Tech

HOUSTON – (June 28, 2012) – Researchers at Rice University have developed a lithium-ion battery that can be painted on virtually any surface.

The rechargeable battery created in the lab of Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan consists of spray-painted layers, each representing the components in a traditional battery. The research appears today in Nature's online, open-access journal Scientific Reports.

Research carried out at the University of Southampton has concluded that participants in drug trials should be better informed about the potential significant benefits and possible side-effects of placebos.

Placebos are traditionally thought of as 'inert' pills, given in trials to act as a yardstick or constant by which to measure the effects of new 'active' drugs, known in clinical trials as the 'target treatment'. However, placebos themselves have been shown to create substantial health changes in patients.

VERNON – Operating on the thought that, if it is not feasible, it's not going to be done, a group of Texas AgriLife Research scientists is studying the costs of getting potential bioenergy sources such as mesquite to the processed stage.

AgriLife Research scientists from the Texas AgriLife Research and Extension Service center at Vernon, Dr. Seong Park, economist; Dr. Jim Ansley, range ecologist; Dr. Mustafa Mirik, associate research scientist; and Marc Maindrault, a visiting forestry student intern from France, have completed a study on costs of delivered biomass.

COLLEGE STATION – When Atlantic Richfield Co. was tasked with cleaning up a major superfund site it had purchased in Montana, Dr. Frank Hons, a Texas A&M University professor, got a call to assist the company's consultants, Pioneer Technical Services.

Hons, a soil and crop science professor, spent two years leading a Texas A&M team studying revegetation solutions on land impacted by 100 years of copper mining, mineral processing and smelting in the Anaconda, Mont. area.

The University of Southampton has developed a new hearing screening test which could help the estimated 100 million people suffering from hearing loss in China.

This new Chinese version is based on a hearing screening test developed by the University's Institute of Sound and Vibration Research (ISVR), which has already been taken by more than a million people across Europe.

WASHINGTON, June 27, 2012 — The latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS') award-winning Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions podcast series describes the first-of-its-kind "pyroelectric nanogenerator," a new device designed to harvest the enormous amounts of energy wasted as heat every year to produce electricity.

During natural or man-made disasters, the U.S. armed forces' rapidly deployable airlift, sealift, communication, and medical evacuation and care capabilities can supplement lead relief agencies in providing aid to victims. The Department of Defense's 2012 strategic guidance document includes humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations as one of the missions for 21st Century defense.

The energy generated from our oceans could be doubled using new methods for predicting wave power. Research led by the University of Exeter, published (27 June) in the journal Renewable Energy, could pave the way for significant advancements in marine renewable energy, making it a more viable source of power.

Modern research tools like supercomputers, particle colliders, and telescopes are generating so much data, so quickly, many scientists fear that soon they will not be able to keep up with the deluge.

"These instruments are capable of answering some of our most fundamental scientific questions, but it is all for nothing if we can't get a handle on the data and make sense of it," says Surendra Byna of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (Berkeley Lab's) Scientific Data Management Group.

Stanford University scientists have breathed new life into the nickel-iron battery, a rechargeable technology developed by Thomas Edison more than a century ago.

Designed in the early 1900s to power electric vehicles, the Edison battery largely went out of favor in the mid-1970s. Today only a handful of companies manufacture nickel-iron batteries, primarily to store surplus electricity from solar panels and wind turbines.

June 26, 2012 – The promise of ultrafast quantum computing has moved a step closer to reality with a technique to create rewritable computer chips using a beam of light. Researchers from The City College of New York (CCNY) and the University of California Berkeley (UCB) used light to control the spin of an atom's nucleus in order to encode information.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Cooling systems that use a liquid that changes phase — such as water boiling on a surface — can play an important part in many developing technologies, including advanced microchips and concentrated solar-power systems. But understanding exactly how such systems work, and what kinds of surfaces maximize the transfer of heat, has remained a challenging problem.

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have invented a new toilet system that will turn human waste into electricity and fertilisers and also reduce the amount of water needed for flushing by up to 90 per cent compared to current toilet systems in Singapore.

Dubbed the No-Mix Vacuum Toilet, it has two chambers that separate the liquid and solid wastes. Using vacuum suction technology, such as those used in aircraft lavatories, flushing liquids would now take only 0.2 litres of water while flushing solids require just one litre.

For companies in Germany, web accessibility has never been a compelling issue until now – this was also confirmed by a series of tests conducted in 2011 by the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin. The scientists at the Web Compliance Center used their analysis tools to test the "web compliance" – or adherence to international web standards – among the Internet sites of German companies listed on the DAX. The outcome: 90 percent of the websites exhibited substantial flaws.

A team of UCLA researchers has created the most powerful high-performance nanoscale microwave oscillators in the world, a development that could lead to cheaper, more energy-efficient mobile communication devices that deliver much better signal quality.