For campers, nothing beats sleeping in a tent in the great outdoors. But scientists are finding out the air inside tents might not be as fresh as people think. A study appearing in Environmental Science & Technology has found that flame retardants used in the manufacturing of tents are released in the air within this enclosed space, which could lead to campers breathing them in.
Tech
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new study by a University of Illinois employment law expert determined that the First Amendment often fails to protect the most controversial ideas expressed by faculty in higher education.
When academics choose to litigate speech disputes with colleges and universities, they end up losing nearly three-quarters of the time - a finding that points to the growing tension between academic freedom and campus speech codes, said Michael LeRoy, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois and author of the paper.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have engineered a strain of bacteria that enables a "one-pot" method for producing advanced biofuels from a slurry of pre-treated plant material.
Materials researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new technique to deposit diamond on the surface of cubic boron nitride (c-BN), integrating the two materials into a single crystalline structure.
"This could be used to create high-power devices, such as the solid state transformers needed to create the next generation 'smart' power grid," says Jay Narayan, the John C. Fan Distinguished Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at NC State and lead author of a paper describing the research.
WASHINGTON, D.C., May 9, 2016 - More, faster, better, cheaper. These are the demands of our device-happy and data-centered world. Meeting these demands requires technologies for processing and storing information. Now, a significant obstacle to the development of next-generation device technologies appears to have been overcome, according to researchers from the University of Tokyo (Japan), Tokyo Institute of Technology (Japan) and Ho Chi Minh University of Pedagogy (Vietnam).
Microbiologists at The University of Texas at Austin and their colleagues have cracked the genetic code of how bacteria broke down oil to help clean up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, revealing that some bacteria have far greater potential for consuming oil than was previously known. The findings, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, have applications for responding to future oil spills and other ecological disasters, while shedding light on the ways in which tiny microbes played an outsized role in limiting damage from the 2010 spill caused by the explosion of a BP oil rig.
UPTON, NY--From cell phones to laptops and tablets, lithium-ion batteries power most of today's portable electronics. Understanding how these batteries store and release energy as they charge and discharge is critical to improving their performance and increasing their longevity, especially for high-power applications such as electric vehicles and smart power grids.
A team led by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) has developed a method to enhance the photoluminescence efficiency of tungsten diselenide, a two-dimensional semiconductor, paving the way for the application of such semiconductors in advanced optoelectronic and photonic devices.
Engineering researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a suite of techniques that allow them to create passive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that are 25 percent smaller - and therefore less expensive. This is possible because the tags no longer need to convert alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC) in order for the tags to function effectively.
Rice University photonics researchers have unveiled a new nanoparticle amplifier that can generate infrared light and boost the output of one light by capturing and converting energy from a second light.
New research that discusses how people will interact with technology in the future will be presented this week at one of the world's most important conferences on human-computer interfaces, ACM CHI 2016, in San Jose, USA [7-12 May].
With the move from burning coal to natural gas and low-sulfur coal and an increase in the use of scrubbers, only about 25 percent as much atmospheric sulfur is available today, compared to 40 years ago.
Sulfur balances in agricultural fields are now negative, with more removed each year in crop harvests and leaching than is added from fertilizers and deposition.
Fields with tile drainage move sulfate quickly to surface waters, contributing to the low levels in the soil.
ALMERIA, SPAIN - In horticultural operations, light-emitting diode (LED) lamps are becoming recognized as an important advance in artificial lighting. Among other benefits, LED lighting systems can offer durability, long operating lifetimes, and high energy efficiency. Researchers published a study in the March 2016 issue of HortScience that shows that continuous spectrum LEDs made specifically for horticultural can be superior to conventional white LEDs in terms of plant response and energy efficiency.
Using tags surgically implanted into thousands of juvenile salmon, UBC researchers have discovered that many fish die within the first few days of migration from their birthplace to the ocean.
"We knew that on average 10 to 40 million smolts leave Chilko Lake every year and only about 1.5 million return as adults two years later," said Nathan Furey, researcher and a PhD candidate in the faculty of forestry. "It's always been a mystery about what happens in between."
Doctors working hundreds of miles away from the nearest hospital could soon have a way to quickly detect Zika virus in blood or saliva samples for less than a dollar per patient. In a proof-of-concept demonstration published May 6 in Cell, Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering researchers at Harvard University show how a new Zika diagnostic, which can be freeze-dried and stored for up to a year, successfully detects the virus in the serum of infected macaques.