Tech

Research from The University of Texas at Austin shows that rock salt, used by Germany and the United States as a subsurface container for radioactive waste, might not be as impermeable as thought or as capable of isolating nuclear waste from groundwater in the event that a capsule or storage vessel failed.

In the production of power, nearly two-thirds of energy input from fossil fuels is lost as waste heat. Industry is hungry for materials that can convert this heat to useful electricity, but a good thermoelectric material is hard to find.

A comprehensive scientific report released today by The Royal Society of Canada (RSC) has concluded that there are still critical research gaps hampering efforts to both assess the environmental impacts of crude oil spills and to effectively remediate them.

A solar cell is basically a semiconductor, which converts sunlight into electricity, sandwiched between metal contacts that carry the electrical current.

But this widely used design has a flaw: The shiny metal on top of the cell actually reflects sunlight away from the semiconductor where electricity is produced, reducing the cell's efficiency.

Swimming in a pool of syrup would be difficult for most people, but for bacteria like E. coli, it's easier than swimming in water. Scientists have known for decades that these cells move faster and farther in viscoelastic fluids, such as the saliva, mucus, and other bodily fluids they are likely to call home, but didn't understand why.

Researchers from the School of Engineering and Applied Science and the School of Arts & Sciences have come together to find an answer. Their findings could inform disease models and treatments, or even help design microscopic swimming robots.

Amsterdam, November 25, 2015 - A new test for club drugs like ketamine can detect low levels of drugs in urine and plasma, making it faster, easier and cheaper to identify them. The authors of the study, published in Journal of Chromatography B, say it could give authorities the boost they need to keep up with trends drug (ab)use.

A robotic bartender has to do something unusual for a machine: It has to learn to ignore some data and focus on social signals. Researchers at the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) of Bielefeld University investigated how a robotic bartender can understand human communication and serve drinks socially appropriately. For their new study, they invited participants in the lab and asked them to jump into the shoes of their robotic bartender. The participants looked through the robot's eyes and ears and selected actions from its repertoire.

Creating characters and situations that computers can use to generate stories for video games is a task that normally requires expert knowledge, but Disney Research is developing a new interface that can help more people build these digital story worlds.

Researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin have developed a first-of-its-kind self-healing gel that repairs and connects electronic circuits, creating opportunities to advance the development of flexible electronics, biosensors and batteries as energy storage devices.

Although technology is moving toward lighter, flexible, foldable and rollable electronics, the existing circuits that power them are not built to flex freely and repeatedly self-repair cracks or breaks that can happen from normal wear and tear.

Cryptography is the approach to protect data secrecy in public environment. Certain cryptographic communications require not only the security of the transmitted message against eavesdropping from an outside adversary, but also the communicators' individual privacy against each other. Symmetrically private information retrieval (SPIR), which deals with the problem of private user queries to a database, is an example of such communication protocols. In a SPIR protocol Alice can obtain one item (i.e.

Boulder, Colorado, USA - The December 2015 GSA Today is now online. The science article by Rebecca N. Greenberger and colleagues presents the "exciting science potential and new insights into geological processes" that imaging spectroscopy provides. In the Groundwork article, author Bradley D. Cramer and colleagues write that while a 16% growth in geoscience jobs is expected by 2022, there is a critical shortage of geoscientists in the workforce, which could lead to a shortfall in the next decade.

SCIENCE ARTICLE

Scientists at the University of Auckland have developed a soft, flexible, stretchable keyboard using a type of rubber known as a dielectric elastomer.

The results are reported today, 25th November 2015, in the journal Smart Materials and Structures.

"Imagine a world where you drop something, and it bounces back without any damage" says Daniel Xu, an author of the paper. "That's the benefit of these rubber devices that can flex and stretch."

NASA's Operation IceBridge, an airborne survey of polar ice, recently finalized two overlapping campaigns at both of Earth's poles. Down south, the mission observed a big drop in the height of two glaciers situated in the Antarctic Peninsula, while in the north it collected much needed measurements of the status of land and sea ice at the end of the Arctic summer melt season.

How much heat can two bodies exchange without touching? For over a century, scientists have been able to answer this question for virtually any pair of objects in the macroscopic world, from the rate at which a campfire can warm you up, to how much heat the Earth absorbs from the sun. But predicting such radiative heat transfer between extremely close objects has proven elusive for the past 50 years.

Columns of workers penetrate the forest, furiously gathering as much food and supplies as they can. They are a massive army that living things know to avoid, and that few natural obstacles can waylay. So determined are these legions that should a chasm or gap disrupt the most direct path to their spoils they simply build a new path -- out of themselves.