Tech

Four million Canadians, including 1.15 million children, are living in households where it is sometimes a struggle to put food on the table, according to researchers at the University of Toronto.

TAMPA, Fla. (Feb. 5, 2014) – Thanks to advanced technologies, those who wear prosthetic and orthotic devices are now able to break previous activity boundaries. People with amputations now have prosthetic devices that allow them to engage in and function more effectively in a wider range of daily activities, exercise, sports, and even extreme sports, such as long-distance snowshoeing and ice climbing.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In his 2014 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama referred to an August 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that showed a decline in the obesity rate among low-income pre-school children, saying, "Michelle's Let's Move! partnership with schools, businesses and local leaders has helped bring down childhood obesity rates for the first time in 30 years, and that's an achievement that will improve lives and reduce health care costs for decades to come."

Nine years after an accident caused the loss of his left hand, Dennis Aabo Sørensen from Denmark became the first amputee in the world to feel – in real-time – with a sensory-enhanced prosthetic hand that was surgically wired to nerves in his upper arm. Silvestro Micera and his team at EPFL (Switzerland) and SSSA (Italy) developed the revolutionary sensory feedback that allowed Sørensen to feel again while handling objects.

We all learn in high school science about the dual nature of light - that it exists as both waves and quantum particles called photons. It is this duality of light that enables the coherent transport of photons in lasers. Sound at the atomic-scale has the same dual nature, existing as both waves and quasi-particles known as phonons. Does this duality allow for phonon-based lasers? Some theorists say yes, but the point has been argued for years.

Scientists with the Wildlife Conservation Society, Oregon State University, Stanford University, Columbia University, and the American Museum of Natural History have found that humpback whales swimming off the coast of western Africa encounter more than warm waters for mating and bearing young; new studies show that the whales share these waters with offshore oil rigs, major shipping routes, and potentially harmful toxicants.

While the debate over using crops for fuel continues, scientists are now reporting a new, fast approach to develop biofuel in a way that doesn't require removing valuable farmland from the food production chain. Their work examining the fuel-producing potential of Streptomyces, a soil bacterium known for making antibiotics, appears in ACS' The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The method also could help researchers identify other microbes that could be novel potential fuel sources

Research from a team led by North Carolina State University is opening the door to smarter sensors by integrating the smart material vanadium dioxide onto a silicon chip and using lasers to make the material magnetic. The advance paves the way for multifunctional spintronic smart sensors for use in military applications and next-generation spintronic devices.

New research predicts that coastal regions may face massive increases in damages from storm surge flooding over the course of the 21st century.

According to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, global average storm surge damages could increase from about $10-$40 billion per year today to up to $100,000 billion per year by the end of century, if no adaptation action is taken.

How do you detect a "botnet", a network of computers infected with malware -so-called zombies - that allow a third party to take control of those machines? The answer may lie in a statistical tool first published in 1966 and brought into the digital age researchers writing this month in the International Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics.

PULLMAN, Wash. – A group of Washington State University researchers have developed a chewing gum-like battery material that could dramatically improve the safety of lithium ion batteries.

Led by Katie Zhong, Westinghouse Distinguished Professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, the researchers recently reported on their work in the journal, Advanced Energy Materials. They have also filed a patent.

WHAT:

Despite their typically small size and sparse distribution, farms that sell their products may boost economic growth in their communities in some regions of the U.S., according to a team of economists.

Gasoline-like fuels can be made from cellulosic materials such as farm and forestry waste using a new process invented by chemists at the University of California, Davis. The process could open up new markets for plant-based fuels, beyond existing diesel substitutes.

A "dark pool" may sound like a mysterious water source or an untapped oil well. In reality, it's a finance term: Dark pools are privately run stock markets that do not show participants' orders to the public before trades happen. They are a growing presence in stock trading, now representing at least one-eighth, and possibly much more, of all stock trading volume in the U.S.