Tech

Amsterdam, Dec. 1, 2015 - The dye industry of the 19th century was fast-moving and international, according to a state-of-the-art analysis of four purple dresses. The study, published in Spectrochimica Acta, Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy, reveals that a brand new purple dye went from first synthesis to commercial use in just a few years.

In Japan, freshness expression is the fundamental and crucial determinant of acceptability and pricing on the market because the valuable and prime fresh fish product is typically suitable to be eaten raw such as 'Sashimi' and 'Sushi'. On the other hand, estimating freshness status of frozen seafood products is greatly important and very difficult to discover. Thus, realizing the initial freshness of fishery products before getting frozen is a big challenge.

Manufacturing safe and lightweight cars that emit less carbon dioxide could become easier thanks to a clever new engineering development from researchers at Hiroshima University.

Dr. Komgrit Lawanwong and colleagues have engineered some subtle refinements to metal forming techniques that allowed them to prevent a difficult problem called "springback," which plagues the process of bending high-strength steel (HSS). Their results appear in the Journal of Materials Processing Technology.

ANN ARBOR--Childbirth is arguably the most traumatic event the human body can undergo, and new imaging techniques show that up to 15 percent of women sustain pelvic injuries that don't heal.

Researchers from the University of Michigan reasoned that using MRI to diagnose childbirth injuries--a technique usually reserved for sports medicine--makes sense because childbirth is as traumatic as many endurance sports.

In hopes of limiting the disastrous environmental effects of massive oil spills, materials scientists from Drexel University and Deakin University, in Australia, have teamed up to manufacture and test a new material, called a boron nitride nanosheet, that can absorb up to 33 times its weight in oils and organic solvents--a trait that could make it an important technology for quickly mitigating these costly accidents.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been pioneering antenna measurement methods for decades, but a new robot may be the ultimate innovation, extending measurements to higher frequencies while characterizing antennas faster and more easily than previous NIST facilities.

The robot -- actually a robotic arm of the type used in manufacturing -- will be used to rapidly and accurately measure the properties of antennas used in advanced communications, remote sensing for weather prediction and climate monitoring, imaging systems and radar.

FORT PIERCE, FL - Aroma, which is produced by a complex mixture of volatile compounds, plays an important role in consumers' perceptions of fresh fruits and vegetables. For example, studies have shown that the familiar aroma of fresh tomatoes has diminished during the last 50 years - and less fresh tomato aroma is leading to more consumer complaints.

If it's green, it's mostly clean, according to a new, comprehensive review of renewable energy sources released today by the International Resource Panel, hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The report, "Green Energy Choices: The Benefits, Risks and Trade-Offs of Low-Carbon Technologies for Electricity Production," takes a cradle-to-grave look at the environmental and health pros-and-cons of nine different renewable sources of energy. It is the first such comprehensive international report to do so.

In electronics, nothing works without transistors: they are the fundamental building blocks on which the logic circuits in our computer chips are based. They usually consist of silicon crystals, doped with other types of atom. One Swiss/Austrian research team (TU Wien, the University of Vienna, the University of Zurich, IBM Zurich) has now succeeded in developing a transistor that functions in a fundamentally different manner and consists solely of a single molecule. Instead of three electrodes, as in a conventional transistor, this switch molecule only requires two.

Researchers at Hiroshima University have developed a technology that improves the removal of salt from seawater, a breakthrough that may alleviate the increasing demand for fresh water in some countries.

"A global shortage of fresh water is a long-term challenge that mankind faces in this century," said the director of the ROBUST membrane project, Professor Toshinori Tsuru.

"Finance ministers are facing strong demand for public investments in education, security or transport - pricing CO2 turns out to be a suitable means of raising the revenues that are needed," says Max Franks from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), lead-author of the study. "Finance ministers can put money into infrastructure that substantially and lastingly improves public welfare. This is something you can count in Dollars. And along the way they save the climate, since pricing CO2 yields a strong incentive to reduce emissions.

Silicon is a conventional material for computer chips and solar cells. However, even though the properties of silicon are well known, nanostructures still offer up surprises. A team headed by Prof. Silke Christiansen at the HZB Institute of Nanoarchitectures for Energy Conversion together with the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL) has shown for the first time how light behaves in a silicon nanocone.

Almost 50 per cent of child injures requiring treatment in emergency departments are linked to consumer products, but a lack of detailed hospital records is restricting child safety experts from identifying if a product fault or misuse is the cause, a QUT study has found.

Dr Jesani Catchpoole, from QUT's Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q), is presenting her research at the 12th Australasian Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion Conference being held in Sydney from Nov. 25-27.

EUGENE, Ore. -- Nov. 27, 2015 -- Lush greenery rich in Douglas fir and hemlock trees covers the Triangle Lake valley of the Oregon Coast Range. Today, however, geologists across the country are more focused on sediment samples dating back 50,000 years that were dug up by University of Oregon scientists.

As countries around the world shift toward greater use of non-fossil fuels, the wide range of methods used to set targets for remaining fossil fuel emissions and to measure results and progress is highly disparate and needs to be standardized, authors of this Policy Forum emphasize. Standardization is increasingly important as the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) begins on 30 November, where world leaders will convene in Paris and once again discuss their countries' long-term energy targets.