Nicolas Chaumont a software engineer at the Natural Capital Project; and Randi Figueroa Sandi a field assistant in Copal de Agua Buena in Costa rica.
After combining equal amounts of RTIL and naturally occurring Bentonite clay into a composite paste the researchers sandwiched it between layers of reduced graphene oxide
or strongly recommend data be stored in an online database and others do said not Drew. The most widely used publicly accessible databases include Genbank Treebase and Dryad.
Most journals require DNA sequences be deposited in Genbank but comparatively few require the sequence alignments to be archived publicly.
There are databases for archiving but some of their interfaces are somewhat cumbersome and if you haven't previously done this it can appear to be a daunting task.
and reveals that individuals from the Eastern African population have adapted to be able to digest milk but via different mutations in their genetic material.
http://academy. asm. org/index. php/browse-all-reports/800-how-microbes-can-help-feed-the-world?
Dr Heard will present the team's findings to INTECOL at Excel London on Thursday 22 august 2013.
and Tobacco Free Teens a smartphone app--both are new approaches to keeping young people free from the grips of nicotine addiction.
solar-lighting technology cookstoves drip irrigation and a line of Nokia cellphones. From their research as well as interviews with product designers the researchers drew up guidelines on how to design for emerging markets.
and distributed in developing countries by Nokia. The company designed phones with a number of features that turned out to have wide appeal for microentrepreneurs:
Multiple contact lists allowed cellphone owners to rent out their phones to others and a time display marking the length of each call served as a method of metering--an easy way for cellphone owners to charge per call.
Nokia also provided reliability via dedicated service vans that traveled to rural Indian villages to fix broken phones.
This combination of features that help to make customers money along with a service plan that established a continuing relationship with the company likely swayed customers toward Nokia's phones.
Yang and Austin-Breneman found that service and reliability were also big factors for small farmers in choosing a system for drip irrigation--an efficient means of delivering small amounts of water directly to the base of each plant.
For example while Nokia was able to invest millions of dollars in developing a service network a startup may not have such resources.
Applied to the cells of plants (intracellular) via the seed it provides every cell in the plant with the ability to fix nitrogen.
These proteins are produced naturally in Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) a bacterium which is applied to crops as a natural insecticide on some organic farms
The interviewees were all taking part in the annual phone Victorian Smoking and Health Survey
The carbon emissions generated by a search on Google or a post on Facebook are related mostly to three things:
and Finance citing a recent account by Google. Big outward-facing companies whose business primarily is cloud computing have solved the sustainability problem for data centers.
In addition to Google and Facebook companies like Amazon ebay and Expedia have instituted most or all of the changes motivated by cost publicity
and pressure from environmental organizations. ebay even discloses its data center efficiency publicly at dse. ebay. com. These companies were hearing a lot of noise from Greenpeace and others.
and others supplying the vast data that feed the Googles and Expedias of the world.
#Graphene onion rings have delicious potentialconcentric hexagons of graphene grown in a furnace at Rice university represent the first time anyone has synthesized graphene nanoribbons on metal from the bottom up--atom by atom.
As seen under a microscope the layers brought onions to mind said Rice chemist James Tour until a colleague suggested flat graphene could never be like an onion.
Usually graphene grown in a hot furnace by chemical vapor deposition starts on a seed--a speck of dust or a bump on a copper or other metallic surface.
Experiments in Tour's lab to see how graphene grows under high pressure and in a hydrogen-rich environment produced the first rings.
Under those conditions Tour Rice theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and their teams found that the entire edge of a fast-growing sheet of graphene becomes a nucleation site
The edge lets carbon atoms get under the graphene skin where they start a new sheet.
But because the top graphene grows so fast it eventually halts the flow of carbon atoms to the new sheet underneath.
The bottom stops growing leaving a graphene ring. Then the process repeats. The mechanism relies on that top layer to stop carbon from reaching the bottom so easily Tour said.
The Tour lab pioneered the bulk manufacture of single-atom-thick graphene nanoribbons in 2009 with the discovery that carbon nanotubes could be unzipped chemically into long thin sheets.
