Tech

FORT PIERCE, FL - Aroma, which is produced by a complex mixture of volatile compounds, plays an important role in consumers' perceptions of fresh fruits and vegetables. For example, studies have shown that the familiar aroma of fresh tomatoes has diminished during the last 50 years - and less fresh tomato aroma is leading to more consumer complaints.

In electronics, nothing works without transistors: they are the fundamental building blocks on which the logic circuits in our computer chips are based. They usually consist of silicon crystals, doped with other types of atom. One Swiss/Austrian research team (TU Wien, the University of Vienna, the University of Zurich, IBM Zurich) has now succeeded in developing a transistor that functions in a fundamentally different manner and consists solely of a single molecule. Instead of three electrodes, as in a conventional transistor, this switch molecule only requires two.

"Finance ministers are facing strong demand for public investments in education, security or transport - pricing CO2 turns out to be a suitable means of raising the revenues that are needed," says Max Franks from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), lead-author of the study. "Finance ministers can put money into infrastructure that substantially and lastingly improves public welfare. This is something you can count in Dollars. And along the way they save the climate, since pricing CO2 yields a strong incentive to reduce emissions.

Almost 50 per cent of child injures requiring treatment in emergency departments are linked to consumer products, but a lack of detailed hospital records is restricting child safety experts from identifying if a product fault or misuse is the cause, a QUT study has found.

Dr Jesani Catchpoole, from QUT's Centre for Accident Research & Road Safety - Queensland (CARRS-Q), is presenting her research at the 12th Australasian Injury Prevention and Safety Promotion Conference being held in Sydney from Nov. 25-27.

As countries around the world shift toward greater use of non-fossil fuels, the wide range of methods used to set targets for remaining fossil fuel emissions and to measure results and progress is highly disparate and needs to be standardized, authors of this Policy Forum emphasize. Standardization is increasingly important as the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) begins on 30 November, where world leaders will convene in Paris and once again discuss their countries' long-term energy targets.

In the production of power, nearly two-thirds of energy input from fossil fuels is lost as waste heat. Industry is hungry for materials that can convert this heat to useful electricity, but a good thermoelectric material is hard to find.

A solar cell is basically a semiconductor, which converts sunlight into electricity, sandwiched between metal contacts that carry the electrical current.

But this widely used design has a flaw: The shiny metal on top of the cell actually reflects sunlight away from the semiconductor where electricity is produced, reducing the cell's efficiency.