Tech

A new Cochrane Review concludes that all countries should consider establishing proper home birth services. They should also provide low-risk pregnant women with information enabling them to make an informed choice. The review has been prepared by senior researcher, statistician Ole Olsen, the Research Unit for General Practice, University of Copenhagen, and midwifery lecturer PhD Jette Aaroe Clausen.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Objects created using 3-D printing have a common flaw: They are fragile and often fall apart or lose their shape.

"I have an entire zoo of broken 3-D printed objects in my office," said Bedrich Benes, an associate professor of computer graphics at Purdue University.

The printed fabrications often fail at points of high stress.

Researchers have developed a new way to observe and track large numbers of rapidly moving objects under a microscope, capturing precise motion paths in three dimensions.

Over the course of the study--reported online Sept. 17, 2012, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences--researchers followed an unprecedented 24,000 rapidly moving cells over wide fields of view and through large sample volumes, recording each cell's path for as long as 20 seconds.

WASHINGTON--U.S. Naval Research Laboratory electronics science and technology engineers demonstrate the ability of single walled carbon nanotube transistors (SWCNTs) to survive the harsh space environment, investigating the effects of ionizing radiation on the crystalline structures and further supporting the development of SWCNT-based nanoelectronics for use in harsh radiation environments.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — A study published online in the Journal of Consumer Research finds that people can differ widely on the level of detail makes them feel they understand something. In experiments, the very same explanations that some subjects required before they would pay top dollar seemed to drive down what others were willing to pay. The natural trick for a marketer would be to figure out which customers are which. The study does that, too.

NEW YORK – In a nationally representative sample of nearly 3,000 children and adolescents, those who had higher concentrations of urinary bisphenol A (BPA), a manufactured chemical found in consumer products, had significantly increased odds of being obese, according to a study in the September 19 issue of JAMA, and theme issue on obesity.

Leonardo Trasande, M.D., M.P.P., of the NYU School of Medicine, New York City, presented the findings of the study at a JAMA media briefing.

Our values change as we age. This is the main conclusion of the 2011 SOM survey, from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, where Swedes were asked to rate the importance of different values. Young people want their lives to be exciting, whereas the older prioritise national security. Cultural life does not promote physical health, but does affect a person's perceived well-being. Three Swedes in five throw away clothes that are in usable condition.

EUGENE, Ore. -- (Sept. 18, 2012) -- An interdisciplinary team of scientists from seven U.S. institutions says a disregard of three critical protocols, including sorting samples by size, explains why a group challenging the theory of a North American meteor-impact event some 12,900 years ago failed to find iron- and silica-rich magnetic particles in the sites they investigated.

Not separating samples of the materials into like-sized groupings made for an avoidable layer of difficulty, said co-author Edward K. Vogel, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon.

Using ultra-low input power densities, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated for the first time how low-power "optical nanotweezers" can be used to trap, manipulate, and probe nanoparticles, including fragile biological samples.

Researchers have developed a new way to observe and track large numbers of rapidly moving objects under a microscope, capturing precise motion paths in three dimensions.

Over the course of the study--reported online Sept. 17, 2012, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences--researchers followed an unprecedented 24,000 rapidly moving cells over wide fields of view and through large sample volumes, recording each cell's path for as long as 20 seconds.

Early in the morning of September 12 the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), mounted on the Victor Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, recorded its first images of a southern sky spangled with galaxies. Galaxies up to eight billion light years away were captured on DECam's focal plane, whose imager consists of 62 charge-coupled devices (CCDs) invented and developed by engineers and physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Magnetically imploded tubes called liners, intended to help produce controlled nuclear fusion at scientific "break-even" energies or better within the next few years, have functioned successfully in preliminary tests, according to a Sandia research paper accepted for publication by Physical Review Letters (PRL).

The U.S. federal government is significantly underestimating the costs of carbon pollution because it is using a faulty analytical model, according to a new study published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences.

A more appropriate accounting of costs would pave the way to cleaner, more economically efficient sources of power generation, the study found.

The earth's limited surface is expected to stretch to everything: food for soon to be nine billion people, feed for our beef cattle and fowl, fuel for our cars, forests for our paper, cotton for our clothes. What is more, the earth's forests are preferably to be left untouched to stabilise the climate. Human ecologist and economist Kenneth Hermele will shortly be defending a thesis at Lund University, Sweden, in which he demonstrates that the struggle for land is intensifying rapidly.

Sweet sorghum is primarily grown in the United States as a source of sugar for syrup and molasses. But the sturdy grass has other attributes that could make it uniquely suited to production as a bioenergy crop, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) studies suggest.