Tech

While the flower may attract the bee and the admiring eye of the passerby, it is the unseen complex network of life below ground where the action is. The microbial community or microbiome that inhabits the rhizosphere and endosphere —the niches immediately surrounding and inside a plant's root—facilitates the shuttling of nutrients and information into and out of the roots within the soil matrix.

Beneath the surface of the earth, an influential community of microbes mingles with plant roots. In the first large-scale analysis of those communities, scientists have now catalogued and compared the hundreds of types of bacteria that associate with the roots of the model plant Arabidopsis under various conditions. The work establishes an experimental framework for examining how plants interact with a microbial community that can influence their growth and development, productivity, and impact on the environment.

Rockville, Md., August 1, 2012 — Two articles recently published in Malaria Journal shed new light on the quality of antimalarial medicines circulating in countries in the Amazon Basin in South America. Researchers from the Promoting the Quality of Medicines (PQM) program, a cooperative agreement between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP), in conjunction with country partners, coordinated these studies in the context of the Amazon Malaria Initiative (AMI).

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – The male response to depictions of ideal masculinity in advertising is typically negative, which has implications for advertisers and marketers targeting the increasingly fragmented consumer demographic, according to research from a University of Illinois marketing expert.

Scientists are reporting development of a new transparent solar cell, an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their report appears in the journal ACS Nano.

URBANA - If you've consulted with a nutrition educator about how best to lose weight or manage your diabetes, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol, you may not have learned as much as you could have, said a University of Illinois professor of nutrition extension.

"Only 80 percent of the dietitians we surveyed did any pre-assessment of the client's nutrition literacy, which makes it difficult for educators to target their counseling so clients can understand and act on the information they are given," said Karen Chapman-Novakofski, also a registered dietitian.

Cambridge, Mass. - July 31, 2012 - Watch out, Barbie: omnivorous beasts are assembling in a 3D printer near you.

A group of graphics experts led by computer scientists at Harvard have created an add-on software tool that translates video game characters -- or any other three-dimensional animations -- into fully articulated action figures, with the help of a 3D printer.

The project is described in detail in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Transactions on Graphics and will be presented at the ACM SIGGRAPH conference on August 7.

Bochum, 31.7.2012No. 256

Never again a flat battery

RUB researchers develop an early warning system for vehicle batteriesBattery management permanently checks the age, state of charge and operational reliability

Alexandria, VA – One man's trash is quickly becoming society's new treasure, according to an article in EARTH Magazine, where they explore how materials that were once considered garbage are now being recognized for their true potential as valuable energy resources capable of solving multiple problems at once.

If successful, these "waste-to-energy" options could serve as a silver bullet – displacing fossil fuels, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and decreasing the amount of trash that winds up in already teeming landfills.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Interactive proofs, which MIT researchers helped pioneer, have emerged as one of the major research topics in theoretical computer science. In the classic interactive proof, a questioner with limited computational power tries to extract reliable information from a computationally powerful but unreliable respondent. Interactive proofs are the basis of cryptographic systems now in wide use, but for computer scientists, they're just as important for the insight they provide into the complexity of computational problems.

Plastic electronics hold the promise of cheap, mass-produced devices. But plastic semiconductors have an important flaw: the electronic current is influenced by "charge traps" in the material. These traps, which have a negative impact on plastic light-emitting diodes and solar cells, are poorly understood.

TORONTO, ON – Researchers from the University of Toronto (U of T) and King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) have made a breakthrough in the development of colloidal quantum dot (CQD) films, leading to the most efficient CQD solar cell ever. Their work is featured in a letter published in Nature Nanotechnology.

The researchers, led by U of T Engineering Professor Ted Sargent, created a solar cell out of inexpensive materials that was certified at a world-record 7.0% efficiency.

A modular datacenter network (MDCN) is the key component in building mega-datacenters. Huang Feng, Li Dongsheng, and their group from the National Key Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Processing, School of Computers, National University of Defense Technology present a novel hybrid intra-container network for a modular datacenter (MDC), called SCautz, together with a suite of routing protocols. SCautz is able to provide high network throughput for various traffic patterns, and achieves graceful performance degradation when failures occur and increase.

On the night of July 20, 2012, the laser system of the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA), which is nearing completion at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), delivered a petawatt of power in a pulse just 40 femtoseconds long at a pulse rate of one hertz – one pulse every second. A petawatt is 1015 watts, a quadrillion watts, and a femtosecond is 10-15 second, a quadrillionth of a second. No other laser system has achieved this peak power at this rapid pulse rate.

A technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. This technology opens the door to the use of plentiful, relatively inexpensive semiconductors, such as the promising metal oxides, sulfides and phosphides, that have been considered unsuitable for solar cells because it is so difficult to taylor their properties by chemical means.