Tech

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30, 2011 — The latest episode in the American Chemical Society's (ACS) award-winning "Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions" podcast series features a new solar cell with high efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity and the durability to last and last.

New research from North Carolina State University shows that some smartphones specifically designed to support the Android mobile platform have incorporated additional features that can be used by hackers to bypass Android's security features, making them more vulnerable to attack. Android has the largest share of the smartphone market in the U.S.

PHILADELPHIA -- Solving the mystery of prematurely dead cell phone and laptop batteries may prove to be a vital step toward creating a sustainable energy grid according to Drexel researcher Dr. Yury Gogotsi. In a piece published in the November 18 edition of Science, Gogotsi, who is the head of the A.J. Drexel Nanotechnology Institute, calls for a new, standardized gauge of performance measurement for energy storage devices that are as small as those used in cell phones to as large as those used in the national energy grid.

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Existing coherent ultraviolet light sources are power hungry, bulky and expensive. University of Michigan researchers have found a better way to build compact ultraviolet sources with low power consumption that could improve information storage, microscopy and chemical analysis.

UI engineers conduct residential soils study, one of few such U.S. studies ever done

University of Iowa engineers have published their findings from a study of residential soils in the city of Cedar Rapids, making it one of only a few such U.S. urban soil studies ever conducted.

ARLINGTON, Va. -- A weapon prototype developed by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) successfully hit two high-speed boat targets during recent testing in Point Mugu, Calif.

"It's a fire-and-forget weapon," said Ken Heeke, the ONR program officer for the Low-Cost Imaging Terminal Seeker (LCITS). "No longer do you have to continue to monitor the target after you've fired the weapon. You can move on to the next threat with the assurance that the rocket will hit the target."

CORVALLIS, Ore. – A new study by economists at Oregon State University questions the cost-effectiveness of biofuels and says they would barely reduce fossil fuel use and would likely increase greenhouse gas emissions.

The idea that biofuels can reduce dependency on fossil fuels and mitigate climate change has led governments to promote them as substitutes for gasoline and petroleum-based diesel, using mandates and subsidies, said Bill Jaeger, the lead author on the study.

A milestone has been reached on the road to developing advanced biofuels that can replace gasoline, diesel and jet fuels with a domestically-produced clean, green, renewable alternative.

Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have engineered the first strains of Escherichia coli bacteria that can digest switchgrass biomass and synthesize its sugars into all three of those transportation fuels. What's more, the microbes are able to do this without any help from enzyme additives.

For Immediate Release – November 29, 2011 – (Toronto) – Fewer Ontario teens are smoking cigarettes than ever before -- good news that is tempered by continuing concerns around binge drinking, and driving while under the influence of cannabis, according to the 2011 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey released today by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). The survey, which included 9,288 students across Ontario in grades 7 to 12, is the longest running student survey in Canada.

One of the first tasks for Warwick's new £1.3 million super computer is to use its monster megabytes to analyse the natural properties of the tiny mollusc shell.

The humble mollusc shell is made up of only one mineral: calcium carbonate, yet the combination of that plus other enzymes and proteins give it remarkable properties in terms of strength while remaining incredibly light.

Although they found that graphene makes very good chemical sensors, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have discovered an unexpected "twist"—that the sensors are better when the graphene is "worse"—more imperfections improved performance.

"This is quite the opposite of what you would want for transistors, for example," explained Eric Pop, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and a member of the interdisciplinary research team. "Finding that the less perfect they were, the better they worked, was counter intuitive at first."

CHICAGO – Newly developed computer software combined with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of a fetus may help physicians better assess a woman's potential for a difficult childbirth. Results of a study using the new software were presented today at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA).

CORVALLIS, Ore. – Pyrite, better known as "fool's gold," was familiar to the ancient Romans and has fooled prospectors for centuries – but has now helped researchers at Oregon State University discover related compounds that offer new, cheap and promising options for solar energy.

These new compounds, unlike some solar cell materials made from rare, expensive or toxic elements, would be benign and could be processed from some of the most abundant elements on Earth. Findings on them have been published in Advanced Energy Materials, a professional journal.

Zanzibar, Tanzania – Researchers at Aalto University in Finland have designed a network proxy that can cut the power consumption of 3G smart phones up to 74 percent. This device enhances performance and significantly reduces power usage by serving as a middleman for mobile devices to connect to the Internet and handling the majority of the data transfer for the smart phone. Historically, the high energy requirements of mobile phones have slowed the adoption of mobile Internet services in developing countries.

How to improve the performance of the plasma actuators is a problem that is of great interest to many scientific researchers in the field of electrohydrodynamics. Professor WANG Lianze and his group from the School of Aerospace, Tsinghua University, set out to investigate this problem. They developed novel plasma actuators using various winding-shaped electrodes to create plasma actuators which induce three-dimensional variations in the shear layer, offering significant flexibility in flow control.