Tech

Rose madder – a natural plant dye once prized throughout the Old World to make fiery red textiles – has found a second life as the basis for a new "green" battery.

Chemists from The City College of New York teamed with researchers from Rice University and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to develop a non-toxic and sustainable lithium-ion battery powered by purpurin, a dye extracted from the roots of the madder plant (Rubia species).

URBANA – Spores from Asian soybean rust (Phakopsora pachyrhizi) pose a serious threat to soybean production in the United States because they can be blown great distances by the wind. University of Illinois researchers have developed a method to determine whether these spores are viable.

"Finding spores is different from finding spores that are living and able to infect plants," said USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) scientist and crop sciences professor Glen Hartman.

The prevalence of tobacco smuggling in Europe is lower than industry figures suggest, reveals the largest study of its kind, published online in Tobacco Control.

CHICAGO – Vision insurance for working-age adults appears to be associated with having eye care visits and reporting better vision, compared with individuals without insurance, according to a report published Online First by Archives of Ophthalmology, a JAMA Network publication.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The small kerosene lamps that light millions of homes in developing countries have a dark side: black carbon – fine particles of soot released into the atmosphere.

New measurements show that kerosene wick lamps release 20 times more black carbon than previously thought, say researchers at the University of Illinois and the University of California, Berkeley. The group published its findings in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Over past decades, many areas of the forested Amazon basin have become a patchwork of farms, pastures and second-growth forest as people have moved in and cleared land--but now many are moving out, in search of economic opportunities in newly booming Amazonian cities. The resulting depopulation of rural areas, along with spreading road networks and increased drought are causing more and bigger fires to ravage vast stretches, say researchers in a new study.

URBANA – Every year farmers spend a lot of money trying to control corn rootworm larvae, which are a significant threat to maize production in the United States and, more recently, in Europe. University of Illinois researchers have been working on validating a model for estimating damage functions.

WASHINGTON—In the summer of 1854 a doctor named John Snow tracked London's deadly outbreak of cholera to contaminated water coming from a public well—the now famous Broad Street pump. But Snow's observations had to wend their way through the annals of science and took years to make an impact on the public health. Now, more than a century later, ordinary people can go online and report observations about public health problems and disasters in real time.

PASADENA, Calif.—A secret agent is racing against time. He knows a bomb is nearby. He rounds a corner, spots a pile of suspicious boxes in the alleyway, and pulls out his cell phone. As he scans it over the packages, their contents appear onscreen. In the nick of time, his handy smartphone application reveals an explosive device, and the agent saves the day.

Renewable energy could fully power a large electric grid 99.9 percent of the time by 2030 at costs comparable to today's electricity expenses, according to new research by the University of Delaware and Delaware Technical Community College.

A well-designed combination of wind power, solar power and storage in batteries and fuel cells would nearly always exceed electricity demands while keeping costs low, the scientists found.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Silicon's crown is under threat: The semiconductor's days as the king of microchips for computers and smart devices could be numbered, thanks to the development of the smallest transistor ever to be built from a rival material, indium gallium arsenide.

A system that uses ultrasound technology to look inside car engines could lead to more efficient engines – and huge fuel savings for motorists.

Ultrasound scans have long been a fundamental tool in healthcare for looking inside the human body, but they have never before been put to use in testing the health of a modern combustion engine.

PASADENA, Calif.—As technology advances, it tends to shrink. From cell phones to laptops—powered by increasingly faster and tinier processors—everything is getting thinner and sleeker. And now light beams are getting smaller, too.

Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a device that can focus light into a point just a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) across—an achievement they say may lead to next-generation applications in computing, communications, and imaging.

It's well known how bacteria exposed to antibiotics for long periods will find ways to resist the drugs—by quickly pumping them out of their cells, for instance, or modifying the compounds so they're no longer toxic.

Detecting parasites in biological or medical samples has never been faster than when using a dime-sized microchip developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Purdue University.

For years, chips have been able to produce test results that are typically gathered from full-scale laboratories, but now they can produce them in three to four seconds. Using a technique called rapid electrokinetic patterning that relies on light and electromagnetic fields, researchers can detect low concentrations of parasites instantly because they group together in a stimulated region of the chip.