ScienceDaily: Top Technology News

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• Toughened silicon sponges may make tenacious batteries
• Asteroid strikes cause the Moon's surface to smooth
• Force of nature: Defining the mechanical mechanisms in living cells
• Sun's coronal mass ejection results in aurora show on Earth
• Record-breaking laser shot: National Ignition Facility fires off 192 laser beams delivering more than 500 trillion watts
• Human eye inspires clog-free ink jet printer
• Carbon-based transistors ramp up speed and memory for mobile devices
• Researchers almost double light efficiency in LC projectors
• Engineering technology reveals eating habits of giant dinosaurs
• Getting to the bottom of statistics: Software utilizes data from the Internet for interpreting statistics
• To extinguish a hot flame, scientists studied cold plasma

Toughened silicon sponges may make tenacious batteries Posted: 16 Jul 2012 01:32 PM PDT Researchers have found a way to make multiple high-performance anodes from a single silicon wafer. The process uses simple silicon to replace graphite as an element in rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, laying the groundwork for longer-lasting, more powerful batteries for such applications as commercial electronics and electric vehicles.

Asteroid strikes cause the Moon's surface to smooth Posted: 16 Jul 2012 01:31 PM PDT The lunar surface is marred by impact craters, remnants of the collisions that have occurred over the past 4.5 billion years. The Orientale basin, the Moon's most recently formed sizeable crater, stands out from the rest. The crater, which lies along the southwestern boundary between the near and far sides of the moon, appears as a dark spot ringed by concentric circles of ejecta that reach more than 900 kilometers (560 miles) from the impact location. Researchers now propose that whenever a large body slams into the Moon, seismic waves produced during the impact travel through the solid lunar material, inducing seismic shaking that causes landslides and surface settling.

Force of nature: Defining the mechanical mechanisms in living cells Posted: 16 Jul 2012 12:23 PM PDT Researchers measured mechanical tension at the nanoscale to explore how living cells produce and detect force. The research could lead to a better understanding of how tissues and tumors form and grow, and, ultimately, to how complex living organisms organize themselves.

Sun's coronal mass ejection results in aurora show on Earth Posted: 16 Jul 2012 10:53 AM PDT Over the July 14-15, 2012 weekend and through the early morning of July 16, Earth experienced what's called a geomagnetic storm, which happens when the magnetic bubble around Earth, the magnetosphere, quickly changes shape and size in response to incoming energy from the sun. In this case that energy came from a coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with a July 12 X-class flare.

Record-breaking laser shot: National Ignition Facility fires off 192 laser beams delivering more than 500 trillion watts Posted: 16 Jul 2012 10:45 AM PDT Fifteen years of work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) team paid off on July 5 with a historic record-breaking laser shot. The NIF laser system of 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target. Five hundred terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.

Human eye inspires clog-free ink jet printer Posted: 16 Jul 2012 09:50 AM PDT Clogged printer nozzles waste time and money while reducing print quality. Engineers recently invented a clog-preventing nozzle cover by mimicking the human eye.

Carbon-based transistors ramp up speed and memory for mobile devices Posted: 16 Jul 2012 09:49 AM PDT By using carbon molecules called C60 to build a sophisticated new memory transistor, scientists have found a way to increase both speed and memory on mobile devices -- and the solution is ready to be produced at existing high-tech fabrication facilities.

Researchers almost double light efficiency in LC projectors Posted: 16 Jul 2012 09:47 AM PDT Researchers have developed new technology to convert unpolarized light into polarized light, which makes projectors that use liquid crystal technology almost twice as energy efficient. The new technology has resulted in smaller, lower cost and more efficient projectors, meaning longer battery life and significantly lower levels of heat.

Engineering technology reveals eating habits of giant dinosaurs Posted: 16 Jul 2012 07:12 AM PDT High-tech technology, traditionally usually used to design racing cars and aeroplanes, has helped researchers to understand how plant-eating dinosaurs fed 150 million years ago. A team of international researchers used CT scans and biomechanical modelling to show that Diplodocus -- one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered -- had a skull adapted to strip leaves from tree branches.

Getting to the bottom of statistics: Software utilizes data from the Internet for interpreting statistics Posted: 16 Jul 2012 06:19 AM PDT Interpreting the results of statistical surveys, e.g., Transparency Internation­al's corruption indices, is not always a simple matter. As Dr. Heiko Paulheim of the Knowledge Engineering Group at the TU Darmstadt's Computer Sciences Dept. put it, "Although methods that will unearth explanations for statistics are available, they are confined to utilizing data contained in the statistics involved. Further, background information will not be taken into account. That is what led us to the idea of applying data-mining methods that we had been studying here to the semantic web in order to obtain further, background infor­ma­tion that will allow us to learn more from statistics."

To extinguish a hot flame, scientists studied cold plasma Posted: 12 Jul 2012 11:19 AM PDT DARPA theorized that by using physics techniques rather than combustion chemistry, it might be possible to manipulate and extinguish flames. To achieve this, new research was required to understand and quantify the interaction of electromagnetic and acoustic waves with the plasma in a flame.

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