The atomic configuration at the edge helps determine graphene's electrical properties. The edges of hexagonal graphene onion rings are zigzags
which make the rings metallic. The big news here he said is that we can change relative pressures of the growth environment of hydrogen
This is dramatically different from regular graphene. Graduate student Zheng Yan a member of Tour's lab and lead author of the paper discovered the new route to nanoribbons
while experimenting with graphene growth under hydrogen pressurized to varying degrees. The sweet spot for rings was at 500 Torr he said.
Yan also determined the top sheet of graphene could be stripped away with argon plasma leaving stand-alone rings.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
Martin suggests product developers go beyond the traditional consumer trials and get consumers to absorb the product into their daily life over an extend period of time.
Microbial genome representation in the databases is skewed quite said Chris Rinke DOE JGI postdoctoral fellow and first author of the study.
With gigabytes of flash memory becoming steadily cheaper a 1k nonvolatile memory unit has little practical use.
Douglas Natelson a professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering and Krishna Palem the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computer science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of statistics.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
It allows extremely fast imaging speeds of up to 50 frames per second via the combined use of dedicated acquisition and reconstruction strategies.
A national database maintained by the American Nonsmokers'Rights Foundation shows that from January 1993 to June 2011 U s. smoking bans were put in effect in 843 parks and on 150 beaches.
Wei a molecular biologist also has extensive knowledge of computer science and he is adept at applying it to large biological data sets.
#Not-weak knots bolster carbon fiberlarge flakes of graphene oxide are the essential ingredient in a new recipe for robust carbon fiber created at Rice university.
Credit goes to the unique properties of graphene oxide flakes created in an environmentally friendly process patented by Rice a few years ago.
Like with pitch the weak Van der waals force holds the graphene flakes together. Unlike pitch the atom-thick flakes have an enormous surface area
Because graphene oxide has very low bending modulus it thinks there's no knot there he said.
The Rice researchers also created a second type of fiber using smaller 9-micron flakes of graphene oxide.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
There are natural sources of iodine that can be incorporated into the diet. We are trialling the use of seaweed as a source of iodine
A beautiful new species Stenoloba solaris from Chinascientist describe a new striking species of moth from China with an engaging wing pattern.
The new species Stenoloba solaris has inspired its name by the orange circular patch on its wings that resembles the rising sun. The study was published in the open access journal Zookeys.
#Unzipped nanotubes unlock potential for batteriesresearchers at Rice university have come up with a new way to boost the efficiency of the ubiquitous lithium ion (LI) battery by employing ribbons of graphene that start as carbon nanotubes.
Proof-of-concept anodes--the part of the battery that stores lithium ions--built with graphene nanoribbons (GNRS)
Since then the researchers have figured out how to make graphene nanoribbons in bulk and are moving toward commercial applications.
In the new experiments the Rice lab mixed graphene nanoribbons and tin oxide particles about 10 nanometers wide in a slurry with a cellulose gum binder and a bit of water spread it on a current collector
Graphene nanoribbons make a terrific framework that keeps the tin oxide nanoparticles dispersed and keeps them from fragmenting during cycling he said.
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of computer science at Rice.
and smoking behaviour and therefore the total ban on tobacco advertising advocated by the World health organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control data from this study support this measure because only exposure to tobacco advertisements predicted smoking initiation
For example Ecker invited the expertise of Carnegie mellon University computer scientist Ziv Bar-Joseph transcriptional expert Timothy Hughes from the University of Toronto as well as computational biologist Trey Ideker
and genomicist Bing Ren from the University of California San diego. The study also represents a milestone for Ecker who has devoted his career to understanding the power exerted by plant-based ethylene.
Gary Hon Dwight Kuo Trey Ideker and Bing Ren from the University of California San diego;
Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt for short. Bt proteins used for decades in sprays by organic farmers kill some devastating pests
but are considered environmentally friendly and harmless to people. However some scientists feared that widespread use of these proteins in genetically modified crops would spur rapid evolution of resistance in pests.
When Bt crops were introduced first the main question was how quickly would pests adapt and evolve resistance said Tabashnik head of the UA department of entomology who led the study.
