Tech

With the United States' legislating out low-cost incandescent light bulbs in a few months, an article in Chemical & Engineering News says the ban on 100-watt bulbs may lead to a new wave of growth for the lowly light-emitting diode (LED), which hasn't taken off because they are overpriced and not very good.

For the first time, a handful of curious bystanders had the opportunity to see TU Muenchen's new electric vehicle in test runs. But the final design of MUTE remained shrouded; it will first be revealed at the IAA in Frankfurt (15 – 25 September 2011, hall 4, C 23). The MUTE prototype is built so that it has the same driving dynamics as the final vehicle.

We've been stuck in a quagmire on individual wind turbine efficiency, meaning wind energy is now a mature technology that is not really a viable mass solution for replacing fossil fuels. But California Institute of Technology researchers have revisited some of the fundamental assumptions that guided the wind industry for the past 30 years, and now believe that a new approach to wind farm design, one that places wind turbines close together instead of farther apart, may provide significant efficiency gains.

A new University of Alberta study says when it comes to goal setting, your unconscious mind can be a great motivator.

Alberta School of Business researcher Sarah Moore and colleagues from Duke and Cornell universities say that unconscious feelings about objects in the environment influence the pursuit of long-term goals. Their study explores how the unconscious mind responds to objects in relation to an individual's goals—and how the unconscious continues to influence feelings about these objects once the goals are reached—whether or not the outcome has been successful.

CORVALLIS, Ore. -- Zoologists at Oregon State University have discovered that a freshwater species of zooplankton will eat a fungal pathogen which is devastating amphibian populations around the world.

This tiny zooplankton, called Daphnia magna, could provide a desperately needed tool for biological control of this deadly fungus, the scientists said, if field studies confirm its efficacy in a natural setting.

A caesium fountain clock that keeps the United Kingdom's atomic time is now the most accurate long-term timekeeper in the world, according to a new evaluation in the October 2011 issue of Metrologia by a team of physicists at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the United Kingdom and Penn State University in the United States.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health have created a mathematical model – and an accompanying online weight simulation tool – of what happens when people of varying weights, diets and exercise habits try to change their weight. The findings challenge the commonly held belief that eating 3,500 fewer calories – or burning them off exercising – will always result in a pound of weight loss.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois researchers are giving a light answer to the heavy question of cell growth.

Led by electrical and computer engineering professor Gabriel Popescu, the research team developed a new imaging method called spatial light interference microscopy (SLIM) that can measure cell mass using two beams of light. Described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the SLIM technique offers new insight into the much-debated problem of whether cells grow at a constant rate or exponentially.

Physicists with the Institute of Ultrafast Spectroscopy and Lasers (IUSL) at The City College of New York have presented a new way to map spiraling light that could help harness untapped data channels in optical fibers. Increased bandwidth would ease the burden on fiber-optic telecommunications networks taxed by an ever-growing demand for audio, video and digital media. The new model, developed by graduate student Giovanni Milione, Professor Robert Alfano and colleagues, could even spur enhancements in quantum computing and other applications.

A new, comprehensive study by an international team of scientists, including scientists at Boston University in the US and the Universities of Viçosa and Campinas in Brazil, has been published in the current issue of Science (August 26, 2011) refuting earlier alarmist claims that drought has induced a decline in global plant productivity during the past decade and posed a threat to global food security.

The expression "beauty's only skin-deep" has often been applied to the chemistry of materials because so much action takes place at the surface. However, for many of the materials in today's high technologies, such as semiconductors and superconductors, once a device is fabricated it is the electronic structures below the surface, in the bulk of the material or in buried layers, that determine its effectiveness. For the past 30 years, one of the most valuable and widely used techniques for studying electronic structures has been ARPES – Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy.

Oil well control is one of the most important processes during drilling operations. In deepwater drilling, controlling pressure in the oil well is crucial, as excessive pressures in the drilled hole can result in blowouts, leading to disastrous events like the 2010 Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill.

Here's one way that old-fashioned newsprint beats the Internet. Tulane University scientists have discovered a novel bacterial strain, dubbed "TU-103," that can use paper to produce butanol, a biofuel that can serve as a substitute for gasoline. They are currently experimenting with old editions of the Times Picayune, New Orleans' venerable daily newspaper, with great success.

TU-103 is the first bacterial strain from nature that produces 
butanol directly from cellulose, an organic compound.

Reducing the risks of catching E. coli O157 in the countryside is everyone's problem. That means we should all take responsibility - individual residents and visitors, as well as farmers and government - according to researchers working on the Research Councils UK Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU).

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Aug. 25, 2011- In a long-running randomized study of over 3,000 preterm infants, those whose care included the Heart Rate Observation System, or HeRO® monitor, experienced greater than 20 percent reduced mortality, effectively saving one infant's life for every 48 who were monitored. The results of this multicenter study of the HeRO monitor, co-sponsored by the National Institutes of Health and Medical Predictive Science Corporation (MPSC), appear in The Journal of Pediatrics.