70170209
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Sure, solar panels are good for the environment, but they’re so boring. Now scientists have found a way to spice things up. In a study published online this month in Nano Letters, researchers describe making solar cells in several colors that still perform efficiently. The team hopes that the colorful cells could win over people averse to solar panels and boost solar adoption on buildings and other structures.
70159061
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Scientists have measured positivity bias--a tendency to describe things in positive terms--in the 100,000 most frequently used words from 10 different languages, including English, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese. Every word was scored for its emotional resonance by 50 different native speakers. Graphs of the data show that Spanish has the most positive words, while Chinese has the least. What remains to be seen is whether using a different language can actually make you happier.
70152675
submission
sciencehabit writes:
In a 2012 episode of the TV series Homeland, Vice President William Walden is assassinated by a terrorist who hacks into his Internet-enabled heart pacemaker and accelerates his heartbeat until he has a heart attack. A flight of fancy? Not everyone thinks so. Internet security experts have been warning for years that such devices are open to both data theft and remote control by a hacker. Now manufacturers are starting to wake up to the issue and are employing security experts to tighten up their systems.
70152615
submission
sciencehabit writes:
A team of researchers that the measured speeds and calculated speeds of stars near the center of our galaxy don't agree. This suggests that there is dark matter in the Milky Way's core that is affecting the motion of these suns. The researchers hope their studies will help narrow down searches for the nature of dark matter as well as aid the understanding of galaxy formation.
, demonstrating that dark matter does indeed play a role in the inner galaxy. The researchers hope their studies will help narrow down searches for the nature of dark matter as well as aid the understanding of galaxy formation.
70083325
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Usually the launch of a spacecraft marks the beginning of its journey, but for NASAâ(TM)s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), this weekendâ(TM)s planned liftoff may feel more like a conclusion. Since the satellite was literally dreamt up by thenâ"Vice President Al Gore one night in 1998, it has been constructed, canceled, shelved, politicized, demonized, revived, renamed, and repurposed. Now, after a 17-year odyssey, the spacecraft formerly known as Triana, and widely referred to as Goresat, is scheduled to leave Earth at 6:10 p.m. EST on 8 February from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida
70049113
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Lately, drones seem to be everywhere. They're monitoring endangered wildlife, launching missiles, mapping rainforests, and filming athletes. They can fly high above a neighborhood or just hover outside a bedroom window. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has already built robotic fliers not much larger than an insect; once batteries become small enough, they may become quite literally a fly on the wall. The opportunities—and potential violations of privacy—seem endless. But current and new laws may offer some protection.
70025087
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Researchers have built contraption from LEGOs that can move and rotate insects every which way while keeping them stable and positioned under a microscope. The design improves on previous insect manipulators because it's cheap, customizable, and easy to build. As natural history museums work on digitizing their voluminous collections—taking high-resolution photographs of each precious beetle, bee, and dragonfly in their possession—they have to handle insects repeatedly. Now the job will be easier on the entomologists, and more insect specimens will be able to hang on to their wings—all thanks to Legos.
70021931
submission
sciencehabit writes:
If you want your new business to be successful, make sure to set up shop in one of about a dozen ZIP codes around San Francisco. That finding, published online today in Science, may not be a revelation, but the study does have its surprises. Researchers found that companies with short names—think Google and Facebook versus long-named failures like Cryptine Networks—are 50% more likely to succeed. Having a trademark boosts a firm’s chances by a factor of 5. Having patents multiplies the chances 25 times. And if a patent-holding company is also incorporated in Delaware—home to an extremely high concentration of corporate lawyers and an efficient corporate court system—it boosts the chances of success a whopping 200-fold. Businesses founded in Silicon Valley are 20 times more likely to succeed on average than those in the median Californian city.
70019425
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Call it a scientific oddity—or a medical miracle. A girl who grew up with a serious genetic immune disease was apparently cured in her 30s by one of her chromosomes shattering into pieces and reassembling. Scientists traced the woman’s improvement to the removal of a harmful gene through this scrambling of DNA in one of her blood stem cells—a recently identified phenomenon that until now had only been linked to cancer.
70014865
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Appear in a photo taken at a protest march, a gay bar, or an abortion clinic, and your friends might recognize you. But a machine probably won't—at least for now. Unless a computer has been tasked to look for you, has trained on dozens of photos of your face, and has high-quality images to examine, your anonymity is safe. Nor is it yet possible for a computer to scour the Internet and find you in random, uncaptioned photos. But within the walled garden of Facebook, which contains by far the largest collection of personal photographs in the world, the technology for doing all that is beginning to blossom.
69992067
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Researchers have designed a cheap, easy-to-use smart phone attachment that can test patients for multiple deadly infectious diseases in 15 minutes. All it takes is a drop of blood from a finger prick. Pressing the device’s big black button creates a vacuum that sucks the blood into a maze of tiny channels within its disposable credit card–sized cartridge. There, several detection zones snag any antibodies in the blood that reveal the presence of a particular disease. It only takes a tiny bit of power from the smart phone to detect and display the results: A fourth-generation iPod Touch could screen 41 patients on a single charge, the team says.
69990553
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Chemotherapy has been a mainstay of cancer treatment for decades. But most of these drugs are toxic to healthy cells, and others have a hard time penetrating tumors. Now researchers report that they’ve come up with a potential solution for both problems. They used electric fields to drive chemo compounds specifically into difficult-to-treat tumors in animals, dramatically increasing the drugs’ concentration within the tumor and shrinking it.
69990109
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Lighter cars and airplanes could be on the horizon thanks to an advance in the manufacture of steel. Researchers have found a way to strengthen the metal and reduce its density—and without increasing costs. The advance might translate to an extra one mile per gallon (2 liters per kilometer) in gas mileage for a standard car, estimates materials scientist Alan Russell of Iowa State University in Ames, who was not involved with the work. That’s not enough to make drivers jump for joy at the gas pump, but “it’s really quite a substantial achievement,” he says.
69965579
submission
sciencehabit writes:
Filthy, smelly, repulsive. There are a lot of ways to describe cockroaches, but “full of personality” usually isn’t one of them. Yet a team of scientists has not only found evidence that the scuttling insects have personalities, but also discovered that when cockroaches get together, they create a group personality. The group personalities of cockroaches vary, too.
69965553
submission
sciencehabit writes:
In an effort to establish ethical guidelines for observing our feathered friends, scientists approached mallards, flamingos, and greenshanks with a quadcopter drone more than 200 times and watched for signs of disturbance. The researchers varied the color of the drone from black to blue to white; they approached at speeds of 2, 4, 6, and 8 m/s; and they approached at angles of 20, 30, 60, and 90. According to the results published online today in Biology Letters, the drone’s speed and color had no effect on whether the birds were bothered by the drone. The only variable that perturbed any of the three species was the angle of approach: When the drone dropped down on the birds from directly overhead (90), all three species showed signs of disturbance such as moving away from the drone or flying away entirely.
