ECE GYAN

Fresh water isn't unlimited. Rainfall isn't predictable. And plants aren't always thirsty. Just 3 percent of the world's water is drinkable, and more than 70 percent of that fresh water is used for agriculture. Unnecessary irrigation wastes huge amounts of water -- some crops are watered twice as much as they need -- and contributes to the pollution of aquifers, lakes and oceans. A predictive model combining information about plant physiology, real-time soil conditions and weather forecasts can help make more informed decisions about when and how much to irrigate. This could save 40 percent of the water consumed by more traditional methods, according to new Cornell University research. "If you have a framework to connect all these excellent sources of big data and machine learning, we can make agriculture smart," said Fengqi You, energy systems engineering professor. You is the senior author of "Robust Model Predictive Control of Irrigation Sys...

Magnetite (Fe 3 O 4 ) is best known as a magnetic iron ore, and is the source of lodestone. It also has potential as a high-temperature resistor in electronics. In new research led by Osaka University, published in  Nano Letters , ultra-thin nanowires made from Fe 3 O 4  reveal insights into an intriguing property of this mineral. When cooled to around 120 K (-150°C), magnetite suddenly shifts from a cubic to a monoclinic crystal structure. At the same time, its conductivity sharply drops -- it is no longer a metal but an insulator. The exact temperature of this unique "Verwey transition," which can be used for switching in electronic devices, depends on the sample's properties, like grain size and particle shape. Magnetite can be made into thin films, but below a certain thickness -- around 100 nm -- the Verwey transition weakens and needs lower temperatures. Thus, for electronics at the nano-scale, preserving this key feature ofFe 3 O 4  is a major challenge. The...

Researchers have created a new type of tiny 3D-printed robot that moves by harnessing vibration from piezoelectric actuators, ultrasound sources or even tiny speakers. Swarms of these "micro-bristle-bots" might work together to sense environmental changes, move materials -- or perhaps one day repair injuries inside the human body. The prototype robots respond to different vibration frequencies depending on their configurations, allowing researchers to control individual bots by adjusting the vibration. Approximately two millimeters long -- about the size of the world's smallest ant -- the bots can cover four times their own length in a second despite the physical limitations of their small size. "We are working to make the technology robust, and we have a lot of potential applications in mind," said Azadeh Ansari, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "We are working at t...

Heat transfer through a single molecule has been measured for the first time by an international team of researchers led by the University of Michigan. This could be a step toward molecular computing -- building circuits up from molecules rather than carving them out of silicon as a way to max out Moore's Law and make the most powerful conventional computers possible. Moore's Law began as an observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years, doubling the density of processing power. Molecular computing is widely believed to be Moore's Law's end game, but many obstacles stand in the way, one of which is heat transfer. "Heat is a problem in molecular computing because the electronic components are essentially strings of atoms bridging two electrodes. As the molecule gets hot, the atoms vibrate very rapidly, and the string can break," said Edgar Meyhofer, U-M professor of mechanical engineering. Until now, the ...

Infants born to women exposed to high levels of air pollution in the week before delivery are more likely to be admitted to a newborn intensive care unit (NICU), suggests an analysis by researchers at the National Institutes of Health. Depending on the type of pollution, chances for NICU admission increased from about 4% to as much as 147%, compared to infants whose mothers did not encounter high levels of air pollution during the week before delivery. The study was led by Pauline Mendola, Ph.D., of the Epidemiology Branch at NIH's Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. It appears in  Annals of Epidemiology . "Short-term exposure to most types of air pollutants may increase the risk for NICU admission," Dr. Mendola said. "If our findings are confirmed, they suggest that pregnant women may want to consider limiting their time outdoors when air quality advisories indicate unhealthy conditions." Previous studies have...

A significant jump in preterm births to Latina mothers living in the U.S. occurred in the nine months following the November 8, 2016 election of President Donald Trump, according to a study led by a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The study, published July 19 in  JAMA Network Open , was prompted by smaller studies that had suggested adverse, stress-related health effects among Latin Americans in the U.S. after the Trump election. The new analysis, based on U.S. government data on more than 33 million live births in the country, found an excess of 2,337 preterm births to U.S. Latinas compared to what would have been expected given trends in preterm birth in the years prior to the election. This is roughly 3.5 percent more preterm births than expected given projections from pre-election data. Preterm birth, defined as birth before 37 weeks of gestation, is associated with a wide range of negative health consequences, from a greater risk of de...

