Tech : Science World Report

Mar 09, 2012 11:13 AM EST

TacSat-4 Enables Polar Region SatCom Experiment

The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter HEALY (WAGB 20) successfully experimented with NRL's TacSat-4 communications satellite, Jan. 24, by communicating from the Bering Sea off the western coast of Alaska to Coast Guard Island, Alameda, Calif.

Mar 09, 2012 10:52 AM EST

Assuring the Future Supply of Raw Materials

"Our future success in the key industrial branches automobile, machine, and plant construction as well as chemical technologies here in Germany will depend essentially on the availability of such strategically important resources as copper, gallium, or rare earths," says Prof. Jens Gutzmer, Director...

Mar 09, 2012 10:26 AM EST

Nanotube Technology Leading to New Era of Fast, Lower-cost Medical Diagnostics

Researchers at Oregon State University have tapped into the extraordinary power of carbon "nanotubes" to increase the speed of biological sensors, a technology that might one day allow a doctor to routinely perform lab tests in minutes, speeding diagnosis and treatment while reducing costs.

Mar 09, 2012 09:06 AM EST

Door Adapted to the Needs of People with Reduced Mobility is Developed for Emergency Exits

Tecnalia Research and Innovation is participating in the Saleme project together with the Spanish companies Demesel, Tesa and Ingema -the MatÃa Gerontology Institute-, in the development of a door for emergency exits adapted for people with functional diversity.

Mar 08, 2012 01:19 PM EST

NRL Designs Robot for Shipboard Firefighting

In both war and peacetime scenarios, fire in the shipboard environment is serious and frequently results in excessive damage and high repair costs because the fire is not detected or controlled adequately. To help further improve future shipboard firefighting capability scientists at the Naval Resea...

Mar 08, 2012 11:33 AM EST

Metamaterials May Advance with New Femtosecond Laser Technique

Researchers in applied physics have cleared an important hurdle in the development of advanced materials, called metamaterials, that bend light in unusual ways. Working at a scale applicable to infrared light, the Harvard team has used extremely short and powerful laser pulses to create three-dim...

Mar 07, 2012 04:18 PM EST

Communication Technologies Including Smartphones and Laptops Could Now be 1,000 Times Faster

Many of the communication tools of today rely on the function of light or, more specifically, on applying information to a light wave. Up until now, studies on electronic and optical devices with materials that are the foundations of modern electronicsâ€”such as radio, TV, and computersâ€”...

Mar 06, 2012 02:57 PM EST

Listening to the 9.0-magnitude Japanese Earthquake

Last year's 9.0-magnitude Tohoku-Oki, Japan, earthquake was the fourth largest since 1900. However, because of thousands of seismometers in the region and Japan's willingness to share their measurements with the rest of the world, the Tohoku-Oki quake is the best-recorded earthquake of all-time.

Mar 05, 2012 02:10 PM EST

App Turns Tablet into Math Aid for Visually Impaired Students

Without looking down, Kira runs her index finger across the screen of an Android tablet that she is holding in her lap. For the occasion, she has painted her fingernails bright pink. When her finger touches a line drawn on the screen, the tablet vibrates quietly. Scanning her finger back and forth a...

Feb 15, 2012 01:55 PM EST

Climate Change May Increase Risk of Water Shortages in Hundreds of US Counties by 2050

More than 1 in 3 counties in the United States could face a "high" or "extreme" risk of water shortages due to climate change by the middle of the 21st century, according to a new study in ACS's Journal of Environmental Science & Technology. The new report concluded that 7 in 10 of the more than 3,1...

Feb 07, 2012 09:43 AM EST

Entire Genome of Extinct Human Decoded From Fossil

The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, has completed the genome sequence of a Denisovan, a representative of an Asian group of extinct humans related to Neandertals.

Feb 04, 2012 07:32 AM EST

Why 2 New Studies Represent Important Breakthrough in Alzheimer's Disease Research

Two different research groups have independently made the same important discoveries on how Alzheimer's disease spreads in the brain, according to a February 2 New York Times story. The groups' findings have the potential to give us a much more sophisticated understanding of what goes wrong in Alzhe...