Tech

"How do I know that the new installed app behaves as described?" asks Andreas Zeller, professor of software engineering at Saarland University. So far experts have identified so-called malicious apps by checking their behavior against patterns of known attacks. "But what if the attack is brand-new?" asks Zeller.

His group seems to have found a new method to answer all these questions. Zeller summarizes the basic idea as follows: "Apps whose functionality is described in the app store should behave accordingly. If that is not the case, they are suspect."

WASHINGTON, Feb. 18, 2014—For futuristic applications like wearable body sensors and robotic skin, researchers need to ferry information along flexible routes. Electronics that bend and stretch have become possible in recent years, but similar work in the field of optics – communicating with light instead of electrons – has lagged behind. Particularly difficult to engineer have been optics that stretch, lengthening when someone wearing body sensors bends to tie their shoe, or when a robotic arm twists through a full range of motion.

A paper in the Institution of Engineering and Technology's (IET) journal Electronics Letters reports that the Leeds team has exceeded a 1 Watt output power from a quantum cascade terahertz laser.

The new record more than doubles landmarks set by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and subsequently by a team from Vienna last year.

It's a time-consuming process for a program to arrange pictures in a consistent order. It is even more complex to order them on the basis of visual characteristics. Computer scientists from Saarbrücken have developed a system to arrange pictures into a consistent order. It requires no more than a small number of pre-sorted example pictures. Operators of online portals or museums could use this technique, for example, to arrange complex datasets.

WA, Seattle (February 17, 2014) – A new study describes the complexity of the new T cell repertoire following immune-depleting therapy to treat multiple sclerosis, improving our understanding of immune tolerance and clinical outcomes.

TEMPE, Ariz. – Nanoscale technology looks promising as a major contributor to advancements needed to fulfill the potential of emerging sources of clean, renewable energy.

Progress in the comparatively new area of nanoelectronics in particular could be the basis for new manufacturing processes and devices to make renewable energy systems and technologies more efficient and cost-effective.

An electrode designed like a pomegranate – with silicon nanoparticles clustered like seeds in a tough carbon rind – overcomes several remaining obstacles to using silicon for a new generation of lithium-ion batteries, say its inventors at Stanford University and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson and his colleagues recently developed detailed plans totransform the energy infrastructure of New York, California and Washington states from fossil fuelsto 100 percent renewable resources by 2050. On Feb. 15, Jacobson will present a new roadmap torenewable energy for all 50 states at the annual meeting of the American Association for theAdvancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago.

The weakly electric black ghost knifefish of the Amazon basin has inspired Northwestern University's Malcolm MacIver and an interdisciplinary team of researchers to develop agile fish robots that could lead to a vast improvement in underwater vehicles used to study fragile coral reefs, repair damaged deep-sea oil rigs or investigate sunken ships.

Larry Smarr, a physicist whose work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on calculating black hole collisions led him to champion a federal commitment to dramatically enhance U.S. computing power – which in turn led to the development of NCSA Mosaic, the precursor to web browsers – was named today as the first 2014 recipient of the Golden Goose Award.

African-Americans spend more time than any other group getting to work and in some cases spend about 15 minutes more a day than whites commuting, according to research by Virginia Parks, associate professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration.

That can be a 25 percent increase over an average urban two-way commute of about an hour, she found, based on a study of 2011 U.S. Census Bureau data.

Pour sand from a bucket and it flows like a liquid, but stand on it and it supports weight like a solid. This unusual behavior is a property of granular materials, and it is one of the reasons Heinrich Jaeger, the William J. and Alicia Townsend Friedman Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago, has chosen to focus on these types of materials in his research.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Every year waste treatment facilities in the United States process more than eight million tons of semi-solid sewage called biosolids -- about half of which is recycled into fertilizer and spread on crop land.

The practice helps solve storage issues and produces revenue to support the treatment plants, but what else is being spread in that sludge?

Think of an oil spill, and images of fouled beaches and oil-soaked seabirds come to mind. But there are less visible effects as well. For instance, even low levels of oil pollution can damage the developing hearts of fish embryos and larvae, reducing the likelihood that those fish will survive. Scientists have known of this effect for some time, but the underlying mechanism has remained elusive.

Researchers at the University of Guelph examined the energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with corn production in Ontario. Their findings are published today in the Agricultural Institute of Canada's (AIC) Canadian Journal of Soil Science.