Tech

COLUMBIA, MO -- Black walnut (Juglans nigra L.) is native to much of the eastern United States and is highly valued for its nuts and timber. Black walnut fruit generally reach most of their size by mid-August and mature by late September or early October. The fruit are then harvested, hulled, and dried in-shell before cracking for commercial markets. Walnut growers use the term "ambers" to describe poorly filled, shriveled eastern black walnut kernels. These "ambered kernels" are not marketable, resulting in economic loss to commercial growers.

Physicists have engineered a spiral laser beam and used it to create a whirlpool of hybrid light-matter particles called polaritons.

"Creating circulating currents of polaritons - vortices - and controlling them has been a long-standing challenge," said leader of the team, theoretician Dr Elena Ostrovskaya, from the Research School of Physics and Engineering at The Australian National University (ANU).

"We can now create a circulating flow of these hybrid particles and sustain it for hours."

For the first time, scientists have vividly mapped the shapes and textures of high-order modes of Brownian motions--in this case, the collective macroscopic movement of molecules in microdisk resonators--researchers at Case Western Reserve University report.

To do this, they used a record-setting scanning optical interferometry technique, described in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Stefanie Schulz-Schupke, M.D., of the Deutsches Herzzentrum Munchen, Technische Universitat, Munich, Germany and colleagues assessed whether vascular closure devices are noninferior (not worse than) to manual compression in terms of access site-related vascular complications in patients undergoing diagnostic coronary angiography. The study appears in the November 19 issue of JAMA, a cardiovascular disease theme issue.

Today's herbaria, as well as all other collections-based environments, are now transitioning their collections data onto the web to remain viable in the smartphone-in-my-pocket age. A team of researchers have examined the importance of these online plant-based resources through the use of Google Analytics (GA) in a study that was published in the open access Biodiversity Data Journal (BDJ).

People with bipolar disorder who are being treated with the drug lithium are at risk of acute kidney damage and need careful monitoring, according to new research from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust.

Lithium is a mainstay treatment for bipolar disorder and it is known that the drug can cause a loss of kidney function. The new research establishes the link between short-term exposure to high levels and potential damage to the kidneys.

To mark World Diabetes Day, the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) has published its annual diabetes report outlining the latest research on coffee and type 2 diabetes. More than 380 million people worldwide have diabetes, with an economic burden of $548 billion, making it one of the most significant global health problems.

The research round up report concludes that regular, moderate consumption of coffee may decrease an individual's risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Key research findings include:

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researches have uncovered "smoking-gun" evidence to confirm the workings of an emerging class of materials that could make possible "spintronic" devices and practical quantum computers far more powerful than today's technologies.

Analyzing page views of Wikipedia articles could make it possible to monitor and forecast diseases around the globe, according to research publishing this week in PLOS Computational Biology.

Dr Sara Del Valle and her team from Los Alamos National Laboratory successfully monitored influenza outbreaks in the United States, Poland, Japan and Thailand, dengue fever in Brazil and Thailand, and tuberculosis in China and Thailand.

Beyond deaths, injuries, and displacements, the ongoing Syrian war is causing growing infectious disease epidemics. A short review published on November 13th in PLOS Pathogens reports on some of the epidemics spreading among vulnerable populations in Syria and neighboring countries.

The ocean is warming steadily and setting up the conditions for stronger El Niño weather events, a new study has shown.

A team of US, Australian, and Canadian researchers sampled corals from a remote island in Kiribati to build a 60-year record of ocean surface temperature and salinity.

"The trend is unmistakeable, the ocean's primed for more El Niño events," says lead-author Dr Jessica Carilli, now based at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

After graphene was first produced in the lab in 2004, thousands of laboratories began developing graphene products worldwide. Researchers were amazed by its lightweight and ultra-strong properties. Ten years later, scientists now search for other materials that have the same level of potential.

Menlo Park, Calif. -- A study at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory suggests for the first time how scientists might deliberately engineer superconductors that work at higher temperatures.

In their report, a team led by SLAC and Stanford University researchers explains why a thin layer of iron selenide superconducts -- carries electricity with 100 percent efficiency -- at much higher temperatures when placed atop another material, which is called STO for its main ingredients strontium, titanium and oxygen.

The "surfactant" chemicals found in samples of fracking fluid collected in five states were no more toxic than substances commonly found in homes, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Fracking fluid is largely comprised of water and sand, but oil and gas companies also add a variety of other chemicals, including anti-bacterial agents, corrosion inhibitors and surfactants. Surfactants reduce the surface tension between water and oil, allowing for more oil to be extracted from porous rock underground.

Applying a thin film of metallic oxide significantly boosts the performance of solar panel cells--as recently demonstrated by Professor Federico Rosei and his team at the Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications Research Centre at Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS). The researchers have developed a new class of materials comprising elements such as bismuth, iron, chromium, and oxygen. These "multiferroic" materials absorb solar radiation and possess unique electrical and magnetic properties.