Tech

New York / Heidelberg, 22 May 2012 -- Mitt Romney's religion was a major stumbling block for his 2008 presidential aspirations, and remains so for his candidacy in 2012, according to David Campbell at the University of Notre Dame. Real time voter analysis of the 2008 primaries reveals that while the social barriers of race and gender were largely overcome during the last US presidential campaign, religious affiliation (in this case, the Church of Latter Day Saints) is still a significant hurdle.

Men whose electrical impulses take a few milliseconds longer to travel through the lower chambers of the heart have an increased risk for sudden cardiac death (SCD), according to research reported in Circulation, an American Heart Association journal.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers have shown how to create morphing robotic mechanisms and shape-shifting sculptures from a single sheet of paper in a method reminiscent of origami, the Japanese art of paper folding.

The new method, called Kaleidogami, uses computational algorithms and tools to create precisely folded structures.

Los Angeles, CA (May 21, 2012) Playing violent shooting video games can improve firing accuracy and influence players to aim for the head when using a real gun finds a new study in Communication Research, published by SAGE.

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Popular firewall technology designed to boost security on cellular networks can backfire, unwittingly revealing data that could help a hacker break into Facebook and Twitter accounts, a new study from the University of Michigan shows.

The researchers also developed an Android app that tells phone users when they're on a vulnerable network. They will present their work May 22 at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Francisco.

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) allow people in multiple, rapidly-moving vehicles to communicate with each other – such as in military or emergency-response situations. Researchers from North Carolina State University have devised a method to improve the quality and efficiency of data transmission in these networks.

"Our goal was to get the highest data rate possible, without compromising the fidelity of the signal," says Dr. Alexandra Duel-Hallen, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the work.

Advertisers spend enormous amounts of time and money attempting to tailor their advertising campaigns to the needs of different demographic groups. After all, the concerns of first-year college students are going to be different from those of retired professionals.

It may not be intuitive, but a coating of reflective metal can actually make something less visible, engineers at Stanford and UPenn have shown. They have created an invisible, light-detecting device that can "see without being seen."

At the heart of the device are silicon nanowires covered by a thin cap of gold. By adjusting the ratio of metal to silicon – a technique the engineers refer to as tuning the geometries – they capitalize on favorable nanoscale physics in which the reflected light from the two materials cancel each other to make the device invisible.

Modern day soldiers who mutilate enemy corpses or take body-parts as trophies are usually thought to be suffering from the extreme stresses of battle. But, research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) shows that this sort of misconduct has most often been carried out by fighters who viewed the enemy as racially different from themselves and used images of the hunt to describe their actions.

Los Angeles, CA (May 18, 2012) More than 5,000 people die each year in vehicle crashes caused by distracted driving, many who were texting and talking on cellphones behind the wheel, according to the May 4 issue of CQ Researcher (published by CQ Press, an imprint of SAGE). Teen drivers appear to be especially susceptible to distraction.

Vacuum tubes have been retro for decades. They almost completely disappeared from the electronics scene when consumers exchanged their old cathode ray tube monitors for flat screen TVs. Their replacement – the semiconductor – is generally the cheaper, lighter, more efficient, and easier to manufacture of the two technologies.

But vacuum tubes are more robust in high-radiation environments such as outer space. And since electrons travel faster in a vacuum than through a semiconductor, vacuum tubes are an intrinsically better medium for electricity.

Laser technology uses light. Light can be rapidly and precisely deflected, shaped and focused. If we pulse laser light and reduce pulse duration more and more, the laser tool works even more precisely. A benefit: The material being processed heats up less and less. High-power, ultra-short pulses, then, are the ideal solution for medical applications, in brain surgery for instance, as the cerebral membrane is not damaged. Or for removing tumor tissue thereby conserving the surrounding tissue and blood vessels.

When manufacturing products, the coating technology is a key innovation driver for almost all areas of daily life – for example, for making scratch-proof displays for smart phones or anti-bacterial surfaces in refrigerators. Other coatings protect components from corrosion or aging, for example in a solar cell module or a car engine, without the end user noticing their existence. In industry today, wet chemical processes or vacuum plasma processes are primarily used for coating applications. Both have drawbacks.

Metalworking plays a key role in industry. Drilling, milling, turning and grinding operations all use lubricants to prevent work pieces and tools from overheating and from excess wear. Standard lubricants today are based on mineral oil. This has drawbacks: fossil mineral oils come from finite resources, transport relatively little heat away from the work piece, are harmful to health and are flammable. All of this calls for extreme technical efforts, for occupational safety, fire safety and disposal, for example. So there's a need for alternative lubricants.

Laser systems can be used to implement highly precise and ultra-fast measuring processes. Railway measuring technology has a huge worldwide need here. One prerequisite for its use is that nobody is damaged or suffers irritations by the laser. Dr. Heinrich Höfler and Dipl.-Ing. Harald Wölfelschneider from the Fraunhofer Institute for Physical Measurement Techniques IPM in Freiburg have worked with their team to develop a 3D laser scanner. It can be used outdoors without hesitation.