Analyzing data from 77 studies of 13 pest species in eight countries on five continents the researchers found well-documented cases of field-evolved resistance to Bt crops in five major pests
Three of the five cases are in the United states where farmers have planted about half of the world's Bt crop acreage.
but in the best cases effectiveness of Bt crops has been sustained more than 15 years. According to the paper both the best and worst outcomes correspond with predictions from evolutionary principles.
The factors we found to favor sustained efficacy of Bt crops are in line with what we would expect based on evolutionary theory said Carriã re explaining that conditions are most favorable
inheritance of resistance is recessive--meaning insects survive on Bt plants only if have two copies of a resistance gene one from each parent
Refuges consist of standard non-Bt plants that pests can eat without ingesting Bt toxins. Computer models showed that refuges should be especially good for delaying resistance
Planting refuges near Bt crops reduces the chances that two resistant insects will mate with each other making it more likely they will breed with a susceptible mate yielding offspring that are killed by the Bt crop.
which evolved resistance rapidly to Bt cotton in India but not in the U s. Tabashnik said.
Same pest same crop same Bt protein but very different outcomes. He explained that in the southwestern U s. scientists from the EPA academia industry
One of the paper's main conclusions is that evaluating two factors can help to gauge the risk of resistance before Bt crops are commercialized.
or this pest will probably evolve resistance quickly to this Bt crop. Two leading experts on Bt crops welcomed publication of the study.
Kongming Wu director of the Institute for Plant Protection at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing said This review paper will be very helpful for understanding insect resistance in agricultural systems
and improving strategies to sustain the effectiveness of Bt crops. Fred Gould professor of entomology at North carolina State university commented:
Although the new report is the most comprehensive evaluation of pest resistance to Bt crops so far Tabashnik emphasized that it represents only the beginning of using systematic data analyses to enhance understanding and management of resistance.
and to analyze their characteristics The hope is that MDS could be joined with graphene which has no band gap
Last year Lou and Ajayan revealed their success at making intricate patterns of intertwining graphene and hbn among them the image of Rice's owl mascot.
The study of graphene prompted research into a lot of 2-D materials; molybdenum disulfide is just one of them.
Essentially we are trying to span the whole range of band gaps between graphene which is a semimetal and the boron nitride insulator.
MDS is distinct from graphene and hbn because it isn't exactly flat. Graphene and hbn are flat with arrays of hexagons formed by their constituent atoms.
But while MDS looks hexagonal when viewed from above it is actually a stack with a layer of molybdenum atoms between two layers of sulfur atoms.
We would like to stick graphene and MDS together (with hbn) into what would be a novel 2-D semiconductor component.
or graphene Najmaei said. We started learning that we could control that nucleation by adding artificial edges to the substrate
With ORNL's images in hand they were not only able to calculate the energies of a much more complex set of defects than are found in graphene
and seawater formed highly stable C# -S-H and Al-tobermorite insuring strength and longevity.
#Even with defects, graphene is strongest material in the worldin a new study published in Science Columbia Engineering researchers demonstrate that graphene
even if stitched together from many small crystalline grains is almost as strong as graphene in its perfect crystalline form.
Graphene consists of a single atomic layer of carbon arranged in a honeycomb lattice. Our first Science paper in 2008 studied the strength graphene can achieve
if it has no defects--its intrinsic strength says James Hone professor of mechanical engineering who led the study with Jeffrey Kysar professor of mechanical engineering.
But defect-free pristine graphene exists only in very small areas. Large-area sheets required for applications must contain many small grains connected at grain boundaries
This our second Science paper reports on the strength of large-area graphene films grown using chemical vapor deposition (CVD)
and we're excited to say that graphene is back and stronger than ever. The study verifies that commonly used methods for postprocessing CVD-grown graphene weaken grain boundaries resulting in the extremely low strength seen in previous studies.
The Columbia Engineering team developed a new process that prevents any damage of graphene during transfer.
