Tech

"We realized that the sidewinder snakes use a template for climbing on sand, two orthogonal waves that they can control independently," said Hamid Marvi, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon who conducted the experiments while he was a graduate student in the laboratory of David Hu, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Mechanical Engineering. "We used the snake robot to systematically study the failure modes in sidewinding.

Washington, DC—Exposure to cold temperatures can convert white fat tissue from the thighs and belly to beige fat that burns calories for heat, but this biological response is hampered in obese people, according to a new study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.

Known as brown adipose tissue (BAT), brown fat is a particular kind of fat tissue that burns energy and glucose to generate heat. Babies and small animals rely on brown fat to stay warm. Brown fat's energy expenditure helps to prevent obesity in rodents.

TIFTON, GA – Weed control is one of the most challenging aspects of organic crop production. Most growers of certified organic crops rely heavily on proven cultural and mechanical weed control methods while limiting the use of approved herbicides. A new study of herbicides derived from clove oil tested the natural products' effectiveness in controlling weeds in Vidalia® sweet onion crops.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass--A long-sought goal of creating particles that can emit a colorful fluorescent glow in a biological environment, and that could be precisely manipulated into position within living cells, has been achieved by a team of researchers at MIT and several other institutions. The finding is reported this week in the journal Nature Communications.

Reports of insomnia are common among the elderly, but a new study finds that sleep problems may stem from the quality of rest and other health concerns more than the overall amount of sleep that patients get.

This news release is available in German.

URBANA, Ill. – Because of its aggressive behavior and its harmful effects, the invasive prairie plant Lespedeza cuneata has been added to several noxious weed lists.

Research at the University of Illinois on how soil bacteria interact with the plants' roots to form nodules that fix nitrogen demonstrated that the invasive variety had superior performance when pitted against the native plant variety Lespedeza virginica.

UPTON, NY - Increasing the oil content of plant biomass could help fulfill the nation's increasing demand for renewable energy feedstocks. But many of the details of how plant leaves make and break down oils have remained a mystery. Now a series of detailed genetic studies conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and published in The Plant Cell reveals previously unknown biochemical details about those metabolic pathways-including new ways to increase the accumulation of oil in leaves, an abundant source of biomass for fuel production.

A new study suggests that drops of fuel spilled at gas stations — which occur frequently with fill-ups — could cumulatively be causing long-term environmental damage to soil and groundwater in residential areas in close proximity to the stations.

Until now, if you want to print a greeting card for a loved one, you can use colorful graphics, fancy typefaces or special paper to enhance it. But what if you could integrate paper-thin displays into the cards, which could be printed at home and which would be able to depict self-created symbols or even react to touch? Those only some of the options computer scientists in Saarbrücken can offer.

They developed an approach that in the future will enable laypeople to print displays in any desired shape on various materials and therefore could change everyday life completely.

The battle against AIDS cannot be won in the laboratory alone. To fight the potentially deadly virus that 34 million people are suffering from we need help from computers. Now research fron University of Southern Denmark turns computers into powerful allies in the battle.

Effective treatment of HIV-virus is a race against time: Many of the drugs that have been potent killers of HIV-virus, have today lost their power, because the virus has become resistant to them. As a result science must constantly develop new drugs that can attack the virus in new ways.

A future where electricity comes mostly from low-carbon sources is not only feasible in terms of material demand, but will significantly reduce air pollution, a study published in the 6 October Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says.

An international team led by Edgar Hertwich and Thomas Gibon from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology conducted the first-ever global comprehensive life cycle assessment of the long-term, wide-scale implementation of electricity generation from renewable resources.

Fuel cells are totally appropriate systems for substituting the batteries of mobile phones, laptop computers and vehicles. They turn the energy resulting from the combining of hydrogen and oxygen into electrical power, with water vapour being the only waste product. In other words, they generate energy in the same way that batteries do, but they do not contaminate.

Anyone who has blown a bubble and seen how quickly it pops has first-hand experience on the major challenge in creating stable foams.

This news release is available in German.