Tech articles from PhysOrg

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Air pollution causes bigger, more destructive hail - Air pollution hugely increases the size of hail, and thus the amount of damage it can cause to crops and property, according to a study presented Wednesday at the European Conference on Severe Storms.

A glass of wine can help find new mineral deposits - The key to finding new mineral deposits in Australia could be to start looking with a glass of wine or a soft drink. In a fascinating piece of spare-time research, CSIRO Exploration & Mining scientist Dr Ryan Noble has found that chemical ingredients in these drinks, including weak organic acids, have the ability to dissolve weakly-bound metals into solution.

Security, life threatened by space junk, weapons: report - Human security and technologies from cell phones to weather forecasts are more at risk than ever from anti-satellite weapons and space junk, said a Space Security Index research report released Friday.

Nanomaterials with a Bright Future - A new fabrication technique, known as soft interference lithography (SIL), makes it possible to inexpensively produce large sheets of gold films with virtually infinite arrays of perforations and microscale "patches" of nanoscale holes. A combination of interference lithography and soft lithography, SIL offers many significant advantages over existing techniques. It can be used to scale-up the nanomanufacturing process to produce plasmonic metamaterials and devices in large quantities. Devices such as films of nanoholes can also serve as templates to make their inverse structures, such as nanoparticles. (Legend: Si=silicon; Cr=chromium; PEEL=electron spectroscopy method called parallel electron energy loss spectroscopy.)

Nanotech could make solar energy as easy and cheap as growing grass - Scientists are working to produce cheap, sustainable solar energy by imitating nature. Nanotechnology researchers like California Institute of Technology professor Nate Lewis are exploring nanoscale materials that mimic the architecture of grass and photosynthesis to capture and store the sun’s energy.

Nanoscale computer memory retrieves data 1,000 times faster - Scientists from the University of Pennsylvania have developed nanowires capable of storing computer data for 100,000 years and retrieving that data a thousand times faster than existing portable memory devices such as Flash memory and micro-drives, all using less power and space than current memory technologies.

Working hard or hardly working? Researcher studies effects of job simplification on employee productivity - Outsourcing. Offshoring. Compartmentalizing. More than corporate buzzwords, these trends are redefining the nature of work for millions of Americans, as well as their counterparts all over the world. But what are the ramifications of these trends for the people who actually do the work? Titled “Integrating Motivational, Social, and Contextual Work Design Features: A Meta-Analytic Summary and Theoretical Extension of the Work Design Literature,” the study indicates that various efforts to increase efficiency by simplifying workers’ job responsibilities may in fact be leading to lower employee job satisfaction and productivity over time.

Leaderless movement proves illusive - Ask the FBI, and they will contend that a dangerous wave of “ecoterrorism” has swept North America in the past decade. Ski resorts, new condominium developments and corporate logging headquarters have all been the target of arson attacks, pushing the damage tally of a shadowy organization called the Earth Liberation Front past the $100 million mark. The FBI’s concern has reached such a fervor, in fact, that it labeled environmental terrorism as the number one domestic terrorism threat in 2005.

Backpack straps harvest energy to power electronics - All that rubbing of your backpack straps on your shoulders may be put to good use, now that researchers have designed a novel type of energy harvesting backpack. The pack has straps made of a piezoelectric material that can convert the mechanical strain on the straps into electrical energy that may power or recharge portable electronics.