We substituted a different etchant and were able to create test samples without harming the graphene notes the paper's lead author Gwan-Hyoung Lee a postdoctoral fellow in the Hone lab. Our findings clearly correct the mistaken consensus that grain boundaries of graphene
are weak. This is great news because graphene offers such a plethora of opportunities both for fundamental scientific research and industrial applications.
In its perfect crystalline form graphene (a one-atom-thick carbon layer) is the strongest material ever measured as the Columbia Engineering team reported in Science in 2008--so strong that as Hone observed it would take an elephant balanced on a pencil to break through a sheet
of graphene the thickness of Saran wrap. For the first study the team obtained small structurally perfect flakes of graphene by mechanical exfoliation or mechanical peeling from a crystal of graphite.
But exfoliation is a time-consuming process that will never be practical for any of the many potential applications of graphene that require industrial mass production.
Currently scientists can grow sheets of graphene as large as a television screen by using chemical vapor deposition (CVD) in
which single layers of graphene are grown on copper substrates in a high-temperature furnace. One of the first applications of graphene may be as a conducting layer in flexible displays.
But CVD graphene is stitched'together from many small crystalline grains--like a quilt--at grain boundaries that contain defects in the atomic structure Kysar explains.
These grain boundaries can severely limit the strength of large-area graphene if they break much more easily than the perfect crystal lattice
and so there has been intense interest in understanding how strong they can be. The Columbia Engineering team wanted to discover what was making CVD graphene so weak.
In studying the processing techniques used to create their samples for testing they found that the chemical most commonly used to remove the copper substrate also causes damage to the graphene severely degrading its strength.
Their experiments demonstrated that CVD graphene with large grains is exactly as strong as exfoliated graphene showing that its crystal lattice is just as perfect.
And more surprisingly their experiments also showed that CVD graphene with small grains even when tested right at a grain boundary is about 90%as strong as the ideal crystal This is an exciting result for the future of graphene
because it provides experimental evidence that the exceptional strength it possesses at the atomic scale can persist all the way up to samples inches
or more in size says Hone. This strength will be invaluable as scientists continue to develop new flexible electronics and ultrastrong composite materials.
Strong large-area graphene can be used for a wide variety of applications such as flexible electronics
and strengthening components--potentially a television screen that rolls up like a poster or ultrastrong composites that could replace carbon fiber.
Or the researchers speculate a science fiction idea of a space elevator that could connect an orbiting satellite to Earth by a long cord that might consist of sheets of CVD graphene
since graphene (and its cousin material carbon nanotubes) is the only material with the high strength-to-weight ratio required for this kind of hypothetical application.
The team is excited also about studying 2d materials like graphene. Very little is known about the effects of grain boundaries in 2d materials Kysar adds.
Our work shows that grain boundaries in 2d materials can be much more sensitive to processing than in 3d materials.
This is due to all the atoms in graphene being surface atoms so surface damage that would normally not degrade the strength of 3d materials can completely destroy the strength of 2d materials.
However with appropriate processing that avoids surface damage grain boundaries in 2d materials especially graphene can be nearly as strong as the perfect defect-free structure.
The most recent finds are being incorporated into a global database of environmental archives and may provide important information about a number of research questions:
Wikipedia).*)**BP=Before Present: a time-scale that is used in archaeology geology and other sciences to date events in the past.
Wikipedia). ) Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Swiss Federal Institute for Forest Snow and Landscape Research WSL.
#Diamonds, nanotubes find common ground in graphenewhat may be the ultimate heat sink is only possible because of yet another astounding capability of graphene.
A diamond film/graphene/nanotube structure was one result of new research carried out by scientists at Rice university
when graphene is used as a middleman surfaces considered unusable as substrates for carbon nanotube growth now have the potential to do so.
By its very nature one-atom-thick graphene is all surface area. The same could be said of carbon nanotubes which are basically rolled-up tubes of graphene.
A vertically aligned forest of carbon nanotubes grown on diamond would disperse heat like a traditional heat sink but with millions of fins.
Graphene and metallic nanotubes are also highly conductive in combination with metallic substrates they may also have advanced uses in electronics he said.
To test their ideas the Honda team grew various types of graphene on copper foil by standard chemical vapor deposition.
