news 2013

Tidal turbines stretched across Pentland Firth, which separates the Orkney Islands from mainland Scotland, could generate up to 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of power - equivalent to almost half of Scotland's electricity needs. A new study, led by Oxford University researchers, provides the first reliable estimate of the maximum energy that could be generated from Pentland Firth.

UAlberta researchers show that a simple glass surface can be made to repel oil underwater. University of Alberta mechanical engineering researchers have shown that a simple glass surface can be made to repel oil underwater. This has huge implications for development of a chemical repellent technology for use in cleaning up oil spills.

Systems such as a beating heart or a power grid that depend on the synchronized movement of their parts could fall prey to an invisible and chaotic tug-of-war known as a "chimera." Sharing its name with the fire-breathing, zoologically patchy creature of Greek mythology, a chimera state arises among identical, rhythmically moving components — known as oscillators — when a few of those parts spontaneously fall out of sync while the rest remain synchronized.

Associate instrument innovators Leland Greenler, left, and Dan Wahl measure the individual tension of thousands of tiny woven wires that make up a prototype neutrino-target screen being designed at the UW-Madison Physical Sciences Lab. Photos: Jeff Miller Sequestered in the farmland near Stoughton, an unusual UW-Madison facility — part machine shop, part design lab, part physics outpost — continues to make machines, equipment and detectors for the world's most advanced experiments.

The chance of infection in some NHS wards varies dramatically according to whether the nurses leave the windows open. A University of Leeds-led team studied airflow in a “Nightingale” ward—the classic NHS ward that traditionally accommodated two rows of up to 30 beds—using tracer gases to simulate how airborne infections spread.

As demand for computing and communication capacity surges, the global communication infrastructure struggles to keep pace, since the light signals transmitted through fiber-optic lines must still be processed electronically, creating a bottleneck in tele networks. While the idea of developing an optical transistor to get around this problem is alluring to scientists and engineers, it has also remained an elusive vision, despite years of experiments with various approaches.

Academics have demonstrated for the first time that a "sonic lasso" can be used to grip microscopic objects, such as cells, and move them about. The research by academics at the University of Bristol's Department of Mechanical Engineering and the University of Dundee's Institute for Medical Science and Technology is published online in Applied Physics Letters .

Tennis players can adapt their movement/playing style in response to subtle differences in court constructions, according to new research by engineers at the University of Sheffield. The findings - published online in the Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology - are the first steps towards setting international standards to characterise the interaction between shoes and surfaces.

Young children are not like sponges just soaking up information. They can actively evaluate what people know and go to the "experts" for information they want, reports a Cornell study published in a special issue of Developmental Psychology (Vol. Children, the researchers say, are "natural scientists" who gather and assess evidence from the world around them.

Public concern about new technology infrastructure like mobile phone masts has been shown to trigger reports of ill health.. and recently even the new 'green' technology of wind turbines has been blamed for medically unexplained non-specific symptoms. But now, for the first time, a study by psychologists, engineers and built environment experts at The University of Nottingham , has found no link between the 'measured' level of noise from small and micro wind turbines and reports of ill health.

New research, published in Neuron , gives insight into how single mutations in the VCP gene cause a range of neurological conditions including a form of dementia called Inclusion Body Myopathy, Paget's Disease of the Bone and Frontotemporal Dementia (IBMPFD), and the motor neuron disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

As a bird sings, some neurons in its brain prepare to make the next sounds while others are synchronized with the current notes—a coordination of physical actions and brain activity that is needed to produce complex movements, new research at the University of Chicago shows. In an article in the current issue of Nature , neuroscientist Daniel Margoliash and colleagues show, for the first time, how the brain is organized to govern skilled performance—a finding that may lead to new ways of understanding human speech production.

Glass doesn't have to be brittle. In a paper published online Feb. 26 , a Yale University team and collaborators propose a way of predicting whether a given glass will be brittle or ductile - a desirable property typically associated with metals like steel or aluminum - and assert that any glass could have either quality.

FINDINGS: Electromagnetic devices, from power drills to smart-phones, require an electric current to create the magnetic fields that allow them to function. But with smaller devices, efficiently delivering a current to create magnetic fields becomes more difficult. In a discovery that could lead to big changes in storing digital information and powering motors in small hand-held devices, researchers at UCLA have developed a method for switching tiny magnetic fields on and off with an electric field — a sharp departure from the traditional approach of running a current through a wire.

A new study by Columbia Engineering researchers finds that the infant brain does not control its blood flow in the same way as the adult brain. The findings, which the scientists say could change the way researchers study brain development in infants and children, are published in the February 18 Early Online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

It's thought abnormalities in their ability to do play an important role in a broad range of disorders, including cardiovascular disease and cancer. The study's findings are outlined in the journal Molecular Cell and describe a surprising new aspect of cell adhesion involving the family of cell adhesion molecules known as integrins, which are found on the surfaces of most cells.

Using the GEOS-CHEM (top) and NASA-GMI (bottom) global climate models, the researchers showed that predictions of cloud droplet numbers could increase up to 20 percent due to organic gas adsorption. Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Georgia Institute of Technology have published a study in the February 4 online Early Edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing—for the first time—that certain volatile organic gases can promote cloud formation in a way never considered before by atmospheric scientists.

Searching for common elements in seemingly incompatible scientific theories may lead to the discovery of new ones that revolutionize our understanding of the world. Such is the idea behind a mathematical framework Princeton University researchers developed that strips away the differences between scientific laws and theories to reveal how the ideas are compatible.

The adulthood of a midge fly is decidedly brief - about three days. But a new study of its mating swarm may yield lasting benefits for analyses of bird flocks, fish schools, human crowds and other forms of collective animal motion. "This is a field where there's been almost no quantitative data," said Nicholas T. Ouellette of the Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science, principal investigator of the research , published Jan.

" The results of a study published today (7 January) suggest that microbes 'feel' their way along a solid surface, much as a blindfolded person would move near a wall. Using high-speed microscopic imaging, University of Cambridge researchers have found that sperm cells accumulate at surfaces and algae move away from them as a result of between the surface and the cells' flagella or cilia - the hair-like appendages that propel cells through their fluid environment.