ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

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• Wind farms can provide society a surplus of reliable clean energy
• Important and complex systems, from the global financial market to groups of friends, may be highly controllable
• Swing voters hold more sway over candidates on economic issues
• Computers see through faked expressions of pain better than people
• Nanoparticle-based coating for aircraft engines may triple service life and reduce fuel consumption
• Moon of Saturn: Surface of Titan sea is mirror smooth
• Improved pavement markings can save lives
• Engineering materials for super-efficient nanoelectronics: Potential way to make graphene superconducting
• New control over topological insulator
• Real-time simulation of textiles with new software
• WPA2 wireless security cracked
• Algae may be a potential source of biofuels and biochemicals even in cool climate
• Tiny transistors for extreme environs: Engineers shrink plasma devices to resist radiation
• Dry future climate could reduce orchid bee habitat
• Titanium clubs can cause golf course fires
• Corporate-funded academic inventions spur increased innovation, analysis says
• Small step towards growing tissue in the lab
• Nanopores underlie our ability to tune in to a single voice: Inner-ear membrane uses tiny pores to mechanically separate sounds
• Computer analyzes massive clinical databases to properly categorize asthma patients

Wind farms can provide society a surplus of reliable clean energy Posted: 20 Mar 2014 11:08 AM PDT Researchers have found that the wind industry can easily afford the energetic cost of building batteries and other grid-scale storage technologies. However, for the solar industry, scientists found that more work is needed to make grid-scale storage energetically sustainable.

Important and complex systems, from the global financial market to groups of friends, may be highly controllable Posted: 20 Mar 2014 11:07 AM PDT Scientists have discovered that all complex systems, whether they are found in the body, in international finance, or in social situations, actually fall into just three basic categories, in terms of how they can be controlled.

Swing voters hold more sway over candidates on economic issues Posted: 20 Mar 2014 10:14 AM PDT Economics professors have published a paper on a theory of candidate competition that accounts for the influence of both economic and cultural issues on individual voting behavior. The researchers tested their theory using what they term a "differentiated candidates framework" in which two office-motivated candidates differ in their ideological position and choose a level of government spending and implied taxes to maximize their vote share.

Computers see through faked expressions of pain better than people Posted: 20 Mar 2014 09:19 AM PDT Scientists have found that a computer system spots real or faked expressions of pain more accurately than people can. Humans could not discriminate real from faked expressions of pain better than random chance -- and, even after training, only improved accuracy to a modest 55 percent. The computer system attains an 85 percent accuracy.

Nanoparticle-based coating for aircraft engines may triple service life and reduce fuel consumption Posted: 20 Mar 2014 08:58 AM PDT Researchers have started using nanoparticles in the heat-insulating surface layer that protects aircraft engines from heat. In tests, this increased the service life of the coating by 300%. This is something that interests the aircraft industry to a very great degree, and the hope is that motors with the new layers will be in production within two years.

Moon of Saturn: Surface of Titan sea is mirror smooth Posted: 20 Mar 2014 07:15 AM PDT The surface of Ligeia Mare, Titan's second largest sea, has a mirror-like smoothness, possibly due to a lack of winds, geophysicists say. As the only other solar system body with an Earth-like weather system, Titan could serve as a model for studying our own planet's early history.

Improved pavement markings can save lives Posted: 20 Mar 2014 07:15 AM PDT As spring finally emerges after a ferocious winter, our battered roads will soon be re-exposed. While potholes and cracks might make news, a bigger concern should be the deterioration to pavement markings, from yellow to white lines, which are a big factor in preventing traffic accidents. A study from Concordia University, funded by Infrastructure Canada and published in Structure and Infrastructure Engineering, found that snowplows are the biggest culprit in erasing roadway markings.

Engineering materials for super-efficient nanoelectronics: Potential way to make graphene superconducting Posted: 20 Mar 2014 07:13 AM PDT Scientists have discovered a potential way to make graphene -- a single layer of carbon atoms with great promise for future electronics -- superconducting, a state in which it would carry electricity with 100 percent efficiency.

