A new type of heat pump being developed at Purdue University could allow residents in cold climates to cut their heating bills in half.The research, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, builds on previous work that began about five years ago at Purdue's Ray W. Herrick Laboratories, said James Braun, a professor of mechanical engineering.Heat pumps provide heating in winter and cooling in summer but are not efficient in extreme cold climates, such as Minneapolis winters."With this technology we can maintain the efficiency of the heat pump even when it gets pretty cold outside," said Eckhard Groll, a professor of mechanical engineering who is working on the project with Braun and W. Travis Horton, an assistant professor of civil engineering.The innovation aims to improve efficiency in general but is especially practical for boosting performance in cold climates. The new heat pumps might be half as expensive to operate as heating technologies now used in cold regions where natural gas is unavailable and residents rely on electric heaters and liquid propane. »

Metallic carbon nanotubes show great promise for applications from microelectronics to power lines because of their ballistic transmission of electrons. But who knew magnets could stop those electrons in their tracks?Rice physicist Junichiro Kono and his team have been studying the Aharonov-Bohm effect -- the interaction between electrically charged particles and magnetic fields -- and how it relates to carbon nanotubes. While doing so, they came to the unexpected conclusion that magnetic fields can turn highly conductive nanotubes into semiconductors.Their findings are published online this month in Physical Review Letters."When you apply a magnetic field, a band gap opens up and it becomes an insulator," said Kono, a Rice professor in electrical and computer engineering and in physics and astronomy. "You are changing a conductor into a semiconductor, and you can switch between the two. So this experiment explores both an important aspect of the results of the Aharonov-Bohm effect and the novel magnetic properties of carbon nanotubes." »

On the long and difficult road toward a carbon-neutral source of transportation fuels, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is pursuing a diversified approach. This effort involves exploring a range of potential new fuel sources in nature: from plants that may serve as cellulosic feedstocks -- fast-growing trees and perennial grasses on land -- to oil-producing organisms in aquatic and other environments, such as algae and bacteria.One contribution that may inform biofuels research is reported in the July 9 issue of Science, where researchers led by the DOE Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and the Salk Institute present the 138 million nucleotide genome of Volvox carteri, a multicellular alga that captures light energy through photosynthesis. The DOE is supporting research into the complex mechanisms present in photosynthetic organisms to better understand how they convert sunlight to energy and how photosynthetic cells control their metabolic processes so that this information can inform the production of renewable biofuels.In the Science paper, the Volvox genome was compared with that of the unicellular alga and close relative Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, whose genome was made available three years ago by the DOE JGI. A major value of the Volvox sequence is as a comparison to that of Chlamydomonas, an alga extensively used for research on potential algal biofuel generation. Both algae belong to the Volvocales family, and researchers are using the comparative data to study both the ways photosynthetic mechanisms are used and the evolution of multicellular organisms. Unlike Chlamydomonas, Volvox contains two cell types, a small minority of reproductive germ cells and a large majority of non-reproductive somatic cells. The germ cells can divide to form new colonies, while the somatic cells provide motility and secrete an extracellular matrix that expands the organism. This division of labor enables Volvox to grow larger and swim faster than Chlamydomonas, thus helping it to escape predation and gain access to nutrients deeper in the water column. »

Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) are participating in a study to develop a system for evaluating sport performance through application of Artificial Intelligence techniques to automatically analyze the development of plays.The principal aim of this Project is to determine certain performance indicators in team sport competition and training for analyzing what kind of plays and strategies are most apt for each case. "In the near future, performance analysis of executions and decisions in real time could be made, providing precise feedback to improve performance during competition," remarked the head of the research at the Artificial Intelligence Group at the UC3M Colmenarejo Campus, Miguel Ángel Patricio, who is carrying out this project with the research group Deporte y Rendimiento (Sport and Performance) from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM).One of the keys of the project lies in the introduction of Artificial Intelligence in order to evaluate the actions which make up the plays in team sports. The scientists have focused the first prototype in which they are working on basketball, and they hope to obtain models for automated analysis of sport behavior. For that purpose, they register all the actions of the players on the court through a series of cameras, to then, in the second phase, describe what has happened during the activity by applying some complex reasoning algorithms which allow them to determine the tactics and types of play that are happening on the scene. »

Swiss and German materials scientists have created simple networks of organic nanowires for future electronic and optoelectronic components. The successful approach synthesises the complex and incredibly thin nanowire structures, and joins them to electrically conducting links (essentially creating an electronic circuit). The result is a culmination of work that began in 2006 under the PHODYE ('New photonic systems on a chip based on dyes for sensor applications scalable at wafer fabrication') project, which was funded EUR 1.92 million under the 'Information society technologies' (IST) Thematic area of the EU's Sixth Framework Programme (FP6). The PHODYE project was initiated by Dr Angel Barranco from the Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Sevilla in Spain, who invited his former colleagues from the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research (Empa) to become involved. Empa is one of eight academic and industrial partners from four European countries (Belgium, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland) currently working on the project. The aim is to develop a new family of sensor devices that combines dye sensor films and photonic structures. These incredibly sensitive gas sensors (made up of thin films that change colour and fluoresce on contact with certain gas molecules) could eventually be used to monitor vehicle emissions or to provide warnings of the presence of poisonous substances. It was during their work on PHODYE that Empa's Ana Borras, Oliver Gröning and Pierangelo Gröning, and Jürgen Köble from Omicron Nanotechnology in Germany created the unique methodology for connecting organic nanowires. The result is a step towards the manufacture of cheaper and more flexible sensors, transistors, diodes, and other components, ranging from the micro all the way to the nano scale.  »

Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of Sheffield have applied computing power to crack a problem in egg shell formation. The work may also give a partial answer to the age old question "what came first the chicken or the egg?"The answer to the question in this context is "chicken" or -- at least a particular chicken protein. There is however a further twist in that this particular chicken protein turns out to come both first and last. That neat trick it performs provides new insights into control of crystal growth which is key to egg shell production.Researchers had long known that a chicken eggshell protein called ovocledidin-17 (OC-17) must play some role in egg shell formation. The protein is found only in the mineral region of the egg (the hard part of the shell) and lab bench results showed that it appeared to influence the transformation of amorphous calcium carbonate (CaCo3) into calcite crystals. The mechanism of this control remained unclear. How this process could be used to form an actual eggshell remained unclear.University of Warwick researchers Mark Rodger and David Quigley, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Sheffield, have now been able to apply a powerful computing tool called metadynamics and the UK national supercomputer in Edinburgh to crack this egg problem.Dr David Quigley from the Department of Physics and Centre for Scientific Computing, University of Warwick, said: "Metadynamics extends conventional molecular dynamics (MD) simulations and is particularly good at sampling transitions between disordered and ordered states of matter." »

Chemical engineers at Purdue University have developed a new method to process agricultural waste and other biomass into biofuels, and they are proposing the creation of mobile processing plants that would rove the Midwest to produce the fuels."What's important is that you can process all kinds of available biomass-- wood chips, switch grass, corn stover, rice husks, wheat straw …," said Rakesh Agrawal, the Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering.The approach sidesteps a fundamental economic hurdle in biofuels: Transporting biomass is expensive because of its bulk volume, whereas liquid fuel from biomass is far more economical to transport, he said."Material like corn stover and wood chips has low energy density," Agrawal said. "It makes more sense to process biomass into liquid fuel with a mobile platform and then take this fuel to a central refinery for further processing before using it in internal combustion engines."The new method, called fast-hydropyrolysis-hydrodeoxygenation, works by adding hydrogen into the biomass-processing reactor. The hydrogen for the mobile plants would be derived from natural gas or the biomass itself. However, Agrawal envisions the future use of solar power to produce the hydrogen by splitting water, making the new technology entirely renewable.The method, which has the shortened moniker of H2Bioil -- pronounced H Two Bio Oil -- has been studied extensively through modeling, and experiments are under way at Purdue to validate the concept. »

How can scientists monitor what's going on under the sea? For instance, to survey populations of fish in the Arctic, scientists generally gather data manually during expensive research cruises. A team of Norwegian researchers believes that setting up a network of wireless sensors is a much more effective solution. They have tested their concept in the Oslo fjord, and are now ready to take the idea to the next level: Norwegian organisations Kongsberg Maritime and SINTEF will take part in the new EU-funded CLAM ('Collaborative embedded networks for submarine surveillance') and UAN ('Underwater acoustic network) projects, both funded under the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). 'The whole thing is rather like building a subsea GSM (global system for mobile communications) system,' describes SINTEF scientist Tor Arne Reinen. Last December, a small group of scientists sailed on the Oslofjord; they dropped 5 plastic tubes filled with electronics and batteries into the sea, at regular intervals of several hundred metres. This network of sensor nodes can either be moored or float freely, and the nodes can both send and receive information including temperature, vibration or chemical composition. 'For example, if one of the sensors registers a high concentration of a particular environmental toxin, it could trigger the whole network to monitor just the same chemical,' Dr Reinen suggests. 'This would provide more rapid and reliable mapping of such occurrences than would a single sensor that could only provide the same warning several weeks or months later.'  »

At the very heart of applications such as quantum cryptography, computation and teleportation lies a fascinating phenomenon known as "entanglement." Two photons are entangled if the properties of one depend on those of the other, whatever the distance separating them.A new source of entangled photons twenty times brighter than all existing systems has been developed by a team from the Laboratoire de Photonique et de Nano-structures (LPN) of CNRS. This novel device is capable of considerably boosting the rate of quantum communications and constitutes a key component in future quantum logic processes. These results are published in the journal Nature (July 8, 2010).Take a photon in Paris and another in Tokyo: if they are "entangled," they are interdependent and measuring the properties of one makes it possible to know the properties of the other instantly, whatever the distance separating them. This mysterious property, known as "entanglement," has far reaching application potential in information fields such as quantum cryptography, quantum computation and quantum teleportation. Normally, researchers use sources of entangled photon pairs that are easy to put in place (a laser transforming a photon into two photons of different color) but with very low brightness: less than one pulse out of 100 actually contains a pair of entangled photons, which considerably restricts the rate of any quantum communication. In addition, the size of such sources means they cannot be easily integrated into microsystems. »

Three NASA aircraft will begin flights to study tropical cyclones on Aug. 15 during the agency's first major U.S.-based hurricane field campaign since 2001. The Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes mission, or GRIP, will study the creation and rapid intensification of hurricanes. Advanced instruments from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., will be aboard two of the aircraft.One of the major challenges in tropical cyclone forecasting is knowing when a tropical cyclone is going to form. Scientists will use the data from this six-week field mission to better understand how tropical storms form and develop into major hurricanes. Mission scientists will also be looking at how storms strengthen, weaken and die."This is really going to be a game-changing hurricane experiment," said Ramesh Kakar, GRIP program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "For the first time, scientists will be able to study these storms and the conditions that produce them for up to 20 hours straight. GRIP will provide a sustained, continuous look at hurricane behavior at critical times during their formation and evolution."GRIP is led by Kakar and three project scientists: Scott Braun and Gerry Heymsfield of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Edward Zipser of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. »