June 26, 2012 – The promise of ultrafast quantum computing has moved a step closer to reality with a technique to create rewritable computer chips using a beam of light. Researchers from The City College of New York (CCNY) and the University of California Berkeley (UCB) used light to control the spin of an atom's nucleus in order to encode information. The technique could pave the way for quantum computing, a long-sought leap forward toward computers with processing speeds many times faster than today's. The group will publish their results on June 26 in Nature Communications. ...

PASADENA, Calif.—Imagine if doctors could perform surgery without ever having to cut through your skin. Or if they could diagnose cancer by seeing tumors inside the body with a procedure that is as simple as an ultrasound. Thanks to a technique developed by engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), all of that may be possible in the not-so-distant future. The new method enables researchers to focus light efficiently inside biological tissue. While the previous limit for how deep light could be focused was only about one millimeter, the Caltech team ...

Researchers in Finland and Germany have developed an open-source software that will make it significantly easier to process bioimaging data. The software, named BioImageXD, will help in analysing cell and tissue functions. The work to develop the software has been funded by the Academy of Finland (through the FinNano Research Programme), the European Union and Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation. Version 1.0 of BioImageXD has been accepted for publication in Nature Methods, the top journal in the field. Among other things, the BioImageXD software ...

According to a study by the Rey Juan Carlos University, data on objective corruption in Spain are higher in politics than in administrative-official institutions. However, the perception of Spaniards is a lot higher. Researchers at the Rey Juan Carlos University (URJC) have analysed how corruption is perceived in Spain. They believe that the "echo phenomenon" is fundamental when trying to understand the origin of corruption because it creates social attitudes which lead to the unfulfillment of civic duties. "As citizens not only do we act according to our own interests, ...

Understanding how a species battles to sustain itself in a challenging habitat is a cornerstone of ecological research; now scientists have applied this approach to science itself to discover why women are being driven out of academia. Their results, published in Oikos, reveals how a gender imbalance in science and academia is maintained by institutional barriers. "In ecology a species can only establish itself and develop if the population exceeds a certain threshold," said Dr Katherine O'Brien from the University of Queensland, Australia. "It's similar for researchers ...

Scientists from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) have invented a new toilet system that will turn human waste into electricity and fertilisers and also reduce the amount of water needed for flushing by up to 90 per cent compared to current toilet systems in Singapore. Dubbed the No-Mix Vacuum Toilet, it has two chambers that separate the liquid and solid wastes. Using vacuum suction technology, such as those used in aircraft lavatories, flushing liquids would now take only 0.2 litres of water while flushing solids require just one litre. The existing conventional ...

Nanodiamonds, pieces of carbon less than ten-thousandths the diameter of a human hair, have been found to help loosen crystallized fat from surfaces in a project led by research chemists at the University of Warwick that transforms the ability of washing powders to shift dirt in eco friendly low temperature laundry cycles. These new findings tackle a problem that forces consumers to wash some of their laundry at between 60 and 90 degrees centigrade more than 80 times a year. Even with modern biological washing powders, some fats and dirt cannot be removed at the lower ...

For companies in Germany, web accessibility has never been a compelling issue until now – this was also confirmed by a series of tests conducted in 2011 by the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin. The scientists at the Web Compliance Center used their analysis tools to test the "web compliance" – or adherence to international web standards – among the Internet sites of German companies listed on the DAX. The outcome: 90 percent of the websites exhibited substantial flaws. For instance, important data could only be found after much ...

Physicists investigating a recent crowd disaster in Germany found that one of the key causes was that at some point the crowd dynamics turned turbulent, akin to behaviour found in unstable fluid flows. The study, led by Dirk Helbing from the Risk Center at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich, Switzerland, is published in EPJ Data Science¹. Never before have crowd disasters been studied by relying on a qualitative analysis of large public data sets. These include media and public authority reports, YouTube videos, Google Earth maps, 360˚ photographs, ...

Aircraft turbulence guidelines should be rewritten after new research revealed thunderstorms could produce unexpected turbulence more than 100km away from storm cells. The research by University of Melbourne and the Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science researcher, Dr Todd Lane, has highlighted the impact of atmospheric gravity waves caused by thunderstorms and how air safety guidelines have not taken them into account. "It is likely that many reports of encounters with turbulence are caused by thunderstorm generated gravity waves, making them far more ...

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Online shoppers would rather receive an offer for a product or service than make their own offer, according to a study led by a Michigan State University scholar that has implications for the fast-growing e-commerce industry. The findings may come as a surprise given that shopping online is an anonymous process that seemingly can give consumers more confidence to drive a hard bargain, said Don Conlon, Eli Broad Professor of Management in MSU's Broad College of Business. But the study found that participants who made their own offers were less successful ...

Athens, Ga. – University of Georgia scientists have discovered a new flu-fighting role for a well-known component of the immune system. Kimberly Klonowski, assistant professor of cellular biology in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, and her colleagues found that administering a cell-signaling protein known as IL-15 to mice infected with influenza reduces their peak viral load by nearly three times. "We gave the IL-15 intranasally and found that it enhanced the movement of the immune system's natural killer cells and CD8 T cells into the lung airways," said ...

The energy generated from our oceans could be doubled using new methods for predicting wave power. Research led by the University of Exeter, published (27 June) in the journal Renewable Energy, could pave the way for significant advancements in marine renewable energy, making it a more viable source of power. The study was carried out by a team of mathematicians and engineers from the University of Exeter and Tel Aviv University. They devised a means of accurately predicting the power of the next wave in order to make the technology far more efficient, extracting twice ...

