In another installment of the PLOS Medicine series on Global Mental Health Practice, Joshua Ssebunnya from the Butabika National Referral and Teaching Mental Hospital in Kampala and colleagues describe their work developing a national mental health policy for Uganda.
Source: Public Library of Science
HOUSTON – (Oct. 2, 2012) – Researchers at Rice University are designing transparent, two-terminal, three-dimensional computer memories on flexible sheets that show promise for electronics and sophisticated heads-up displays.
The technique based on the switching properties of silicon oxide, a breakthrough discovery by Rice in 2008, was reported today in the online journal Nature Communications.
MINNEAPOLIS / ST. PAUL (10/02/2012) —A team of scientists and engineers at the University of Minnesota has invented a unique microscale optical device that could greatly increase the speed of downloading information online and reduce the cost of Internet transmission.
The device uses the force generated by light to flop a mechanical switch of light on and off at a very high speed. This development could lead to advances in computation and signal processing using light instead of electrical current with higher performance and lower power consumption.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2, 2012—In the operating room, surgeons can see inside the human body in real time using advanced imaging techniques, but primary care physicians, the people who are on the front lines of diagnosing illnesses, haven't commonly had access to the same technology – until now.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 2—Nearsightedness, or myopia, affects more than 40 percent of people in the U.S. and up to 90 percent of children in some parts of Asia. The problem begins in childhood and often progresses with age. Standard prescription lenses can correct the defocus but do not cure nearsightedness, and do not slow progression rates as children grow.
LIVERMORE, Calif. — As part of ongoing research to help prevent and mitigate disruptions to computer networks on the Internet, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories in California have turned their attention to smartphones and other hand-held computing devices.
Sandia cyber researchers linked together 300,000 virtual hand-held computing devices running the Android operating system so they can study large networks of smartphones and find ways to make them more reliable and secure. Android dominates the smartphone industry and runs on a range of computing gadgets.
"Questions have been raised if restricting nuclear energy – an option considered by some countries after the accident in Fukushima, Japan – combined with climate policies might get extremely expensive. Our study is a first assessment of the consequences of a broad range of combinations of climate and nuclear policies," lead author Nico Bauer says. Restrictions on nuclear power could be political decisions, but also regulations imposed by safety authorities.
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Increasingly, U.S. firms are moving or considering moving their manufacturing operations back to domestic soil from overseas, finds a new study co-authored by a Michigan State University supply chain expert.
Fueling the trend are rising labor costs in emerging countries, high oil prices and increasing transportation costs, global risks such as political instability and other factors, said Tobias Schoenherr.
This press release is available in Spanish.
Ensuring the monarch butterfly's survival by saving its milkweed habitat could result from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) studies initially intended to improve detection of boll weevils with pheromone traps.
Charles Suh and his colleagues at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Areawide Pest Management Research Unit in College Station, Texas, have found a pheromone formula that is attractive to a major milkweed pest, the milkweed stem weevil.
Tampa, Fla. (Oct.
This press release is available in Spanish.
Montserrat Fernández-Vallejo, a telecommunications engineer and graduate of the UPNA-Public University of Navarre, has experimentally developed various fibre-optic sensor networks for the remote monitoring of large infrastructures. Specifically, she has managed to develop the largest network so far in existence —measuring 250 km—, which is equipped with a multiplexing capability, (which enables two or more information channels to be combined within a single transmission medium).
Feature sensitive re-sampling of point set surfaces is an important and challenging task in many computer graphics and geometric modeling applications. Professor MIAO Yongwei and his group at the College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University of Technology, set out to tackle this problem. Based on regular sampling of a Gaussian sphere and the mapping of surface normals onto the Gaussian sphere, they have presented an adaptive re-sampling framework for point set surfaces.
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — University of Illinois researchers have a new low-cost method to carve delicate features onto semiconductor wafers using light – and watch as it happens.
"You can use light to image the topography and you can use light to sculpture the topography," said electrical and computer engineering professor Gabriel Popescu. "It could change the future of semiconductor etching."
Quantum dots are nanostructures of semiconducting materials that behave a lot like single atoms and are very easy to produce. Given their special properties, researchers see huge potential for quantum dots in technological applications. Before this can happen, however, we need a better understanding of how the electrons "trapped" inside them behave. Dresden physicists have recently observed how electrons in individual quantum dots absorb energy and emit it again as light. Their results were recently published in the journal "Nano Letters".
RICHLAND, Wash. -- Anyone who owns an electronic device knows that lithium ion batteries could work better and last longer. Now, scientists examining battery materials on the nano-scale reveal how nickel forms a physical barrier that impedes the shuttling of lithium ions in the electrode, reducing how fast the materials charge and discharge. Published last week in Nano Letters, the research also suggests a way to improve the materials.