Tech

Ottawa — An Ottawa scientist has discovered a critical reason why women experience fertility problems as they get older. The breakthrough by Dr. Johné Liu, a senior scientist at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and professor at the University of Ottawa, also points to a simple solution that could increase the viability of egg cells for women in their late 30s and older — putrescine water.

Streaming data, social networks, online games and services, databases – the number of interactions we have with the Internet is continually increasing. Every time we click on a link, we trigger an avalanche of computer operations that are then carried out in huge server farms. It's estimated that these massive installations are responsible for 2% of total world electricity consumption. EPFL Scientists are proposing a novel solution to help rein in this runaway consumption.

With increasing demands for sustainable energy, being able to cost-efficiently produce biofuels from plant biomass is more important than ever. However, lignin and hemicelluloses present in certain plants mean that they cannot be easily converted into biofuels. A study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Biotechnology for Biofuels appears to have solved this problem, using gene manipulation techniques to engineer plants that can be more easily broken down into biofuels.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The quest to harness a broader spectrum of sunlight's energy to produce electricity has taken a radically new turn, with the proposal of a "solar energy funnel" that takes advantage of materials under elastic strain.

"We're trying to use elastic strains to produce unprecedented properties," says Ju Li, an MIT professor and corresponding author of a paper describing the new solar-funnel concept that was published this week in the journal Nature Photonics.

"Try to imagine changing a tyre in freezing weather, snow and darkness," says professor Tore Markeset, a specialist in cold climate technology at the University of Stavanger (UiS).

That is his way of visualising the challenges facing oil companies seeking to produce oil and gas from the far north of the Norwegian continental shelf (NCS).

Weather, winter darkness, vast distances, and safety and emergency response challenges for petroleum facilities in the Barents Sea will all be more extreme than in the North Sea.

Until national safety guidelines are in place, parents should consider the risks before allowing their child to use an inflatable bouncer. If parents allow their child to use an inflatable bouncer, they should consider limiting use to children 6 years of age and older, requiring that an adult be present to supervise while the bouncer is in use and allowing only one child on the bouncer at a time. If more than one child will be on the bouncer at the same time, the children should be approximately of the same age and size.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- An Indiana University study in the Journal of Child Neurology proposes an innovative treatment for developmental coordination disorder, a potentially debilitating neurological disorder in which the development of a child's fine or gross motor skills, or both, is impaired.

Ultrasound scans of faces in utero can distinguish between when a fetus yawns and when it just opens its mouth, according to research published November 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Nadja Reissland from the University of Durham and colleagues at other institutions.

Engineers pave the way towards 3D printing of personal electronicsScientists are developing new materials which could one day allow people to print out custom-designed personal electronics such as games controllers which perfectly fit their hand shape.

The University of Warwick researchers have created a simple and inexpensive conductive plastic composite that can be used to produce electronic devices using the latest generation of low-cost 3D printers designed for use by hobbyists and even in the home.

Forging dies must withstand a lot. They must be hard so that their surface does not get too worn out and is able to last through great changes in temperature and handle the impactful blows of the forge. However, the harder a material is, the more brittle it becomes - and forging dies are less able to handle the stress from the impact. For this reason, the manufacturers had to find a compromise between hardness and strength. One of the possibilities is to surround a semi-hard, strong material with a hard layer.

Animals, including humans, actively select the gut microbes that are the best partners and nurture them with nutritious secretions, suggests a new study led by Oxford University, and published November 20 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

In this week's PLOS Medicine, Charles Weijer and colleagues present the Ottawa Statement on the Ethical Design and Conduct of Cluster Randomized Trials, which aims to provide researchers and research ethics committees with detailed guidance on the ethical design, conduct, and review of CRTs.

Source: Public Library of Science

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Scotch tape, a versatile household staple and a mainstay of holiday gift-wrapping, may have a new scientific application as a shape-changing "smart material."

Researchers used a laser to form slender half-centimeter-long fingers out of the tape. When exposed to water, the four wispy fingers morph into a tiny robotic claw that captures water droplets.

The innovation could be used to collect water samples for environmental testing, said Babak Ziaie, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering.

Called BRIGHTs, the tiny probes described in the online issue of Advanced Materials on Nov. 15, bind to biomarkers of disease and, when swept by an infrared laser, light up to reveal their location.

Tiny as they are, the probes are exquisitely engineered objects: gold nanoparticles covered with molecules called Raman reporters, in turn covered by a thin shell of gold that spontaneously forms a dodecahedron.

The Raman reporters are molecules whose jiggling atoms respond to a probe laser by scattering light at characteristic wavelengths.

Researchers at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly) have published findings that further illuminate the emerging field of ethorobotics — the study of bioinspired robots interacting with live animal counterparts.

Maurizio Porfiri, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU-Poly, doctoral candidates Vladislav Kopman and Jeffrey Laut and research scholar Giovanni Polverino studied the role of real-time feedback in attracting or repelling live zebrafish in the presence of a robotic fish.