Tech

The Internet Time Service operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) serves much of the Earth, with customers from around the globe. In one month of study alone, just two of the 20 NIST servers that supply time information to Internet-connected devices received requests from 316 million unique Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, according to detailed data about the service published for the first time. This represents at least 8.5 percent of devices on the entire Internet.

Photocatalytic hydrogen generation via water splitting has become a hot spot in the field of energy and materials. The goal of this technique is to construct cheap and efficient photocatalytic water splitting systems at an industrial scale, which first need us to search and develop efficient photocatalysts and suitable reductive/oxidative cocatalysts.

Water in, water out: such is the cycle of porous material. In some cases, like with soils, it is preferable to keep water in. In others, it makes better economic and ecological sense to have porous materials dry faster, e.g. in the paper industries or with plasterboard manufacturing. Modeling how porous material retains water or dries up can be resolved by narrowing the focus down to a single porous channel; now, a team of physicists has uncovered subtle underlying effects.

Robot makers may want to follow Ikea's strategy for customer satisfaction and give people a chance to partially assemble their new robots to ease acceptance of the devices, according to Penn State researchers.

Rice University researchers have determined a more effective way to use natural gas to reduce climate-warming emissions would be in the replacement of existing coal-fired power plants and fuel-oil furnaces rather than burning it in cars and buses.

The Rice study by environmental engineer Daniel Cohan and alumnus Shayak Sengupta compared the net greenhouse gas-emission savings that could be realized by replacing other fuels in vehicles, furnaces and power plants.

Put your phone away when I'm talking to you. Don't text while you're driving -- not even at red lights. Stop posting photos of me without my permission.

These are some of the rules for Internet and smartphone use that kids would set for their parents, according to a new study by researchers at the University of Washington and University of Michigan.

The researchers surveyed 249 families with children between the ages of 10 and 17 about their household's most important technology rules and expectations, as well as what made those rules easier or harder to follow.

Video games are a favorite activity of children, yet its affect on their health is often perceived to be negative. A study by researchers at Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and colleagues at Paris Descartes University assessed the association between the amount of time spent playing video games and children's mental health and cognitive and social skills, and found that playing video games may have positive effects on young children. Results are published online in the journal Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology.

A computer program that can predict whether or not a given pharmaceutical will have worrying side effects has been developed by researchers in the USA. Md Jamiul Jahid and Jianhua Ruan of the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Texas at San Antonio, have developed the "in silico" testing system for drugs in the early stage of drug development.

Washington - Researchers have demonstrated, for the first time, that laser light can be used to manipulate a glass optical fiber tapered to a sharp point smaller than a speck of dust, in the middle of an optical fiber with a hollow core. Amazingly, optical forces cause the sharp point, or "nanospike," to self-align at the center of the hollow core, trapping it more and more strongly at the core center as the laser power increases.

Companies with women on their executive and supervisory boards are valued more highly by the stock markets. Investors rate the performance of the few women who climbed to the top of the career ladder in companies without a gender quota as being better than that of their male peers. Economists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the University of Hong Kong used an unusual method to reach this conclusion. They studied the share price development of companies following the exit of top managers due to death or illness in a sample of around 50 countries.

Varnish does more than just provide a protective sheen to a violin. It influences the vibrations and impulses that the wood absorbs and therefore the quality of sound the instrument produces, says Marjan Gilani of the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Material Science and Technology (EMPA) in Switzerland. In research published in Springer's journal Applied Physics A, Gilani and her colleagues demonstrate the importance of the vibro-mechanical properties of varnish, its chemical composition, thickness and penetration into wood.

Fukuoka, Japan - The successful future of fuel cells relies on improving the performance of the catalysts they use. Gold nanoparticles have been cited as an ideal solution, but creating a uniform, useful catalyst has proven elusive. However, a team of researchers at Kyushu University's International Institute for Carbon-Neutral Energy Research (I2CNER) devised a method for using a new type of catalyst support.

Drones are used for various applications such as aero picturing, disaster recovery, and delivering. Despite attracting attention as a new growth area, the biggest problem of drones is its small battery capacity and limited flight time of less than an hour. A fuel cell developed by Prof. Gyeong Man Choi (Dept. of Materials Science and Engineering) and his research team at POSTECH can solve this problem.

In the first study to track antibiotic resistance in intensively-farmed beef, scientists discovered a "startling" lack of resistance genes in meat.

Meanwhile, in soil and faeces samples from cattle pens they found genes resistant to a powerful "last resort" class of antibiotics called carpabemens that aren't used in the livestock industry. These genes may have jumped from humans or companion animals to livestock, or could even be present at low levels in the wider environment.

The United States lags behind 22 other highly ranked countries in terms of economic and human development when it comes to mandating employers to provide paid sick leave. In the U.S., only four states (Connecticut, California, Massachusetts and Oregon) along with a few dozen municipalities, now mandate paid sick leave as an employee benefit. That leaves 49 million U.S. workers without paid sick leave, causing an even greater divide in health care disparities as well as undesirable health care outcomes.