Tech

NEW YORK — With everyone from the federal government to corporate America working to encourage more women to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, you would think the doors would be wide open to women of all backgrounds. A new study from Columbia Business School shows that this could not be further from the truth and that gender bias among hiring managers in STEM fields is extraordinarily prevalent.

Chemists at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich have developed a novel type of red phosphor material, which significantly enhances the performance of white-emitting LEDs.

CHICAGO, IL—Almost 70 percent of adults with Type 1 diabetes never use their blood glucose self-monitoring devices or insulin pumps to download historical data about their blood sugar levels and insulin doses—information that likely would help them manage their disease better. These new survey results, which were presented Sunday at the joint meeting of the International Society of Endocrinology and the Endocrine Society: ICE/ENDO 2014 in Chicago, also show that only 12 percent of patients regularly review their past glucose and insulin pump data at home.

ITHACA, N.Y. – Robots are getting smarter, but they still need step-by-step instructions for tasks they haven't performed before. Before you can tell your household robot "Make me a bowl of ramen noodles," you'll have to teach it how to do that. Since we're not all computer programmers, we'd prefer to give those instructions in English, just as we'd lay out a task for a child.

In the past years, invisibility cloaks were developed for various senses. Objects can be hidden from light, heat or sound. However, hiding of an object from being touched still remained to be accomplished. KIT scientists have now succeeded in creating a volume in which an object can be hidden from touching similar to a pea under the mattress of a princess. The results are now presented in the renowned Nature Communications journal.

Georgia Tech researchers have identified a weakness in one of Android's security features and will present their work at Black Hat USA 2014, which will be held August 6-7 in Las Vegas.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass-- What's the difference between the Eiffel Tower and the Washington Monument?

Both structures soar to impressive heights, and each was the world's tallest building when completed. But the Washington Monument is a massive stone structure, while the Eiffel Tower achieves similar strength using a lattice of steel beams and struts that is mostly open air, gaining its strength from the geometric arrangement of those elements.

HOUSTON – (June 19, 2014) – Rice University scientists have created a one-step process for producing highly efficient materials that let the maximum amount of sunlight reach a solar cell.

The Rice lab of chemist Andrew Barron found a simple way to etch nanoscale spikes into silicon that allows more than 99 percent of sunlight to reach the cells' active elements, where it can be turned into electricity.

The research by Barron and Rice graduate student and lead author Yen-Tien Lu appears in the Royal Society of Chemistry's Journal of Materials Chemistry A.

Jena (Germany) In a chemistry lab at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena (Germany): Prof. Dr. Alexander Schiller works at a rectangular plastic board with 384 small wells. The chemist carefully pipets some drops of sugar solution into a row of the tiny reaction vessels. As soon as the fluid has mixed with the contents of the vessels, fluorescence starts in some of the wells. What the Junior Professor for Photonic Materials does here – with his own hands – could also be called in a very simplified way, the 'sweetest computer in the world'.

WASHINGTON, June 18, 2014—Your smartphone's display glass could soon be more than just a pretty face, thanks to new technology developed by researchers from Montreal and the New York-based company Corning Incorporated. The team has created the first laser-written light-guiding systems that are efficient enough to be developed for commercial use.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Researchers have developed a technique that might be used to produce "soft machines" made of elastic materials and liquid metals for potential applications in robotics, medical devices and consumer electronics.

Such an elastic technology could make possible robots that have sensory skin and stretchable garments that people might wear to interact with computers or for therapeutic purposes.

Scientists at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have made the first structural observations of liquid water at temperatures down to minus 51 degrees Fahrenheit, within an elusive "no-man's land" where water's strange properties are super-amplified.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Decades of effort to increase the number of minority students entering the metaphorical science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) pipeline, haven't changed this fact: Traditionally underrepresented groups remain underrepresented. In a new paper in the journal BioScience, two Brown University biologists analyze the pipeline's flawed flow and propose four research-based ideas to ensure that more students emerge from the far end with Ph.D.s and STEM careers.

Magnetic separators exploit the difference in magnetic properties between minerals, for example when separating magnetite from quartz. But this exercise becomes considerably more complex when the particles are not magnetic. In the wake of previous particle levitation experiments under high-power magnetic fields, a new study reveals that particles are deflected away from the magnet's round-shaped bore centre in a horizontal direction. Previous studies had observed the vertical levitation of the particles.

Scientists have found that two-dimensional (2D) nanostructures with asymmetric design enable a new quantum mechanism, triggering the emission of tunable light at terahertz frequencies—with unprecedented efficiency.

The researchers, from the University of Southampton and Imperial College London, found that quantum wells, 2D nanostructures formed of several layers of semi-conductor alloys placed on top of each other like a sandwich, can enhance light emission in a technological challenging spectral range.