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.
Halas Rice's Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering professor of physics professor of chemistry and professor of biomedical engineering is one of the world's most-cited chemists.
Neumann created a version of nanoshells that converts a broad spectrum of sunlight--including both visible and invisible bandwidths--directly into heat.
and the autoclave setup we reported in this paper can do said that Halas her team hopes to work with waste-treatment pioneer Sanivation to conduct the first field tests of the solar steam waste sterilizer at three sites in Kenya.
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.
and to analyze their characteristics The hope is that MDS could be joined with graphene which has no band gap
and hexagonal boron nitride (hbn) an insulator to form field-effect transistors integrated logic circuits photodetectors and flexible optoelectronics.
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
#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.
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!
To do this they built tiny transistors the most basic component in all of electronics out of the crystals
The nanostructured black silicon coating features very low reflectivity meaning that a larger portion of the Sun's radiation can be exploited.
whereas transistors for example are located on the surface of the silicon disk and accordingly impurities cannot be controlled in solar cells by means of the same methods as those used in microelectronics.
In these areas women and children often spend hours each day hauling heavy containers of water from the local stream for drinking and to water crop-growing sites up to a half-mile away.
Since 2006 students with the Johns Hopkins chapter of Engineers Without Borders-USA (EWB-USA) have journeyed to Africa to help install low-cost ram pumps devices that date back to the 1700s
The focus is on a particularly inexpensive appropriate and robust type of ram pump designed by a South african named David Alcock.
and community gardeners in other regions to run their own ram pump irrigations systems without relying on outside assistance.
and a global leader in providing access to chemistry-related research through its multiple databases peer-reviewed journals and scientific conferences.
or monthly at numerous monitoring sites during the period from 1980-2010 to track wet deposition of nitrate and sulfate near several U s. and East Asian cities.
To test this idea Warudkar used a software package that's commonly used to model industrial chemical processes.
plug-in hybrid electric vehicles such as the Chevrolet Volt; battery electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf;
http://www. nap. edu/catalog. php? record id=18264story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by National Academy of Sciences.
The technology can be used in power plants paper mills ethanol processors and other manufacturing facilities. As a carbon-negative technology BECCS takes advantage of the innate ability of trees grasses
Using computer models Moreira found that from 1975 to 2007 ethanol production from sugar cane in Brazil resulted in a net-negative capture of 1. 5 metric tons of CO2 per cubic meter of ethanol produced.
Aizenberg is also Director of the Kavli Institute for Bionano Science and Technology at Harvard and a Core Faculty member at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
which is part of the National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network supported by the U s. National Science Foundation.
The five teams used different computer models that had been developed independently. Their computer models included not just energy use and production but also the broader economy and the climate system.
These integrated assessment models accounted for energy use the economy and climate and the way these different systems interact with one another.
The technique believed to be the first of its kind uses advanced computer technology to analyze photographs taken of root systems in the field.
The imaging and software are designed to give scientists the statistical information they need to evaluate crop improvement efforts.
We've produced an imaging system to evaluate the root systems of plants in field conditions said Alexander Bucksch a postdoctoral fellow in the Georgia Tech School of Biology and School of Interactive Computing.
The research is supported by the National Science Foundation's Plant Genome Research Program (PGRP) and Basic Research to Enable Agriculture Development (BREAD) the Howard Buffett Foundation the Burroughs Wellcome Fund and the Center for Data analytics at Georgia Tech.
The roots are photographed then against a black background using a standard digital camera pointed down from a tripod.
The resulting images are uploaded then to a server running software that analyzes the root systems for more than 30 different parameters--including the diameter of tap roots root density the angles of brace roots and detailed measures
and have spreadsheets of results ready for study the next day. In the lab you are just seeing part of the process of root growth said Bucksch who works in the group of Associate professor Joshua Weitz in the School of Biology and School of Physics at Georgia Tech.
Developing the digital photography technique required iterative refinements to produce consistent images that could be analyzed using computer programs.
We have a host of excellent software applications and production technology at our disposal but it is the stockperson who knows its cattle
Our laboratory has ongoing research with the USDA Animal Plant Health Inspection Service into remote-reporting Internet-based technologies
In a presentation today at the Association for Computing Machinery's Mobicom 2014 conference in Maui Hawaii researchers from Rice's Wireless Network Group will unveil a multiuser multiantenna transmission scheme for UHF a portion
of the radio spectrum that is traditionally reserved for television broadcasts. The holy grail of wireless communications is to go both fast and far said lead researcher Edward Knightly professor and chair of Rice's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Usually you can have one or the other but not both. Wireless local area networks today can serve data very fast
but one brick wall and they're done. UHF can travel far but it hasn't had the high capacity of Wifi.
