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Scientists can now listen to a set of solar wind data that’s usually represented visually, as numbers or graphs. University of Michigan researchers have “sonified” the data. They’ve created an acoustic, or musical, representation of it.
The researchers’ primary goal was to try to hear information that their eyes might have missed in solar wind speed and particle density data gathered by NASA’s Advanced Composition Explorer satellite. The solar wind is a stream of charged particles emanating from the sun.
Read more: Scientists Listen to the Sun in New Sonification Project
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by David l. Chandler
A team of researchers at MIT and Pennsylvania State University has been developing a new method for producing novel kinds of membranes that could have improved properties for batteries, fuel cells and other energy conversion and storage applications.
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In an advance that might interest Q-Branch, the gadget makers for James Bond, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and partners from industry and academia have designed and tested experimental antennas that are highly efficient and yet a fraction of the size of standard antenna systems with comparable properties. The novel antennas may be useful in ever-shrinking and proliferating wireless systems such as emergency communications devices, micro-sensors and portable ground-penetrating radars to search for tunnels, caverns and other geophysical features.
Read more: Engineering Metamaterials Enable Remarkably Small Antennas
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by David L. Chandler
It can be inconvenient to replace batteries in devices that need to work over long periods of time. Doctors might have to get beneath a patient’s skin to replace batteries for implanted biomedical monitoring or treatment systems. Batteries used in devices that monitor machinery, infrastructure or industrial installations may be crammed into hard-to-reach nooks or distributed over wide areas that are often difficult to access.
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- Category: Chemical
As climate change challenges continue to crop up around fossil fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide, identifying renewable fuel materials and developing processes that produce environmentally friendly, cost-competitive biofuels are becoming increasingly important.
MSU scientists are at the forefront of biofuels research and have made Michigan a leader in producing biofuels from cellulose and hemicellulose, the complex sugars that make grasses, plant stems and stalks, and leaves rigid.
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New report on climate change explores the reasons
Planet Earth has warmed much less than expected during the industrial era based on current best estimates of Earth’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of global temperature increase expected in response to a given rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2). In a study to be published in the Journal of Climate, a publication of the American Meteorological Society (the early online release of the paper is available starting 19 January 2010; the link is given below), Stephen Schwartz, of Brookhaven National Laboratory, and colleagues examine the reasons for this discrepancy.