A bone cancer known as osteosarcoma is genetically similar in dogs and human children, according to the results of a study published today by Tufts University and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), an affiliate of City of Hope. The findings could help break the logjam in the treatment of this deadly disease, which hasn't seen a significant medical breakthrough in nearly three decades. "While osteosarcoma (OS) is rare in children, it is all too common in many dog breeds, which makes it a prime candidate for the kind of comparative cancer biology studies that could enhance drug development for both children and our canine friends," said Will Hendricks, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor in TGen's Integrated Cancer Genomics Division, and one of the study's senior authors. Using multiple molecular-level testing platforms, TGen and Tufts researchers sequenced the genomes of 59 dogs, finding that canine OS shares many of the genomic features of huma...

Greenland's more than 860,000 square miles are largely covered with ice and glaciers, and its melting fuels as much as one-third of the sea level rise in Florida. That's why a team of University of South Florida geoscientists' new discovery of one of the mechanisms that allows Greenland's glaciers to collapse into the sea has special significance for the Sunshine State. In research published in  Nature Communications , a group of scientists led by USF Distinguished University Professor Tim Dixon, PhD, uncovered a process that can control the "calving" of glaciers -- when large chunks of glacier ice collapse into the sea, forming icebergs like the one that sank the Titanic. The discovery by the team that included USF PhD student Surui Xie; David Holland, PhD, and Irena Vaková, PhD, at New York University (NYU) and NYU-Abu Dhabi Research Institute; and Denis Voytenko, PhD, formerly at NYU and now at Nielson Communications, will help the scientific community...

Either to check the time or waste time, people often look at their smartphones after waking in the middle of the night. While this acute burst of light does make it more difficult to fall back to sleep, a new Northwestern University study reports that it won't interfere with the body's overall circadian rhythms. For the first time, researchers directly tested how short pulses of light are processed by the brain to affect sleep. They discovered that separate areas of the brain are responsible for short pulses versus long-term exposure to light. This finding challenges the widely accepted, long-held belief that all light information is relayed through the brain's suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which synchronizes the body's sleep/wake cycles. "Prior to the widespread use of electricity, our exposure to light and darkness occurred in a very predictable pattern," said Northwestern's Tiffany Schmidt, who led the study. "But light has become very ch...

Hallucinations are spooky and, fortunately, fairly rare. But, a new study suggests, the real question isn't so much why some people occasionally experience them. It's why all of us aren't hallucinating all the time. Neurons illustration In the study, Stanford University School of Medicine neuroscientists stimulated nerve cells in the visual cortex of mice to induce an illusory image in the animals' minds. The scientists needed to stimulate a surprisingly small number of nerve cells, or neurons, in order to generate the perception, which caused the mice to behave in a particular way. "Back in 2012, we had described the ability to control the activity of individually selected neurons in an awake, alert animal," said Karl Deisseroth, MD, PhD, professor of bioengineering and of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. "Now, for the first time, we've been able to advance this capability to control multiple individually specified cells at once, and ma...

The molten rock that feeds volcanoes can be stored in the Earth's crust for as long as a thousand years, a result which may help with volcanic hazard management and better forecasting of when eruptions might occur. Volcanic eruption Researchers from the University of Cambridge used volcanic minerals known as 'crystal clocks' to calculate how long magma can be stored in the deepest parts of volcanic systems. This is the first estimate of magma storage times near the boundary of the Earth's crust and the mantle, called the Moho. The results are reported in the journal  Science . "This is like geological detective work," said Dr Euan Mutch from Cambridge's Department of Earth Sciences, and the paper's first author. "By studying what we see in the rocks to reconstruct what the eruption was like, we can also know what kind of conditions the magma is stored in, but it's difficult to understand what's happening in the deeper parts of v...

By measuring the fast electrical spikes of individual neurons in the touch region of the brain, Brown University neuroscientists have discovered a new type of cell that keeps time so regularly that it may serve as the brain's long-hypothesized clock or metronome. Metronome This type of neuron spikes rhythmically, and in a synchronized manner, independent of external sensations, said Chris Moore, a professor of neuroscience at Brown and the associate director of the Carney Institute for Brain Science. By "setting the beat," the neurons appear to improve rodents' ability to detect when their whiskers are lightly tapped. Brain waves with approximately 40 cycles per second -- also known as gamma rhythms -- have been studied since the mid-1930s in humans and rodents, and earlier work from Moore's lab showed that boosting the rodents' natural gamma rhythms helped the rodents detect fainter whisker sensations. "Gamma rhythms have been a huge topic o...