Tech

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Workers earning the lowest wages have a higher risk of hypertension than workers with the highest wages, according to new research from UC Davis.

The correlation between wages and hypertension was especially strong among women and persons between the ages of 25 to 44.

HOUSTON – (Jan. 3, 2013) – Plasmonic gold nanoparticles make pinpoint heating on demand possible. Now Rice University researchers have found a way to selectively heat diverse nanoparticles that could advance their use in medicine and industry.

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Almost all computer chips use two types of transistors: one called p-type, for positive, and one called n-type, for negative. Improving the performance of the chip as a whole requires parallel improvements in both types.

Scientists have cast doubt on the widely held perception that there has been a global increase in jellyfish.

BEER-SHEVA, Israel, December 27, 2012 -- Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's (BGU) Social Networks Security Research Group in its Department of Information Systems Engineering has developed a novel method to predict how well or badly a student will perform in an academic course.

Ultraviolet (UVC) light can eradicate wound-infecting bacteria on mice increasing both survival and healing rates, according to a paper in the July 2012 issue of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. The light did not damage the animals' skin or delay wound healing, says principal investigator Michael R. Hamblin, of the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.

Someday, Oahu's Koolau and Waianae mountains will be reduced to nothing more than a flat, low-lying island like Midway.

But erosion isn't the biggest culprit. Instead, scientists say, the mountains of Oahu are actually dissolving from within.

"We tried to figure out how fast the island is going away and what the influence of climate is on that rate," said Brigham Young University geologist Steve Nelson. "More material is dissolving from those islands than what is being carried off through erosion."

Theoretical physicist Elad Eizner from Ben Gurion University, Israel, and colleagues created models to study the attractive forces affecting atoms located at a wide range of distances from a surface, in the hundreds of nanometers range. Their results, about to be published in EPJ D, show that these forces depend on electron diffusion, regardless of whether the surface is conducting or not. Ultimately, these findings could contribute to designing minimally invasive surface probes.

Little more than a decade ago, the United States imported much of its natural gas. Today, the nation is tapping into its own natural gas reserves and producing enough to support most of its current needs for heating and power generation, and is beginning to export natural gas to other countries.

The trend is expected to continue, as new methods are developed to extract natural gas from vast unrecovered reserves embedded in shale. Natural gas can be used to generate electricity, and it burns cleaner than coal.

The Seventies: Smog alert in the Ruhr area, acid rain, dying spruce trees in the Bavarian Forest. In those days, the solution was filter systems for the smokestacks in the Ruhr area. Today, people in the urban areas are suffering from high levels of pollution that is being caused by, among other things, automotive traffic. Particularly undesired: the nitrogen oxides (NOX). In the meantime, the European Union tightened the limit values even further; in many communities they are being exceeded.

If the key to winning battles is knowing both your enemy and yourself, then scientists are now well on their way toward becoming the Sun Tzus of medicine by taking a giant step toward a priceless advantage – the ability to see the soldiers in action on the battlefield.

Asking all commuters to cut back on rush-hour driving reduces traffic congestion somewhat, but asking specific groups of drivers to stay off the road may work even better.

The conclusion comes from a new analysis by engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, that was made possible by their ability to track traffic using commuters' cellphone and GPS signals.

For all their promise, solar cells have frustrated scientists in one crucial regard – most are rigid. They must be deployed in stiff, often heavy, fixed panels, limiting their applications. So researchers have been trying to get photovoltaics to loosen up. The ideal: flexible, decal-like solar panels that can be peeled off like band-aids and stuck to virtually any surface, from papers to window panes.

Fights between siblings about simple things, like whose turn it is to empty the dishwasher, aren't harmless. Rather, such fights are about equality and fairness, and they can lead to depression, according to a new study.

The longitudinal research, by researchers at the University of Missouri, appears in the journal Child Development.

Holiday presents will soon be under the tree for millions of adolescents. With those gifts may come sibling squabbles over violations of personal space, such as unwanted borrowing of a fashionable clothing item, or arguments over fairness, such as whose turn it is to play a new video game. Those squabbles represent two specific types of sibling conflict that can have different effects on a youth's emotional health, according to a multi-year study by a University of Missouri psychologist.