Hydrophobic Surface Refuses to Get Wet

Engineering researchers have crafted a flat surface that refuses to get wet. Water droplets skitter across it like ball bearings tossed on ice.
The inspiration? Not wax. Not glass. Not even Teflon.
Instead, University of Florida engineers have achieved what they label in a new paper a “nearly perfect hydrophobic interface” by reproducing, on small bits of flat plastic, the shape and patterns of the minute hairs that grow on the bodies of spiders, ScienceDaily said.
“They have short hairs and longer hairs, and they vary a lot. And that is what we mimic,” said Wolfgang Sigmund, a professor of materials science and engineering.
A paper about the surface, which works equally well with hot or cold water, appears in this month’s edition of the journal Langmuir.
Spiders use their water-repelling hairs to stay dry or avoid drowning, with water spiders capturing air bubbles and toting them underwater to breathe.
Potential applications for UF’s ultra-water-repellent surfaces are many, Sigmund said. When water scampers off the surface, it picks up and carries dirt with it, in effect making the surface self-cleaning.
“It is ideal for some food packaging, or windows, or solar cells that must stay clean to gather sunlight,” he said.
Boat designers might coat hulls with it, making boats faster and more efficient.

Protecting Baby’s Smile

The best way to give your children’s teeth a healthy start is to begin dental care early in life, and the American Dental Association has tips for keeping kids’ teeth in tip-top shape:
Routine exams, cleanings and fluoride treatments can catch problems early before they get worse and require significant care, HealthDay said.
• Visit the dentist for regular checkups. Set up an appointment within six months of the eruption of a child’s first tooth, but no later than the first birthday.
• Guard against tooth decay by clearing your baby’s mouth within a few days of birth and wiping your baby’s gums with a damp washcloth or gauze pad after every feeding. This will help remove plaque.
• Don’t allow your child to breastfeed for long periods of time. Tooth decay can develop if you allow your baby to nap or sleep at night with a bottle of milk, formula or fruit juice.
• Encourage your child to drink from a cup by age 1. Discourage frequent use of a training cup.
• For older kids who play sports or even those who ride a scooter or bicycle, mouth protectors can provide important protection. Your dentist may be able to make a better-fitting mouth protector than those supplied in stores.
• Know what to do if your child has a dental emergency: If a tooth is knocked out, rinse off the root if it’s dirty but don’t scrub it or remove attached tissue fragments. If possible, gently insert and hold the tooth in its socket. If that’s not possible, put the tooth in a cup of milk and get to the dentist right away.

Iranian Makes Trucks More Green, Profitable

If you have ever stood by a highway and felt the blast wave of a large truck passing by, that experience may become a thing of the past, or at least, one greatly reduced. When that happens, thank a researcher at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and an experiment he brought to the world’s largest wind tunnel at NASA Ames in Mountain View.
“What happens is this trailer is going to have a wake,” explained Iran-born Dr. Kambiz Salari, who has spent ten years studying how large trucks move the air and how that same air creates aerodynamic drag on them. His research could save the nation’s truckers 3.4 billion gallons of diesel a year and has the industry’s attention, Abclocal.go reported.
“Well, if I said I could save you a 1/100th of a mile per gallon, that’s a million dollars. Would you put a $1 million in your pocket?” asked Steve Bruford, a vice president of product development at Navistar Trucks.
Essentially, this research provides common ground for two competing efficiencies. For trucks, a box is the most effective shape for carrying cargo, but aerodynamically it is inefficient. So, Salari has been working on ways to retain the box shape while streamlining it. His solution is bolt-on drag-defeating technology.
At a cursory glance, an 18-wheeler recently tested in NASA’s wind tunnel looked much like ones seen on the road. But, a closer examination revealed devices on the hood, between the cab and trailer, beneath the trailer itself, and also behind it. They alter differences in air flow and pressure, especially at high speed.
The testing measured their combined benefit in reducing drag.
Salari designed them to be adaptable for models now on the road. His hope is that such modifications will pay for themselves in a year of driving or less.
“It’s a big deal if you have thousands of trucks and you spend $1.2 billion in fuel in a year,” said Bruford. “If I can make a 50-percent reduction, it’s a big deal.”
More important, it represents a textbook case of green technology saving fuel and lowering carbon dioxide consumption for the most pragmatic of reasons: profit.

Processed Meat May Harm Heart

Conventional wisdom has dictated that fat from red meat is a risk factor for heart disease, but a new analysis from Harvard researchers finds it’s eating processed meat--not unprocessed red meat--that increases the risk for heart disease and even diabetes.
The term “processed meat” refers to any meat preserved by smoking, curing or salting or with the addition of chemical preservatives.
The researchers defined unprocessed meats as hot dogs, hamburger and sausage, BusinessWeek reported.
“To lower risk of heart attacks and diabetes, people should avoid eating too much processed meats--for example, hot dogs, sausage or processed deli meats,” said lead researcher Renata Micha, a research fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health.
“Based on our findings, eating up to one serving per week would be associated with relatively small risk.”
For the study, Micha’s team analyzed data from 20 studies that included more than 1.2 million participants. Among them, 23,889 had coronary heart disease, 2,280 had had a stroke and 10,797 had diabetes.
The researchers found that people who ate unprocessed red meat did not significantly increase their chances of developing heart disease or diabetes. However, eating processed meat was linked to an increased risk for the two conditions.
In fact, for every 50-gram (1.8-ounce) serving, the risk for heart disease jumped 42 percent and the risk for diabetes increased 19 percent.
Though neither unprocessed red meat nor processed meats were linked to an increased risk for stroke, the researchers pointed out that just three studies looked at the connection between eating meat and stroke, so the data was insufficient to draw a valid conclusion.
“When we looked at average nutrients in unprocessed meats and processed meats eaten in the US, we found that they contained similar amounts of saturated fat and cholesterol,” Micha said. “In contrast, processed meats contained, on average, four times higher amounts of sodium and two times higher amounts of nitrate preservatives.”
Micha noted that salt and other preservatives, rather than fats, probably explain the higher risk for heart attacks and diabetes seen with processed meats.

