February 1, 2007, 7:53 PM CT

Vocal Smoke Alarms

This is not your playing ball but it is much more beyond that. The ball is a KidSmart Vocal Smoke Alarm, which are particularly designed to save your kids life from fire around in house.

New studies say that sleeping children respond more quickly to your smoke alarms personalized with parent's voice than the conventional ringing alarms. This KidSmart smoke detector lets you record your message specific to your child.

The Vocal Smoke Alarm includes an alarm tone, a vocal message, and a bright light ring that illuminates during drills and when there will be so much chaos your sleeping child will definitely wake-up. Sale Price: $99.00.

The alarm works on batteries which should be changed after every six months.........

Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

January 31, 2007, 9:05 PM CT

Continuing Tomato Sequence Project

An international project led by Cornell and the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research (BTI) at Cornell has received $1.8 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to continue sequencing the tomato genome and to create a database of genomic sequences and information on the tomato and related plants.

The grant for the International Tomato Sequencing Project, a collaboration of scientists from nine other countries, will enable U.S. scientists to continue their work. In 2004 the NSF provided $4 million for the U.S. part of the research.

Sequencing the tomato genome is the first step in creating the comprehensive International Solanaceae Genomics Project (SOL) Genomics Network database. This will tie together maps and genomes of all plants in the Solanaceae family, also called nightshades, which includes the potato, eggplant, pepper and petunia and is closely correlation to coffee from the Rubiaceae family.

The public database will help scientists ask fundamental questions: Have changes from a common ancestor brought about the attributes of crop species? What are the functions of specific genes? How has domestication changed genes? Which plants might be good candidates for genetically engineered improvements for growing crops?

Cornell scientists are close to completing a toolkit of resources about tomato and solanaceae species (some currently available in the database) to make the sequencing possible. These resources include genetic maps, DNA libraries, individual gene sequences, DNA markers and associated information, comparative mapping data to go from one species to another as sequences are added, and tools to query and search this information.........

Posted by: Jessica      Read more         Source

January 31, 2007, 8:35 PM CT

Stretches The Limits Of Composite Materials

In an advance that could lead to composite materials with virtually limitless performance capabilities, a University of Wisconsin-Madison scientist has dispelled a 50-year-old theoretical notion that composite materials must be made only of "stable" individual materials to be stable overall.

Writing in the Feb. 2 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, Engineering Physics Professor Walter Drugan proves that a composite material can be stable overall even if it contains a material having a negative stiffness, or one unstable by itself-as long as it is contained within another material that is sufficiently stable. "It's saying you're allowed to use a much wider range of properties for one of the two materials," he says.

Comprising everything from golf clubs and bicycle frames to bridge beams and airplane wings, composite materials - or materials made by combining multiple distinct materials - deliver advantages over conventional materials including high stiffness, strength, lightness, hardness, fracture resistance or economy. "The idea is that you have one material with some great properties, but it also has some disadvantages, so you combine it with another material to try to ameliorate the disadvantages and get the best of both," says Drugan.

Until now, materials engineers adhered to proven mathematical limits on composite performance, he says. "For example, if you give me two materials and one has one stiffness and the other has another stiffness, there are rigorous mathematical bounds that show that with these two materials, you cannot make a material that has a stiffness greater than this upper bound," says Drugan. "However, all these theoretical limits are based on the assumption that every material in the composite has a positive stiffness-in other words, that every material is stable by itself".........

Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

January 30, 2007, 9:42 PM CT

Liquid Crystals Stabilised

Dutch-sponsored researcher Ioan Paraschiv has stabilised new columnar discotic liquid crystals by making use of hydrogen bonds. This stabilisation approach yielded well-ordered, column-shaped aggregates that can transport charges. Liquid crystals are materials that combine the properties of a liquid with those of crystalline solids. They show a middle phase, known as mesophase or liquid crystalline phase, in which the material has unique characteristics that can be used in liquid crystal display (LCD) screens and solar cells. One use of columnar discotic liquid crystals is charge transport in photovoltaic solar cells, where a high degree of order within the mesophase is required.

