Tech

An international team of high-energy physicists says the discovery of an electrically charged subatomic particle called Zc(4020) is a sign that they have begun to unveil a whole new family of four-quark objects.

The Beijing Spectrometer (BESIII) collaboration, which includes scientists from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, previously announced the discovery of a mysterious four-quark particle called Zc(3900) in April 2013.

A new device capable of pumping human waste into the "engine room" of a self-sustaining robot has been created by a group of researchers from Bristol.

Modelled on the human heart, the artificial device incorporates smart materials called shape memory alloys and could be used to deliver human urine to future generations of EcoBot – a robot that can function completely on its own by collecting waste and converting it into electricity.

For nearly 20 years, Professor Eric Fortune has studied glass knifefish, a species of three-inch long electric fish that lives in the Amazon Basin. In his laboratory he tries to understand how their tiny brains control complex electrical behaviors. But he could not help but be intrigued by the special "ribbon fin" that knifefish use to swim back and forth. The fin oscillates at both ends, allowing the fish to move forward or backward. Biologists have long wondered why an animal would produce seemingly wasteful forces that directly oppose each other while not aiding its movement.

DURHAM, N.C. -- Using inexpensive materials configured and tuned to capture microwave signals, researchers at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering have designed a power-harvesting device with efficiency similar to that of modern solar panels.

The device wirelessly converts the microwave signal to direct current voltage capable of recharging a cell phone battery or other small electronic device, according to a report appearing in the journal Applied Physics Letters in December 2013. (It is now available online.)

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists have developed a new password system that incorporates inkblots to provide an extra measure of protection when, as so often occurs, lists of passwords get stolen from websites.

This new type of password, dubbed a GOTCHA (Generating panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart), would be suitable for protecting high-value accounts, such as bank accounts, medical records and other sensitive information.

The University of Oklahoma Natural Products Discovery Group has taken an unconventional approach to finding new compounds with therapeutic relevance by launching a crowdsourcing initiative with citizen scientists from around the country. With this approach, OU researchers team with the public to sample soils from all across the United States for the purpose of identifying new microorganisms that produce drug-like compounds.

Philadelphia, PA, November 7, 2013 – More people are cooking at home, and more people are finding their recipes online via food blogs. The photos of dishes posted on the blogs, however, may attract potential cooks more than the nutritional value of the recipes. In addition, many food companies sponsor these sites, so the recipes become advertisements for their products. This has the potential to change the healthfulness of the recipes.

Floods didn't make floodplains fertile during the dawn of human agriculture in the Earth's far north because the waters were virtually devoid of nitrogen, unlike other areas of the globe scientists have studied.

Instead, the hardy Norsemen and early inhabitants of Russia and Canada have microorganisms called cyanobacteria to mostly thank for abundant grasses that attracted game to hunt and then provided fodder once cattle were domesticated. The process is still underway in the region's pristine floodplains.

This news release is available in German.

Researchers from Georgia Tech, the University of Tokyo and Microsoft Research have developed a novel method to rapidly and cheaply make electrical circuits by printing them with commodity inkjet printers and off-the-shelf materials. For about $300 in equipment costs, anyone can produce working electrical circuits in the 60 seconds it takes to print them.

The technique, called instant inkjet circuits, allows the printing of arbitrary-shaped conductors onto rigid or flexible materials and could advance the prototyping skills of non-technical enthusiasts and novice hackers.

LIVERMORE, Calif. – Researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich have developed a new method of using nanotubes to detect molecules at extremely low concentrations enabling trace detection of biological threats, explosives and drugs.

The joint research team, led by LLNL Engineer Tiziana Bond and ETH Scientist Hyung Gyu Park, are using spaghetti-like, gold-hafnium-coated carbon nanotubes (CNT) to amplify the detection capabilities in surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS).

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- An MIT mathematician and a celebrity chef have combined talents to create two culinary novelties inspired by nature.

John Bush, a professor of applied mathematics, and renowned Spanish chef José Andrés have designed a cocktail accessory and a palate cleanser based on the mechanics of water bugs and water lilies, respectively.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — With some fierce pitching on display, this year's World Series featured its share of shattered wood bats. That's a problem many youth baseball players avoid by using metal or composite carbon fiber bats. But ever since those bats entered the game, people have debated whether and when non-wood bats make the ball fly faster. That's because non-wood bats transfer energy to the ball better, a phenomenon called the "trampoline effect."

Playing pop and rock music improves the performance of solar cells, according to new research from scientists at Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College London.

The high frequencies and pitch found in pop and rock music cause vibrations that enhanced energy generation in solar cells containing a cluster of 'nanorods', leading to a 40 per cent increase in efficiency of the solar cells.

The study has implications for improving energy generation from sunlight, particularly for the development of new, lower cost, printed solar cells.

The remarkable mechanism by which the tiny ears of locusts can hear and distinguish between different tones has been discovered by researchers from the University of Bristol.

Understanding how the nanoscale features of the insect eardrum mechanically process sound could open up practical possibilities for the fabrication of embedded signal processing in extremely small microphones.