Tech

Experiments aimed at devising new types of photodetectors have been triggered by the increasing use of optoelectronic devices in personal electronics, cameras, medical equipment, computers and by the military. Professor Zhao Kun and co-researchers at the State Key Laboratory of Petroleum Resource and Prospecting, part of the China University of Petroleum in Beijing, have proposed a new type of infrared photodetector.

Li Haijun and fellow researchers at Minzu University of China, in Beijing, conducted a series of geometric morphometric analyses of the contours of the side face and variations in the Tu and Zang (Tibetan) ethnic minorities from Qinghai Province, in northwestern China.

Their study, entitled "Morphometric analysis of the Chinese facial profile: Contours of the side face and variations in the Tu and Zang ethnic minorities", was published (in Chinese) in the Chinese Science Bulletin, 2014, Vol 59(16).

Scientists don't fully understand how 'plastic' solar panels work, which complicates the improvement of their cost efficiency, thereby blocking the wider use of the technology. However, researchers at the University of Montreal, the Science and Technology Facilities Council, Imperial College London and the University of Cyprus have determined how light beams excite the chemicals in solar panels, enabling them to produce charge.

Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. Those instructions were once printed on punch cards that fed data to mainframe computers. Today's smart phones process more data, but they still weren't built for being shoved into back pockets.

In the quest to build gadgets that can survive such abuse, engineers have been testing electronic systems based on a new materials that are both flexible and switchable – that is, capable of toggling between two electrical states, on-off, one-zero, the binary commands that can program all things digital.

Munich, 1 July 2014: While the majority of younger women are aware of egg freezing as a technique of fertility preservation and consider it an acceptable means of reproductive planning, only one in five would consider it appropriate for them, according to the results of an internet survey performed in the UK and Denmark.

The lifestyle altering effects of westernisation could be responsible for the high prevalence of obesity, and associated health risks in sub-Saharan Africa, researchers have found.

The study, published in PLOS ONE, by a team from the University of Warwick Medical School found that over one in five women in Nigeria were reported to be overweight or obese, with this statistic increasing among demographics with improved social and economic indicators.

A relic from long before the age of supercomputers, the 169-year-old math strategy called the Jacobi iterative method is widely dismissed today as too slow to be useful. But thanks to a curious, numbers-savvy Johns Hopkins engineering student and his professor, it may soon get a new lease on life.

NEW YORK — Widespread finger-pointing in the fallout from the 2008-2009 financial crisis is only exacerbated by the continuing legal battles between the big banks and SEC. Fair value accounting (FVA) is often cast as the culprit for accelerating the economic downturn, but a new study from Columbia Business School, published in the Journal of Accounting and Public Policy, examines FVA's role in the financial crisis and considers the advantages it offers relative to other methods of accounting.

Carbon nanotubes "unzipped" into graphene nanoribbons by a chemical process invented at Rice University are finding use in all kinds of projects, but Rice scientists have now found a chemical-free way to unzip them.

The Rice lab of materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan discovered that nanotubes that hit a target end first turn into mostly ragged clumps of atoms. But nanotubes that happen to broadside the target unzip into handy ribbons that can be used in composite materials for strength and applications that take advantage of their desirable electrical properties.

A genetic discovery by a team of scientists from the Malaysian Palm Oil Board (MPOB), aided by scientists from Orion Genomics, paves the way for increased production of palm oil, which accounts for 45 percent of the world's edible oil, while also helping to conserve sensitive wild habitats at risk of being turned into agricultural land.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) — For his doctoral dissertation in the Goldman Superconductivity Research Group at the University of Minnesota, Yu Chen, now a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara, developed a novel way to fabricate superconducting nanocircuitry. However, the extremely small zinc nanowires he designed did some unexpected — and sort of funky — things.

Pioneering work using touchless technology for vascular surgery is now being extended to neurosurgery.

Dr Mark Rouncefield and Dr. Gerardo Gonzalez from the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University were part of a collaborative team from Microsoft Research, Guy's Hospital, St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, and King's College London to pilot the technology in the operating theatre.

A world record that has stood for more than a decade has been broken by a team led by University of Cambridge engineers, harnessing the equivalent of three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.

Telemedicine is an effective strategy to screen for the potentially blinding disease known as retinopathy of prematurity (ROP), according to a study funded by the National Eye Institute (NEI). The investigators say that the approach, if adopted broadly, could help ease the strain on hospitals with limited access to ophthalmologists and lead to better care for infants in underserved areas of the country. NEI is a part of the National Institutes of Health.

WASHINGTON, June 26, 2014—By fusing together the concepts of active fiber sensors and high-temperature fiber sensors, a team of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh has created an all-optical high-temperature sensor for gas flow measurements that operates at record-setting temperatures above 800 degrees Celsius.

This technology is expected to find industrial sensing applications in harsh environments ranging from deep geothermal drill cores to the interiors of nuclear reactors to the cold vacuum of space missions, and it may eventually be extended to many others.