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High-speed pipeline revs up biomass analysis

3/11/10 | News

Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Lab are analyzing 1,000 samples of biomass at a time, finding which one, combined with the right enzyme, most eagerly gives up its sugars to be converted into biofuel. Their work is part of an effort to meet federal regulations that require the U.S. produce 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022.

Study validates general relativity on cosmic scale, existence of dark matter

Mar 11 | News

An analysis of more than 70,000 galaxies by physicists in the U.S. and Switzerland demonstrates that the universe—at least up to a distance of 3.5 billion light years from Earth—plays by the rules set out 95 years ago by Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity.

Conquering the chaos in multiprocessor computers

Mar 11 | News

Computers should not play dice. That, to paraphrase Einstein, is the feeling of a Univ. of Washington computer scientist with a simple manifesto: If you enter the same computer command, you should get back the same result.

World crude oil production may peak a decade earlier than predicted

Mar 11 | White Papers

The American Chemical Society has made public a recent study by Kuwaiti scientists in the journal Energy & Fuels that predicts world conventional crude oil production will peak in 2014. This is about 10 years earlier than other forecasts, particularly the Hubbert model, which accurately predicted peak production in the U.S. in 1970.

Intentional environmental variations increase result validity in mouse testing

Mar 10 | News

For decades, the traditional practice in animal testing has been standardization, but a study involving Purdue Univ. has shown that adding as few as two controlled environmental variables to preclinical mice tests can greatly reduce costly false positives, the number of animals needed for testing and the cost of pharmaceutical trials.

Pressure sensors keep vacuum panels at their insulating best

Mar 10 | News

Vacuum panels are particularly good for insulating buildings—as long as the vacuum does not leak. A tiny pressure sensor developed by engineers at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany constantly checks the condition of the vacuum and indicates whether the insulation effect is still present.

Broadband wireless from a desk lamp?

Mar 10 | News

The Optical Society of America has highlighted an upcoming presentation at an annual optics conference San Diego in which the researchers from Germany will describe a method for encoding a wireless broadband signal through the light generated by a common household lamp. Visible-frequency signals have a tremendous advantage in bandwidth, and modulation would be so fast no one would notice the flickering.

Nature gives clues to a way to break down a common greenhouse gas

Mar 10 | News

A recent discovery in understanding how to chemically break down the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into a useful form opens the doors for scientists to wonder what organism is out there—or could be created—to accomplish the task.

Cotton threads: As good as a metal wire to conduct electricity?

Mar 10 | News

A Cornell Univ. team has developed cotton threads that can conduct electric current as well as a metal wire can, yet remain light and comfortable enough to give a whole new meaning to multi-use garments.

Evidence: Snowball Earth was iced to the equator

Mar 10 | News

Ancient tropical rocks that now reside in the remote northern reaches of Canada tell the tale: about 716.5 million years ago the Earth lay bound in a layer of ice that limited life to eukaryotes. Strangely, this glaciation—history’s most extensive at 5 million years, say researchers at NSF and Harvard—occurred at about the same time that animals appear in the fossil record.

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