GEN-ERIC News

Eggs give many of us the fuel we need to start the day, but leftover eggshells of the future could provide fuel to start hydrogen cars. The fragile leftovers can be ground up and used to filter out carbon dioxide, a pesky by-product of hydrogen production, engineers said. “The key to making pure hydrogen is separating out the carbon dioxide,” said L.S. Fan, a chemical and biomolecular engineer at Ohio State University. Calcium carbonate—the main component in eggshells and antacid tablets—serves as the active ingredient in Fan and his team’s process when heated up. The material soaks up acidic carbon dioxide gas during hydrogen-producing reactions, making them more efficient. In fact, it’s now the most effective carbon dioxide absorber ever tested, Fan said.

The amount of dark matter left over from the early universe may be less than previously believed. Research published in the open access journal PMC Physics A shows that the “relic abundance” of stable dark matter particles such as the neutralino may be reduced as compared to standard cosmology theories due to the effects of the “dilaton"‘, a particle with zero spin in the gravitational sector of strings. Results were obtained by studying a special “off-shell” time-dependent term (due to the dilaton) in the Boltzmann equation that describes the evolution of hot matter density as the Universe cooled down. “The formalism that this work used was developed in partial collaboration with John Ellis of CERN and Vasiliki Mitsou of IFIC, Valencia, and is a version of ‘non-critical string theory’", said Mavromatos. All the matter and radiation in the universe is thought to have been created by the Big Bang. The radiation stopped interacting with the matter some 400,000 years later – when the universe had cooled down enough for electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms. The density of dark matter particles such as the neutralino (a dark matter candidate favoured by many of the current “supersymmetric” approaches to particle physics) was therefore “frozen” at this time – the so-called relic abundance.

Three-dimensional drawing programs offer precision, but still require input in two dimensions. Now scientists have developed a software program that trades the keyboard and mouse for virtual reality goggles with feedback to illustrate objects in mid-air. The program, Drawing on Air, is meant to give scientists a better way to model complex ideas, and could eventually allow doctors to visualize a surgical procedure before they ever cut into a patient. It could also give artists an intuitive, simple way for moving from traditional freehand methods to computers. “It’s got ‘drawing’ in the title, but it’s very three-dimensional, so in many ways it’s more sculptural than it is drawing-based,” said Daniel Keefe, post-doctoral research associate in computer science at Brown University in Providence, RI.

Struggling with the new public smoking ban or simply fed up with being addicted to the evil weed? QuitmateME is a Java application which records each cigarette the user smokes and then calculates a quitting regime for them to follow. The smoker is then encouraged to beat targets set by the software to gradually reduce their daily intake. For instance a 20-a-day smoker could easily reduce their intake to 10 a day in just 10 days. Monthly, Daily, Hourly and AM/PM reports are provided help understand smoking patterns and motivate users to cut down on their smoking levels.

More than 5.5 million Filipinos now use their cell phones as virtual wallets, making the Philippines a leader among developing nations in providing financial transactions over mobile networks. Mobile banking services, which are also catching on in Kenya and South Africa, enable people who don’t have bank accounts to transfer money easily, quickly and safely. It’s spreading in the developing world because mobile phones are much more common than bank accounts. The system is particularly useful for the 8 million Filipinos – 10 percent of the country’s citizens – who work overseas and send money home.

A 51-year-old surrogate mother for her daughter has given birth to her own twin grandchildren in northeastern Brazil, the delivery hospital said. Rosinete Palmeira Serrao, a government health worker, gave birth to twin boys by Caesarean section on Thursday at the Santa Joana Hospital in the city of Recife, the hospital said in a statement on its Web site.

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is using randomization software to determine the location and timing of security checkpoints and patrols. The theory is that random security will make it impossible for terrorists to predict the actions of security forces. The ARMOR software, written by computer scientists at the University of Southern California, was initially developed to solve a problem in game theory. Doctoral student Praveen Paruchuri wrote algorithms on how an agent should react to an opponent who has perfect information about the agent’s choices.