Ioan Paraschiv investigated whether it is possible to stabilise columnar discotic liquid crystals using hydrogen bonds. For this, he prepared columnar discotic liquid crystals based on triphenylene core. He stabilised the ordering in the mesophase by realising a synergy between various bonding interactions. The mesophases of the newly-formed columnar discotic liquid crystals were found to be highly stable. Moreover, the material was still easy to process, due to its high solubility in organic solvents. This combination of stability and ease of processing is especially important for the use of these materials in different applications.........

Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

January 30, 2007, 7:39 PM CT

Sources of the World's Tiny Pollutants

Pinpointing pollutant sources is an important part of the ongoing battle to improve air quality and to understand its impact on climate. Researchers using NASA data recently tracked the path and distribution of aerosols -- tiny particles suspended in the air -- to link their region of origin and source type with their tendencies to warm or cool the atmosphere.

By altering the amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface, aerosols influence both regional and global climate, but their impact is difficult to quantify because most only stay airborne for about a week, while greenhouse gases can persist in the atmosphere for decades. As per a research findings published Jan. 24 in the American Geophysical Union's Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, scientists investigated the sources of aerosols and how different types of aerosols influence climate.

"This study offers details on the aerosol source regions and emission source types that policy makers could target to most effectively combat climate change," said Dorothy Koch, lead author and atmospheric scientist at Columbia University and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), New York.

Using a GISS computer model that includes a variety of data gathered by NASA and other U.S. satellites, the scientists simulated realistic aerosol concentrations of important aerosol types in the atmosphere and studied the amount of light and heat they absorb and reflect over several regions around the globe.........

Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

January 30, 2007, 6:38 PM CT

Blood-cell-sized Memory Device

Scientists have created an ultra-dense memory device the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to store the Declaration of Independence and still have space left over. The accomplishment represents an important step toward the creation of molecular computers that are much smaller and could be more powerful than today's silicon-based computers.

"Using molecular components for memory or computation or to replace other electronic components holds tremendous promise," said J. Fraser Stoddart, who is the Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Science at UCLA and director of the California NanoSystems Institute.

The 160,000 memory bits are arranged like a large tic-tac-toe board: 400 silicon wires crossed by 400 titanium wires, each 16 nanometers wide, with a layer of dumbbell-shaped molecular switches sandwiched between the crossing wires.

"This research is one of the only examples of building large molecular memory in a chip at an extremely high density, testing it, and working in an architecture that is practical, where it is obvious how information can be written and read," Stoddart said.

Stoddart, his collaborator James R. Heath, the Elizabeth W. Gilloon Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, and their research teams report the work in the January 25 issue of the journal Nature.........

Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

January 30, 2007, 4:43 AM CT

Hot Stuff On Saturn

UCL scientists have reported findings in the journal 'Nature' that rule out a long-held theory about why the Gas Giants like Saturn have such hot outer atmospheres.

Along with colleagues from Boston University, the team from UCL Physics & Astronomy observed that the upper atmospheres of the giant planets in our solar system do not heat up in the same way as here on Earth.

A simple calculation to give the expected temperature of a planet's upper atmosphere balances the amount of sunlight absorbed by the energy lost to the lower atmosphere. However, the calculated values don't tally with the actual observations of the gas giants - they are consistently much hotter.It has long been thought that the culprit behind the heating process was the ionosphere, being driven by the planet's magnetic field, or magnetosphere. On the Earth this is seen in the auroral region where the spectacular Aurora Borealis, or Northen Lights, show where this energy transfer is taking place.

By analogy, it was believed the heating effect on the gas giants would be similar. The 'auroral zone' heating would then somehow be distributed to lower latitudes, though this is difficult to do because the high spin rates of these planets tends to prevent north-south movement.

The UCL team was investigating this redistribution when they reached their surprising conclusion. By using numerical models of Saturn's atmosphere, the scientists observed that there, the net effects of the winds driven by polar energy inputs is not to heat the atmosphere, but to actually cool it equatorward of the heated region.........

