ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

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• Routes towards defect-free graphene
• Inside a solar eruption: NASA's SDO provides first sightings of how a coronal mass ejection forms
• Discovery in synthetic biology takes us a step closer to new 'industrial revolution'
• Gap geometry grasped: New algorithm elucidates structure of liquids and how they flow through porous media
• Astronomers ask 'where are all the dwarf galaxies?'
• An ideal material: Solving a mystery leads to the discovery of a true topological insulator
• Flat boron by the numbers: Researchers calculate what it would take to make new two-dimensional material
• Corn cobs eyed for bioenergy production
• A possible answer for protection against chemical/biological agents, fuel leaks, and coffee stains

Routes towards defect-free graphene Posted: 01 Feb 2013 10:23 AM PST A new way of growing graphene without the defects that weaken it and prevent electrons from flowing freely within it could open the way to large-scale manufacturing of graphene-based devices with applications in fields such as electronics, energy, and healthcare.

Inside a solar eruption: NASA's SDO provides first sightings of how a coronal mass ejection forms Posted: 01 Feb 2013 06:27 AM PST On July 18, 2012, a fairly small explosion of light burst off the lower right limb of the sun. Such flares often come with an associated eruption of solar material, known as a coronal mass ejection or CME -- but this one did not. Something interesting did happen, however. Magnetic field lines in this area of the sun's atmosphere, the corona, began to twist and kink, generating the hottest solar material -- a charged gas called plasma -- to trace out the newly-formed slinky shape. The plasma glowed brightly in extreme ultraviolet images from the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) aboard NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and scientists were able to watch for the first time the very formation of something they had long theorized was at the heart of many eruptive events on the sun: a flux rope.

Discovery in synthetic biology takes us a step closer to new 'industrial revolution' Posted: 01 Feb 2013 06:06 AM PST Scientists report that they have developed a method that cuts down the time it takes to make new 'parts' for microscopic biological factories from 2 days to only 6 hours. The scientists say their research brings them another step closer to a new kind of industrial revolution, where parts for these biological factories could be mass-produced. These factories have a wealth of applications including better drug delivery treatments for patients, enhancements in the way that minerals are mined from deep underground and advances in the production of biofuels.

Gap geometry grasped: New algorithm elucidates structure of liquids and how they flow through porous media Posted: 01 Feb 2013 06:04 AM PST A new algorithm could help understand the structure of liquids, and how they flow through porous media. Theoretical physicists have now implemented an algorithm for analyzing void space in sphere packing, where the spheres need not all be the same size.

Astronomers ask 'where are all the dwarf galaxies?' Posted: 01 Feb 2013 06:03 AM PST Astronomers have identified "Cosmic Web Stripping" as a new way of explaining the famous missing dwarf problem: the lack of observed dwarf galaxies compared with that predicted by the theory of Cold Dark Matter and Dark Energy.

An ideal material: Solving a mystery leads to the discovery of a true topological insulator Posted: 01 Feb 2013 05:22 AM PST Experimentalists have recently confirmed that SmB6 is the first true 3D topological insulator —- as originally predicted by theorists in 2010. Topological insulators have been discussed widely as a new area of material science, with the potential to study quantum Hall physics and exotic states such as Majorana fermions. While this finding provides a conclusion to one mystery, it is also the beginning of a new chapter that will certainly lead to a clearer understanding of this strange physics and even new quantum devices.

Flat boron by the numbers: Researchers calculate what it would take to make new two-dimensional material Posted: 31 Jan 2013 09:13 AM PST Physicists detail several possible routes to the creation of two-dimensional sheets of boron. They say such sheets would be more conductive than graphene and thus useful in electronic applications.

Corn cobs eyed for bioenergy production Posted: 31 Jan 2013 09:10 AM PST Corn crop residues are often left on harvested fields to protect soil quality, but they could become an important raw material in cellulosic ethanol production. USDA research indicates that soil quality would not decline if post-harvest corn cob residues were removed from fields.

A possible answer for protection against chemical/biological agents, fuel leaks, and coffee stains Posted: 31 Jan 2013 09:09 AM PST A recent discovery may very well lead to a process that not only benefits every uniformed service member of the U.S. Department of Defense, but everyone else as well: protection from chemical/biological agents, to self-cleaning apparel, to effortless thermal management, to fuel purification as well as enhanced control of leaks -- especially oil and fuels.

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