New control over topological insulator Posted: 20 Mar 2014 07:11 AM PDT Scientists investigating the electronic properties of ultra-thin films of new materials -- topological insulators (TIs) -- have demonstrated a new method to tune their unique properties using strain. Topological insulators are new materials with surfaces that host a new quantum state of matter and are insensitive to contaminants, defects and impurities. Surface electrons in TIs behave like massless Dirac particles in a similar way to electrons in graphene. Moreover, surface currents in topological insulators also preserve their spin orientation and coherence on a macro scale.

Real-time simulation of textiles with new software Posted: 20 Mar 2014 07:11 AM PDT Fashion designers, pattern makers and tailors produce new collections using computer programs. Scientists are now connecting both worlds so the design process can be virtually simulated. New software technology depicts clothing samples in real time and is highly realistic. New collections can get to market faster and customer preferences can be realized more flexibly.

WPA2 wireless security cracked Posted: 20 Mar 2014 07:08 AM PDT There are various ways to protect a wireless network. Some are generally considered to be more secure than others. Some, such as WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), were broken several years ago and are not recommended as a way to keep intruders away from private networks. Now, a new study reveals that one of the previously strongest wireless security systems, Wi-Fi protected access 2 (WPA2) can also be easily broken into on wireless local area networks (WLANs).

Algae may be a potential source of biofuels and biochemicals even in cool climate Posted: 20 Mar 2014 07:08 AM PDT Algae are organisms useful in many ways in the transition towards a bio-economy. Even in a cool climate as in Finland, algae might be used to produce biochemicals and biofuels, besides use in capture of industrial carbon dioxide emissions. Algae are not yet profitably cultivated for energy production purposes. The cultivation is challenging especially in cool climate where there is little daylight in winter.

Tiny transistors for extreme environs: Engineers shrink plasma devices to resist radiation Posted: 20 Mar 2014 07:05 AM PDT Electrical engineers have fabricated the smallest plasma transistors that can withstand high temperatures and ionizing radiation found in a nuclear reactor. Such transistors someday might enable smartphones that take and collect medical X-rays on a battlefield, and devices to measure air quality in real time.

Dry future climate could reduce orchid bee habitat Posted: 19 Mar 2014 04:57 PM PDT During Pleistocene era climate changes, neotropical orchid bees that relied on year-round warmth and wet weather found their habitats reduced by 30 to 50 percent, according to a study that used computer models and genetic data to understand bee distributions during past climate changes.

Titanium clubs can cause golf course fires Posted: 19 Mar 2014 11:39 AM PDT Titanium alloy golf clubs can cause dangerous wildfires, according to scientists. When a club coated with the lightweight metal is swung and strikes a rock, it creates sparks that can heat to more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit for long enough to ignite dry foliage, according to new findings.

Corporate-funded academic inventions spur increased innovation, analysis says Posted: 19 Mar 2014 11:39 AM PDT Academic research sponsored by industry leads to innovative patents and licenses, challenging assumptions that corporate support skews science toward inventions that are less accessible and less useful to others than those funded by the government or non-profit organizations, according to a new analysis.

Small step towards growing tissue in the lab Posted: 19 Mar 2014 06:38 AM PDT Mathematicians have devised a method for identifying how cell clusters have formed by analyzing an image of the cluster. Their modelling tool will be useful in helping biologists and tissue engineers to move towards growing human tissue such as liver in the laboratory.

Nanopores underlie our ability to tune in to a single voice: Inner-ear membrane uses tiny pores to mechanically separate sounds Posted: 18 Mar 2014 08:37 AM PDT Even in a crowded room full of background noise, the human ear is remarkably adept at tuning in to a single voice -- a feat that has proved remarkably difficult for computers to match. A new analysis of the underlying mechanisms has provided insights that could ultimately lead to better machine hearing, and perhaps to better hearing aids as well.

Computer analyzes massive clinical databases to properly categorize asthma patients Posted: 18 Mar 2014 08:22 AM PDT A computer program capable of tracking more than 100 clinical variables for almost 400 people has shown it can identify various subtypes of asthma, which perhaps could lead to targeted, more effective treatments. A computational biologist led the analysis of patient data for the study.

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