They then transferred the tiny graphene sheets to diamond quartz and other metals for further study by the Rice team.
They found that only single-layer graphene worked well and sheets with ripples or wrinkles worked best.
The researchers think graphene facilitates nanotube growth by keeping the catalyst particles from clumping. Ajayan thinks the extreme thinness of graphene does the trick.
In a previous study the Rice lab found graphene shows materials coated with graphene can get wet
but the graphene provides protection against oxidation. That might be one of the big things about graphene that you can have a noninvasive coating that keeps the property of the substrate
but adds value he said. Here it allows the catalytic activity but stops the catalyst from aggregating.
Testing found that the graphene layer remains intact between the nanotube forest and the diamond or other substrate.
On a metallic substrate like copper the entire hybrid is highly conductive. Such seamless integration through the graphene interface would provide low-contact resistance between current collectors
and the active materials of electrochemical cells a remarkable step toward building high-power energy devices said Rice research scientist
The temperate and boreal forests of Europe and North america have been repeated subject to pathogen outbreaks over the last 100 years said Martyn Waller from Kingston University.
Graphene a single sheet of carbon atoms is the thinnest electrical conductor we know. With the addition of the monolayer molybdenum disulfide and other metal dichalcogenides we have all the building blocks for modern electronics that must be created in atomically thin form.
For example we can now imagine sandwiching two different monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides between layers of graphene to make solar cells that are only eight atoms thick--20 thousand times smaller than a human hair!
and prepared a description using Google docs. In this triumph for citizen science talents from around the globe collaborated by using new media in making the discovery.
and research scientist Elsa Olivetti broke down the various steps involved in both materials extraction
Olivetti Kirchain and their colleagues found that for these small light components such processes are energy-intensive
which we hadn't seen in similar products Olivetti adds. Part of that is because it's a synthetic product.
Kirchain and Olivetti view their results as a guide for companies looking to evaluate the impact of similar products.
which makes a lot of sense Olivetti says. But we tried to identify a set of characteristics that would point you to making sure you were also looking at the manufacturing side--when it matters.
and deposited into the GISAID database (http://platform. gisaid. org/epi3/frontend). Genetic analysis of these isolates revealed high homology across all eight gene segments.
Fauquet and his colleagues in the GCP21--an alliance of scientists developers donors and industry representatives--are gathering at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy this week for a conference dedicated to declaring war on cassava viruses in Africa.
while it would take several years for the disease to spread across the continent via whiteflies alone infected stem cuttings could spark outbreaks in new areas overnight.
Just as our cell phones will need more advanced technology to carry more information plants need better
Constructed by IBM the 120-rack Sequoia supercomputer has a peak performance of 25 petaflops per second
A petaflop is a quadrillion floating point operations per second. In addition to breaking the record for computing speed the research team set a record for the most highly parallel discrete event simulation with 7. 86 million simultaneous tasks using 1. 97 million cores.
Authors of the study are Peter Barnes Jr. and David Jefferson of LLNL and CCNI Director and computer science professor Chris Carothers and graduate student Justin Lapre of Rensselaer.
http://www. nap. edu/catalog. php? record id=18344story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by National Academy of Sciences.
The scientists also tested the Mosoy catalyst anchored on sheets of graphene--an approach that has proven effective for enhancing catalyst performance in electrochemical devices such as batteries supercapacitors fuel cells and water electrolyzers.
and Materials Science Department the scientists were able to observe the anchored Mosoy nanocrystals on 2d graphene sheets.
The graphene-anchored Mosoy catalyst surpassed the performance of pure platinum metal. Though not quite as active as commercially available platinum catalysts the high performance of graphene-anchored Mosoy was extremely encouraging to the scientific team.
The direct growth of anchored Mosoy nanocrystals on graphene sheets may enhance the formation of strongly coupled hybrid materials with intimate seamless electron transfer pathways
thus accelerating the electron transfer rate for the chemical desorption of hydrogen from the catalyst further reducing the energy required for the reaction to take place Sasaki said.
The scientists are conducting additional studies to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the interaction at the catalyst-graphene interface
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