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Cooling systems that use a liquid that changes phase — such as water boiling on a surface — can play an important part in many developing technologies, including advanced microchips and concentrated solar-power systems. But understanding exactly how such systems work, and what kinds of surfaces maximize the transfer of heat, has remained a challenging problem. Now, researchers at MIT have found that relatively simple, microscale roughening of a surface can dramatically enhance its transfer of heat. Such an approach could be far less complex and more ...

From Earth, observers use telescopes to look and learn about the distant luminous spheres. But the telescope often isn't the only instrument used. Karl Gebhardt, professor of astrophysics at The University of Texas at Austin and one of the principal investigators for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) project, makes revolutionary discoveries about dark matter by combining deep-space observations with the powerful Lonestar supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). Dark matter exerts a gravitational pull on matter in a galaxy, ...

Athens, Ga. – People love social networks. That's the obvious conclusion from Facebook's 900 million active users and its current standing as one of the most visited sites on the web, second only to Google. New research from the University of Georgia finds what people may really "like" about social networking are themselves. "Despite the name 'social networks,' much user activity on networking sites is self-focused," said Brittany Gentile, a UGA doctoral candidate who looked at the effects of social networks on self-esteem and narcissism. According to the research, ...

Ann Arbor, Mich. — Many hospitals offer residency programs for doctors in training, allowing them to complete the education needed to become practicing physicians. Hospitals find those residents using National Residency Matching Program (NRMP) rules, but a new study finds wide variation in the interpretation of those rules. The NRMP rules are intended to minimize pressure on residency candidates, says lead author Diana S. Curran, M.D., F.A.C.O.G., residency program director for the U-M Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. But her study, published in the Journal of ...

New data released by the Forum of International Respiratory Societies (FIRS) to coincide with World Spirometry Day today has revealed a worrying lack of understanding and concern among the public about the world's biggest killer - lung disease, which now claims the lives of almost 4 million people a year. Despite the high incidence of lung disease, research conducted by YouGov across four continents revealed that people are far more worried about cancer, heart disease and stroke . This lack of concern is even more striking as data shows that while the other major diseases ...

Test performance can improve dramatically if students are offered rewards just before they are given standardized tests and if they receive the incentive immediately afterward, new research at the University of Chicago shows. Educators have long debated the value of financial and other rewards as incentives, but a series of experiments in Chicago-area schools showed that with the right kind of rewards, students achievement improved by as much as six months beyond what would be expected. The rewards apparently provide students with an incentive to take tests more seriously. ...

URBANA -- When D.K. Lee and Lane Rayburn, faculty members in the crop sciences department at the University of Illinois, talk about prairie cordgrass (Spartina pectinata) they have difficulty containing their enthusiasm. They are among the very few people doing research on this grass as a potential energy crop. According to Lee, switchgrass has been studied extensively as a forage crop and a dedicated energy crop. Recently this research has been extended to big bluestem, indiangrass, and other native grasses. Prairie cordgrass has received comparatively little attention ...

An automated lung nodule matching program can improve radiologists' efficiency almost two-fold, a first of its kind study shows. The study found that the time required for manual nodule matching ranged from 1 second to about 11.4 minutes, whereas automated nodule matching ranged from less than one second to about 6.6 minutes, said Chi Wan Koo, MD, the lead author of the study. The study conducted at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York, included 57 patients, yielding a total of 325 pulmonary nodules identified on CT. Four thoracic radiologists manually ...

June 26, 2012 – Scientists from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) have released comprehensive reviews of the most effective treatments for alcohol dependence, one of the most prevalent addictions in Canada. Published in the latest edition of the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, the reviews explore the most effective treatments and interventions for problem alcohol use and concurrent disorders. Almost 40 per cent of people with an alcohol use problem also have a concurrent mental illness, particularly schizophrenia, mood or anxiety disorders. The reviews ...

Tropical Storm Debby continues to be a big rainmaker in Florida and southern Georgia and NASA's TRMM satellite has measured those rainfall rates from space, showing where heavy rain has fallen. The Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite is basically a flying rain gauge in space. Scientists use TRMM data to calculate rainfall rates and rain totals from space. TRMM imagery from June 25 showed Debby's heaviest rains were falling at a rate of over 2 inches (50 mm) per hour, and to the southeast of the center. Debby has been a huge rainmaker. For example, Debby ...

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Rhode Island Hospital researcher Suzanne de la Monte, M.D., has found a link between brain insulin resistance (diabetes) and two other key mediators of neuronal injury that help Alzheimer's disease (AD) to propagate. The research found that once AD is established, therapeutic efforts must also work to reduce toxin production in the brain. The study, Dysfunctional Pro-Ceramide, ER Stress, and Insulin/IGF Signaling Networks with Progression of Alzheimer's Disease, is published in the June 22, 2012, supplement of the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. Alzheimer's ...

The MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP), under the direction of co-principal investigators University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen, and Joseph Kahne, professor of education at Mills College, has unveiled the findings of the largest nationally representative study to date of new media and politics among young people. The national survey questioned 3,000 young people, ages 15-25 on how they use the Internet, social media and engage in politics. Unlike any prior study on the topic, the YPP survey included large numbers of black, ...