Technology

Civil War Stories Forever Preserved

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Faded and sometimes tattered, letters and journal entries written 150 years ago by hopeful and homesick Civil War soldiers will forever be preserved online, thanks to digitization by Michigan State University archivists. (more…)

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Another Advance on the Road to Spintronics

Berkeley Lab Researchers Unlock Ferromagnetic Secrets of Promising Materials

Spintronic technology, in which data is processed on the basis of electron “spin” rather than charge, promises to revolutionize the computing industry with smaller, faster and more energy efficient data storage and processing. Materials drawing a lot of attention for spintronic applications are dilute magnetic semiconductors – normal semiconductors to which a small amount of magnetic atoms is added to make them ferromagnetic. Understanding the source of ferromagnetism in dilute magnetic semiconductors has been a major road-block impeding their further development and use in spintronics. Now a significant step to removing this road-block has been taken.

A multi-institutional collaboration of researchers led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), using a new technique called HARPES, for Hard x-ray Angle-Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy, has investigated the bulk electronic structure of the prototypical dilute magnetic semiconductor gallium manganese arsenide. Their findings show that the material’s ferromagnetism arises from both of the two different mechanisms that have been proposed to explain it. (more…)

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Medication Beliefs Strongly Affect Individuals’ Management of Chronic Diseases, MU Expert Says

Health practitioners should use behavior-change tactics so patients take medications as prescribed

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Nearly half of patients taking medications for chronic conditions do not strictly follow their prescribed medication regimens. Failure to use medications as directed increases patients’ risk for side effects, hospitalizations, reduced quality of life and shortened lifespans. Now, a University of Missouri gerontological nursing expert says patients’ poor adherence to prescribed medication regimens is connected to their beliefs about the necessity of prescriptions and concerns about long-term effects and dependency.

MU Assistant Professor Todd Ruppar found that patients’ beliefs about the causes of high blood pressure and the effectiveness of treatment alternatives significantly affected their likelihood of faithfully following prescribed medication regimens. In his pilot study, Ruppar focused on older patients’ adherence to medication treatments that control high blood pressure, a condition that affects nearly 70 million adults in the U.S. and can lead to heart disease and stroke. (more…)

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How Galaxies Grow Up

A study of 544 star-forming galaxies shows that disk galaxies like our own Milky Way reached their current state as orderly rotating pinwheels much later than previously thought, long after much of the universe’s star formation had ceased

Galaxies are in no hurry to grow up, a team of astronomers has discovered. A comprehensive study of hundreds of galaxies observed by the Keck telescopes in Hawaii and NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has revealed an unexpected pattern of change that extends back 8 billion years, or more than half the age of the universe. (more…)

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Diana Davis dances her Ph.D.

What if the Ph.D. research becomes too complex for words? Dozens of candidates turned to the language of dance in the fifth annual national contest sponsored by Science Magazine. Diana Davis, a graduate student in mathematics, won the first-ever “Dance Your Ph.D.” prize in pure mathematics. (more…)

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Driving Force

UD prof leads photonics revolution to help researchers access high-tech foundry services

Michael Hochberg joined the University of Delaware in the spring of 2012 as an associate professor in electrical and computer engineering.

An industry leader in silicon photonics and large-scale photonic-electronic integration, Hochberg is renowned for establishing Optoelectronic Systems Integration in Silicon (OpSIS), a high-tech foundry service for silicon photonics in which the community shares the cost of fabricating complex chip-scale systems across many projects. (more…)

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