URBANA. Ill. – Pork producers need accurate information on the energy value of fat in feed ingredients to ensure that diets are formulated economically and in a way that maximizes pork fat quality. Researchers at the University of Illinois have determined the true ileal and total tract digestibility of fat in four corn co-products, as well as in full fat soybeans and corn oil.
Tech
WASHINGTON D.C. -- In today's precision manufacturing environment, designers of products as diverse as car airbag sensors, computer microchips, drill bits and paint often need to know the mechanical properties of their materials' down to the nanometer scale. Scientists have now built a machine that sets a new standard of accuracy for testing one of those properties: a material's hardness, which is a measure of its resistance to bumps and scratches.
Researchers overcome technical hurdles in quest for inexpensive, durable electronics and solar cells
Electronic touch pads that cost just a few dollars and solar cells that cost the same as roof shingles are one step closer to reality today.
Researchers in the University of Minnesota's College of Science and Engineering and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., have overcome technical hurdles in the quest for inexpensive, durable electronics and solar cells made with non-toxic chemicals. The research was published in the most recent issue of Nature Communications, an international online research journal.
HOUSTON – (July 30, 2013) – New research at Rice University shows how water makes it practical to form long graphene nanoribbons less than 10 nanometers wide.
And it's unlikely that many of the other labs currently trying to harness the potential of graphene, a single-atom sheet of carbon, for microelectronics would have come up with the technique the Rice researchers found while they were looking for something else.
Materials that have the ability to switch between being good conductors and being good insula-tors are considered good potential candidates for electronic building blocks – for use in transis-tors, for example.
The iron oxide magnetite is the best known representative of this class of ma-terials. At low temperatures, magnetite has insulating properties; at high temperatures, the oxide is a good conductor. This switching mechanism however happens so quickly that it's been im-possible until now to fully grasp it on an atomic level.
7/30/13, New Orleans, LA. Research to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Study of Ingestive Behavior (SSIB), the foremost society for research into all aspects of eating and drinking behavior, suggests that exposure to stress in the first few days of life increases stress responses, anxiety and the consumption of palatable "comfort" foods in adulthood.
UCLA computer science professor Amit Sahai and a team of researchers have designed a system to encrypt software so that it only allows someone to use a program as intended while preventing any deciphering of the code behind it. This is known in computer science as "software obfuscation," and it is the first time it has been accomplished.
PITTSBURGH—Objects made from graphite—such as lithium-ion batteries—are "hydrophobic," meaning that they "dislike" water. For decades this lack of likeability has presented significant challenges in terms of building more durable technological devices made with graphite—until now.
Choking is a leading cause of injury among children, especially for children 4 years of age and younger. A new study by researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital and colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined nonfatal food-related choking among children 14 years of age or younger from 2001through 2009. During the nine-year study period, more than 12,000 children were treated each year in U.S. emergency departments for injuries from choking on food, which equals 34 children each day.
Fluorescent tetrapod nanocrystals could light the way to the future design of stronger polymer nanocomposites. A team of researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has developed an advanced opto-mechanical sensing technique based on tetrapod quantum dots that allows precise measurement of the tensile strength of polymer fibers with minimal impact on the fiber's mechanical properties.
Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have devised a method to convert a relatively inexpensive conventional microscope into a billion-pixel imaging system that significantly outperforms the best available standard microscope. Such a system could greatly improve the efficiency of digital pathology, in which specialists need to review large numbers of tissue samples. By making it possible to produce robust microscopes at low cost, the approach also has the potential to bring high-performance microscopy capabilities to medical clinics in developing countries.
Antibiotic use—and misuse—is the main driver for selection of antibiotic resistant bacteria. This has led many countries to implement interventions designed to reduce overall antibiotic consumption. Now, using methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) as an example, Laura Temime of the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, Paris, and collaborators warn that simply reducing antibiotics consumption does not necessarily reduce resistance. The research is published online ahead of print in Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
PITTSBURGH -- Amphibians exposed to insecticides early in life—even those not yet hatched—have a higher tolerance to those same insecticides later in life, according to a recent University of Pittsburgh study.
Published in Evolutionary Applications, the Pitt study found that wood frog populations residing farther from agricultural fields are not very tolerant to a particular type of insecticide, but they can become more tolerant with early exposure.
Using a simple solar cell and a photo anode made of a metal oxide, HZB and TU Delft scientists have successfully stored nearly five percent of solar energy chemically in the form of hydrogen. This is a major feat as the design of the solar cell is much simpler than that of the high-efficiency triple-junction cells based on amorphous silicon or expensive III-V semiconductors that are traditionally used for this purpose.
91 percent of on average 20-year-old Swiss men drink alcohol, almost half of whom drink six beverages or more in a row and are thus at-risk consumers. 44 percent of Swiss men smoke tobacco, the majority of whom are at-risk consumers – they smoke at least once a day. 36 percent of young adults smoke cannabis, whereby over half are at-risk consumers, using the drug at least twice a week.