Aromatic compounds are found widely in natural resources such as petroleum and biomass, and breaking the carbon?carbon bonds in these compounds plays an important role in the production of fuels and valuable chemicals from natural resources. However, aromatic carbon-carbon bonds are very stable and difficult to break. In the chemical industry, the cleavage of these bonds requires the use of solid catalysts at high temperatures, usually giving rise to a mixture of products, and the mechanisms are still poorly understood.
Tech
The last time you experienced worrisome medical symptoms, did you look for advice online before consulting a health-care professional? If so, you're not alone. Consumers are increasingly turning to forums, video-sharing sites, and peer support groups to gather anecdotal information and advice, which may distract them from more reliable and trustworthy sources. New research to be presented at the HFES 2014 Annual Meeting in Chicago studies the characteristics of consumers who use the Internet to collect health-care information.
Despite major retailers investing tens of millions of dollars a year into loyalty programs, they are a dying breed, with customers struggling to see the benefits of signing up, according to QUT research.
But benefits that stimulate gratitude in customers have the power to strengthen the seller-customer relationship and ensure loyalty, researchers Dr Syed Hasan, Professor Ian Lings, Associate Professor Larry Neale and Dr Gary Mortimer, from QUT's School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations, found.
Sheepdogs use just two simple rules to round up large herds of sheep, scientists have discovered.
The findings could lead to the development of robots that can gather and herd livestock, crowd control techniques, or new methods to clean up the environment.
For the first time scientists used GPS technology to understand how sheepdogs do their jobs so well. Until now, they had no idea how the dogs manage to get so many unwilling sheep to move in the same direction.
A study published in this week's PLOS Medicine on large-scale rural sanitation programs in India highlights challenges in achieving sufficient access to latrines and reduction in open defecation to yield significant health benefits for young children.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois engineers are bringing a touch of color to glucose monitoring.
The researchers developed a new continuous glucose monitoring material that changes color as glucose levels fluctuate, and the wavelength shift is so precise that doctors and patients may be able to use it for automatic insulin dosing - something not possible using current point measurements like test strips.
A new argument has just been added to the growing case for graphene being bumped off its pedestal as the next big thing in the high-tech world by the two-dimensional semiconductors known as MX2 materials. An international collaboration of researchers led by a scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has reported the first experimental observation of ultrafast charge transfer in photo-excited MX2 materials.
By combining plasmonics and optical microresonators, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a new optical amplifier (or laser) design, paving the way for power-on-a-chip applications.
"We have made optical systems at the microscopic scale that amplify light and produce ultra-narrowband spectral output," explained J. Gary Eden, a professor of electrical and computer engineering (ECE) at Illinois. "These new optical amplifiers are well-suited for routing optical power on a chip containing both electronic and optical components.
The illegal use of waste cooking oil in parts of the nationwide food system is threatening the public's health in China.
Now scientists led by Professor Ding Hongbin at the Dalian University of Technology, in northeastern China, present a new means to confront this problem. In a study published in the Chinese Science Bulletin, Ding and fellow researchers at the university's School of Physics and Optoelectronic Engineering outline the potential use of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) to rapidly distinguish between "gutter oil" and safe, edible oil.
Quartz glass does not conduct electric current, it is a typical example of an insulator. With ultra-short laser pulses, however, the electronic properties of glass can be fundamentally changed within femtoseconds (1 fs = 10^-15 seconds). If the laser pulse is strong enough, the electrons in the material can move freely. For a brief moment, the quartz glass behaves like metal. It becomes opaque and conducts electricity. This change of material properties happens so quickly that it can be used for ultra-fast light based electronics.
Big Data presents scientists with unfolding opportunities, including, for instance, the possibility of discovering heterogeneous characteristics in the population leading to the development of personalized treatments and highly individualized services. But ever-expanding data sets introduce new challenges in terms of statistical analysis, bias sampling, computational costs, noise accumulation, spurious correlations, and measurement errors.
Decades of experiments have verified the quirky laws of quantum theory again and again. So when scientists in Germany announced in 2012 an apparent violation of a fundamental law of quantum mechanics, a physicist at the University of Rochester was determined to find an explanation.
"You don't destroy the laws of quantum mechanics that easily," said Robert Boyd, professor of optics and of physics at Rochester and the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Quantum Nonlinear Optics at the University of Ottawa.
A series of experiments conducted by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) researchers is shedding new light on the photosynthetic process. The work also illustrates how light sources and supercomputing facilities can be linked via a "photon science speedway" as a solution to emerging challenges in massive data analysis.
Personal protective equipment designed to shield health care workers from contaminated body fluids of Ebola patients is not enough to prevent transmission, according to a commentary being published early online today in Annals of Internal Medicine.
There's an old saying in the biofuels industry: "You can make anything from lignin except money." But now, a new study may pave the way to challenging that adage. The study from the Energy Department's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) demonstrates a concept that provides opportunities for the successful conversion of lignin into a variety of renewable fuels, chemicals, and materials for a sustainable energy economy.