ScienceDaily: Engineering and Construction News |
- Water-cleanup catalysts tackle biomass upgrading
- Ask the crowd: Robots learn faster, better with online helpers
- LEGO bricks turned into scientific tool to study plant growth
- Janus capsules, miniature hollow structures, produced easily at low cost
- A breakthrough for organic reactions in water
- New easel reveals secrets of old masters
- Electrostatics do the trick: Simple model describes what happens between organic semiconductors and metals
| Water-cleanup catalysts tackle biomass upgrading Posted: 26 Jun 2014 11:18 AM PDT A chemical engineer has spent a decade amassing evidence that palladium-gold nanoparticles are excellent catalysts for cleaning polluted water, but even he was surprised at how well the particles converted biodiesel waste into valuable chemicals.  |
| Ask the crowd: Robots learn faster, better with online helpers Posted: 26 Jun 2014 10:20 AM PDT Sometimes it takes a village to teach a robot. Computer scientists have shown that crowdsourcing can be a quick and effective way to teach a robot how to complete tasks. Instead of learning from just one human, robots could one day query the larger online community, asking for instructions or input on the best way to set the table or water the garden.  |
| LEGO bricks turned into scientific tool to study plant growth Posted: 26 Jun 2014 09:17 AM PDT Engineers are using LEGO bricks to build controlled environments to study how variations in climate and soil affect plant growth. They say LEGO bricks "are highly convenient and versatile building blocks" for the studies. While looking for a way to study plant and root growth that was simple, inexpensive and flexible -- something that allowed experiments to be reproduced all over the world, even in labs without the latest technologies or the infrastructure required for plant science or agronomy research -- researchers thought of LEGO bricks. And it worked.  |
| Janus capsules, miniature hollow structures, produced easily at low cost Posted: 26 Jun 2014 06:46 AM PDT Everything depends on how you look at them. Looking from one side you will see one face; and when looking from the opposite side – you will see a different one. So appear Janus capsules, miniature, hollow structures, in different fragments composed of different micro- and nanoparticles. Theoreticians were able to design models of such capsules, but a real challenge was to produce them. Now, Janus capsules can be produced easily and at low cost.  |
| A breakthrough for organic reactions in water Posted: 26 Jun 2014 06:29 AM PDT Green-chemistry researchers have discovered a way to use water as a solvent in one of the reactions most widely used to synthesize chemical products and pharmaceuticals. The findings mark a potential milestone in efforts to develop organic reactions in water.  |
| New easel reveals secrets of old masters Posted: 25 Jun 2014 07:14 AM PDT A state-of-the-art easel is literally shedding new light on the ingenious variety of materials that have been used over the centuries to create artists' paint pigments.  |
| Posted: 23 Jun 2014 07:42 AM PDT Organic semiconductors allow for flexible displays, solar cells, and other applications. One common problem in these devices, however, is the interface between the metallic contacts and the organic semiconductor material, where undesirable losses occur. Now researchers have shown what these losses depend upon.  |
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