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Asian users experience poor fit in products used on the head, like helmets. The reason is that designers only use data from Western heads. To solve this problem, product designer and researcher Roger Ball set up the award winning SizeChina project, in which 2000 Chinese heads were scanned. On Tuesday May 17th he defends his PhD-thesis on this subject at the Delft University of Technology.
Do we buy things because of their attributes, their price, or out of brand loyalty? This was one of the questions asked by researchers from the University of Seville (US), who studied families' behaviour in putting together their shopping basket. They did this by studying their consumption patterns for ground coffee and tomato puree.
When people think about how academia links with external organisations they often think in terms of commercialisation of research. But the results of a large-scale survey of academics across all disciplines in every UK university, and a parallel survey of all sectors of UK business, tell a very different story.
Customers often “like” businesses on Facebook, but when it comes to those companies’ ads on the social networking site, “dislike” is closer to the mark, says a University of Florida study of college-age users.
New research by a University of Illinois law and labor expert shows that in labor disputes between professional athletes and owners, courts have consistently failed to maintain a clear separation between antitrust and labor law.
It doesn't matter if you're black or white. If you're interested in celebrity and entertainment news, you're more likely to start using Twitter, according to a new Northwestern University study.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A statistical phenomenon, called the Wisdom of Crowds, happens when a group of individuals make guesses and the average of the guesses reveal accurate average answers. However, researchers have discovered that when the individuals are made aware of other participant’s guesses, there is a clear disruption to the accuracy of the guesses.
Nanotechnology news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Such highly coveted technical capabilities as the observation of single catalytic processes in nanoreactors, or the optical detection of low concentrations of biochemical agents and gases are an important step closer to fruition. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in collaboration with researchers at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, report the first experimental demonstration of antenna-enhanced gas sensing at the single particle level. By placing a palladium nanoparticle on the focusing tip of a gold nanoantenna, they were able to clearly detect changes in the palladium's optical properties upon exposure to hydrogen.
Physics news
(PhysOrg.com) -- Magnetic materials in which the north and south poles can be reversed with an electric field may be ideal candidates for low-power electronic devices, such as those used for ultra-high data storage. But finding a material with the right combination of magnetoelectric properties has proven a difficult challenge. Using a theoretical approach, Cornell theorists might have found one.
A Toledo, Ohio, physicist has implemented a new mathematical approach that accelerates some complex computer calculations used to simulate the formation of micro-thin materials.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Does helium-4 become a "supersolid" near absolute zero? What previous researchers thought might be a supersolid transition is better explained by changes in the solid's resistance to shearing, according to new research by J. C. Séamus Davis, the J.G. White Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences. The research is reported in the May 13 issue of Science.
(PhysOrg.com) -- In the push toward ever-smaller and ever-faster data transmission technology, a team of Stanford electrical engineers has produced a nanoscale laser that is much faster and vastly more energy efficient than anything available today.
Physicists said on Tuesday they believed that by the end of 2012 they could determine whether a theorised particle called the Higgs boson, which has unleashed a gruelling decades-long hunt, exists or not.
(PhysOrg.com) -- By combining high pressure with high temperature, Livermore researchers have created a nanocyrstalline diamond aerogel that could improve the optics something as big as a telescope or as small as the lenses in eyeglasses.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The quest to develop a so-called room-temperature superconductor – one that exhibits lossless electronic transmission – has long fueled both popular and scientific imagination. At the same time, however, ongoing efforts to raise the still-frigid temperatures at which certain materials display superconductivity are making incremental progress. That research – historically based on lattice and/or spin-based interpretations of electron pairing – has now taken a potentially significant step forward thanks to a theoretical view of how electron orbital pairing in a class of materials known as ferropnictides may provide a new road to high transition temperature superconductivity.
Space & Earth news
(PhysOrg.com) -- An exhaust cloud forms around Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida as space shuttle Endeavour soars into the sky on the STS-134 mission to the International Space Station.
Farmers who rotate pulse crops with wheat have reduced energy usage and a higher wheat yield than farmers growing wheat exclusively, according to an MSU study.
With summer around the corner, millions worldwide will head to pristine beaches and waterways. However, with items such as bottles, cans and other debris washing up on U.S. shores each year, the University of Georgia and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, have teamed up to create a new, innovative cell phone reporting mechanism to combat the marine debris problem.
Can you bring something back from the dead? Scientists in Sweden say that if it's at the bottom of the sea and oxygenation is present, you can. Oxygenation gives ecosystems the boost they need to come to life and helps nature deal with eutrophication, the bloom of phytoplankton in water.
NASA has selected Southwest Research Institute's MAss Spectrometer for Planetary EXploration (MASPEX) for technology development funding. Originally offered as part of the Primitive Material Explorer (PriME) mission proposal, the mass spectrometer was selected to further advance NASA's capability for evaluating the chemical composition of comets.
The USDA Forest Service and the Southern Group of State Foresters released the first phase of the Southern Forest Futures Project report on Tuesday, May 17, which identifies areas forest managers will focus on to maintain southern forests in the coming years.
Britain on Tuesday unveiled plans to cut its carbon emissions by 50 percent from 1990 levels by 2025, saying the proposal marked a significant step forward in its efforts to fight climate change.
Nitrogen pollution in our coastal ecosystems, the result of widespread use of synthetic agricultural fertilizers and of human sewage, leads to decreased water transparency, the loss of desirable fish species, and the emergence of toxic phytoplankton species—such as the algae behind the renowned "red tides" that kill fish.
