Tech

New insights into how plants regulate their absorption of an essential nutrient could help avoid pollution caused by excess use of fertiliser.

The findings could lead to the development of crop varieties that need less of the primary nutrient - nitrogen - than conventional crops. It could also inform how much nitrogen should be added to plant feed.

This would allow optimum plant growth without producing excess nitrogen in run-off from fields, which is a major source of water pollution.

Medicine is drifting towards a major problem. An increasing number of bacteria is no longer sensitive to known antibiotics. Doctors urgently need to find new ways of fighting these multi-resistant pathogens. To address the problem, pharmaceutical research is turning back to the source of most of our drugs: nature.

Making a paper airplane in school used to mean trouble. Today it signals a promising discovery in materials science research that could help next-generation technology -like wearable energy storage devices- get off the ground. Researchers at Drexel University and Dalian University of Technology in China have chemically engineered a new, electrically conductive nanomaterial that is flexible enough to fold, but strong enough to support many times its own weight.

A new climate change modeling tool developed by scientists at Indiana University, Princeton University and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration finds that carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere owing to greater plant growth from rising CO2 levels will be partially offset by changes in the activity of soil microbes that derive their energy from plant root growth.

X-rays are widely used in medicine and in materials science. To take a picture of a broken bone, it is enough to create a continuous flux of X-ray photons, but in order to study time-dependent phenomena on very short timescales, short X-ray pulses are required. One possibility to create short hard X-ray pulses is hitting a metal target with laser pulses. The laser rips electrons out of the atoms and makes them emit X-ray radiation.

The sound of monitor alarms in hospitals can save patients' lives, but the frequency with which the monitors go off can also lead to "alarm fatigue," in which caregivers become densensitized to the ubiquitous beeping.

Researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center have tackled this problem and developed a standardized, team-based approach to reducing cardiac monitor alarms. The process reduced the median number of daily cardiac alarms from 180 to 40, and increased caregiver compliance with the process from 38 percent to 95 percent.

ANN ARBOR--In a step toward robots smaller than a grain of sand, University of Michigan researchers have shown how chains of self-assembling particles could serve as electrically activated muscles in the tiny machines.

So-called microbots would be handy in many areas, particularly medicine and manufacturing. But several challenges lie between current technologies and science fiction possibilities. Two of the big ones are building the 'bots and making them mobile.

A new class of apps and wireless devices used by private pilots during flights for everything from GPS information to data about nearby aircraft is vulnerable to a wide range of security attacks, which in some scenarios could lead to catastrophic outcomes, according to computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego and Johns Hopkins University. They presented their findings Nov.

The e-incubator, an innovative miniature incubator that is compatible with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), enables scientists to grow tissue-engineered constructs under controlled conditions and to study their growth and development in real-time without risk of contamination or damage. Offering the potential to test engineered tissues before human transplantation, increase the success rate of implantation, and accelerate the translation of tissue engineering methods from the lab to the clinic, the novel e-incubator is described in an article in Tissue Engineering.

Cities around the world are increasingly making urban data freely available to the public. But is the content or structure of these vast data sets easy to access and of value? A new study of more than 9,000 data sets from 20 cities presents encouraging results on the quality and volume of the available data and describes the challenges and benefits of analyzing and integrating these expanding data sets, as described in an article in Big Data.

Several companies are developing spacecraft designed to take ordinary citizens, not astronauts, on short trips into space. "Space tourism" and short periods of weightlessness appear to be safe for most individuals according to a series of articles on space biomedicine published in New Space.

New research published today in the journal Nature Communications, has demonstrated how glass can be manipulated to create a material that will allow computers to transfer information using light. This development could significantly increase computer processing speeds and power in the future.

Army doctors in the First World War were helpless to stop soldiers who lost limbs from suffering in pain, according to researchers.

A century on, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have made the loss of limbs common among military casualties once again, but while prosthetic technology has improved dramatically, there is still a shortage of effective treatments for pain caused by damaged nerves.

In Tennessee, the introduction in 2010 of a new pneumococcal vaccine for infants and young children coincides with a 27 percent decline in pneumonia hospital admissions across the state among children under age 2.

That's the lead finding of a report from investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), released Thursday in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The report was timed to coincide with the sixth annual observance of World Pneumonia Day on Nov. 12.

OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Nov. 6, 2014 - For much the same reason LCD televisions offer eye-popping performance, a thermomagnetic processing method developed at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory can advance the performance of polymers.