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.........

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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".........

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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.........

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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.........

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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.........

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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.........

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January 24, 2007, 5:29 PM CT

Step Toward Building Molecular Computers

A team of UCLA and California Institute of Technology chemists reports in the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Nature the successful demonstration of a large-scale, "ultra-dense" memory device that stores information using reconfigurable molecular switches. This research 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.

The 160-kilobit memory device uses interlocked molecules manufactured in the UCLA laboratory of J. Fraser Stoddart, director of the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), who holds UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences and who was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II less than a month ago.

A bit, or binary digit, is the basic unit of information storage and communication in digital computing. A kilobit is equal to 1,000 bits and is commonly used for measuring the amount of data that is transferred in one second between two telecommunication points.

The research published in Nature describes the fabrication and operation of a memory device. The memory is based on a series of perpendicular, crossing nanowires, similar to a tic-tac-toe board, with 400 bottom wires and another 400 crossing top wires. Sitting at each crossing of the tic-tac-toe structure and serving as the storage element are approximately 300 bistable rotaxane molecules. These molecules may be switched between two different states, and each junction of a crossbar can be addressed individually by controlling the voltages applied to the appropriate top and bottom crossing wires, forming a bit at each nanowire crossing.........

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January 17, 2007, 8:15 PM CT

Obstacle From Mass Production Of Tiny Circuits Removed

As they eliminate tiny air bubbles that form when liquid droplets are molded into intricate circuits, a Princeton-led team is dissolving a sizable obstacle to the mass production of smaller, cheaper microchips.

Led by Stephen Chou, the Joseph C. Elgin Professor of Engineering at Princeton, the team worked to troubleshoot one form of nanoimprint lithography, a revolutionary method invented by Chou in the 1990s. Nanoimprint uses a nanometer-scale mold to pattern computer chips and other nanostructures, and is in marked contrast to conventional methods that use beams of light, electrons or ions to carve designs onto devices.

This technique allows for the creation of circuits and devices with features that are not much longer than a billionth of a meter, or nanometer -- more than 10 times smaller than is possible in today's mass-produced chips, yet more than 10 times cheaper. Because of its unique capabilities and reasonable cost, nanoimprinting is a key solution to the future manufacturing of computer chips and a broad range of nanodevices for use in optics, magnetic data storage and biotechnology, among other disciplines.

In dispensing-based nanoimprinting, liquid droplets on the surface of a silicon wafer are pressed into a pattern, which quickly hardens to form the desired circuitry. This technique is more attractive to manufacturers than some other forms of nanoimprinting because it does not need to be done in an expensive vacuum chamber. However, the widespread use of the technique has been hindered by the formation of gas bubbles that distort the intended pattern.........

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January 11, 2007, 5:04 AM CT

High school physics enrollment record high

More U.S. high-school students are taking physics than ever before, and the number of physics bachelor's degree recipients in the nation has increased 31 percent since 2000, as per new data presented today by the American Institute of Physics (AIP). In addition, physics bachelor's degree recipients are eight times more likely to go on to earn any kind of PhD than those with non-physics bachelor's, the new data show. Michael Neuschatz, senior research associate at AIP's Statistical Research Center, will present these new data in a physics education symposium entitled --"Overcoming Gravity"-- at this week's joint meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) and the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

"Good physics education is the backbone of a first-class workforce in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics," said Toufiq Hakim, AAPT's Executive Director, who organized the "Overcoming Gravity" session. "The future of U.S. economic competitiveness hinges on strong science education in our country".

Presenting new data that encourage this outlook, Neuschatz will show that enrollment in high school physics classes is up and likely to continue increasing. The data show more than 30 percent of high school seniors have taken physics classes, more than ever before. This percentage has been rising steadily since the mid-1980s.........

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January 10, 2007, 9:31 PM CT

But Now You Can Touch It

Engineers have developed a system that uses a simple water purification technique that can eliminate 100 percent of the microbes in New Orleans water samples left from Hurricane Katrina. The technique makes use of specialized resins, copper and hydrogen peroxide to purify tainted water.

The system--safer, cheaper and simpler to use than a number of other methods--breaks down a range of toxic chemicals. While the method cleans the water, it doesn't yet make the water drinkable. However, the method may eventually prove critical for limiting the spread of disease at disaster sites around the world.

National Science Foundation-funded scientists Vishal Shah and Shreya Shah of Dowling College in Long Island, New York, collaborated with Boris Dzikovski of Cornell University and Jose Pinto of New York's Polytechnic University in Brooklyn to develop the technique. They will publish their findings in Environmental Pollution.

"After the disaster of Hurricane Katrina, researchers have had their backs against the wall trying to develop safeguards," said Shah. "No one knows when a similar situation may arise. We need to develop a therapy for decontaminating flood water before it either comes in contact with humans or is pumped into natural reservoirs".

The therapy system that the scientists are in the process of developing is simple: a polymer sheet of resins containing copper is immersed in the contaminated flood water. The addition of hydrogen peroxide generates free radicals on the polymer. The free radicals remain bound to the sheet, where they come in contact with bacteria and kill them.........

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