Posted by: Brooke      Read more         Source

January 29, 2007, 9:00 PM CT

Major Breakthrough In Laser Diode Development

A team of scientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara led by Shuji Nakamura, winner of the 2006 Millennium Technology Prize, has reported a major breakthrough in laser diode development.

The researchers, from the Solid State Lighting and Display Center in UCSB's College of Engineering, have achieved lasing operation in nonpolar gallium nitride (GaN) semiconductors and demonstrated the world's first nonpolar blue-violet laser diodes.

The nonpolar blue-violet laser diodes have numerous commercial applications, including high-density optical data storage for high definition displays and video, optical sensing, and medical applications. Because of the shorter wavelength of emission in these devices, they can accommodate higher densities of optical storage than conventional red-laser based systems.

Nakamura, a professor in the Department of Materials at UC Santa Barbara's College of Engineering, is internationally known for his invention of revolutionary new light sources: blue, green, and white light-emitting diodes and the blue laser diode. He and two of his UCSB faculty colleagues, professors Steven DenBaars and James Speck, directed the work of two graduate students, Mathew Schmidt and Kwang Choong Kim, who fabricated the new nonpolar blue-violet laser diodes.........

Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

January 28, 2007, 9:43 PM CT

Improving Energy Efficiency Of Ethanol Production

Carnegie Mellon University Chemical Engineers have devised a new process that can improve the efficiency of ethanol production, a major component in making biofuels a significant part of the U.S. energy supply.

Carnegie Mellon scientists have used advanced process design methods combined with mathematical optimization techniques to reduce the operating costs of corn-based bio-ethanol plants by more than 60 percent.

The key to the Carnegie Mellon strategy involves redesigning the distillation process by using a multi-column system together with a network for energy recovery that ultimately reduces the consumption of steam, a major energy component in the production of corn-based ethanol.

"This new design reduces the manufacturing cost for producing ethanol by 11 percent, from $1.61 a gallon to $1.43 a gallon,'' said Chemical Engineering Professor Ignacio E. Grossmann, who completed the research with graduate students Ramkumar Karuppiah, Andreas Peschel and Mariano Martin. "This research also is an important step in making the production of ethanol more energy efficient and economical.''.

For a long time, corn-based ethanol was considered a questionable energy resource. Today, 46 percent of the nation's gasoline contains some percentage of ethanol. And demand is driven by a federal mandate that 5 percent of the nation's gasoline supply - roughly 7.5 billion gallons - contain some ethanol by 2012.........

Posted by: Kevin      Read more         Source

January 26, 2007, 4:32 AM CT

Assessing Diet And Exercise In Adolescents

Do adolescents get enough exercise and eat the right foods? Is there too much fat in their diets? According to a research findings published in the February 2007 issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, researchers analyzed the behavior of almost 900 11-to-15 year-olds and found that nearly 80% had multiple physical activity and dietary risk behaviors, almost half had at least three risk behaviors, and only 2% met all four of the health guidelines in the study.

Using both physical measurements and surveying techniques, four behaviors were assessed: physical activity, television viewing time, percent calories from fat, and daily servings of fruits and vegetables. In addition, parental health behaviors were sampled.

Fifty-five percent of adolescents did not meet the physical activity guideline, although significantly more boys (59%) than girls (33.6%) did meet the standard. About 30% exceeded 2 hours of television viewing time and the majority of the sample did not meet dietary standards. Only 32% and 11.9% of the sample met the recommendations for fat consumption and servings of fruits and vegetables, respectively.

There was some evidence that parents' health behaviors were associated with adolescents' health behaviors. For the girls, two parent health behaviors-never smoking and meeting fruit and vegetable guidelines-were associated with fewer adolescent risk behaviors. Parents' number of risk behaviors was weakly but positively associated with a higher number of risk behaviors in boys.........

Posted by: Sean      Read more         Source