This provides the best of both worlds he said of the new technology. Rice's technology combines several proven technologies that are used already widely in wireless data transmission.
One of these is multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) a scheme that employs multiple antennae to boost data rates without the need for additional channels or transmitter power.
In effect MIMO allows for a larger wireless pipeline and the technology is standard in the latest generation of wireless routers
UHF is referred often to as the beach front portion of the wireless spectrum because the signals travel for miles and one popular idea for the liberated portion of the spectrum is for open wireless access points like those used for today's Wifi hotspots.
Using UHF for broadband Internet is particularly appealing for rural areas where wired brandband is unavailable.
When comparing UHF and Wifi there's usually a tradeoff of capacity for range or vice versa said Rice graduate student Narendra Anand the lead author of the new study.
Imagine that the Wifi access point in your home or office sends data down a 100-lane highway
but it's only one mile long. For UHF the highway is 100 miles long but only three or four lanes wide.
Based on Rice's wireless open-access research platform or WARP the system allowed the team to perform a side-by-side comparison of multiuser MIMO for UHF and for both 2. 4 gigahertz and 5. 8 gigahertz Wifi.
Based on over-the-air experiments in a range of indoor and outdoor operating environments we found that UHF-band multiuser MIMO compared favorably
Dr. Mahalingam is studying how wildland fire propagates in an effort to be able to more accurately model such fires via physically based computational models.
when wildland fires will be forecast using computer models just as accurately as we now can forecast the next day's weather.
Everyone from government agencies to developers to forest managers to firefighters --and even potential evacuees--could benefit from reliable physically sound fire prediction tools.
) In a computer model we are using very small volumes of space on the order of one cubic millimeter on one end to a cubic meter on the other end he says.
Shrubs burned in controlled settings are being compared to computer modeled shrub fires to assess predictive qualities.
#New test reveals purity of graphene: Scientists use terahertz waves to spot contaminantsgraphene may be tough
Because it's so easy to accidently introduce impurities into graphene labs led by physicists Junichiro Kono of Rice
They expect the finding to be important to manufacturers considering the use of graphene in electronic devices.
It was made possible by the Rice-based Nanojapan program through which American undergraduates conduct summer research internships in Japanese labs. Even a single molecule of a foreign substance can contaminate graphene enough to affect its electrical and optical properties
The researchers used it as a substrate for graphene. Hitting the combined material with femtosecond pulses from a near-infrared laser prompted the indium phosphide to emit terahertz back through the graphene.
Imperfections as small as a stray oxygen molecule on the graphene were picked up by a spectrometer.
The change in the terahertz signal due to adsorption of molecules is said remarkable Kono. Not just the intensity but also the waveform of emitted terahertz radiation totally and dynamically changes in response to molecular adsorption and desorption.
The laser gradually removes oxygen molecules from the graphene changing its density and we can see that Kono said.
The experiment involved growing pristine graphene via chemical vapor deposition and transferring it to an indium phosphide substrate.
Laser pulses generated coherent bursts of terahertz radiation through a built-in surface electric field of the indium phosphide substrate that changed due to charge transfer between the graphene and the contaminating molecules.
For any future device designs using graphene we have to take into account the influence of the surroundings said Kono.
Graphene in a vacuum or sandwiched between noncontaminating layers would probably be stable but exposure to air would contaminate it he said.
The Rice and Osaka labs are continuing to collaborate on a project to measure the terahertz conductivity of graphene on various substrates he said.
Plants in full sun absorb red light while shaded plants receive only the leftover far-red light. The type of light the phytochrome sees tells the plant
By mutating the phytochromes we created plants that think they're in full sun even when they're not Vierstra says.
and as part of the planning process developers must now provide data on presence and abundance of this species and provide mitigation plans to prevent their disturbance before planning applications will be considered.
and analysis software the technology is trained'to automatically recognise the calls of individual species in this case the nightjar.
Remote recorders were deployed at specific sites and the results were compared against observations from standard human field surveys of the same sites.
Andrew Baker managing director of Baker Consultants Ltd and a co-author of the paper said: This is a key piece of research that has demonstrated how effective bioacoustics techniques can be for providing ecological data.
#Silicon oxide for better computer memory: Use of porous silicon oxide reduces forming voltage, improves manufacturabilityrice University's breakthrough silicon oxide technology for high-density next-generation computer memory is one step closer to mass production thanks to a refinement that will allow manufacturers to fabricate devices at room temperature with conventional
production methods. First discovered five years ago Rice's silicon oxide memories are a type of two-terminal resistive random-access memory (RRAM) technology.
