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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. When former Pennsylvania pastor Arthur Schirmer was convicted in January of murder in the 2008 death of his second wife, a Penn State vehicle crash expert's analysis had helped sort out the facts of the story. Schirmer, a former pastor from Reeders, in northeast Pennsylvania, had claimed that he was driving his wife to the emergency room for treatment of jaw pain when he swerved to avoid a deer and hit a guide rail.

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.

Researchers at the University of Warwick and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust have completed a study that may lead to clinicians being able to more accurately predict which patients will suffer from the side effects of radiotherapy. Gastrointestinal side effects are commonplace in radiotherapy patients and occasionally severe, yet there is no existing means of predicting which patients will suffer from them.

The trolls are winning. Pick a story about some aspect of science, any story, scroll down to the blog comments and let the bashing begin: "Wonder how much taxpayer cash went into this 'deep' study?" "I think you can take all these studies by pointy headed scientists, 99 percent of whom are socialists and communists, and stick them where the sun don't shine." "Yawn.

A recent scientific study has shown that pre-stun shocks in commercial broiler processing significantly affect carcase and meat quality as well as bird welfare. A report of a study into the incidence and effect of pre-stun shocks in a commercial broiler processing plant using an electrical waterbath stunning system, the most commonly used system in the UK, has been published in Animal Welfare , the journal of the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW).

A new way of growing graphene without the defects that weaken it and prevent electrons from flowing freely within it could open the way to large-scale manufacturing of graphene-based devices with applications in fields such as electronics, energy, and healthcare. A team led by Oxford University scientists has overcome a key problem of growing graphene - a one atom-thick layer of carbon - when using an established technique called chemical vapour deposition, that the tiny flakes of graphene form with random orientations, leaving defects or 'seams' between flakes that grow together.

Each step on our spintronic staircase is only a few atoms high. I find it amazing that by using nanotechnology not only can we build structures with such precision in the lab but also using advanced laser instruments we can actually see the data climbing this nano-staircase step by step." —Professor Russell Cowburn, lead researcher of the study from the Cavendish Laboratory, the University of Cambridge's Department of Physics Scientists from the University of Cambridge have created, for the first time, a new type of microchip which allows information to travel in three dimensions.

Using innovative lab-on-a-chip technology, Samuel K. Sia, PhD , associate professor of biomedical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has developed a way to not only check a patient's HIV status anywhere in the world with just a finger prick, but also synchronize the results automatically and instantaneously with central healthcare records-10 times faster, the researchers say, than the benchtop ELISA, a broadly used diagnostic technique.

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.

Researchers have found new evidence that metabolic stress can increase the onset of atrial arrhythmias, such as atrial fibrillation (AF), a common heart condition that causes an irregular and often abnormally fast heart rate. The findings may pave the way for the development of new therapies for the condition which can be expected to affect almost one in four of the UK population at some point in their lifetime.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. Norfolk Southern Railway No. 999 is the first all-electric, battery-powered locomotive in the United States. But when one of the thousand lead-acid batteries that power it dies, the locomotive shuts down. To combat this problem, a team of Penn State researchers is developing more cost-effective ways to prolong battery life.

A completely new method of manufacturing the smallest structures in electronics could make their manufacture thousands of times quicker, allowing for cheaper semiconductors. Instead of starting from a silicon wafer or other substrate, as is usual today, researchers have made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended nanoparticles of gold in a flowing gas.

One of the most promising innovations of nanotechnology has been the ability to perform rapid nanofabrication using nanometer-scale tips. Heating such tips can dramatically increase fabrication speeds, but high speed and high temperature have been known to blunt their atomically sharp points. Now, research conducted by a team that included the University of Pennsylvania's Robert Carpick and Tevis Jacobs has created a new type of nano-tip for thermal processing, which is made entirely made out of diamond.

Electronic circuits are typically integrated in rigid silicon wafers, but flexibility opens up a wide range of applications. In a world where electronics are becoming more pervasive, flexibility is a highly desirable trait, but finding materials with the right mix of performance and manufacturing cost remains a challenge.

To build the computer chips of the future, designers will need to understand how an electrical charge behaves when it is confined to metal wires only a few atom-widths in diameter. Now, a team of physicists at McGill University, in collaboration with researchers at General Motors R&D, have shown that electrical current may be drastically reduced when wires from two dissimilar metals meet.

Posted under: Engineering , Environment , News Releases , Research , Science , Technology If two birds meet deep in the forest, does anybody hear? Until now, nobody did, unless an intrepid biologist was hiding underneath a bush and watching their behavior, or the birds happened to meet near a research monitoring station.

Computers may be getting faster every year, but those advances in computer speed could be dwarfed if their 1's and 0's were represented by bursts of light, instead of electricity. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have made an important advance in this frontier of photonics, fashioning the first all-optical photonic switch out of cadmium sulfide nanowires.

Analysis of data from the National Science Foundation's South Pole Telescope , for the first time, more precisely defines the period of cosmological evolution when the first stars and galaxies formed and gradually illuminated the universe. The data indicate that this period, called the epoch of reionization, was shorter than theorists speculated — and that it ended early.

A revolutionary tool created by scientists at the University of Sheffield has enabled researchers to analyse nanometer-sized devices without destroying them for the first time, opening the door to a new wave of technologies. The nuclear magnetic resonance apparatus - developed by the University's Department of Physics and Astronomy - will allow for further developments and new applications for nanotechnology which is increasingly used in harvesting solar energy, computing, communication developments and also in the medical field.

Heat transfer in everything from computer chips to powerplants could be improved through new analysis of surface textures. 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.