Tech

HOUSTON – (July 9, 2013) – A Rice University laboratory pioneering memory devices that use cheap, plentiful silicon oxide to store data has pushed them a step further with chips that show the technology's practicality.

The team led by Rice chemist James Tour has built a 1-kilobit rewritable silicon oxide device with diodes that eliminate data-corrupting crosstalk.

A paper on the new work appears this week in the journal Advanced Materials.

Using nanostructured glass, scientists at the University of Southampton have, for the first time, experimentally demonstrated the recording and retrieval processes of five dimensional digital data by femtosecond laser writing. The storage allows unprecedented parameters including 360 TB/disc data capacity, thermal stability up to 1000°C and practically unlimited lifetime.

Global atmospheric change, stagnation of yield increases, uncertain societal acceptance, and government policies are some of the greatest barriers to meeting the growing demand for food, feed and fuel from our major crops, said guest lecturer Stephen Long at the 2013 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and World Food Prize Foundation (WFPF) Charles Valentine Riley Memorial Lecture on June 25 in Washington, D.C.

While the results may not be representative of the UK as a whole, nevertheless, excess drinking and drug taking in pregnancy is a pairing that is likely to be more common than generally thought, say the authors.

It is known that women prescribed maintenance methadone use other illicit drugs, but the extent to which they do this has never been quantified in the UK, nor are there any figures on the prevalence of drug and alcohol use during pregnancy for this group of women, they add.

Buyers want larger size animals to obtain the maximum meat yield, so go for thoroughbreds and riding horses, the study indicates.

The researchers looked at the animals put up for sale at seven randomly selected auction markets in Britain in August and September 2011, and the type preferred by dealers buying on behalf of abattoirs.

The auctions were in North Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Wales (Powys), Berkshire and Cheshire and traded equines only, but of all types, breed and age.

Carbon capture and storage has been heralded as a new technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In an effort to help slow climate change, human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2) is captured at point-source emitters like power stations and sequestered in underground rocks. In porous rocks like sandstone, the CO2 is trapped in tiny spaces or pores, which act like a sponge and soak up the injected fluid.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- A high level of air pollution, in the form of particulates produced by burning coal, significantly shortens the lives of people exposed to it, according to a unique new study of China co-authored by an MIT economist.

Defying 30 mph gusts and temperatures down to minus 22 F, NASA's new polar rover recently demonstrated in Greenland that it could operate completely autonomously in one of Earth's harshest environments.

Lithium ion batteries are at the energetic heart of almost all things tech, from cell phones to tablets to electric vehicles. That's because they are a proven technology, light, long-lasting and powerful. But they aren't perfect.

If you tickle a robot, it may not laugh, but you may still consider it humanlike -- depending on its role in your life, reports an international group of researchers.

Designers and engineers assign robots specific roles, such as servant, caregiver, assistant or playmate. Researchers found that people expressed more positive feelings toward a robot that would take care of them than toward a robot that needed care.

Light can oscillate in different directions, as we can see in the 3D cinema: Each lens of the glasses only allows light of a particular oscillation direction to pass through. However, changing the polarization direction of light without a large part of it being lost is difficult. The TU Vienna has now managed this feat, using a type of light – terahertz radiation – that is of particular technological importance. An electrical field applied to an ultra-thin layer of material can turn the polarisation of the beam as required.

July 7, Ulsan, S. Korea - Korean Researchers from Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) developed a new method to massively synthesize enhanced yet affordable materials for supercapacitors.

Supercapacitors have attracted increasing attention due to their long life cycle, highly reversible charge storage process and specific power density along with increased concern over the exhaustion of natural resources.

Small and large-scale farmers in Riau province, Sumatra, have been blamed for the recent choking smoke smothering Singapore and parts of Malaysia. But scientists in Indonesia have added a third category of 'mid-level entrepreneurs'. These entrepreneurs buy unregulated access to land for oil palm and clear it by burning, seemingly unrestrained by government.

London, 8 July 2013: Egg donation is now one of the major reasons why couples travel abroad for fertility treatment. Because this growing trend may circumvent regulations at home or raise concerns about financial inducement, it has also become one of the most controversial. Yet little is known about the women who provide the donor eggs in overseas clinics - their characteristics, their motivation and their compensation.

London, 8 July 2013: Phthalates are among a group of industrial chemicals shown in somestudies to have adverse effects on reproductive health and development, particularly in themale. As such, they have been collectively defined as "endocrine disruptors", and proposed asone of several possible environmental exposures responsible for a decline in fertility.