Tech

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory Materials Testing Facility demonstrated, Oct.31, the one-thousandth successful firing of its Electromagnetic Railgun, reaching a materials testing milestone in the weapon's technological development and future implementation aboard U.S. Navy warships.

Paul Blom and Ton van Mol from the Holst Centre in Eindhoven have a way of creating thin, flexible sheets of organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) using a cheap, newspaper-style "roll-to-roll" printing process.

These bendable materials could oust the conventional light bulb and revolutionize the way we illuminate our surroundings, being used for everything from lighting tiles and strips in homes and offices to windows that can simulate sunrise and sunset.

Having radiologists shut down their workstations (and monitors) after an eight hour shift leads to substantial cost savings and energy reduction, according to a study in the November issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology.

Radiology is at the forefront of technology use in medicine with the use of computers and scanning equipment.

Researchers have developed a tank-like robot that has the ability to scale smooth walls, opening up a series of applications ranging from inspecting pipes, buildings, aircraft and nuclear power plants to deployment in search and rescue operations.

Their study, published today, 1 November, in IOP Publishing's journal Smart Materials and Structures, is the first to apply this unique, bioinspired material to a robot that operates in a tank-like manner.

Boys do better on tests of technical aptitude (for example, mechanical aptitude tests) than girls. The same is true for adults. A new study published in Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, describes a theory explaining how the difference comes about: the root cause is that boys are just more interested in technical things, like taking apart a bike, than girls are.

Moore's Law, hardly a law but undeniably a persistent trend, says that every year and a half the number of transistors that fit on a chip roughly doubles. It's why electronics – from smart phones to flat screens, from MP4 players to movie cameras, from tablets to supercomputers – grow ever more varied, powerful, and compact, but also ever less expensive.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 31—Misshapen red blood cells (RBCs) are a sign of serious illnesses, such as malaria and sickle cell anemia. Until recently, the only way to assess whether a person's RBCs were the correct shape was to look at them individually under a microscope – a time-consuming process for pathologists. Now researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have pioneered a technique that will allow doctors to ascertain the healthy shape of red blood cells in just a few seconds, by analyzing the light scattered off hundreds of cells at a time.

For those who live or work in cities, parking is a major source of stress and frustration. Researchers estimate that for every 110 vehicles circulating on the roads looking for spaces, there are 100 available spots, both in lots and on the street.

PITTSBURGH—Internet users who want to protect their privacy by stopping advertisers and other companies from tracking their online behavior will have great difficulty doing so with commonly available "opt-out" tools, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University report.

User testing found that privacy options in popular browsers, as well as online tools or plug-ins for blocking access by certain websites or otherwise opting out of tracking, were hard for the typical user to understand or to configure successfully.

A milestone in the description of complex processes - for example the ups and downs of share prices - has been reached by mathematicians at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Researchers led by Prof. Dr. Holger Dette (stochastics) have developed a new method in spectral analysis, which allows a classical mathematical model assumption, so-called stationarity, to be precisely measured and determined for the first time. The approach also makes it possible to construct statistical tests that are considerably better and more accurate than previous methods.

Tests at a school beside an informal electronic waste salvage site in Ghana's capital Accra reveal contamination due to lead, cadmium and other health-threatening pollutants over 50 times higher than risk-free levels.

A produce market, a church headquarters and a soccer field are likewise polluted to varying degrees, all neighbours of the Agbogbloshie scrap metal site, where electronic trash is scavenged for valuable metals - especially copper. Schoolchildren as young as six work around bonfires of circuitry, plastic and other leftover high-tech trash.

Across-wind loads and effects have become increasingly important factors in the structural design of super-tall buildings and structures with increasing height. Although researchers have investigated the problem for over 30 years now, the research achievements of across-wind loads and effects and the computation methods of equivalent static wind loads are still not satisfactory. Professor GU Ming and his group from the State Key Laboratory of Disaster Reduction in Civil Engineering set out to tackle this problem.

The human genome has been decoded. Of all the puzzles it contains, though, many remain unsolved. We know that the genome provides the blueprint for various proteins, the building blocks of each and every cell. But what role do they play? Which proteins control cell division in a healthy body, for instance? And what takes place in tumor tissue in which cells incessantly subdivide and control over proteins gets out of hand?

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a prototype wireless sensor capable of detecting trace amounts of a key ingredient found in many explosives.

The device, which employs carbon nanotubes and is printed on paper or paper-like material using standard inkjet technology, could be deployed in large numbers to alert authorities to the presence of explosives, such as improvised explosive devices (IEDs).

Managing light to carry computer data, such as text, audio and video, is possible today with laser light beams that are guided along a fibre-optic cable. These waves consist of countless billions of photons, which carry information down the fibre across continents.

A research team at the University of Alberta wants to refine the optical transmission of information by using a single photon, the fundamental building block of light that can allow unprecedented applications in optical information transfer.