ScienceDaily Technology Headlines
for Saturday, November 27, 2010
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A high-yield biomass alternative to petroleum for industrial chemicals (November 26, 2010) -- Chemical engineers report that they have developed a way to produce high-volume chemical feedstocks including benzene, toluene, xylenes and olefins from pyrolytic bio-oils, the cheapest liquid fuels available today derived from biomass. The new process could reduce or eliminate industry's reliance on fossil fuels to make industrial chemicals worth an estimated 0 billion annually. ... > full story
First evidence for magnetic field in protostar jet: Magnetism common to all cosmic jets? (November 26, 2010) -- Highly-sensitive observations with the Very Large Array show the first-ever evidence for a magnetic field in the jet of a young star. This gives such protostellar jets a common characteristic with jets from quasars and microquasars. ... > full story
Gender gap in physics exams reduced by simple writing exercises, study finds (November 26, 2010) -- Women are underrepresented and on average perform more poorly than men in introductory physics. But a recent study finds that this gap arises predominantly from differential preparation prior to college and psychological factors, rather than differences in ability. ... > full story
Pulsating star mystery solved in rare alignment of Cepheid variable and another star (November 26, 2010) -- By discovering the first double star where a pulsating Cepheid variable and another star pass in front of one another, an international team of astronomers has solved a decades-old mystery. The rare alignment of the orbits of the two stars in the double star system has allowed a measurement of the Cepheid mass with unprecedented accuracy. The new result shows that the prediction from stellar pulsation theory is spot on, while the prediction from stellar evolution theory is at odds with the new observations. ... > full story
When Belgium sneezes, the world catches a cold (November 26, 2010) -- As the Eurozone continues to wobble, a new analysis of countries' economic interconnectedness finds that some of the countries with the greatest potential to cause a global crash have surprisingly small gross domestic production. ... > full story
New guidance issued for first responders collecting suspected biothreat agents (November 26, 2010) -- The US National Institute of Standards and Technology and a coalition of federal, state and local agencies and other organizations have updated a standard and provided overall guidance and recommendations to help the nation's first responders and law enforcement agencies deal with collecting and managing samples of suspicious powders. ... > full story
Imaging with neutrons: Magnetic domains shown for the first time in 3-D (November 25, 2010) -- Although they exist in almost every magnetic material, you cannot see them: magnetic domains are microscopically small regions of uniform magnetization. Scientists have now developed a method by which they can image the full spatial structure of magnetic domains -- even deep within materials. ... > full story
Massive galaxies formed when universe was young, new findings suggest (November 25, 2010) -- Scientists have found a number of very massive, highly luminous galaxies that existed almost 12 billion years ago when the universe was only about 1.5 billion years old. These findings appear to disagree with the latest predictions from models of galaxy formation and evolution. ... > full story
Short, on-chip light pulses will enable ultrafast data transfer within computers (November 25, 2010) -- Electrical engineers generated short, powerful light pulses on a chip -- an important step toward the optical interconnects that will likely replace the copper wires that carry information between chips within today's computers. Electrical engineers recently developed the first ultra compact, low power pulse compressor on a silicon chip to be described in the scientific literature. ... > full story
The physics of coffee rings (November 25, 2010) -- Researchers have analyzed the stain patterns left behind by coffee droplets on a surface and have presented their "coffee ring" models. ... > full story
New imaging technique accurately finds cancer cells, fast (November 25, 2010) -- The long, anxious wait for biopsy results could soon be over, thanks to a new tissue-imaging technique. Researchers have demonstrated the novel microscopy technique, called nonlinear interferometric vibrational imaging, on rat breast-cancer cells and tissues. It produced easy-to-read, color-coded images of tissue, outlining clear tumor boundaries, with more than 99 percent confidence -- in less than five minutes. ... > full story
Optimizing large wind farms (November 25, 2010) -- Researchers have developed a model to calculate the optimal spacing of wind turbines for the very large wind farms of the future. ... > full story
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