Tech

WASHINGTON --Research into digital holography (DH), the process of electronically recording and numerically reconstructing an optical field, has made tremendous strides in recent years.

At the advent of the Internet thirty years ago, the brand new Domain Name System (DNS) (which translated website names like science.com into a network address like 1.2.3.4) was trusted by everyone. Today, hackers take advantage of our long-standing trust in DNS and work to trick the system by stealing information and redirecting data every day.

In fire experiments conducted in uniformly furnished, but vacant Chicago-area townhouses, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers uncovered temperature and heat-flow conditions that can seriously damage facepiece lenses on standard firefighter breathing equipment, a potential contributing factor for first-responder fatalities and injuries.

Researchers have found the first evidence that some athletes who take part in extreme endurance exercise such as marathons, endurance triathlons, alpine cycling or ultra triathlons may incur damage to the right ventricles of their hearts – one of the four chambers in the heart involved in pumping blood around the body.

Up to three quarters of elderly people in parts of India have vitamin C deficiency, a study by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine found.Vitamin C is an essential nutrient for human health, playing a role from maintenance and repair of tissues to antioxidant activities. This study is the first ever large screening of vitamin C blood levels in the older Indian population.

Power -- defined as the ability to influence others -- makes people think differently. For North Americans, a feeling of power leads to thinking in a focused and analytical way, which may be beneficial when pursuing personal goals.

WEST LAFAYETTE, IN - Researchers from Purdue and Harvard universities have created a new type of transistor made from a material that could replace silicon and have a 3-D structure instead of conventional flat computer chips.

The approach could enable engineers to build faster, more compact and efficient integrated circuits and lighter laptops that generate less heat than today's. The transistors contain tiny nanowires made not of silicon, like conventional transistors, but from a material called indium-gallium-arsenide.

Researchers from various Belgian (UCL-Louvain, ULB-Brussels, HUB-Brussels, KULeuven, U. Antwerp) and American universities (New School, Harvard) have conducted research and reflections that give insights into the political crisis in Belgium, which has now been resolved, nearly 18 months after the general elections in June 2010. Their focus was on the way memories of past events affect current political and inter-group relations.

PITTSBURGH -- Computers can mimic the human ability to find visually similar images, such as photographs of a fountain in summer and in winter, or a photograph and a painting of the same cathedral, by using a technique that analyzes the uniqueness of images, say researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.

Brussels, 6 December – Scientists at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) have identified a shortlist of denaturants that could be used to harmonise denaturing practices at EU level and reduce fraud and tax evasion of alcoholic beverages. The proposed denaturants could potentially replace over 100 different substances currently used in Member States to denature alcohol.

Young women may reduce their risk of developing cardiovascular disease simply by eating more fish rich in omega-3 fatty acids, researchers reported in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.

In the first population-based study in women of childbearing age, those who rarely or never ate fish had 50 percent more cardiovascular problems over eight years than those who ate fish regularly.

Compared to women who ate fish high in omega-3 weekly, the risk was 90 percent higher for those who rarely or never ate fish.

CHICAGO – The prevalence of conduct disorder (CD) appears to have increased substantially across generations of the Mexican-origin population after migration to the United States, however this increase was observed more for nonaggressive than aggressive symptoms of CD, according to a report in the December issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

The whitefly in Texas may be sending up a surrender flag to tomato processors in the state thanks to a Texas AgriLife Research scientist developing a new variety that resists the virus spread by this pesky insect.

A 10-year battle against the insect all but wiped out the tomato industry in Texas, but the new tomato already is encouraging small processors to stay in business, according to Dr. Kevin Crosby, AgriLife Research vegetable breeder.

Individual molecules have been used to create electrical components like resistors, transistors and diodes, that mimic the properties of familiar semiconductors. But according to Nongjian (NJ) Tao, a researcher at the Biodesign Institute® at Arizona State University, unique properties inherent in single molecules may also allow clever designers to produce novel devices whose behavior falls outside the performance observed in conventional electronics.