When Rachel Aronson travels this month to Alaska, she and a local research assistant will interview people who are in danger of being displaced by climate change. She will also send about 100 postcards to her funders.
Aronson is among a growing number of University of Washington students, faculty and staff who are using online campaigns to pay for their research. Crowdsourcing uses the Internet to broadcast a question and pool the answers; crowd funding uses the Internet to post an idea and ask people to pony up money to make it a reality. (more…)
For years, many scientists had thought that plate tectonics existed nowhere in our solar system but on Earth. Now, a UCLA scientist has discovered that the geological phenomenon, which involves the movement of huge crustal plates beneath a planet’s surface, also exists on Mars.
“Mars is at a primitive stage of plate tectonics. It gives us a glimpse of how the early Earth may have looked and may help us understand how plate tectonics began on Earth,” said An Yin, a UCLA professor of Earth and space sciences and the sole author of the new research. (more…)
A third of Earth’s organisms live in rocks and sediments, but their lives have been a mystery
By some estimates, a third of Earth’s organisms live in our planet’s rocks and sediments, yet their lives are almost a complete mystery.
This week, the work of microbiologist James Holden of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and colleagues shines a light into this dark world.
In the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they report the first detailed data on methane-exhaling microbes that live deep in the cracks of hot undersea volcanoes. (more…)
Thin, conductive films are useful in displays and solar cells. A new solution-based chemistry developed at Brown University for making indium tin oxide films could allow engineers to employ a much simpler and cheaper manufacturing process.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — In a touch-screen display or a solar panel, any conductive overlay had better be clear. Engineers employ transparent thin films of indium tin oxide (ITO) for the job, but a high-tech material’s properties are only half its resume. They must also be as cheap and easy to manufacture as possible. In a new study, researchers from Brown University and ATMI Inc. report the best-ever transparency and conductivity performance for an ITO made using a chemical solution, which is potentially the facile, low-cost method manufacturers want.
“Our technology is already at the performance level for application in resistive touch screens,” said Jonghun Lee, a Brown chemistry graduate student and lead author of the paper posted online Aug. 1 by the Journal of the American Chemical Society. (more…)
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Dividing tasks among different individuals is a more efficient way to get things done, whether you are an ant, a honeybee or a human.
A new study by researchers at Michigan State University’s BEACON Center for the Study of Evolution in Action suggests that this efficiency may also explain a key transition in evolutionary history, from single-celled to multi-celled organisms.
The results, which can be found in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, demonstrate that the cost of switching between different tasks gives rise to the evolution of division of labor in digital organisms. In human economies, these costs could be the mental shift or the travel time required to change from activity to another. (more…)
Direct Imaging by Berkeley Lab Researchers Confirms the Importance of Electron-Electron Interactions in Graphene
Perhaps no other material is generating as much excitement in the electronics world as graphene, sheets of pure carbon just one atom thick through which electrons can race at nearly the speed of light – 100 times faster than they move through silicon. Superthin, superstrong, superflexible and superfast as an electrical conductor, graphene has been touted as a potential wonder material for a host of electronic applications, starting with ultrafast transistors. For the vast potential of graphene to be fully realized, however, scientists must first learn more about what makes graphene so super. The latest step in this direction has been taken by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley.
Michael Crommie, a physicist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley’s Physics Department, led a study in which the first direct observations at microscopic lengths were recorded of how electrons and holes respond to a charged impurity – a single Coulomb potential – placed on a gated graphene device. The results provide experimental support to the theory that interactions between electrons are critical to graphene’s extraordinary properties. (more…)
If a group of tourists piled out of a transport vehicle onto the surface of Mars, they’d no doubt start snapping pictures wildly. NASA’s Curiosity rover, set to touch down on the Red Planet the evening of Aug. 5 PDT (early morning EDT), will take a more careful approach to capturing its first scenic views.
The car-size rover’s very first images will come from the one-megapixel Hazard-Avoidance cameras (Hazcams) attached to the body of the rover. Once engineers have determined that it is safe to deploy the rover’s Remote Sensing Mast and its high-tech cameras, a process that may take several days, Curiosity will begin to survey its exotic surroundings.(more…)
Professor and students study how microbial life changes along the river
The mercury is pushing 100, but professor Michael Sadowsky and two assistants leave the indoor coolness for the bank of the Mississippi River as it flows by the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus.
The three men send a bucket splashing into the current and haul back a water sample. That doesn’t affect the river much, but information locked away in bacteria from the sample may tell them a great deal about how the river’s microbial communities change along its course through Minnesota and how human activity affects them.(more…)
