Tech

ITHACA, N.Y. - Imagine a health care robot that could display the patient's temperature and pulse, and even reacts to a patient's mood. It sounds futuristic, but a team of Cornell graduate students - led by Rob Shepherd, assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering - has developed an electroluminescent "skin" that stretches to more than six times its original size while still emitting light. The discovery could lead to significant advances in health care, transportation, electronic communication and other areas.

Researchers have developed an artificial skin that can stretch, sense pressure, and emit light, demonstrating a level of multi-functionality seen in the skin of cephalopods like octopuses. The artificial skin, which outperforms some previous models in terms of stretchiness, could be used on soft electronics and robots that change their shape and color display. The development that made the skin's creation possible is a hyperelastic, light-emitting capacitor (HLEC), which Chris Larson and colleagues designed using two ionic, hydrogel electrodes embedded in a matrix of silicone.

For cultural, technical, and financial reasons, field sciences such as geology, ecology, and archaeology have lagged behind many of the laboratory sciences in making research data and samples available to the broader research community - but it is time for this to change, Marcia McNutt, Brian Nosek and colleagues emphasize in this Policy Forum. They note that data sharing is key for transparency and reproducibility.

BUFFALO, N.Y. - Graphene is a wonder material saddled with great expectations.

Discovered in 2004, it is 1 million times thinner than a human hair, 300 times stronger than steel and it's the best known conductor of heat and electricity. These qualities could, among other things, make computers faster, batteries more powerful and solar panels more efficient.

But the material is tough to manipulate beyond its two-dimensional form.

As strategies for energy security, investment opportunities and energy policies prompt ever-growing production and consumption of biofuels like bioethanol and biodiesel, land and water that could otherwise be used for food production increasingly are used to produce crops for fuel.

A ballooning world population, projected to hit 10 billion around 2060, is raising public concerns, according to a new study by the University of Southampton.

The research into public perceptions of population growth shows people are worried the increase will create moderate-to-high risks, with concerns focussing on food and water shortages, species extinctions and other catastrophic consequences.

Fossil fuels propelled the Industrial Revolution and subsequent technological advances. However, our future cannot be based on them, if only because they are a finite resource; and we are very close to exhausting them.

Renewable hydropower generated from desalination plants and other existing infrastructure would bring economic and environmental benefits to our biggest cities, according to new research from Griffith University.

Based on studies focused on Warragamba Dam -- the main water reservoir for Australia's biggest city, Sydney -- scientists say their findings offer new options for government, industry and city planners on urban water and energy management.

The findings are published in the esteemed journal, Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews.

Scientists have harnessed static electricity to control chemical reactions for the first time, in a breakthrough that could bring cleaner industry and cheaper nanotechnology.

The team used an electric field as a catalyst for a common reaction, the Diels-Alder reaction, improving its reaction rate by a factor of five.

Unlike conventional energy sources, like coal or oil, the supply and demand of renewable energy are, to a large extent, unpredictable because they are affected by the natural fluctuations in the power source itself. This poses a number of difficulties in calculating how much renewable energy will be available for consumer needs at any given time.

Children and adolescents who take medication for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) show decreased bone density, according to a large cross-sectional study presented today at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS).

"This is an important step in understanding a medication class, that is used with increasing frequency, and its effect on children who are at a critical time for building their bones," said senior study author Jessica Rivera, MD, an orthopaedic surgeon with the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research.

Neil Sturchio, professor and chair of the University of Delaware's Department of Geological Sciences, is exploring how the thawing of permafrost, a subsurface layer of soil that remains mostly frozen throughout the year, affects vegetation and the carbon cycle in the Toolik Lake area of the Alaska's North Slope.

"There is a lot of carbon frozen in the Arctic soil's permafrost layer. If this all thaws out, prevailing thought is that the carbon in the soil could be released to the atmosphere and potentially accelerate global warming," said Sturchio.

If you buy a hybrid SUV rather than a conventional SUV of equal size, you naturally think you have chosen the "green" option. But that hybrid vehicle is not greener than a conventional compact car that gets poorer mileage than the hybrid.

Irvine, Calif., March 2, 2016 -- With findings that could have been taken from the pages of a spy novel, researchers at the University of California, Irvine have demonstrated that they can purloin intellectual property by recording and processing sounds emitted by a 3-D printer.

For Pennsylvania dairy farmers, producing feed grain on-farm requires significantly less energy than importing it from the Midwest, according to Penn State researchers whose findings may help dairy farmers save energy and money in the face of rising feed costs.