A normally fragile quantum state has been shown to survive at room temperature for a world record 39 minutes, overcoming a key barrier towards building ultrafast quantum computers.
Tech
WASHINGTON D.C. Nov. 14, 2013 -- Back in 1991, Nature published a picture from the IMAX movie Antarctica, along with the caption: "Emperor penguins may be waddling jokes on land, but underwater they can turn into regular rockets…accelerating from 0 to 7 m/s in less than a second."
Lower doses of the antimalarial drug primaquine are as effective as higher doses in reducing malaria transmission, according to a study published today in Lancet Infectious Diseases by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine researchers.
Primaquine is one of the few antimalarial drugs that targets the transmission stages of the malaria parasite, the gametocytes, and is therefore considered to be an important tool for malaria elimination.
Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed new technology and techniques for transmitting power wirelessly from a stationary source to a mobile receiver – moving engineers closer to their goal of creating highway "stations" that can recharge electric vehicles wirelessly as the vehicles drive by.
"We've made changes to both the receiver and the transmitter in order to make wireless energy transfer safer and more efficient," says Dr. Srdjan Lukic, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at NC State and senior author of a paper on the research.
PULLMAN, Wash.—Quite by accident, Washington State University researchers have achieved a 400-fold increase in the electrical conductivity of a crystal simply by exposing it to light. The effect, which lasted for days after the light was turned off, could dramatically improve the performance of devices like computer chips.
Expanding millions of hectares of Brazilian land to produce palm oil for food or for renewable, clean-burning biodiesel could result in extremely high emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) unless strict controls are put in place.
This is according to a new study published today, 14 November, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, by a group of researchers from the University of California, Davis.
ORNL study uses neutron scattering, supercomputing to demystify forces at play in biofuel production
OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Nov. 13, 2013 — Researchers studying more effective ways to convert woody plant matter into biofuels at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory have identified fundamental forces that change plant structures during pretreatment processes used in the production of bioenergy.
It's a foggy fall morning, and University of Washington researcher Susan Dickerson-Lange pokes her index finger into the damp soil beneath a canopy of second-growth conifers. The tree cover is dense here, and little light seeps in among the understory of the Cedar River Municipal Watershed about 30 miles east of Seattle.
Nature designed lignin, the tough woody polymer in the walls of plant cells, to bind and protect the cellulose sugars that plants use for energy. For this reason, lignin is a major challenge for those who would extract those same plant sugars and use them to make advanced biofuels. As part of their search for economic ways to overcome the lignin challenge, researchers at the Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI) have characterized the enzymatic activity of a rain forest microbe that breaks down lignin essentially by breathing it.
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Cats that live outdoors in the city do their darnedest to steer clear of urban coyotes, a new study says.
The cats cause less damage to wildlife in urban green spaces, such as city parks and nature preserves, because of that dodging, the study suggests. And they live longer and are healthier than previously thought.
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Lithium-air batteries have become a hot research area in recent years: They hold the promise of drastically increasing power per battery weight, which could lead, for example, to electric cars with a much greater driving range. But bringing that promise to reality has faced a number of challenges, including the need to develop better, more durable materials for the batteries' electrodes and improving the number of charging-discharging cycles the batteries can withstand.
Identifying the individual's transportation behavior is a fundamental problem, as it reveals information about the user's physical activity, personal CO2 -footprint and preferred transit type. On a larger scale, this information could be aggregated to discover information about the utilization of different transportation options to aid urban planning.
Semiconductors, the foundation of modern electronics used in flat-screen TVs and fighter jets, could become even more versatile as researchers make headway on a novel, inexpensive way to turn them into thin films. Their report on a new liquid that can quickly dissolve nine types of key semiconductors appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Triggered by the recession that began in 2008, major chemical companies are aggressively re-inventing themselves through multi-billion dollar overhauls, reports Chemical & Engineering News, the weekly newsmagazine of the American Chemical Society. Rather than growing through the expansion of existing operations into emerging economies, which continue to suffer from the downturn, large chemical firms are now shedding some of those operations and investing in specialty areas with higher growth.
Advanced plasma-based etching is a key enabler of Moore's Law that observes that the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles nearly every two years. It is the plasma's ability to reproduce fine patterns on silicon that makes this scaling possible and has made plasma sources ubiquitous in microchip manufacturing.