How Hormone Helps Animals Bond

Scientists have pinpointed how a key hormone helps animals to recognize others by their smell.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh have shown that the hormone vasopressin helps the brain differentiate between familiar and new scents, ScienceDaily said.
The study, published in the journal Nature, suggests that when the hormone fails to function, animals are unable to recognize other individuals from their scent.
The ability to recognize others by smell is crucial in helping animals to establish strong bonds with other animals.
The research, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, may offer clues about the way people make emotional connections with others through smell and deepen our understanding of the role scent plays in memory.
Many scientists think a failure in this recognition system in humans may prevent them from forming deep emotional bonds with others.
It is thought that it may be at the root of conditions such as some forms of autism and social phobia.
Researchers, including scientists in Germany and Japan, reached their conclusion by studying the way rats familiarize themselves with other rats through smell.
They placed an adult rat in an enclosure with a baby rat and left them to sniff and interact with each other.
After a short separation, they placed the baby back in the adult’s enclosure, together with an unknown baby.
Adult rats, whose vasopressin had been blocked, failed to recognize the baby they had already met.
Professor Mike Ludwig, who led the study at the University of Edinburgh, said, “This study gives us a window into understanding the biological basis of social interactions.”

Ice Once Covered the Equator

Sea ice may have covered the Earth’s surface all the way to the equator hundreds of millions of years ago, a new study finds, adding more evidence to the theory that a “snowball Earth” once existed.
The finding also has implications for the survival and evolution of life on Earth through this bitter ice age, LiveScience wrote.
Geologists found evidence that tropical areas were once covered by glaciers by examining ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada. These rocks have moved because the Earth’s surface and the rocks on it are in constant motion, pushed around by the roiling currents of the planet’s interior, a process called plate tectonics.
Rocks from Canada’s Yukon Territory showed glacial deposits and other signs of glaciation, such as striated clasts, ice-rafted debris and deformation of soft sediments.
The scientists were able to determine, based on the magnetism and composition of these rocks, that 716.5 million years ago the rocks were located at sea-level in the tropics, at about 10 degrees latitude. The period of glaciations that occurred then is called Sturtian glaciation, one of the two greatest ice ages known to have taken place on Earth.
“This is the first time that the Sturtian glaciation has been shown to have occurred at tropical latitudes, providing direct evidence that this particular glaciation was a ‘snowball Earth’ event,” said lead author of the study Francis Macdonald, a geologist at Harvard University.
“Our data also suggest that the Sturtian glaciation lasted a minimum of five million years,” Macdonald added.
One intriguing question suggested by the finding is how life forms--particularly those more complex than microbes--survived throughout this harsh climate. Their survival suggests that sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on Earth’s surface, perhaps in patches of open water that formed in the sea ice and provided a refuge for life.

Lip-Reading Cellphones

Researchers in Germany are working on a technology that will enable mobile phones to convert silent mouth movement in speech.
Using electromyography, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology team has developed a system that measures the electrical activity of muscle movements in the face and converts it into speech.
The pickups can be turned on seamlessly during a regular conversation and the implications of this research are huge, IdeaConnection wrote.
Besides the obvious advantage of giving speech-impaired individuals another way to communicate, think about it for the average person. You can give sensitive password information without being overheard or have a heated argument with your spouse while carpooling.

VoltPot Charges Gadgets

Concept coffee table harvests dirt power to recharge portable gadgets.
According to Ecofriend, the VoltPot by designers at Nectar Design is a unique coffee table that doubles as an indoor planter and triples as a gadget charger.
The concept table puts the environment to work indoors by harvesting the power of dirt using a built-in microbial fuel cell to provide enough energy to charge your portable gadgets.
The onboard fuel cell is able to utilize the metabolic energy of microbes present in soil and convert it directly to electrical energy at a continuous rate.
The designers state that harvesting about 1W of power per cubic meter of soil is achievable at the moment, but test conditions have shown that 10 times that amount is possible.

Car Flashlight Always Ready to Go

It’s a problem as old as the flashlight--or the automobile, whichever came second.
A flashlight is a must among your car accessories, but chances are that if you do, its batteries will be dead by the time you need it. This is especially likely if you live somewhere that gets cold winters, where just a few hours parked outside could send your car-flashlight’s batteries into hibernation.
There’s a nifty new product, however, that addresses this problem. The Spotlight is a small yet heavy-duty flashlight that plugs straight into your car’s dashboard power socket, where it will stay charged constantly, Gizmag wrote.
The Spotlight has a 0.5W LED bulb that delivers 25 lumens of illumination--enough to light up objects 50 meters (150 feet) away, according to the company website. An indicator light lets you know when its rechargeable Ni-MH battery has reached a full charge. Once it has, it will reportedly provide over 180 minutes of light.
It’s even submersible, should you choose to drive into the water (or drop it accidentally in a puddle).

41 Anti-Cancer Drugs

Iranian researchers are set to develop 41 types of anti-cancer medications over the next six months.