news 2013

The sound vibrations that make up music can make solar panels work harder, according to new research, and pop music performs better than classical. Scientists showed that high pitched sounds like those common in pop and rock music caused the greatest improvement in the solar cells' power output, increasing it by up to forty per cent.

Engineers from the University of Sheffield have developed a way to significantly reduce the volume of some higher activity wastes, which will reduce the cost of interim storage and final disposal. The researchers, from the University's Faculty of Engineering, have shown that mixing plutonium-contaminated waste with blast furnace slag and turning it into glass reduces its volume by 85-95 per cent.

The remarkable mechanism by which the tiny ears of locusts can hear and distinguish between different tones has been discovered by researchers from the University of Bristol. Understanding how the nanoscale features of the insect eardrum mechanically process sound could open up practical possibilities for the fabrication of embedded signal processing in extremely small microphones.

Playing pop and rock music improves the performance of solar cells, according to new research from scientists at Queen Mary University of London and Imperial College London. The high frequencies and pitch found in pop and rock music cause vibrations that enhanced energy generation in solar cells containing a cluster of 'nanorods', leading to a 40 per cent increase in efficiency of the solar cells.

From supersensitive detections of magnetic fields to quantum information processing, the key to a number of highly promising advanced technologies may lie in one of the most common defects in diamonds. Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have taken an important step towards unlocking this key with the first ever detailed look at critical ultrafast processes in these diamond defects.

Breakthrough guarantees "unconditional" security of information by harnessing quantum theory and relativity, and has been successfully demonstrated on a global scale for the first time.

It's an everyday material we take for granted but now the secrets of how we came to benefit from the many uses of the most unique of substances.. glass, are revealed in a new book by a world-leading archaeologist from The University of Nottingham. The beautifully illustrated Cambridge University Press volume, 'Ancient Glass', by Professor Julian Henderson , is the first monograph of this versatile composite material to combine forensic investigational techniques from both the sciences and the humanities.

01 Nov 2013 A radio telescope once used to track ballistic missiles has helped astronomers determine how the magnetic field structure and rotation of the young and rapidly rotating Crab pulsar evolves with time. The Crab pulsar is a neutron star which formed in a massive cosmic explosion seen in both Europe and China in AD 1054 as a bright star in the daytime sky.

New theories emerge from more complicated microscopic theories; for example, the behavior of superconductors depends only on a few properties of the metals they are made of. The idea that only a few combinations of microscopic details combine into emergent properties is shared with "sloppy" models in other fields.

Scientists testing the Large Underground Xenon (LUX) experiment have reported promising scientific and technological results today. They have set up the experiment to identify the nature of dark matter, an invisible substance that physicists believe is all around us, making up most of the matter in the universe, but that barely has any effect on our every-day lives.

Three generations of University of Chicago physicists have spent decades painstakingly cataloging the characteristics of a family of exotic particles called kaons, and an upcoming experiment promises to be the most precise one yet. "Chicago played a major role in each of the key advancements in kaon physics—every single one," said Yau Wah, professor in physics.

30 Oct 2013 Manchester scientists working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) have reported the world's most precise measurement of the difference between matter and antimatter – known as CP violation – during the decay of charm particles. The team, which included colleagues from the universities of Oxford and Glasgow, presented their findings at the sixth International Workshop for Charm Physics hosted by The University of Manchester's School of Physics and Astronomy in September and have now submitted their publication .

Many people use tree ring records to see into the past. But redwoods - the iconic trees that are the world's tallest living things - have so far proven too erratic in their growth patterns to help with reconstructing historic climate. A University of Washington researcher has developed a way to use the trees as a window into coastal conditions, using oxygen and carbon atoms in the wood to detect fog and rainfall in previous seasons.

Posted under: Education , Engineering , Learning , News Releases , Research , Science , Technology During spring break the last five years, a University of Washington class has headed to the Nevada desert to launch rockets and learn more about the science and engineering involved. Sometimes, the launch would fail and a rocket smacked hard into the ground.

A common blue pigment used in the £5 note could have an important role to play in the development of a quantum computer, according to a paper published today in the journal Nature . The pigment, copper phthalocyanine (CuPc), which is similar to the light harvesting section of the chlorophyll molecule, is a low-cost organic semiconductor that is found in many household products.

Scientists identify a mathematical 'crystal ball' that may predict calamities Neuroscientists have come up with a mathematical equation that may help predict calamities such as financial crashes in economic systems and epileptic seizures in the brain. The University of Sussex-led study, published this week (24 October 2013) in Physics Review Letters , could have far-reaching implications.

New MIT-led experiment could finally shed light on the mysteries of dark matter. Dark matter, believed by physicists to outweigh all the normal matter in the universe by more than five to one, is by definition invisible. But certain features associated with dark matter might be detectable, according to some of the many competing theories describing this elusive matter.

Errors in the human genetic code that arise from mismatched nucleotide base pairs in the DNA double helix can lead to cancer and other disorders. In microbes, such errors provide the basis for adaption to environmental stress. As one of the first responders to these genetic errors, a small protein called MutS - for "Mutator S" - controls the integrity of genomes across a wide range of organisms, from microbes to humans.

An international team, including Oxford University scientists, has used the powerful X-ray laser at the US Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to create atomic-scale movies of 'the ultimate spring'. Normally, when a metal is crushed suddenly, as during an impact, it deforms and buckles, with the atoms re-arranging themselves in a complex way to take up the deformed shape - and usually only small pressures allow a metal to 'bounce back' like a spring.

Scientists at the University of Birmingham have discovered a stellar system in our Galaxy where the spin of its 'red giant' star and the orbits of its planets are misaligned, according to research published in the journal Science today (17 October 2013). In our own solar system the rotation of the Sun and the orbits of the planets are perfectly aligned, with the spin axis of the Sun at right angles to the orbits of the planets.