Tech

EAST LANSING, Mich. — The stock market should be regulated only during times of extraordinary financial disruptions when speculators can destroy healthy businesses, according to a new study led by a Michigan State University scholar.

The study, in the Journal of Financial Economics, is one of the first to suggest when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission should get involved in the market.

Increasingly often, mobile applications on web-enabled mobile phones and tablet computers do more than they appear to.

International university students and water experts have converged at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) to form the backbone of an intellectual and research community on a scarce natural resource -- water.

The long and complicated journey to detect the Higgs boson, which started with one small step about 25 years ago, might finally have reached its goal. This was reported by LHC particle accelerator scientists today at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, near Geneva.

Swaying trees is the way to go, if you are a primate crossing the jungle. Using human street athletes as stand-ins for orangutans, researchers have measured the energy required to navigate a forest using different strategies and found it pays to stay up in the trees. Their work was presented at the Society for Experimental Biology's meeting in Salzburg, Austria on 2 July 2012.

How does the world's smallest mammalian diver survive icy waters to catch its prey? A recent study of American water shrews to be presented at the Society for Experimental Biology meeting in Salzburg on 1st July has surprised researchers by showing that the animals rapidly elevate body temperature immediately before diving into cold water.

This behaviour is unexpected because lower body temperatures enable diving mammals to stay underwater for longer, so heating up doesn't make sense. This is because animals use up oxygen more quickly when they are warmer.

A robot that drives into an industrial disaster area and shuts off a valve leaking toxic steam might save lives. A robot that applies supervised autonomy to dexterously disarm a roadside bomb would keep humans out of harm's way. A robot that carries hundreds of pounds of equipment over rocky or wooded terrain would increase the range warfighters can travel and the speed at which they move. But a robot that runs out of power after ten to twenty minutes of operation is limited in its utility. In fact, use of robots in defense missions is currently constrained in part by power supply issues.

For people with heart conditions and other ailments that require monitoring, life can be complicated by constant hospital visits and time-consuming tests. But what if much of the testing done at hospitals could be conducted in the patient's home, office, or car?

Scientists foresee a time when medical monitoring devices are integrated seamlessly into the human body, able to track a patient's vital signs and transmit them to his doctors. But one major obstacle continues to hinder technologies like these: electronics are too rigid.

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– The world has gotten smaller and more accessible since applications like Google Earth became mainstream, says UC Santa Barbara Professor of Geography Michael Goodchild. However, there is still a long way to go, and there are important steps to take to get there. His perspective, shared with many co-authors around the world, has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in a paper titled, "Next-generation Digital Earth."

The use of compact laser accelerators for cancer therapy with charged particles such as protons could become possible in the future if scientists succeed in generating protons with very high energies. Physicists at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) directed the light of the high power laser DRACO perpendicularly and obliquely onto a thin metal foil; thus, permitting them to demonstrate for the first time that accelerated protons follow the direction of the laser light.

WACO, Texas (July 2, 2012) - Methamphetamine abuse leads to an increase in child abuse and neglect, which causes an increase in foster care admissions, according to a study from Baylor University.

The study, published online in the journal Economic Inquiry, found that a 1 percent increase in meth use led to a 1.5 percent increase in foster care admissions. It is the first study to provide evidence for meth abuse's causal effect on foster home admissions.

Producing strong, lightweight and complex parts for car manufacturing and the aerospace industry is set to become cheaper and more accurate thanks to a new technique developed by engineers from the University of Exeter. The research team has developed a new method for making three-dimensional aluminium composite parts by mixing a combination of relatively inexpensive powders.

The industry is interested in establishing a biorefinery sector in Denmark that can replace oil-based products with biofriendly materials, chemicals, energy and fuel. But this requires a larger biomass production than we are currently achieving. Scientists from University of Copenhagen and Aarhus University have published an extensive report that shows how we can increase the production of biomass by more than 200% in an environmentally friendly way.

Istanbul, 2 July 2012: The state funding of fertility treatment through public reimbursement policies has a direct influence on national birth rates. Lower levels of reimbursement are correlated with higher unmet needs for treatment, while more generous reimbursement policies increase access to treatment and may even make a measurable contribution to national birth rates.

Kyle Elliott, a PhD student at the University of Manitoba and the study's lead author, said, "Most of what we know about aging is from studies of short-lived round worms, fruit flies, mice, and chickens, but long-lived animals age differently. We need data from long-lived animals, and one good example is long-lived seabirds."

Elliott also said, "Not only do these birds live very long, but they maintain their energetic lifestyle in a very extreme environment into old age."