Tech

Ylva Sommerland, from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, has studied the tomboy in manga, a girl manoeuvring in masculine situations. The study concerns sports manga and fantasy manga for teens – genres that offer plenty of tomboy stories.

The study focuses on a tomboy found in Mitsuru Adachi's sports manga Cross Game. Sports manga is immensely popular in Japan, and Mitsuru Adachi is one of the most well-known artists in this genre. He has been active since the 1970s.

Spintronic technology, in which data is processed on the basis of electron "spin" rather than charge, promises to revolutionize the computing industry with smaller, faster and more energy efficient data storage and processing. Materials drawing a lot of attention for spintronic applications are dilute magnetic semiconductors – normal semiconductors to which a small amount of magnetic atoms is added to make them ferromagnetic. Understanding the source of ferromagnetism in dilute magnetic semiconductors has been a major road-block impeding their further development and use in spintronics.

When we read a text, we hear a voice talking to us. Yet the voice changes over time. In his new book titled Poesins röster, Mats Malm, professor in comparative literature at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, shows that when reading older literature, we may hear completely different voices than contemporary readers did – or not hear any voices at all.

CINCINNATI—A joint study by University of Cincinnati Department of Emergency Medicine and Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center researchers has found that, in contrast to popular opinion, major holidays are associated with a lower number of suicide attempts by poisoning.

The study found that holidays like Christmas and Thanksgiving may actually be protective against suicide attempts, possibly due to the increased family or social support structures present around those times. In contrast, New Year's Day had significantly higher numbers of suicide attempts by overdose.

An experiment carried out on rodents exposed to fuel similar to that of the Prestige tanker oil spill – which took place nearly a decade ago – shows that inhalation of the fuel causes damage to genetic material. According to the study, led by the University of A Coruña, the results could be used in relation to people who carry out the industrial cleaning of coasts.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed new techniques for stretching carbon nanotubes (CNT) and using them to create carbon composites that can be used as stronger, lighter materials in everything from airplanes to bicycles.

By stretching the CNT material before incorporating it into a composite for use in finished products, the researchers straighten the CNTs in the material, which significantly improves its tensile strength – and enhances the stiffness of the composite material and its electrical and thermal conductivity.

This press release is available in Spanish.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A new approach that allows objects to become "invisible" has now been applied to an entirely different area: letting particles "hide" from passing electrons, which could lead to more efficient thermoelectric devices and new kinds of electronics.

The concept — developed by MIT graduate student Bolin Liao, former postdoc Mona Zebarjadi (now an assistant professor at Rutgers University), research scientist Keivan Esfarjani, and mechanical engineering professor Gang Chen — is described in a paper in the journal Physical Review Letters.

By force of habit we tend to assume computers are made of silicon, but there is actually no necessary connection between the machine and the material. All that an engineer needs to do to make a computer is to find a way to build logic gates — the elementary building blocks of digital computers — in whatever material is handy.

So logic gates could theoretically be made of pipes of water, channels for billiard balls or even mazes for soldier crabs.

The potential of GMES for crisis management and environmental monitoring is highlighted in a new publication with users demonstrating the importance of Earth observation data to European regions.

WASHINGTON, Oct.

A new breakthrough in solar technology means portable electronic devices such as e-book readers could soon be re-charged on the move in low light levels and partial shading. Scientists from the University of Warwick, in collaboration with spin-out company Molecular Solar, have created an organic solar cell that generates a sufficiently high voltage to recharge a lithium-ion battery directly, without the need to connect multiple individual cells in series.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have created flower-like structures out of germanium sulfide (GeS) – a semiconductor material – that have extremely thin petals with an enormous surface area. The GeS flower holds promise for next-generation energy storage devices and solar cells.

Chemists at Queen's University Belfast have devised a novel, environmentally friendly technique, which allows the rapid production of Metal-Organic Frameworks porous materials (MOFs).

These revolutionary nanomaterials have the potential to transform hazardous gas storage, natural gas vehicles and drug delivery and have the highest surface-area of any known substance.

A sugar-lump sized piece of MOF material can have the same surface area as a football pitch.