UD faculty members discuss 2013 prize-winners at annual symposium
Today’s chemists might work at a computer as often as in a laboratory, medical researchers studying conditions such as diabetes rely on understanding how cells carry and deposit materials within the body, and average investors in the market increasingly buy index funds to average out the short-term ups and downs of individual stocks. (more…)
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has passed the milestone of 100,000 shots fired by its laser. It uses the laser as one way to check which chemical elements are in rocks and soils. (more…)
Berkeley Researchers Develop Technique For Imaging Individual Carbon Nanotubes
Despite their almost incomprehensibly small size – a diameter about one ten-thousandth the thickness of a human hair – single-walled carbon nanotubes come in a plethora of different “species,” each with its own structure and unique combination of electronic and optical properties. Characterizing the structure and properties of an individual carbon nanotube has involved a lot of guesswork – until now.
Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have developed a technique that can be used to identify the structure of an individual carbon nanotube and characterize its electronic and optical properties in a functional device. (more…)
Splitting water into its components, two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, is an important first step in achieving carbon-neutral fuels to power our transportation infrastructure – including automobiles and planes.
Now, North Carolina State University researchers and colleagues from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have shown that a specialized coating technique can make certain water-splitting devices more stable and more efficient. Their results are published online in two separate papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (more…)
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has obtained the highest-resolution movie yet of a unique six-sided jet stream, known as the hexagon, around Saturn’s north pole. (more…)
There’s no peak in sight – fitness peak, that is – for the bacteria in Richard Lenski’s Michigan State University lab.
Lenski, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, has been running his evolutionary bacteria experiment for 25 years, generating more than 58,000 generations. In a paper published in the current issue of Science, Michael Wiser, lead author and MSU zoology graduate student in Lenski’s lab, compares it to hiking. (more…)
Schmidt Ocean Institute (SOI) has begun working with the Deep Submergence Laboratory at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) to design and build the world’s most advanced robotic undersea research vehicle for use on SOI’s ship Falkor. The new vehicle will be capable of operating in the deepest known trenches on the planet, including the nearly 11,000-meter-deep Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench. The design will capitalize on lessons learned from past WHOI vehicle designs, as well as advanced technologies developed for DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, the submersible and science platform that explorer and director James Cameron piloted to Challenger Deep in 2012 and donated to WHOI in 2013.
On Sunday, December 8th, Victor Zykov, SOI’s director of research, will publicly discuss the project for the first time at a University-National Oceanographic Laboratory System’s (UNOLS) Deep Submergence Science Committee meeting in San Francisco. (more…)
Human activities, a changing climate and natural disasters are rapidly altering the face of our planet. Now, with NASA’s Images of Change iPad application, users can get an interactive before-and-after view of these changes.
The app presents pairs or sets of images of places around the world that have changed dramatically. Some of these locations have suffered a disaster, such as a fire or tsunami, or illustrate the effects of human activities, such as dam building or urban growth. Others document impacts of climate change such as persistent drought and rapidly receding glaciers. (more…)
