• High tech more effective than tax climate in driving states' economic growth

    Race-to-the-top policies are generally defined as those involving investments in education, entrepreneurship, and infrastructure; race-to-the-bottom policies involve competition among the states for jobs by using lower taxes and industrial recruitment incentives; researchers find that states with more technology classes in school, higher domain name registrations, and more people online tended to economically outperform states with a lower emphasis on technology

  • Official dispels government green procurement regulation myths

    The U.S. government owns or manages one in five acres in the United States, and is the largest domestic user of electricity; it is also one of the largest consumers of resources in the United States, purchasing on average $535 billion worth of goods each year; In 2009 President Obama issued an executive order requiring that all government agencies establish and implement plans to increase their environmental performance; speaking at the 2011 Security Industry Association’s (SIA) Government Summit to an audience of security professionals, a government official sought to clarify myths surrounding the government’s new green procurement regulations and assured government service providers that the rules would not drastically affect a company’s existing practices

  • China deploys drought relief team to country's north

    China’s northernmost provinces are still suffering from a prolonged drought that has been the country’s worst in fifty years; in the northern provinces and the autonomous regions of inner Mongolia more than 11.67 million people and 3.62 million livestock have been affected by the drought; nearly six million acres of the region’s crops have also been hit hard by the drought; the government has declared it a level-four emergency, the highest level, and is launching a full out emergency response plan to aid the beleaguered region

  • Nanowire-based sensors detect volatile organic compounds

    Researchers have made nano-sized sensors that detect volatile organic compounds — harmful pollutants released from paints, cleaners, pesticides, and other products — which offer several advantages over today’s commercial gas sensors, including low-power room-temperature operation and the ability to detect one or several compounds over a wide range of concentrations

  • New commuting method: Personal Aerial Vehicles

    Researchers in Germany have an idea for solving the growing congestions in urban centers: a Personal Aerial Vehicles (PAVs) for traveling between homes and working places; the PAVs will fly at low altitude in urban environments, thus making it unnecessary to change current air-traffic control regulations

  • NFL in search of new helmets to reduce brain trauma

    Researchers at the NFL’s Southern Impact Research Center are currently exploring ways to install sensors on helmets to measure the amount of head trauma players receive; league officials hope that the sensors can eventually be installed on all helmets to provide accurate data that can then be used to adjust game rules and construct better helmets that will reduce the number of concussions

  • Record rise in sea level in two millennia

    An international research team of scientists has shown that the rate of sea-level rise along the U.S. Atlantic coast is greater now than at any time in the past 2,000 years and that there is a consistent link between changes in global mean surface temperature and sea level

  • New tool predicts drought

    Knowing when to instigate water saving measures in dry times will be easier from now on, following a breakthrough in drought prediction: an Australian researcher has developed a way to predict droughts six months before they begin

  • Navy funds development of new explosives detection technology

    The Navy recently awarded researchers at Texas Tech University a four year $1.2 million grant to develop a more effective method to detect explosive materials; the project is spearheaded by four Texas Tech professors specializing in chemical engineering; one professor explained, “In layman’s terms, basically we’re trying to enhance detection for explosives”

  • Ceramic armor receives development prize

    New ceramic armor has many advantages: currently the ceramic composite offers a 30 percent weight saving compared with an armor plate of the same size made of alumina ceramics and is 15 percent lighter than another widely used ceramic armor, silicon carbide; it also requires a much lower furnace temperature meaning less energy is used and less CO2 is produced in manufacture, making it an environmentally-friendly product

  • Strong 1Q growth for U.S. solar power, more expected

    The United States showed strong first quarter growth in solar panel capacity, increasing installations by 66 percent; the increase in solar capacity is due largely to falling panel prices and developers taking advantage of government incentives that were set to expire in 2010; analysts expect solar panel growth to increase throughout the year

  • Anxious Searchers Miss Multiple Targets

    Research shows that when people search for objects — say, air port security personnel screening baggage for weapons — they typically miss the second of two objects once they find the first one; missing a second target is a well-known issue called “satisfaction of search,” and it manifests itself in both airport screening and looking for cancerous tumors in a lab; now researchers find that anxiety heightened the satisfaction-of-search problem

  • Mississippi River floods to cause large Gulf of Mexico dead zone

    Hypoxia, which creates oceanic dead zones, is caused by excessive nutrient pollution, often from human activities such as agriculture, which results in too little oxygen to support most marine life in bottom and near-bottom water; scientists are predicting the dead zone area in the Gulf could measure between 8,500 and 9,421 square miles, or an area roughly the size of New Hampshire; the largest hypoxic zone measured to date occurred in 2002 and encompassed more than 8,400 square miles

  • Arizona wildfire now largest in state's history

    The Wallow wildfire in Arizona has continued to burn out of control and is now the largest fire in Arizona’s history; on Tuesday firefighters in Arizona reported that they had 18 percent of the fire contained; so far the blaze has burned 479,407 acres in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona; officials have evacuated thousands of residents from mountain towns and are urging residents to stay clear as the smoke has created dangerous air conditions

  • New smartphone app reduces information overload

    Researchers have developed a new smartphone application to avoid information overload by processing large quantities of data in real time and presenting it in user friendly clusters; the software is the first to allow a user to make real time adjustments to how information is displayed on a phone as it is acutely “aware” of how cluttered the screen is; the new application can be used in a wide array of instances including natural disasters, monitoring multiple hospital patient’s heart levels, and mapping the locations of first responders deployed during an emergency