Category: New products
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Modified Graphene Found to Dissipate Electronics Heat
Researchers in the U.S., Korea, and China have discovered a modified form of the material graphene with better thermal properties than graphene in its natural state. The team led by Alexander Balandin, an engineering professor at University of California – Riverside, published its findings online in the journal Nature Materials (paid subscription required). The researchers…
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Ford to Open Silicon Valley Research Lab
Automobile maker Ford Motor Company says it will open a new research facility during the first quarter of 2012 located in the Silicon Valley region of California near San Francisco. The lab will be part of Ford’s Research and Innovation division, according to chief technical officer Paul Mascarenas who made the announcement in a statement…
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Lizard Tail Feedback Boosts Jumping Robot Stability
A team of biologists and engineers at University of California, Berkeley have documented the way lizards manage to leap successfully even when they slip and stumble, and applied that capability to robots. Berkeley professor of integrative biology Robert Full and colleagues, including graduate and undergraduate students, describe their findings in the 5 January online issue…
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Prototype Livestock Device Cuts Pollutants, Energy Use
Researchers from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, West Virginia University in Morgantown, and University of Maryland in College Park have developed a new technology that can lower harmful emissions from some chicken and swine barns, and reduce energy use by recovering heat. The authors published their findings in the December 2011 issue of the…
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Stem Cells to be Produced for Research in Muscle Disorders
BioTime Inc. in Alameda, California says it will market to researchers progenitors of muscle stem cells bearing hereditary diseases. The company says it will produce the cells from five human embryonic stem cell (hESC) lines provided by Reproductive Genetics Institute (RGI) in Chicago. The cell lines will display the genes for six hereditary muscle diseases:…
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Student Project Develops Bacteria-Based Glucose Sensor
A team of Missouri University of Science and Technology students in Rolla developed a sensor based on genetically modified E. coli bacteria to detect glucose levels. The students, members of the university’s chapter of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGem) Foundation, developed the system as part of an annual competition sponsored by iGEM, receiving a…
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Software Speeds Database Sequence Searches
Computational biologists at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität (LMU) in Munich, Germany have developed software that makes possible a new search method to identify proteins in databases with similar genomic sequences. The software that the developers say is faster and can discover twice as many evolutionarily related proteins as previous methods, is described online in the journal Nature…
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Apple Files Patent Applications for Fuel Cell Power
Apple Inc. in Cupertino, California has filed two U.S. patent applications for building fuel cell systems into the power supplies used in their electronic devices. The patent applications were reported yesterday on the Web site AppleInsider. One invention outlines a fuel cell system to directly power a portable electronic device. In this system, a fuel…
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Nanotech Solar Energy Paint Developed
Researchers at University of Notre Dame in Indiana have created an inexpensive paste made with semiconducting nanoparticles to produce a spreadable substance that can generate energy. The work of chemistry professor Prashant Kamat and colleagues is described in the 6 December issue of the journal ACS Nano (paid subscription required). Kamat’s team based the compound…
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Math Model Helps Predict Unknown Drug Side Effects
Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston in Massachusetts have created a new method that combines data from a widely used drug safety database to predict adverse drug reactions. The findings from postdoctoral fellow Aurel Cami (pictured left) and colleagues from the Children’s Hospital Informatics Program, appear online in the the journal Science Translational Medicine (paid subscription…