Tech

Crabs, insects and spiders living in coastal salt marshes affected by the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster were damaged by the massive oil spill but were able to recover within a year if their host plants remained healthy, according to a University of Houston study published Wednesday (March 7) in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

Crabs, insects, and spiders in coastal salt marshes affected by the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April 2010 were both quite vulnerable to oil exposure, but also resilient enough to recover within a year if their host plants remained healthy, according to a study published Mar. 7 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.

Conflicts are inevitable wherever there is cohabitation. This is no different with our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. Sound conflict management is crucial for group cohesion. Individuals in chimpanzee communities also ensure that there is peace and order in their group. This form of conflict management is called "policing" – the impartial intervention of a third party in a conflict. Until now, this morally motivated behavior in chimpanzees was only ever documented anecdotally.

University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy without using fossil fuels and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Reporting in the journal Nanoscale, the team said nanowires, which are made from abundant natural materials like silicon and zinc oxide, also offer a cheap way to deliver hydrogen fuel on a mass scale.

A series of studies conducted by psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Toronto in Canada reveal something the well off may not want to hear. Individuals who are relatively high in social class are more likely to engage in a variety of unethical behaviors.

That is the finding of new research published in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and it's a doozy.

Boulder, Colorado, USA - Drought events are largely unknown in Earth's history, because reconstruction of ancient hydrological conditions remains difficult due to lack of proxy. New GEOLOGY research supported by China's NNSF and MS&T uses a microbial lipid proxy of highly alkaline conditions to identify enhanced aridity in Miocene sediments on the Tibetan Plateau. This enhanced aridity is associated with significant uplift of the Tibetan Plateau nine million years ago.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a new certified reference material to support the federal government's Natural Resources Damage Assessment (NRDA) in the wake of the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill 40 miles off the Louisiana coast. The new Standard Reference Material, Gulf of Mexico Crude Oil" (SRM 2779), will be used as a quality control material for the ongoing environmental impact analyses for the NRDA effort.

Words spelled with more letters on the right of the keyboard are associated with more positive emotions than words spelled with more letters on the left, according to new research by cognitive scientists Kyle Jasmin of University College London and Daniel Casasanto of The New School for Social Research, New York. Their work shows, for the first time, that there is a link between the meaning of words and the way they are typed - a relationship they call the QWERTY* effect. Their study is published online in Springer's journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

A new edition of the Strategic Energy Technologies review has been published. This "2011 Technology Map", produced by the European Commission's in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC), provides a European and worldwide analysis of 15 low-carbon energy technologies, energy efficiency in industry, energy performance of buildings and electricity storage in the power sector. Compared with the 2009 Technology Map, the steep increase of wind and solar (photovoltaics) generation capacity in the EU and worldwide is to be highlighted.

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed the first functional oxide thin films that can be used efficiently in electronics, opening the door to an array of new high-power devices and smart sensors. This is the first time that researchers have been able to produce positively charged (p-type) conduction and negatively charged (n-type) conduction in a single oxide material, launching a new era in oxide electronics.

Not a week goes by without reports on security gaps, data theft or hacker attacks. Both businesses and private users are becoming increasingly uneasy. However, when it comes to technologies like cloud computing, trust and security are essential if we intend to use data and applications that are flexible, cost-effective and above all, mobile. That's why Fraunhofer researchers are working on a series of security solutions that they will present in Hall 26, Booth E08.

A control center for the cloud

Wetlands created to replace those lost to environmental degradation or development take up carbon from the atmosphere and so potentially reduce greenhouse warming, a unique 15-year study suggests. Such artificial wetlands caused emissions of methane, which may contribute to warming, smaller than those from natural wetlands.

Using a combination of guillotine-based experiments and cutting-edge computer modelling, researchers at the University of Bristol have explored the most efficient ways for teeth to slice food. Their results, published today in Journal of the Royal Society Interface, show just how precisely the shape of an animal's teeth is optimized to suit the type of food it eats.

Ex-offenders face significant barriers to securing accommodation, says research by University of Southampton academics from the Third Sector Research Centre.

The link between homelessness and offending is well established. About a third of offenders are homeless before or after imprisonment, and housing is a key factor in reducing reoffending rates. However, while many prisons now have links with third sector organisations and even a dedicated housing advisor, stronger relationships between housing advice agencies and local authorities are vital.

WASHINGTON — The costs to switch to numeric criteria for limiting nutrient pollutants in Florida waters are expected to exceed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates, says a new National Research Council report. The committee that wrote the report questioned the validity of several assumptions in the EPA cost analysis and found that EPA did not adequately report on the uncertainties that could affect the cost of the rule change.