarial drug primaquine are as effective as higher doses in reducing malaria transmission, according to a study published today in Lancet Infectious Diseases by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine researchers.

Primaquine is one of the few antimalarial drugs that targets the transmission stages of the malaria parasite, the gametocytes, and is therefore considered to be an important tool for malaria elimination.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed new technology and techniques for transmitting power wirelessly from a stationary source to a mobile receiver – moving engineers closer to their goal of creating highway "stations" that can recharge electric vehicles wirelessly as the vehicles drive by.

"We've made changes to both the receiver and the transmitter in order to make wireless energy transfer safer and more efficient," says Dr. Srdjan Lukic, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper on the research.

PULLMAN, Wash.—Quite by accident, Washington State University researchers have achieved a 400-fold increase in the electrical conductivity of a crystal simply by exposing it to light. The effect, which lasted for days after the light was turned off, could dramatically improve the performance of devices like computer chips.

Expanding millions of hectares of Brazilian land to produce palm oil for food or for renewable, clean-burning biodiesel could result in extremely high emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) unless strict controls are put in place.

This is according to a new study published today, 14 November, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, by a group of researchers from the University of California, Davis.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Nov. 13, 2013 — Researchers studying more effective ways to convert woody plant matter into biofuels at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have identified fundamental forces that change plant structures during pretreatment processes used in the production of bioenergy.

It's a foggy fall morning, and University of Washington researcher Susan Dickerson-Lange pokes her index finger into the damp soil beneath a canopy of second-growth conifers. The tree cover is dense here, and little light seeps in among the understory of the Cedar River Municipal Watershed about 30 miles east of Seattle.

Nature designed lignin, the tough woody polymer in the walls of plant cells, to bind and protect the cellulose sugars that plants use for energy. For this reason, lignin is a major challenge for those who would extract those same plant sugars and use them to make advanced biofuels. As part of their search for economic ways to overcome the lignin challenge, researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have characterized the enzymatic activity of a rain forest microbe that breaks down lignin essentially by breathing it.