Tech

To hold up its end of the landmark climate deal signed in Paris last week, the U.S. will need to make cars and trucks of the future far more fuel efficient.

Its commitment to reduce carbon pollution relies -- in part -- on fuel economy standards enacted by the Obama administration that aim to increase the fuel efficiency of cars and light trucks to the equivalent of 54 miles per gallon by 2025.

Four UC Santa Barbara engineers have been elected to the National Academy of Inventors (NAI) for 2015. Recognized for their "highly prolific spirit of invention," professors John Bowers, Craig Hawker, Umesh Mishra and Galen Stucky are among the newest fellows elected by the organization.

They join 164 other new NAI members for 2015, bringing the total of NAI fellows to 582, representing more than 190 research universities and governmental and non-profit research institutions.

Scientists are learning more about how the upper atmosphere and ionosphere affect space satellites as well as communications and navigation here on Earth, thanks to new data from a U.S. Air Force satellite that recently completed a more than seven-year mission.

People vary according to different personality traits, such as extraversion or conscientiousness, and new research suggests that they also vary according to a particular cognitive trait: distractibility. The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. - Researchers are proposing a new "hydricity" concept aimed at creating a sustainable economy by not only generating electricity with solar energy but also producing and storing hydrogen from superheated water for round-the-clock power production.

-- A new material that is both highly transparent and electrically conductive could make large screen displays, smart windows and even touch screens and solar cells more affordable and efficient, according to the Penn State materials scientists and engineers who discovered it.

WASHINGTON, D.C., Dec. 15, 2015 - A team of engineers from Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame and the semiconductor company IQE has created gallium nitride (GaN) power diodes capable of serving as the building blocks for future GaN power switches -- with applications spanning nearly all electronics products and electricity distribution infrastructures.

The cycling World champion is significantly less successful during the year when he wears the rainbow jersey than in the previous year, but this is not due to a curse, as many believe, according to a study in the Christmas issue of The BMJ.

The "rainbow" jersey is worn by the current cycling World champion (it is white, with bands of blue, red, black, yellow and green across the chest), explains Thomas Perneger at Geneva University Hospital, Switzerland.

State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometer -- a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent years, AFMs have produced desktop-worthy close-ups of atom-sized structures, from single strands of DNA to individual hydrogen bonds between molecules.

But scanning these images is a meticulous, time-consuming process. AFMs therefore have been used mostly to image static samples, as they are too slow to capture active, changing environments.

PALMERSTON NORTH, NEW ZEALAND - As the use of soilless, hydroponic growing methods becomes more prevalent among crop producers, researchers are looking for new materials that can help growers save money, produce healthy plants, and contribute to sustainable practices. The authors of a study in the October 2015 issue of HortScience say that biochar, a charcoal-like material produced by heating biomass in the absence of oxygen, can help "close the loop" when used as a substrate for soilless, hydroponic tomato production.

What is a catalyst? A material that facilitates (increases the speed and likelihood of) a chemical reaction. In general, catalysts are rare metals (platinum, for example), which are often used in the form of nanoparticles. In the field of renewable energy, catalysts are crucial, and scientists are striving to maximize their efficiency (in part also to avoid wasting these precious materials).

PITTSBURGH--Combining photo-responsive fibers with thermo-responsive gels, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering and Clemson University have modeled a new hybrid material that could reconfigure itself multiple times into different shapes when exposed to light and heat, allowing for the creation of devices that not only adapt to their environment, but also display distinctly different behavior in the presence of different stimuli.

PULLMAN, Wash. - Washington State University researchers have developed a catalyst that easily converts bio-based ethanol to a widely used industrial chemical, paving the way for more environmentally friendly, bio-based plastics and products.

The researchers have published a paper online describing the catalyst in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and have been granted a U.S. patent.

A pair of socks embedded with miniaturised microbial fuel cells (MFCs) and fuelled with urine pumped by the wearer's footsteps has powered a wireless transmitter to send a signal to a PC. This is the first self-sufficient system powered by a wearable energy generator based on microbial fuel cell technology.

The scientific paper, 'Self-sufficient Wireless Transmitter Powered by Foot-pumped Urine Operating Wearable MFC' is published in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.

Cleaning up the water left over from mining operations can literally take generations - 25 to 50 years on average - leaving billions of gallons of the precious resource locked up and useless.

Now, a University of Florida researcher has figured out how to trim that time dramatically - to just two to three hours, a potential boon to mining companies, the environment and global regions where water is scarce.