Tech

A new study shows that children who are exposed to bullying during childhood are at increased risk of psychiatric disorders in adulthood, regardless of whether they are victims or perpetrators.

Rockville, Md., February 13, 2013 – With substandard and counterfeit medicines a dangerous and growing problem in the developing world and elsewhere, identifying new technologies to detect such drugs is an urgent matter. In a new study published in the Journal of Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Analysis, scientists from the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP) evaluated a handheld Raman device's potential to detect counterfeit and substandard medicines.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- It took only a few years for high-definition televisions to make the transition from high-priced novelty to ubiquitous commodity — and they now seem to be heading for obsolescence just as quickly. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, several manufacturers debuted new ultrahigh-definition, or UHD, models (also known as 4K or Quad HD) with four times the resolution of today's HD TVs.

WASHINGTON -- The potential benefits of successful development of an inertial confinement fusion-based energy technology justify investment in fusion energy research and development as part of the long-term U.S. energy R&D portfolio, says a new report from the National Research Council. Although ignition of the fusion fuel has not yet been achieved, scientific and technological progress in inertial confinement fusion over the past decade has been substantial.

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2013— Digital cameras, medical scanners, and other imaging technologies have advanced considerably during the past decade. Continuing this pace of innovation, an Austrian research team has developed an entirely new way of capturing images based on a flat, flexible, transparent, and potentially disposable polymer sheet. The team describes their new device and its possible applications in a paper published today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optics Express.

Luis Hueso, the CICnanoGUNE researcher, together with researchers from the University of Cambridge, among others, has developed a new technology in the magnetic cooling of chips based on the straining of materials. Compared with the current technologies, this advance enables the impact on the environment to be lessened. The work has been published recently in the prestigious journal Nature Materials.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have long understood that using energy more efficiently can be just as beneficial as finding new ways to produce energy more efficiently.

On Feb. 7, NREL Director Dan Arvizu and a blue-ribbon panel of 20 energy experts drove that message home, declaring that the United States can double its energy productivity by 2030 — and do so in ways that bolster the nation's economy.

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory and other labs have demonstrated a process whereby quantum dots can self-assemble at optimal locations in nanowires, a breakthrough that could improve solar cells, quantum computing, and lighting devices.

A paper on the new technology, "Self-assembled Quantum Dots in a Nanowire System for Quantum Photonics," appears in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature Materials.

While the demand for ever-smaller electronic devices has spurred the miniaturization of a variety of technologies, one area has lagged behind in this downsizing revolution: energy-storage units, such as batteries and capacitors.

Now, Richard Kaner, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and a professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and Maher El-Kady, a graduate student in Kaner's laboratory, may have changed the game.

Between 2007 and 2010, the use of robotically-assisted hysterectomy for benign gynecologic disorders increased substantially, although, when compared with laparoscopic hysterectomy, the robotic procedure appears to offer little short-term benefit and is accompanied by significantly greater costs, according to a study appearing in the February 20 issue of JAMA.

If you want to read a mouse's mind, it takes some fluorescent protein and a tiny microscope implanted in the rodent's head.

Stanford scientists have demonstrated a technique for observing hundreds of neurons firing in the brain of a live mouse, in real time, and have linked that activity to long-term information storage. The unprecedented work could provide a useful tool for studying new therapies for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's.

Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new type of nanoscale structure that resembles a "nano-shish-kebab," consisting of multiple two-dimensional nanosheets that appear to be impaled upon a one-dimensional nanowire. But looks can be deceiving, as the nanowire and nanosheets are actually a single, three-dimensional structure consisting of a single, seamless series of germanium sulfide (GeS) crystals. The structure holds promise for use in the creation of new, three-dimensional (3-D) technologies.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Today's consumers switch between media forms so often – from TV to laptops to smart phones – that capturing their attention with advertising has gone, as one CEO explained, from shooting fish in a barrel to shooting minnows.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Your smartphone snapshots could be instantly converted into professional-looking photographs with just the touch of a button, thanks to a processor chip developed at MIT.

The chip, built by a team at MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratory, can perform tasks such as creating more realistic or enhanced lighting in a shot without destroying the scene's ambience, in just a fraction of a second. The technology could be integrated with any smartphone, tablet computer or digital camera.

For the first time, researchers have designed a special material interface that has been shown to add to and to improve the functioning of non-silicon-based electronic devices, such as those used in certain kinds of random access memory (RAM).