CHAMPAIGN, Ill.-- Smaller and faster has been the trend for electronic devices since the inception of the computer chip, but flat transistors have gotten about as small as physically possible. For researchers pushing for even faster speeds and higher performance, the only way to go is up.
Tech
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - What's good for crops is not always good for the environment. Nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants, can cause problems when it leaches into water supplies. University of Illinois engineers developed a model to calculate the age of nitrogen in corn and soybean fields, which could lead to improved fertilizer application techniques to promote crop growth while reducing leaching.
Civil and environmental engineering professor Praveen Kumar and graduate student Dong Kook Woo published their work in the journal Water Resources Research.
WASHINGTON, D.C., July 26, 2016 -- Researchers have nearly doubled the continuous output power of a type of laser, called a terahertz quantum cascade laser, with potential applications in medical imaging, airport security and more. Increasing the continuous output power of these lasers is an important step toward increasing the range of practical applications. The researchers report their results in the journal AIP Advances, from AIP Publishing.
Our desire for indulgent meals may be over 500 years old. A new analysis of European paintings shows that meat and bread were among the most commonly depicted foods in paintings of meals from the 16th century.
"Crazy meals involving less-than-healthy foods aren't a modern craving," explains lead author Brian Wansink, PhD, Director of the Cornell Food and Brand Lab and author of Slim by Design. "Paintings from what's sometimes called the Renaissance Period were loaded with the foods modern diets warn us about - salt, sausages, bread and more bread."
Solar cells have been manufactured already for a long from inexpensive materials with different printing techniques. Especially organic solar cells and dye-sensitized solar cells are suitable for printing.
-We wanted to take the idea of printed solar cells even further, and see if their materials could be inkjet-printed as pictures and text like traditional printing inks, tells University Lecturer Janne Halme.
WASHINGTON - To improve and ensure the efficacy of restoration efforts in the Gulf of Mexico following Deepwater Horizon - the largest oil spill in U.S. history - a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine recommends a set of best practices for monitoring and evaluating ecological restoration activities.
With a growing number of people connecting to the Internet everyday, Internet cables are under the threat of a "bandwidth explosion."
Free-space optical (FSO) communication is a promising candidate to lighten the load. FSO uses visible or infrared light to wirelessly transmit data through open air as opposed to using cables, which have limited bandwidth. The new technology provides a low-cost and low-power alternative to traditional radio-frequency wireless data links.
WASHINGTON -- The primary source of infrared radiation is heat -- the radiation produced by the thermal motion of charged particles in matter, including the motion of the atoms and molecules in an object. The higher the temperature of an object, the more its atoms and molecules vibrate, rotate, twist through their vibrational modes, the more infrared radiation they radiate. Because infrared detectors can be "blinded" by their own heat, high-quality infrared sensing and imaging devices are usually cooled down, sometimes to just a few degrees above absolute zero.
Graphene oxide has been hailed as a veritable wonder material; when incorporated into nanocellulose foam, the lab-created substance is light, strong and flexible, conducting heat and electricity quickly and efficiently.
Now, a team of engineers at Washington University in St. Louis has found a way to use graphene oxide sheets to transform dirty water into drinking water, and it could be a global game-changer.
Engineers from the University of Utah and the University of Minnesota have discovered that interfacing two particular oxide-based materials makes them highly conductive, a boon for future electronics that could result in much more power-efficient laptops, electric cars and home appliances that also don't need cumbersome power supplies.
Their findings were published this month in the scientific journal, APL Materials, from the American Institute of Physics.
James Cook University researchers have shown a way to potentially halve the amount of fertiliser dairy farmers use while maintaining pasture yields, providing improved protection for the Great Barrier Reef.
JCU's Dr Paul Nelson said nitrogen from fertiliser spread on fields can have significant environmental effects on creeks and coastal waters.
"Ensuring plants have sufficient nitrogen is important for profitable farming, but it must be balanced with the potential for losses to the environment.
HOUSTON - (July 25, 2016) - The old rules don't necessarily apply when building electronic components out of two-dimensional materials, according to scientists at Rice University.
The Rice lab of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson analyzed hybrids that put 2-D materials like graphene and boron nitride side by side to see what happens at the border. They found that the electronic characteristics of such "co-planar" hybrids differ from bulkier components.
Their results appear this month in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.
HOUSTON - (July 25, 2016) - New discoveries about spider silk could inspire novel materials to manipulate sound and heat in the same way semiconducting circuits manipulate electrons, according to scientists at Rice University, in Europe and in Singapore.
A paper in Nature Materials today looks at the microscopic structure of spider silk and reveals unique characteristics in the way it transmits phonons, quasiparticles of sound.
In 2014, an international trio won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing super-resolution fluorescence microscopy, a technique that made it possible to study molecular processes in living cells.
Now a Northwestern Engineering team has improved this groundbreaking technology by making it faster, simpler, less expensive, and increasing its resolution by four fold.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass -- Lithium-air batteries are considered highly promising technologies for electric cars and portable electronic devices because of their potential for delivering a high energy output in proportion to their weight. But such batteries have some pretty serious drawbacks: They waste much of the injected energy as heat and degrade relatively quickly. They also require expensive extra components to pump oxygen gas in and out, in an open-cell configuration that is very different from conventional sealed batteries.