Tech

REDDING, Calif.—As trees grow larger in even-aged stands, competition develops among them. Competition weakens trees, as they contend for soil moisture, nutrients, and sunlight. Competition also increases trees' risk to bark beetles and diseases, and subsequently leads to a buildup of dead fuels. A recent study, led by Dr. Jianwei Zhang, research forester at the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station, considered if the onset of this risk could be determined.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois researchers have developed a way to heal gaps in wires too small for even the world's tiniest soldering iron.

Led by electrical and computer engineering professor Joseph Lyding and graduate student Jae Won Do, the Illinois team published its results in the journal Nano Letters.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — In addition to its already well-documented negative direct effects on a person's well-being, materialism also wields an indirect negative effect by making bad events even worse, according to a paper co-written by a University of Illinois expert in consumption values.

Business professor Aric Rindfleisch says not only is materialism antithetical to individual welfare, it also has a secondary effect of amplifying traumatic events – everything ranging from terrorism to car accidents and life-threatening illness – to make them seem that much worse.

WASHINGTON D.C. Nov. 25, 2013 -- Plants use a variety of methods to spread their seeds, including gravity, forceful ejection, and wind, water, and animal dispersion. But what of the mushrooms, whose spores also need to be strewn far and wide to ensure their propagation?

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Playing violent video games not only increases aggression, it also leads to less self-control and more cheating, a new study finds.

Researchers found that teens who played violent video games ate more chocolate and were more likely to steal raffle tickets in a lab experiment than were teens who played nonviolent games.

The effects were strongest in teens who scored high on a measure of moral disengagement – the ability to convince yourself that ethical standards don't apply to you in a particular situation.

WASHINGTON D.C. Nov. 24, 2013 -- A deadly menace stalks the loons, gulls and other water birds of the Great Lakes region: Type E botulism, a neuromuscular disease caused when birds eat fish infected with toxin-producing bacteria. Cases of the disease are on the rise, killing approximately 10,000 more waterfowl in 2007 than when it was first reported in 1963.

WASHINGTON D.C. Nov. 24, 2013 -- Up, up in the sky: It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a . . . jellyfish? That's what researchers have built -- a small vehicle whose flying motion resembles the movements of those boneless, pulsating, water-dwelling creatures.

The work, which will be presented at the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting on November 24 in Pittsburgh, demonstrates a new method of flight that could transport miniaturized future robots for surveillance, search-and-rescue, and monitoring of the atmosphere and traffic.

Usually, when researchers work with quantum information, they do everything they can to prevent the information from decaying. Now researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, have flipped things around and are exploiting the decay to create the so-called entanglement of atomic systems, which is the foundation for quantum information processing. The results are published in the scientific journal, Nature.

BOULDER, Colo -- Suggesting that quantum computers might benefit from losing some data, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have entangled—linked the quantum properties of—two ions by leaking judiciously chosen information to the environment.

Lincoln, Neb., Nov. 24 – Using a compact but powerful laser, a research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has developed a new way to generate synchrotron X-rays.

Although the high quality of synchrotron X-rays make them ideal for research ranging from the structure of matter to advanced medical images, access to the technology has been limited until now. Most traditional synchrotron X-ray devices are gigantic and costly, available only at a few sites around the world.

WASHINGTON D.C. Nov. 24, 2013 -- A deadly menace stalks the loons, gulls and other water birds of the Great Lakes region: Type E botulism, a neuromuscular disease caused when birds eat fish infected with toxin-producing bacteria. Cases of the disease are on the rise, killing approximately 10,000 more waterfowl in 2007 than when it was first reported in 1963.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- It's often easy to tell at a glance the difference between a mass-produced object and one that has been handcrafted: The handmade item is likely to have distinctive imperfections and clear signs of an individual's technique and style.

For all the promise of graphene as a material for next-generation electronics and quantum computing, scientists still don't know enough about this high-performance conductor to effectively control an electric current.

Graphene, a one-atom-thick layer of carbon, conducts electricity so efficiently that the electrons are difficult to control. And control will be necessary before this wonder material can be used to make nanoscale transistors or other devices.

A single layer of tin atoms could be the world's first material to conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency at the temperatures that computer chips operate, according to a team of theoretical physicists led by researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University.

Researchers call the new material "stanene," combining the Latin name for tin (stannum) with the suffix used in graphene, another single-layer material whose novel electrical properties hold promise for a wide range of applications.

November 20, 2013 -- A latest study by researchers at the Mailman School of Public Health and Columbia University Medical Center reports that pre-eclampsia, characterized by an elevation in the blood pressure and excess protein in the urine of pregnant women, has a 1.5-fold to 2-fold higher incidence in first pregnancies. The condition, which causes complications in approximately 3-6% of all pregnancies, is also associated with high risks of preterm delivery, intrauterine growth restriction, placental abruption, and perinatal mortality.