Researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have developed a method for greatly enhancing biofuel production in tiny marine algae by genetically engineering a key growth component in biofuel.
The researchers say a significant roadblock in algal biofuel research surrounds the production of lipid oils, the fat molecules that store energy that can be produced for fuel: algae mainly produce the desired… read more
Kano is a computer you make yourself. Simple as Lego, powered by Pi.… read more
In another leap for 3D printing, researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have developed a faster 3D printing process that allows for 3D-printing multi-material objects in minutes instead of hours.
Fabrication time and the complexity of multi-material objects have been a hurdle to widespread use of 3D printing.
Speeding up printing
USC Viterbi researchers developed improved mask-image-projection-based stereolithography (MIP-SL) to drastically… read more
A computer program called the Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) is now running 24 hours a day at Carnegie Mellon University, searching the Web for images, doing its best to understand them. And as it builds a growing visual database, it is gathering common sense on a massive scale.
NEIL leverages recent advances in computer vision that enable computer programs to identify and label objects in images,… read more
In another major new application of graphene, Columbia Engineering researchers have taken advantage of graphene’s special properties — its mechanical strength and electrical conductivity — to develop a nanomechanical system that can create FM signals — in effect, the world’s smallest FM radio transmitter.
“This is an important first step in advancing wireless signal processing and designing ultrathin, efficient cell phones, Mechanical Engineering Professor James… read more
Data from computed tomography (CT) scans can be used with 3D printers to make accurate copies of fossilized bones, according to new research published online in the journal Radiology.
Fossils are often stored in plaster casts, or jackets, to protect them from damage. Getting information about a fossil typically requires the removal of the plaster and all the sediment surrounding it, which can lead to loss of material or… read more
Unexpected behavior in ferroelectric materials explored by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory supports a new approach to information storage and processing called “memcomputing,” or memristor-based computing.
Ferroelectric materials are known for their ability to spontaneously switch polarization when an electric field is applied.
So using a scanning probe microscope, the ORNL-led team took advantage of… read more
It is possible to distinguish aggregations of the proteins believed to cause Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob (“mad cow”) diseases from normal proteins by using a multiphoton laser technique, researchers at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden the Polish Wroclaw University of Technology have discovered.
Today, amyloid protein aggregates are treated with highly toxic chemicals for detection and removal.
With a multiphoton laser, the chemical treatment would be unnecessary,… read more
A polymer originally designed to help mend broken bones could be successful in delivering chemotherapy drugs directly to the brains of patients suffering from glioblastoma brain tumors, researchers at The University of Nottingham have discovered.
Their study, published in the journal PLOS ONE (open access), shows that the biomaterial can be easily applied to the cavity created following brain cancer surgery and used to release chemotherapy drugs over several… read more
Printable curved computer displays, TV screens, signs, clothing, fluorescent wallpaper, and flexible solar cells will soon be possible using a new printing process for flexible, organic light-emitting diodes, or OLEDs, say German scientists.
“Almost any surface can be made into a display,” said Dr. Armin Wedel, head of division at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Polymer Research IAP.
The first curved OLED screens were demonstrated at… read more
New work by University of California Berkeley researchers could one day make nanomagnetic switches a viable replacement for the conventional power-consuming transistors found in all computers.
“Increased energy consumption of modern day computers is a major challenge that the computer industry faces,” researcher Debanjan Bhowmik explained to KurzweilAI. Bhowmik is a UC Berkeley graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and the first author of a paper on this… read more
A normally fragile quantum state has been shown to survive at room temperature for a world record 39 minutes, overcoming a key barrier towards building ultrafast quantum computers, the researchers say.
An international team including Stephanie Simmons of Oxford University‘s Department of Materials report in this week’s Science a test performed by Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University, Canada and colleagues.
Qubits survive at 25 °C for 39 minutes… read more
From a bacteria’s perspective, the environment is one big DNA waste yard. Now researchers from Denmark and Norway have shown that bacteria can take up small as well as large pieces of old DNA from this scrapheap and include it in their own genome.
This discovery may have major consequences both in connection with resistance to antibiotics in hospitals and in our perception of the evolution of life itself.… read more
A team of researchers led by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies has generated three-dimensional kidney structures from human stem cells for the first time, opening new avenues for studying development and diseases of the kidneys and discovery of new drugs that target human kidney cells.
The findings were reported November 17, 2013 in Nature Cell Biology.
Diseases affecting the kidneys represent a major and… read more
Researchers have created tiny holograms using a “metasurface” capable of the ultra-efficient control of light, representing a potential new technology for advanced sensors, high-resolution displays and information processing.
The metasurface, thousands of V-shaped nanoantennas formed into an ultrathin gold foil, could make possible “planar photonics” devices and optical switches small enough to be integrated into computer chips for information processing, sensing and telecommunications, said Alexander Kildishev, associate research professor… read more