Tech

BINGHAMTON, NY - Industrial manufacturing businesses can save over 30 percent on electrical bills, and cut greenhouse gas emissions by over 5 percent, by adjusting production schedules, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

Up until recently, researchers thought they had the behaviors of ferroelectric materials mostly figured out.

"The conventional wisdom is that you can put almost any material under mechanical stress, and provided the stress is coherently maintained, the material will become ferroelectric or exhibit an electrical polarization," said James Rondinelli, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering. "If you apply similar stresses to a compound that's already ferroelectric, then its polarization increases."

A paper by Brazilian researchers published in the journal Scientific Reports describes a study showing that a subgroup of olfactory neurons in the nasal cavity express a cellular receptor specializing in the transport of lipid molecules.

Terahertz radiation -- the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and visible light -- has promising applications in security and medical diagnostics, but such devices will require the development of compact, low-power, high-quality terahertz lasers.

In this week's issue of Nature Photonics, researchers at MIT and Sandia National Laboratories describe a new way to build terahertz lasers that could significantly reduce their power consumption and size, while also enabling them to emit tighter beams, a crucial requirement for most practical applications.

New Haven, Conn. - Yale scientists have found a way to greatly boost the intensity of light waves on a silicon microchip using the power of sound.

Writing in the journal Nature Photonics, a team led by Peter Rakich describes a new waveguide system that harnesses the ability to precisely control the interaction of light and sound waves. This work solves a long-standing problem of how to utilize this interaction in a robust manner on a silicon chip as the basis for powerful new signal-processing technologies.

Remote lakes in a perpetually ice-free area of Antarctica show not only the chemical signature of ancient wildfires, but also some much more recent evidence of fossil-fuel combustion, according to National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research published this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Perovskite materials have shown great promise for use in next-generation solar cells, light-emitting devices (LEDs), sensors, and other applications, but their instability remains a critical limitation.

Light and matter are typically viewed as distinct entities that follow their own, unique rules. Matter has mass and typically exhibits interactions with other matter, while light is massless and does not interact with itself. Yet, wave-particle duality tells us that matter and light both act sometimes like particles, and sometimes like waves.

BERKELEY, Calif. and RICHLAND, Wash.--Researchers are investigating a new material that might help in nuclear fuel recycling and waste reduction by capturing certain gases released during reprocessing. Conventional technologies to remove these radioactive gases operate at extremely low, energy-intensive temperatures. By working at ambient temperature, the new material has the potential to save energy, make reprocessing cleaner and less expensive. The reclaimed materials can also be reused commercially.

The present-day chemical industry is based on oil: many chemical products - from plastics through to detergents and solvents to medication and crop protection products - have their origins in oil and its constituents. Since oil reserves are finite, scientists have been looking for ways to manufacture these products from sustainable materials.

Sustained high (US$110-120 per barrel) or low (US$40-55 per barrel) oil prices could have an important impact on future carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Energy. The magnitude of the impact is found to depend not just on oil prices, but also on other uncertainties connected to energy supply and demand technologies, alternative resources and climate policy.

RICHLAND, Wash. and Berkeley, Calif. -- Researchers are investigating a new material that might help in nuclear fuel recycling and waste reduction by capturing certain gases released during reprocessing. Conventional technologies to remove these radioactive gases operate at extremely low, energy-intensive temperatures. By working at ambient temperature, the new material has the potential to save energy, make reprocessing cleaner and less expensive. The reclaimed materials can also be reused commercially.

Older Americans with diabetes born in the 1940s are living longer and with less disability performing day to day tasks than those born 10 years earlier, according to new research published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal.

The susceptibility of the global economic network to workers' heat-stress has doubled in the last decade, a new study published in the journal Science Advances finds. The analysis by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Columbia University shows for the first time how enhanced connectivity of the global network of supply can amplify production losses, as these losses can be spread more easily across countries.

The continuing permanence of major neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) is leading to a revision of the related research agenda towards current and future control interventions and associated targets. In the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases, published 7 June 2016, LSTM's Professors Louis Niessen and Russell Stothard argue for a broad research and implementation approach in an efficient and equitable upscaling of the control of schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminthiasis in Sub-Saharan Africa.