Tech

The use of portable, wireless cameras and monitoring equipment for recording and transmitting footage of wildlife is perhaps familiar to anyone who watches nature programs on TV. However, common to all such equipment is the problem of limited battery life, which becomes particularly troublesome when using such equipment in remote and hazardous locations.

(Lebanon, NH, 1/24/14) — Dartmouth engineers and radiologists are developing new approaches for an emerging technique in diagnostic imaging for breast cancer—MRI with near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) as reported in the journal Academic Radiology, February 2014.

The use of portable, wireless cameras and monitoring equipment for recording and transmitting footage of wildlife is perhaps familiar to anyone who watches nature programs on TV. However, common to all such equipment is the problem of limited battery life, which becomes particularly troublesome when using such equipment in remote and hazardous locations.

Scientists have called for data held in biobanks to be made accessible to the people donating material and data to them. In a paper published today in Science, Jeantine Lunshof and George Church from Harvard Medical School and Barbara Prainsack from King's College London write that donors should have unrestricted access to data derived from their own material and that advanced technology means allowing such access is today a question of will rather than feasibility.

Scientists have called for data held in biobanks to be made accessible to the people donating material and data to them. In a paper published today in Science, Jeantine Lunshof and George Church from Harvard Medical School and Barbara Prainsack from King's College London write that donors should have unrestricted access to data derived from their own material and that advanced technology means allowing such access is today a question of will rather than feasibility.

People improve their performance more when they practise with a partner rather than on their own, according to a new study.

The research could ultimately help people rehabilitating from a stroke.

Scientists from Imperial College London and two Japanese institutions explored whether physical interaction improved the way people performed in a computer-based task where they were using a joystick-like device. They were connected by a virtual elastic band to the same type of device operated by another person, who was hidden from view.

When capturing images at the atomic scale, even tiny movements of the sample can result in skewed or distorted images – and those movements are virtually impossible to prevent. Now microscopy researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique that accounts for that movement and eliminates the distortion from the finished product.

Humans are able to smell sickness in someone whose immune system is highly active within just a few hours of exposure to a toxin, according to new research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

According to researcher Mats Olsson of Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, there is anecdotal and scientific evidence suggesting that diseases have particular smells. People with diabetes, for example, are sometimes reported to have breath that smells like rotten apples or acetone.

SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 22, 2014 – University of Utah bioengineers showed that tiny blood vessels grow better in the laboratory if the tissue surrounding them is less dense. Then the researchers created a computer simulation to predict such growth accurately – an early step toward treatments to provide blood supply to tissues damaged by diabetes and heart attacks and to skin grafts and implanted ligaments and tendons.

PHILADELPHIA (January 22, 2014) – New research from the Monell Center reveals humans can use the sense of smell to detect dietary fat in food. As food smell almost always is detected before taste, the findings identify one of the first sensory qualities that signals whether a food contains fat. Innovative methods using odor to make low-fat foods more palatable could someday aid public health efforts to reduce dietary fat intake.

"Cool it!" That's a prime directive for microprocessor chips and a promising new solution to meeting this imperative is in the offing. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have developed a "process friendly" technique that would enable the cooling of microprocessor chips through carbon nanotubes.

This news release is available in German.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Living cells are ready for their close-ups, thanks to a new imaging technique that needs no dyes or other chemicals, yet renders high-resolution, three-dimensional, quantitative imagery of cells and their internal structures – all with conventional microscopes and white light.

Called white-light diffraction tomography (WDT), the imaging technique opens a window into the life of a cell without disturbing it and could allow cellular biologists unprecedented insight into cellular processes, drug effects and stem cell differentiation.

Rice University scientists have created a highly sensitive portable sensor to test the air for the most damaging greenhouse gases.

The device created by Rice engineer and laser pioneer Frank Tittel and his group uses a thumbnail-sized quantum cascade laser (QCL) as well as tuning forks that cost no more than a dime to detect very small amounts of nitrous oxide and methane.

The QCL emits light from the mid- to far-infrared portion of the spectrum. That allows for far better detection of gases than more common lasers that operate in the near-infrared.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a new theoretical model that explains macroscale fluid convection induced by plasmonic (metal) nanostructures. Their model demonstrates the experimentally observed convection velocities of the order of micrometers per second for an array of gold bowtie nanoantennas (BNAs) coupled to an optically absorptive indium-tin-oxide (ITO) substrate.