Tour is Rice's T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry and professor of mechanical engineering and nanoengineering and of computer science.
For example manufacturers have announced plans for RRAM prototype chips that will be capable of storing about one terabyte of data on a device the size of a postage stamp--more than 50 times the data density of current flash memory technology.
Each has its own sensor run by an embedded computer. We envision dozens of SPOTS on a space habitat said Dane Larsen who is working on a master's degree on computer science.
Telemetry in each SPOT provides data on plant condition to a computer display. The robots and plants are networked together
We want to optimize a system allowing the humans to get psychological benefits from interacting with the plants she said in a 2013 Web video interview produced by the University of Colorado Boulder.
For Daniel Zukowski who is also working on a master's in computer science the X-Hab Challenge is an opportunity to use terrestrial-based know-how
Hava noted that the team has benefited from support from former NASA astronaut Joe Tanner who now is a senior instructor of aerospace engineering sciences at the University of Colorado and Nikolaus Correll assistant professor of computer science at the university.
Traditionally carbon dioxide has been removed from natural gas to meet pipelines'specifications. The Tour lab with assistance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) produced the patented material that pulls only carbon dioxide molecules from flowing natural gas
Apache Corp. a Houston-based oil and gas exploration and production company funded the research at Rice
Tour is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Chair in Chemistry as well as a professor of mechanical engineering and nanoengineering and of computer science.
But such simple steps as leaving slash--the plant waste left over after crop production--on fields after harvests so it could be incorporated into the soil could reintroduce between 0. 4 and 1. 1 gigatons of carbon annually to soil the study says.
In this respect the members of the BATFARM project have developed software (BATFARM) to select the best farm waste technologies
The software will shortly be available on the websites of the institutions that have participated in the building of this tool.
#New technology for greenhouses developedagricultural and fruit producers could acquire high-tech greenhouses at a considerably less cost thanks to experts from the Autonomous University of Zacatecas (UAZ) in the North of Mexico developing computer systems to control
nchez researcher in the Department of Electrical engineering some factors that may increase the cost of acquiring the import greenhouses are the level of sophistication of its technologies for automation its size
nchez said the technology consists of a motherboard embedded computer systems (for specific functions) a graphical interface for monitoring variables such as humidity temperature wind speed
and radiation as well as elements that enable wireless connectivity between the greenhouse and mobile devices like cell phones.
Behind those pages lie countless hours of meetings on several continents thousands of email exchanges and two levels of peer review by other scientists
#Advantages, potential of computer-guided spinal surgeryin a series of research studies Cedars-Sinai spinal surgeons show that a new method of computer-guided spine surgery is beneficial for spinal reconstruction
Computer-guided surgical navigation technology delivers on quality and safety said J. Patrick Johnson MD a neurosurgery spine specialist and director of Spine Education and the Neurosurgery Spine Fellowship program in the Department of Neurosurgery.
The images are transferred to a computer which displays them on overhead monitors that allow precise tracking of surgical instruments as surgeons insert screws for reconstruction
because hardware was initially out of place. The Cedars-Sinai surgeons say they have cut these to nearly zero by using computer-guided methods.
The surgeons said the technology has others applications for treating spinal disorders serving as a tool to remove tumors decompress the spinal column
This approach represents a major leap forward for instrumented spine surgery said Terrence T. Kim MD an orthopedic spine surgeon in the Cedars-Sinai Spine Center and expert in the computer-guided navigation field.
and computer-aided system used during minimally invasive surgery increased the accuracy of screw placement into vertebral pedicle bones.
The final two articles offer an overview of computer-guided surgery of the spine including its use in revision
and the potential future use of robotic spine surgery with computer navigation. The special issue of the journal can be accessed at:
and resolution to produce all the data scientists need said Liang Dong an Iowa State university associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
That has Dong leading a research team that includes Namrata Vaswani an Iowa State associate professor of electrical and computer engineering;
and hopefully the new instrumentation will create a paradigm shift in the plant phenomics area by placing powerful data analysis capability in the hands of researchers.
The course covered 11 broad topics and approximately five core concepts per topic. Questions on the midterm and final exams covered specific concepts and topics so by comparing how the two groups fared on those questions the research team could compare
whether an intervention had a significant effect said Baraniuk the Victor E. Cameron Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of Rice's RDLS.
The software used in the test was developed in Baraniuk's lab and is an academic research tool that has many of the same features as powerful learning aids that are currently on the market.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and by Google's Faculty Research Award program.
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