Tech

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers have shown that popular free smartphone apps spend up to 75 percent of their energy tracking the user's geographical location, sending information about the user to advertisers and downloading ads.

"It turns out the free apps aren't really free because they contain the hidden cost of reduced battery life," said Y. Charlie Hu, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering.

AMHERST, Mass. – In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward.

World-leading ship science expert, Professor Ajit Shenoi, says that a seafaring tragedy on the scale of the Titanic disaster is unlikely to happen again.

Professor Shenoi, who is the Director of the Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute at the University of Southampton, believes this is due to the many lessons that have been learned as a result of the tragedy 100 years ago.

Defying thousands of years of conventional wisdom, scientists are reporting that it is possible for water to float on oil, a discovery they say has important potential applications in cleaning up oil spills that threaten seashores and fisheries. Their report appears in ACS' journal Langmuir.

Chicago, IL (April 4, 2012) -- Patients whose symptoms of Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) start outside of the hospital setting have a higher risk of colectomy due to severe infection, according to a large multicenter study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and published in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, the journal of the Society for Healthcare Epidemiology of America.

To most of us, electricity is a matter of course. At the push of a button the light turns on and the TV starts. In reality, a tremendous amount of effort lies behind a secure supply of power. Because of the demand fluctuations, specialists must calculate precisely how much power is needed and when. Weekends, for instance, when offices and stores are closed, require less energy than Mondays. And when it is gray and rainy outside, the lights get turned on earlier than on sunny days.

Listening to the radio is a favorite German pastime. Every day, more than 60 million people turn their radios on, especially while driving, and studies show that one in two of them are unwilling to give up enjoying radio programs behind the wheel. But in the vehicle of the future, the electric car, listening to the radio is in principle not possible, since electrical interference impedes the reception of radio waves.

Robot squirrels from the University of California, Davis, are going into rattlesnake country near San Jose, continuing a research project on the interaction between squirrels and rattlesnakes.

In the lab, robot squirrels have shown how squirrels signal to snakes with heat and tail flagging. Through field experiments, researchers from San Diego State University and UC Davis aim to learn more about rattlesnake behavior.

The least expensive way for the Western U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to help prevent the worst consequences of global warming is to replace coal with renewable and other sources of energy that may include nuclear power, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, researchers.

Researchers at Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech have assembled the draft genome of a marine algae sequence to aid scientists across the US in a project that aims to discover the best algae species for producing biodiesel fuel. The results have been published in Nature Communications.

Robot squirrels from the University of California, Davis, are going into rattlesnake country near San Jose, continuing a research project on the interaction between squirrels and rattlesnakes.

In the lab, robot squirrels have shown how squirrels signal to snakes with heat and tail flagging. Through field experiments, researchers from San Diego State University and UC Davis aim to learn more about rattlesnake behavior.

Physicists have recently devised a new method for handling the effect of the interplay between vibrations and electrons on electronic transport. Their paper is about to be published in EPJ B¹. This study, led by scientists from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, and the Centre for Computational Science and Engineering at the National University of Singapore, could have implications for quantum computers due to improvements in the transport of discrete amounts of information, known as qubits, that are encoded in electrons.

Sparrows in San Francisco's Presidio district changed their tune to soar above the increasing cacophony of car horns and engine rumbles, details new George Mason University research in the April edition of "Animal Behaviour."

The study, "Birdsongs Keep Pace with City Life: Changes in Song Over Time in an Urban Songbird Affects Communication," compares birdsongs from as far back as 1969 to today. The researchers also detail how San Francisco's streets have grown noisier based on studies from 1974 and 2008.

Chicago – Once again, science and anthropology have teamed up to solve questions concerning the fascinating, brilliantly hued pigment known as Maya Blue. Impervious to the effects of chemical or physical weathering, the pigment was applied to pottery, sculpture, and murals in Mesoamerica largely during the Classic and Postclassic periods (AD 250-1520), playing a central role in ancient Maya religious practice. This unusual blue paint was used to coat the victims of human sacrifice and the altars on which they were dispatched.

DURHAM, N.H. – A series of global warming events called hyperthermals that occurred more than 50 million years ago had a similar origin to a much larger hyperthermal of the period, the Pelaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), new research has found. The findings, published in Nature Geoscience online on April 1, 2012, represent a breakthrough in understanding the major "burp" of carbon, equivalent to burning the entire reservoir of fossil fuels on Earth, that occurred during the PETM.