Tech

The expression dog is man's best friend might have more weight in the case of first-year university students suffering from homesickness, according to a new UBC study.

The study shows that animal-assisted therapy can help students combat homesickness and could be a useful tool in lowering post-secondary drop-out rates.

"Transitioning from high school to university can prove to be a challenge for many first-year students," says Assistant Professor John Tyler Binfet of UBC's Okanagan campus.

Sept. 8, 2016 WASHINGTON - A new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine urges Congress, federal and state agencies, and regulatory institutions to significantly increase their support for innovation for what the report's study committee calls "increasingly clean" electric power technologies - nuclear power, carbon capture and storage, and renewables such as solar and wind.

ANN ARBOR--College student marijuana use continues its nearly decade-long increase, according to the most recent national Monitoring the Future study.

In 2015, 38 percent of college students said they had used marijuana in the prior 12 months, up from 30 percent in 2006.

Daily or near-daily use of marijuana (having used 20 or more times in the prior 30 days) also has increased in recent years for college students, rising from 3.5 percent in 2007 to 5.9 percent in 2014--the highest level of daily use measured in the last 34 years.

AMHERST, Mass. - For the past 30 years, computer science researchers have been teaching their machines to read, for example, assigning back issues of the Wall Street Journal, so computers can learn the English they need to run search engines like Google or mine platforms like Facebook and Twitter for opinions and marketing data.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - The ubiquity of smartphones and their sophisticated gadgetry make them an ideal tool to steal sensitive data from 3-D printers.

That's according to a new University at Buffalo study that explores security vulnerabilities of 3-D printing, also called additive manufacturing, which analysts say will become a multibillion-dollar industry employed to build everything from rocket engines to heart valves.

When roboticists create behaviors for teams of robots, they first build algorithms that focus on the intended task. Then they wrap safety behaviors around those primary algorithms to keep the machines from running into each other. Each robot is essentially given an invisible bubble that other robots must stay away from. As long as nothing touches the bubble, the robots move around without any issues. But that's where the problems begin.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. -- Fuel cells provide power without pollutants. But, as in the Goldilocks story, membranes in automobile fuel cells work at temperatures either too hot or too cold to be maximally effective. A polyphenyline membrane patented by Sandia National Laboratories, though, seems to work just about right, says Sandia chemist Cy Fujimoto.

The membrane, which operates over a wide temperature range, lasts three times longer than comparable commercial products, Fujimoto and his co-authors say in the Aug. 21 issue of Nature Energy.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria, known as "superbugs," pose a major public health threat. Some officials have even warned of a post-antibiotic -- and sicker -- era. To better understand the problem, researchers have been piecing together its contributing factors. Now in the ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology, scientists report for the first time a link between antimicrobial substances such as triclosan in indoor dust and levels of antibiotic-resistance genes, which can transfer from one bacterial cell to another.

A group of researchers at Chalmers University of Technology has discovered a completely new way of using lasers to accelerate ion beams. In time, the new technique could possibly give more people access to advanced cancer treatment. The results were recently published in the high impact journal Physical Review Letters.

EAST LANSING, Mich. --- Local school board elections increasingly are becoming a national political battleground, as millions of dollars in campaign cash pours in from out-of-state donors in the name of education reform, indicates new research led by a Michigan State University scholar.

Most people do not act solely in their own interests when distributing funds, but instead take into consideration both the positive and negative consequences for everyone involved. Numerous examples indicate, however, that many people find it hard to weigh up costs and benefits efficiently when the costs are spread over several individuals.

BINGHAMTON, NY - A new service developed at Binghamton University, State University of New York could improve performance of mobile devices that save data to the cloud.

Storage and computing power is limited on mobile devices, making it necessity to store data in the cloud. However, with the myriad of apps from a myriad of developers that use the cloud, the user experience isn't always smooth. Battery life can be taxed due to extended synchronization times and clogged networks when multiple apps are trying to access the cloud all at the same time.

The results of AFF008A, a Phase I clinical trial to assess boost immunizations with AFFITOPE® PD01A, an active vaccine against Parkinson's disease (PD), have been announced.

A recent survey by the Cyber Security Centre at the University of Kent has revealed that 5% of British adults have browsed the darknet, with 1% acknowledging they have bought items from it, but this percentage is much higher (14%) for 18-24 year olds.

The survey, now in its third year, also revealed that:

The Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has released the 2016 Annual Technology Baseline. In addition to updated data for utility-scale renewable and conventional energy technologies, this year's version includes cost and performance data for residential and commercial rooftop photovoltaics (PV) systems.