When the shuttle Endeavor launched Monday morning there was a little bit of BYU on board. A BYU research team designed a highly specialized type of circuit that could improve the reliability of current NASA technology.
To understand the long-term effects of a prolonged tropical storm in the Panama Canal watershed, Robert Stallard, staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and research hydrologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, and Armando Ubeda, the LightHawk Mesoamerica program manager, organized four flights over the watershed to create a digital map of landslide scars.
A tropical forest is easy to cut down, but getting it back is another story. In a special issue of the journal Forest Ecology and Management, leading researchers at the Smithsonian in Panama and across Latin America offer new insights on reforestation based on 20 years of research.
(Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have developed new methods for studying how environmental factors and climate affect giant kelp forest ecosystems at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales.
Evidence of plagiarism and complaints about the peer-review process have led a statistics journal to retract a federally funded study that condemned scientific support for global warming.
Still hoping for that job as an astronaut, even as the last days of the space shuttle are winding down? You may want to practice your Russian.
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The potential health consequences of the nuclear crisis at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant are not equal to those caused by the disaster at Chernobyl, Japanese health officials said Tuesday
The US space agency said Tuesday it is preparing to launch a satellite to observe levels of salt on the surface of the world's oceans and how changes in salinity may be linked to future climate.
(AP) -- Groggy from a late night watching the Yankees, frigid from a chilled airplane cabin, Stefanie Gordon stirred to action after the pilot's announcement. Lifting her iPhone to the plane's window, she captured an otherworldly image that rocketed around the globe as fast as her subject: Space shuttle Endeavour soaring from a bank of clouds, its towering plume of white smoke lighting the azure sky.
(PhysOrg.com) -- A tumbling comet nucleus with a changing rotational rate has been observed for the first time, according to a new paper by a Planetary Science Institute researcher.
The mass extinction of marine life in our oceans during prehistoric times is a warning that the Earth will see such an extinction again because of high levels of greenhouse gases, according to new research by geologists.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have long debated about the origin of carbon in Earth’s oldest sedimentary rocks and how it might signal the remnants of the earliest forms of life on the planet. New research by a team including five scientists from Carnegie’s Geophysical Laboratory and Department of Terrestrial Magnetism discovered that carbon samples taken from ancient Canadian rock formations are younger than the sedimentary rocks surrounding them, which were formed at least 3.8 billion years ago. Their results, published online May 15 by Nature Geoscience, indicate that the carbon contained in such ancient rocks should not be assumed to be as old as the rocks, unless it can be shown to have had the same metamorphic history as the host rock.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Applying statistical analysis to a truly inspirational idea, economic researchers Xi Chen and William D. Nordhaus used nighttime satellite images taken by the U.S. Department of Defense over the period 1992-2008 to gauge the economic vitality of regions of the Earth that have little to no reliable sources of information to indicate how a country or region is doing; going on the assumption that lots of bright city lights generally indicates a lot of economic activity.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Japanese geologist Tetsuji Onoue, of Kagoshima University, after studying chert rock (a form of microcrystalline quartz) he’d taken from Ajiro Island off the southern coast of Honshu, Japan, has discovered the oldest known bits of space dust to have fallen on the Earth. At an estimated age of 240 million years old, the microscopic iron rich spheroids, are some 50 million years older than any other space dust ever found on Earth.
Chemistry news
(PhysOrg.com) -- The separation of olefins and paraffin, two hydrocarbon compounds in petroleum waste streams, is a heavy expense for the petrochemical industry. The existing technology consumes a lot of energy because the olefin-paraffin pairs have similar boiling and evaporation properties, making it difficult and costly to separate them. Companies are looking for techniques that reduce energy consumption and that economically recycle such waste streams.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Terpenoids are a very large and diverse class of compounds which includes certain hormones, flavors, and drugs, such as steroids, cinnamon or menthol, and antibacterials. They are found in all living organisms, but their biosynthesis is not yet fully understood. To learn more about how plants or animals make these important natural products, chemists typically turn to labeling experiments.
Researchers at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute (UOHI) have identified a novel gene in the nucleus of muscle and brain cells that affects heart development and the aging process. Their investigation brings the promise of new treatments for an old, failing heart.
The development and successful testing of a method for unreeling the strands of silk in wild silkworm cocoons could clear the way for establishment of new silk industries not only in Asia but also in vast areas of Africa and South America. The report appears in ACS' journal Biomacromolecules.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Victims of third-degree burns and other traumatic injuries endure pain, disfigurement, invasive surgeries and a long time waiting for skin to grow back. Improved tissue grafts designed by Cornell scientists that promote vascular growth could hasten healing, encourage healthy skin to invade the wounded area and reduce the need for surgeries.
Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine have published a study that offers a new understanding of a protein critical to physiological processes involved in major diseases such as diabetes and cancer. This work could help scientists design drugs to battle these disorders.
(PhysOrg.com) -- The growing number of research and development efforts focused on microfluidics speaks to the technology’s promise of a potentially broad range of applications, largely in highly-integrated single-chip medical devices. However, the materials currently used to fabricate these labs-on-a-chip and other microfluidic devices have significant limitations, including absorption of small nonpolar and weakly polar molecules, adsorption of biomolecules, and the material’s molecules leaching into the microfluidic channel. The good news is that researchers have overcome these obstacles using microfluidic channels made entirely of Teflon, which supports cellular activity similar to that found in current materials. Moreover, whole-Teflon microchannels have gas permeability levels that permit cells to be cultured in-channel for extended periods of time.
Provided by PhysOrg.com
