It started with an unwanted laptop, and it ended in Britain's Supreme Court.

The complexities and implications of the chemical spill into West Virginia's Elk River keep growing, according to a study led by Virginia Tech Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Andrea Dietrich.

Time is ticking for baby boomers, with many older drivers fearing the day they hand over their license as a day they will lose their independence.

A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but a high-definition 3D image could be worth a whole lot more.

As the search resumes for any debris in the southern Indian Ocean today air crash investigators still need to find proof it could be wreckage from the missing Malaysia Airlines flight.

Starting about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, brachiopod groups disappeared in large numbers, along with 90 percent of the planet's species. Today, only a few groups, or genera, of brachiopods remain. "Most people won't be familiar with brachiopods. They're pretty rare in the modern ocean," said Jonathan Payne, a paleobiologist at Stanford University.

Seiko Epson Corporation, the world leader in quartz crystal technology, today introduces availability of the SG7050EBN, a next-generation differential-output crystal oscillator that achieves extremely low phase jitter.

(Phys.org) —It's well-known that the human body is a good conductor of electricity, and now researchers have taken advantage of this fact to create a small generator that uses the body as an electrode to power portable devices without the need for batteries. The "body contact electrode" replaces a grounded electrode that was used in a previous version of the generator, which would have been...

A group of geologists working for the Geological Survey of Western Australia has confirmed a long-standing belief that most of the Yilgarn Craton has a similar crustal architecture.

Australians and New Zealanders can now use their computers to help scientists discover if climate change has contributed to record heatwaves, droughts and flooding across both countries.

When it comes to data transmission, light is superior to electronics. An ability to transmit data in parallel by utilizing multiple light wavelengths allows optical fibers to carry more information than electrical cables. Computers are currently based on electronics, but they would benefit from employing optical signals. However, for this to become a reality, it needs to be implemented on a small...

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers at MIT, led by Raluca Ada Popa has developed a platform for building secure web applications that is based on ensuring data on servers is always encrypted—they call it Mylar. In announcing the new platform, the developers noted that Mylar can protect user data from snooping even if a hacker obtains full access to a server.

The semiconductor silicon lies at the heart of the current revolution in electronics and computing. In particular, it can produce compact integrated circuits when processed by modern techniques capable of fabricating structures just a few nanometers in size.

Lithium-ion batteries power a vast array of modern devices, from cell phones, laptops, and laser pointers to thermometers, hearing aids, and pacemakers. The electrodes in these batteries typically comprise three components: active materials, conductive additives, and binders.

The objective of the MAGNETIDE project is to develop a new type of generator that transforms the mechanical energy produced by the movement of the tides into electric energy. Researchers have modified the generator's design so that components manufactured using PIM, Powder Injection Moulding, could be installed. This would reduce the cost of these systems as well as increasing their efficiency by...

We told you this was going to be a good season to observe Jupiter, and astrophotographers in the northern hemisphere have been making the most of this time of opposition where Jupiter has been riding high in the sky. What we didn't know was that there was going to be a familiar face staring back at us.

In a new study published in Tellus A, Francois Counillon and co-authors at the Bjerknes Centre are testing seasonal-to-decadal prediction.

Russian mathematician Yakov G. Sinai has won this year's $1 million Abel Prize in mathematics.

Neural probe arrays are expected to significantly benefit the lives of amputees and people affected by spinal cord injuries or severe neuromotor diseases. By providing a direct route of communication between the brain and artificial limbs, these arrays record and stimulate neurons in the cerebral cortex.

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have the ability to both convert into any cell type in the human body and to proliferate indefinitely in the laboratory. However, cultured hESCs, which are plucked from the developing embryo and then grown in vitro, often display a number of biological differences when compared to the pluripotent epiblast cells in the early embryo from which they originated.

Despite the well-documented disadvantages of graduating from college during a recession, could graduates actually be happier with their jobs in the long run?

A Turkish court ordered the telecommunications authority to restore access to Twitter on Wednesday, issuing a temporary injunction five days after the government blocked the social network in Turkey.

Ferroelectric materials have an intrinsic electrical polarization caused by a small shift in the position of some of their atoms that occurs below a critical point called the Curie temperature. This polarization can be switched by an external electric field, an effect exploited in some computer memory devices.

I was 12 when I first came across an ocean dandelion. I wish I had known then how strange these animals truly are. I was watching a documentary where researchers had collected a deep-sea dandelion using a submersible, but upon returning to the surface, the dandelion had disintegrated into nothing but "petals".