Tech

Lighting is crucial to the art of photography. But lights are cumbersome and time-consuming to set up, and outside the studio, it can be prohibitively difficult to position them where, ideally, they ought to go.

Researchers at MIT and Cornell University hope to change that by providing photographers with squadrons of small, light-equipped autonomous robots that automatically assume the positions necessary to produce lighting effects specified through a simple, intuitive, camera-mounted interface.

In Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and other major cities in New Mexico, nearly every public golf course is now watered with treated municipal wastewater rather than precious potable water supplies. Across the U.S. Southwest as a whole, more than 40% of all golf courses receive treated effluent. Reusing the effluent increases the sustainability of golf courses.

The first dengue vaccine candidate (CYD-TDV) to reach phase 3 clinical testing has shown moderate protection (56%) against the disease in Asian children, according to new research published in The Lancet.

Dengue is a mosquito-borne disease that infects around 390 million people each year, of whom about 96 million suffer from symptomatic infection. WHO estimates that the global burden of dengue has risen 30-fold over the past 50 years, with over half of the world's population at risk of the disease.

With the help of a smart tablet and Angry Birds, children can now do something typically reserved for engineers and computer scientists: program a robot to learn new skills. The Georgia Institute of Technology project is designed to serve as a rehabilitation tool and to help kids with disabilities.

The vegetable oil found in your popcorn or soap might not be ape friendly, and the situation appears likely to get even worse, according to an analysis in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on July 10.

The growing demand for vegetable oil has already led to the conversion of Southeast Asian forest into oil palm plantations, bringing trouble for orangutans in particular. If guidelines are not put in place very soon, researchers say the spread of those large-scale industrial plantations from Asia into Africa will be bad news for great apes there as well.

Rice University's breakthrough silicon oxide technology for high-density, next-generation computer memory is one step closer to mass production, thanks to a refinement that will allow manufacturers to fabricate devices at room temperature with conventional production methods.

EAST LANSING, Mich. – For those students looking to bump up their grade point averages during college, the answer may not be spending more time in a library or study hall, but in a gym.

New Michigan State University research shows that students who were members of the recreational sports and fitness centers on MSU's campus during their freshman and sophomore years had higher GPAs than those who weren't.

The research also indicated that students with memberships stayed in school longer. An increase of 3.5 percent in two-year retention rates was seen among this group.

ANN ARBOR – Because the strong currents in the Straits of Mackinac reverse direction every few days, a rupture of the oil pipeline beneath the channel would quickly contaminate shorelines miles away in both lakes Michigan and Huron, according to a new University of Michigan study commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — To keep data safe in the cloud, a group of computer scientists suggests doing the Melbourne Shuffle.

That may sound like a dance move (and it is), but it's also a computer algorithm developed by researchers at Brown University.

A recent study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provides new insights on the physical mechanisms governing the interplay of spin and heat at the nanoscale, and addresses the fundamental limits of ultrafast spintronic devices for data storage and information processing.

A hard drive stores bits in the form of tiny magnetic domains. The directions of the magnetic north and south poles of these domains, which are referred to as the magnetization, determine whether they are a 0 or a 1. Data is stored by changing the direction of the magnetization of the associated bits. At present this is done using a write head to create a local magnetic field, which makes a bit change direction.

Limit reached

Polar bear population estimates based on satellite images are similar to aerial estimates, according to a study published July 9, 2014 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Seth Stapleton from United States Geological Survey and colleagues.

Tampa, Fla. (July 9, 2014) – Emerging fungal pathogens pose a greater threat to biodiversity than any other parasitic group, causing population declines of amphibians, bats, corals, bees and snakes. New research from the University of South Florida published in the prestigious journal Nature reveals that amphibians can acquire behavioral or immunological resistance to a deadly chytrid fungus implicated in global amphibian population declines.

This news release is available in German.

URBANA, Ill. – With over 100 diseases that can attack soybean crops, why would charcoal rot rise to the top of the most wanted list? University of Illinois scientists cite the earth's changing climate as one reason that more research is needed on the fungus that causes charcoal rot.

Fungi may often be associated with cool, damp growing conditions but Macrophomina phaseolina, the fungus that causes charcoal rot, prefers hot and dry drought conditions.