Tech

The search for sustainable new materials to store heat captured from the sun for release during the night has led scientists to a high-tech combination of paraffin wax and sand. Their report on the heat-storing capability of this microencapsulated sand appears in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

Ultrafast supercomputers that operate at speeds 100 times faster than current systems are now one step closer to reality. A team of IBM researchers working on a U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded program have found a way to transmit massive amounts of data with unprecedentedly low power consumption.

New multicore optical fibers have many times the signal-carrying capacity of traditional single-core fibers, but their use in telecommunications has been severely restricted because of the challenge in splicing them together-- picture trying to match up and connect two separate boxes of spaghetti so that all of the noodles in each box are perfectly aligned. Now, a new splicing technique offers an automated way to do just that, with minimal losses in signal quality across the spliced sections.

Enriching crops by adding a naturally-occurring soil mineral to fertilisers could potentially help to reduce disease and premature death in the African country of Malawi, researchers have said.

An international study led by academics at The University of Nottingham has shown that dietary deficiency of the mineral selenium — which plays a vital role in keeping the immune system healthy and fighting illness — is likely to be endemic among the Malawi population.

The energy produced by solar panels, be it heat or electricity, has to be used right away. It is hard to store and preserve and also its transportation can be rather complicated. Creating solar cells capable of producing energy in an easily storable and transportable way, that is to say fuel, is therefore the future challenge of solar energy. For this reason the scientists at SISSA are working on a catalyst that imitates and improves what nature has been able to do for millions of years.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo will soon decide whether to approve hydraulic fracturing for natural gas in the state. To date, no alternative to expanded gas drilling has been proposed.

Coral reefs not only provide the world with rich, productive ecosystems and photogenic undersea settings, they also contribute an economic boost valued at hundreds of billions of dollars. But their decline in recent years due to a variety of threats—from pollution to climate warming—has lent urgency to the search for new ways to evaluate their health.

A new study by Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego scientists has revealed that fluorescence, the dazzling but poorly understood light produced by corals, can be an effective tool for gauging their health.

TEMPE, Ariz. -- A breakthrough in nanolaser technology has been made by Arizona State University researchers.

Electrically powered nano-scale lasers have been able to operate effectively only in cold temperatures. Researchers in the field have been striving to enable them to perform reliably at room temperature, a step that would pave the way for their use in a variety of practical applications.

PASADENA, Calif.—Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.

New research, published today in the journal PNAS, shows that surprisingly accurate estimates of Facebook users' race, age, IQ, sexuality, personality, substance use and political views can be inferred from automated analysis of only their Facebook Likes - information currently publicly available by default.

In the study, researchers describe Facebook Likes as a "generic class" of digital record - similar to web search queries and browsing histories - and suggest that such techniques could be used to extract sensitive information for almost anyone regularly online.

The temptation to steal or cheat is sometimes great — especially when the risk of being caught is low. A new study suggests that denying people the opportunity to engage in these taboo behaviors may lead them to seek out violent video games as a way of managing their frustration.

The study, led by researcher Brad Bushman of Ohio State University, is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

It may be better to tolerate lower oil content in algae grown for biodiesel to boost growth and overall productivity, says research from the University of Sheffield.

The research shows that the commonly accepted method of depriving algae of key nutrients such as nitrogen in order to boost its oil content may be detrimental to overall oil yield in the long term.

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study suggests that people get frustrated when they are offered the opportunity to cheat or steal and that chance is then taken away from them.

Other studies have shown that blocking people from achieving their positive goals increases frustration, which is not surprising. But this is the first to show that even denying people the chance to commit forbidden behaviors can increase frustration.

Researchers of five European universities have developed a cloud-computing platform for robots. The platform allows robots connected to the Internet to directly access the powerful computational, storage, and communications infrastructure of modern data centers - the giant server farms behind the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon - for robotics tasks and robot learning.

The current international climate policy framework is mainly based on the national and regional level of macroscopic carbon emissions data, such as the regional per capita carbon emissions are often used as the indicator to measure the fairness of carbon emission rights.