URBANA, Ill. – Because of its aggressive behavior and its harmful effects, the invasive prairie plant Lespedeza cuneata has been added to several noxious weed lists.
Research at the University of Illinois on how soil bacteria interact with the plants' roots to form nodules that fix nitrogen demonstrated that the invasive variety had superior performance when pitted against the native plant variety Lespedeza virginica.
UPTON, NY - Increasing the oil content of plant biomass could help fulfill the nation's increasing demand for renewable energy feedstocks. But many of the details of how plant leaves make and break down oils have remained a mystery. Now a series of detailed genetic studies conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory and published in The Plant Cell reveals previously unknown biochemical details about those metabolic pathways-including new ways to increase the accumulation of oil in leaves, an abundant source of biomass for fuel production.
A new study suggests that drops of fuel spilled at gas stations — which occur frequently with fill-ups — could cumulatively be causing long-term environmental damage to soil and groundwater in residential areas in close proximity to the stations.
Until now, if you want to print a greeting card for a loved one, you can use colorful graphics, fancy typefaces or special paper to enhance it. But what if you could integrate paper-thin displays into the cards, which could be printed at home and which would be able to depict self-created symbols or even react to touch? Those only some of the options computer scientists in Saarbrücken can offer.
They developed an approach that in the future will enable laypeople to print displays in any desired shape on various materials and therefore could change everyday life completely.
The battle against AIDS cannot be won in the laboratory alone. To fight the potentially deadly virus that 34 million people are suffering from we need help from computers. Now research fron University of Southern Denmark turns computers into powerful allies in the battle.
Effective treatment of HIV-virus is a race against time: Many of the drugs that have been potent killers of HIV-virus, have today lost their power, because the virus has become resistant to them. As a result science must constantly develop new drugs that can attack the virus in new ways.
A future where electricity comes mostly from low-carbon sources is not only feasible in terms of material demand, but will significantly reduce air pollution, a study published in the 6 October Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says.
An international team led by Edgar Hertwich and Thomas Gibon from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology conducted the first-ever global comprehensive life cycle assessment of the long-term, wide-scale implementation of electricity generation from renewable resources.
Fuel cells are totally appropriate systems for substituting the batteries of mobile phones, laptop computers and vehicles. They turn the energy resulting from the combining of hydrogen and oxygen into electrical power, with water vapour being the only waste product. In other words, they generate energy in the same way that batteries do, but they do not contaminate.
Anyone who has blown a bubble and seen how quickly it pops has first-hand experience on the major challenge in creating stable foams.
Trying on clothes when a shop is closed could become a reality thanks to new research that uses semi-transparent mirrors in interactive systems and which will be unveiled at an international conference tomorrow [Tuesday 7 October].
The research paper, to be presented at one of the world's most important conferences on human-computer interfaces - ACM UIST 2014 [5-8 October], could change the way people interact and collaborate in public spaces, such as museums and shop windows.
Researchers from UCL, Stanford Engineering, Google, Chalmers and Mozilla Research have built a new system that protects Internet users' privacy whilst increasing the flexibility for web developers to build web applications that combine data from different web sites, dramatically improving the safety of surfing the web.
Researchers often use microelectronic devices embedded with biological components to interrogate biology, but such devices can do much more – perhaps even control biology.
As such, researchers have looked to patterned assemblies of proteins and cells for in vitro metabolic engineering to characterize—and potentially control—cell metabolism on a chip. New devices are envisioned to recreate animal and human physiological functions on a chip, and such capabilities could revolutionize drug development.
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have created a new model to more accurately describe the greenhouse gases likely to be released from Arctic peatlands as they warm. Their findings, based on modeling how oxygen filters through soil, suggest that previous models probably underestimated methane emissions and overrepresented carbon dioxide emissions from these regions.
A team of researchers, led by the Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) at the University of Southampton, has demonstrated a breakthrough technique that offers the first possibility of silicon detectors for telecommunications.
For decades, silicon has been the foundation of the microelectronics revolution and, owing to its excellent optical properties in the near- and mid-infrared range, is now promising to have a similar impact on photonics.
The world's fiber-optic network spans more than 550,000 miles of undersea cable that transmits e-mail, websites, and other packets of data between continents, all at the speed of light. A rip or tangle in any part of this network can significantly slow telecommunications around the world.