Tech

Royal Dutch Shell has unveiled a first-of-its-kind community football pitch in the heart of Rio de Janeiro - and the energy to run it comes from action on the field.

North America's largest power plant fueled completely by biomass, the Atikokan Generating Station conversion, is complete and the station is now generating electricity and helping meet local power needs in northwestern Ontario.

Atikokan Generating Station, which employs 70 full-time workers, burned its last coal two years ago, on Sept. 11, 2012. Conversion of the station began in mid-2012 and included construction of two silos and boiler modifications to accommodate the biomass. The project employed over 200 highly skilled trades people and technical workers.

After nearly four years to complete, researchers belie they have opened a fundamentally new direction in photonics.

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego have built the first 500 Gigahertz (GHz) photon switch. "Our switch is more than an order of magnitude faster than any previously published result to date," said UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Stojan Radic. "That exceeds the speed of the fastest lightwave information channels in use today."

The RAISE trial, a Phase III study of ramucirumab (CYRAMZA™) in combination with chemotherapy in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC), met its primary endpoint of overall survival. The global, randomized, double-blind study compared ramucirumab plus FOLFIRI to placebo plus FOLFIRI as a second-line treatment in patients with mCRC after treatment with bevacizumab, oxaliplatin and a fluoropyrimidine in the first-line setting, according to Eli Lilly and Company.

Switching the polarity of a magnet using an electric field (magnetoelectric memory [MEM] effect), can be a working principle of the next-generation technology for information processing and storage. Multiferroic materials are promising candidates for the MEM effect, due to the coexistence of electric and magnetic orders. On the other hand, the coexistence of spontaneous electric and magnetic polarizations is rare in known materials, which hinders the application potential of the MEM effect.

When it comes to the development of soft robots, researchers have finally managed to cut the cord.

Engineers at Harvard's School for Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed the world's first untethered soft robot – a quadruped which can literally stand up and walk away from its designers.

URBANA, Ill. – Chicago residents today might have had a Wisconsin zip code if the originally proposed northern boundary of Illinois had been approved. It was a straight line from the southernmost tip of Lake Michigan to just south of the Rock and Mississippi River confluence. University of Illinois soil scientist Ken Olson said that had the proposed northern border not been changed, the state of Illinois would have a much smaller population and footprint with the northern 51 miles of the Illinois Territory ceded to Wisconsin when it became a state in 1848.

An NJIT research team has estimated the total mass of oil that reached the Gulf of Mexico shore in the wake of the BP Deepwater Horizon blowout. It's the first time such an estimate was reported, and the study is published in the August issue of Environmental Science and Technology.

The researchers found that 22,000 tons of oil reached the Gulf shoreline in 2010. This finding will help officials determine the persistence of oil on the shore and identify potential harm to the ecosystem.

This news release is available in German.

Theories show how computing devices that operate according to quantum mechanics can solve problems that conventional (classical) computers, including super computers, can never solve. These theories have been experimentally tested for small-scale quantum systems, but the world is waiting for the first definitive demonstration of a quantum device that beats a classical computer.

A team of Berkeley Lab researchers believes it has uncovered the secret behind the unusual optoelectronic properties of single atomic layers of transition metal dichalcogenide (TMDC) materials, the two-dimensional semiconductors that hold great promise for nanoelectronic and photonic applications.

New research from North Carolina State University finds that young people who have had mentors are more likely to find work early in their careers that gives them more responsibility and autonomy – ultimately putting them on a path to more financially and personally rewarding careers.

A record-setting X-ray microscopy experiment may have ushered in a new era for nanoscale imaging. Working at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a collaboration of researchers used low energy or "soft" X-rays to image structures only five nanometers in size. This resolution, obtained at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS), a DOE Office of Science User Facility, is the highest ever achieved with X-ray microscopy.

A team of researchers has discovered a way to cool electrons to −228 °C without external means and at room temperature, an advancement that could enable electronic devices to function with very little energy.

The process involves passing electrons through a quantum well to cool them and keep them from heating.

Sendai, Japan – A research team headed by Prof. Patrick Han and Prof. Taro Hitosugi at the Advanced Institute of Materials Research (AIMR), Tohoku University discovered a new bottom-up fabrication method that produces defect-free graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) with periodic zigzag-edge regions. This method, which controls GNR growth direction and length distribution, is a stepping stone towards future graphene-device fabrication by self-assembly.