Researchers Make New Electronics
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Researchers Make New Electronics -- With A Twist 3 New Life Beneath Sea And Ice 5 Secondary Prevention Program Helps Reduce Cardiovascular Risks After Heart Attack 7 Darwin Was Right About How Evolution Can Affect Whole Group 9 Biomarkers Used To Predict Chronological And Physiological Age 11 Works Of Art Shed New Light On Climate Change 12 Potential Sources Of 'Rain-Making' Bacteria In The Atmosphere Identified 14 Removing Part Of Brain Controls Girl's Epilepsy 16 Anthropological Engagement, for Good and for Bad? 18 Power Grab at DuPage 22 Doctorate Production Continues to Grow 24 In Qatar, an Art Museum of Imposing Simplicity 27 Layers of Devotion (and the Scars to Prove It) 29 Drawings With a Message About Political Power 32 In Her Hands, Naturalism Won Out 34 A Whisper, Perhaps, From the Universe’s Dark Side 36 A Soldier, Taking Orders From Its Ethical Judgment Center 40 New Arena for Testing of Drugs: Real World 43 Point Toe, Click Mouse 47 For Laid-Off Journalists, Free Blog Accounts 50 Skye's dinosaur connection to US 51 Many keeping babies with Down's 53 Centenarians 'depression prone' 55 'Sticky cell' clues to epilepsy 57 Can China's Future Earthquakes Be Predicted? 59 Networks Of Small Habitat Patches Can Preserve Urban Biodiversity 61 How Global Warming May Affect U.S. Beaches, Coastline 63 Hope For Treating Relapse To Methamphetamine Abuse 66 Breakthrough Technique Unlocks Secret Of Plasmas 68 How Red Wine Compounds Fight Alzheimer's Disease 70 Lactic Acid Found To Fuel Tumors 72 Glacial Erosion Changes Mountain Responses To Plate Tectonics 74 Study Suggests Some Cancers May Go Away 77 Statins May Lower Odds of Pneumonia Death 80 Longevity Linked to Heart Disease Protection 81 Patterns: Better Health for Religiously Observant 82 Too Much Information 83 Taming Menstrual Cramps in Adolescents 86 A Berkeley Museum Wrapped in Honeycomb 89 Marine life faces 'acid threat' 91 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Genetic disease testing advance 94 Bad bosses may damage your heart 96 Fieldwork with Three Children 98 ‘Teaching Unprepared Students’ 100 Sea Level Rise Alters Chesapeake Bay's Salinity 103 Binary Star Explosion Inside Nebula Challenges Star Theory 105 New Clinical Study Will Help Doctors Assess Abnormal Bleeding 107 Mineral Oil Contamination In Humans: A Health Problem? 108 Quantum Computing Spins Closer 109 How Do Math And Intuition Help Us Understand Whole Systems? 111 The Network Of Everything: Personal Networks Will Have To Cope With At Least A 114 Thousand Devices New Mechanism For Superconductivity? 117 Seismometer Able To Measure Earth Tremors Over Longer Periods Is Unveiled 119 Beauty Is Truth In Mathematical Intuition: First Empirical Evidence 121 Randy Scandinavia? 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What About Privacy? 193 Amazon deforestation accelerates 197 Protection boost for rare gorilla 199 2 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 49 December 2008 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Researchers Make New Electronics -- With A Twist An optical image of an electronic device in a complex deformation mode. (Credit: Image courtesy of Northwestern University) ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2008) — They've made electronics that can bend. They've made electronics that can stretch. And now, they've reached the ultimate goal -- electronics that can be subjected to any complex deformation, including twisting. Yonggang Huang, Joseph Cummings Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, and John Rogers, the Flory-Founder Chair Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, have improved their so-called "pop-up" technology to create circuits that can be twisted. Such electronics could be used in places where flat, unbending electronics would fail, like on the human body. Their research is published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Electronic components historically have been flat and unbendable because silicon, the principal component of all electronics, is brittle and inflexible. Any significant bending or stretching renders an electronic device useless. Huang and Rogers developed a method to fabricate stretchable electronics that increases the stretching range (as much as 140 percent) and allows the user to subject circuits to extreme twisting. This emerging technology promises new flexible sensors, transmitters, new photovoltaic and microfluidic devices, and other applications for medical and athletic use. The partnership -- where Huang focuses on theory, and Rogers focuses on experiments -- has been fruitful for the past several years. Back in 2005, the pair developed a one-dimensional, stretchable form of single- crystal silicon that could be stretched in one direction without altering its electrical properties; the results were published by the journal Science in 2006. Earlier this year they made stretchable integrated circuits, work also published in Science. 3 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 49 December 2008 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila Next, the researchers developed a new kind of technology that allowed circuits to be placed on a curved surface. That technology used an array of circuit elements approximately 100 micrometers square that were connected by metal "pop-up bridges." The circuit elements were so small that when placed on a curved surface, they didn't bend -- similar to how buildings don't bend on the curved Earth. The system worked because these elements were connected by metal wires that popped up when bent or stretched. The research was the cover article in Nature in early August. In the research reported in PNAS, Huang and Rogers took their pop-up bridges and made them into an "S" shape, which, in addition to bending and stretching, have enough give that they can be twisted as well. "For a lot of applications related to the human body -- like placing a sensor on the body -- an electronic device needs not only to bend and stretch but also to twist," said Huang. "So we improved our pop-up technology to accommodate this. Now it can accommodate any deformation." Huang and Rogers now are focusing their research on another important application of this technology: solar panels. The pair published a cover article in Nature Materials this month describing a new process of creating very thin silicon solar cells that can be combined in flexible and transparent arrays. Adapted from materials provided by Northwestern University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081119171324.htm 4 Infoteca’s E-Journal No. 49 December 2008 Sistema de Infotecas Centrales Universidad Autónoma de Coahuila New Life Beneath Sea And Ice Sample of ice core recovered from Vostok ice core. Studying ice cores has provided a way to examine the biology of icy environments buried beneath kilometers of ice for millions of years. (Credit: Image courtesy of Brent C. Christner) ScienceDaily (Nov. 21, 2008) — Scientists have long known that life can exist in some very extreme environments. But Earth continues to surprise us. At a European Science Foundation and COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) 'Frontiers of Science' meeting in Sicily in October, scientists described apparently productive ecosystems in two places where life was not known before, under the Antarctic ice sheet, and above concentrated salt lakes beneath the Mediterranean. In both cases, innumerable tiny microbes are fixing or holding onto quantities of organic carbon large enough to be significant in the global carbon cycle. Lakes under the ice Brent Christner of Louisiana State University, in the US, told the conference about the microbes living within and beneath the ice on Antarctica. In the last decade, scientists have discovered lakes of liquid water underneath the Antarctic ice sheet. So far we know of about 150 lakes, but this number will probably increase when the entire continent has been surveyed. These lakes occur as a result of geothermal heat trapped by the thick ice, melting it from underneath, and the great pressure from the ice above, which lowers the melting point of water.