Tech

This news release is available in German.

A drunken sailor staggers onto a square with lots of streetlamps on it. Sometimes he will run into one of the lamps, change his direction and keep moving. Does the time he spends on this square depend on the number of streetlamps? The surprising answer is: no.

This news release is available in French.

Deaf teenagers have better reading skills if they were identified as deaf by the time they were nine months old, research from the University of Southampton has shown.

The Southampton team has been studying the development of a group of children who were identified with permanent childhood hearing impairment (PCHI) at a very early age in a pilot screening programme conducted in Southampton and London in the 1990s.

LIVERMORE, Calif. - Nanoporous metals -- foam-like materials that have some degree of air vacuum in their structure -- have a wide range of applications because of their superior qualities.

They posses a high surface area for better electron transfer, which can lead to the improved performance of an electrode in an electric double capacitor or battery. Nanoporous metals offer an increased number of available sites for the adsorption of analytes, a highly desirable feature for sensors.

This news release is available in German.

Bitcoin is the new money: minted and exchanged on the Internet. Faster and cheaper than a bank, the service is attracting attention from all over the world. But a big question remains: are the transactions really anonymous? Several research groups worldwide have shown that it is possible to find out which transactions belong together, even if the client uses different pseudonyms. However it was not clear if it is also possible to reveal the IP address behind each transaction.

LIND, Wash. - In the world's driest rainfed wheat region, Washington State University researchers have identified summer fallow management practices that can make all the difference for farmers, water and soil conservation, and air quality.

Wheat growers in the Horse Heaven Hills of south-central Washington farm with an average of 6-8 inches of rain a year. Wind erosion has caused blowing dust that exceeded federal air quality standards 20 times in the past 10 years.

A larger percentage of patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) achieved normalization of CD4+ T-cell counts when they started antiretroviral therapy (ART) within 12 months of the estimated dates of seroconversion (EDS) rather than later, according to a report published online by JAMA Internal Medicine.

This news release is available in German.

X-ray flashes are a unique scientific tool. They are generated by accelerating electrons to very high energy levels in kilometer-long vacuum tubes, so-called linear accelerators, and then deflecting them with specially arranged magnets. In the process the particles emit X-ray radiation that is amplified until an ultra-short and intensive X-ray flash is released.

The first detailed, high-resolution 3-D maps of Antarctic sea ice have been developed using an underwater robot. Scientists from the UK, USA and Australia say the new technology provides accurate ice thickness measurements from areas that were previously too difficult to access.

The results, published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience (Monday 24 November 2014), step up the pace of research in the polar regions aimed at understanding the dramatic sea ice changes in the context of climate change.

Scientists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) have studied the dynamics of electrons from the "wonder material" graphene in a magnetic field for the first time. This led to the discovery of a seemingly paradoxical phenomenon in the material. Its understanding could make a new type of laser possible in the future. Together with researchers from Berlin, France, the Czech Republic and the United States, the scientists precisely described their observations in a model and have now published their findings in the scientific journal Nature Physics.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Researchers have made great progress in recent years in the design and creation of biological circuits -- systems that, like electronic circuits, can take a number of different inputs and deliver a particular kind of output. But while individual components of such biological circuits can have precise and predictable responses, those outcomes become less predictable as more such elements are combined.

BOSTON (Nov. 20, 2014) Investigators at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School Department of Ophthalmology and colleagues reported the development and characterization of a comprehensive genetic test for inherited eye disorders in the online version of the Nature journal Genetics In Medicine today. The Genetic Eye Disease (GEDi) test includes all of the genes known to harbor mutations that cause inherited retinal degenerations, optic atrophy and early onset glaucoma.

As an actress, producer, director and theatre arts lecturer at The University of Texas at Arlington, Julienne Greer knows the techniques that help draw people's deepest emotions to the surface. Now, she's building on her experience and research to help scientists and robotics engineers better understand the human experience so that they can build more responsive robots.

TUSCON, AZ - Soil solarization, a process that uses solar radiation to rid the soil of pests, is most common in regions with high solar radiation and high temperatures during the summer season. An alternative to soil fumigation, the process is used either alone or in combination with fumigants. To accomplish solarization, solar radiation is used to passively heat moist soil covered with clear plastic sheeting, with the goal of increasing soil temperatures to the point where they are lethal to soilborne organisms.