Curated News: Scientific Meetings

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Researchers from Binghamton University—State University of New York and the University of California, Riverside have found a weakness in the Haswell central processing unit (CPU) components that makes common computer operating systems vulnerable to malicious attacks. Computer hackers could take control of individual, company and government computers if a weak point in address space layout randomization (ASLR) software is exploited by manipulating a CPU’s branch predictor, a piece of hardware designed to improve program performance.

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Michigan State University biometrics researchers created a life-size 3-D model hand complete with fingerprints using a 3-D high resolution printer. While intended to help calibrate fingerprint scanners, they realized this technology could be used to spoof someone’s hand and steal their identity. Now they want manufacturers to design a spoof-resistant scanner.

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A study of 20 major cloud hosting services has found that as many as 10 percent of the repositories hosted by them had been compromised – with several hundred of the “buckets” actively providing malware. Such bad content could be challenging to find, however, because it can be rapidly assembled from stored components that individually may not appear to be malicious.

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A billion years ago, the core of what was to become North America nearly ripped apart, creating a huge branched scar that extends from the tip of Lake Superior deep into the Midwest. Washington University in St. Louis scientists are using data from seismometers they placed across and along the rift to take a good hard look.

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Computation is stuck in a rut. The integrated circuits that powered the past 50 years of technological revolution are reaching their physical limits. This predicament has computer scientists scrambling for new ideas. Researchers from Sandia National Laboratories will present three papers at the IEEE International Conference on Rebooting Computing held Oct. 17-19, highlighting the breadth of potential non-traditional neural computing applications.

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University of Washington engineers have devised a way to send secure passwords through the human body using smartphone fingerprint sensors and laptop touchpads -- rather than over the air where they're vulnerable to hacking.

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Researchers from North Carolina State University and Samsung Electronics have found a way to boost the speed of computer applications by more than 9 percent. The improvement results from techniques that allow computer processors to retrieve data more efficiently.

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Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a new type of inverter device with greater efficiency in a smaller, lighter package – which will improve the fuel-efficiency and range of hybrid and electric vehicles.

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PRiME is the largest, most significant research conference of its kind in the world. Learn more about presentations to be delivered by pioneering researchers in renewable energy, biomedical, sensors, and more.

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Is life better or worse after sticking your Fitbit in a drawer? University of Washington engineers surveyed hundreds of people who had abandoned self-tracking tools and found emotions ranged from guilt to indifference to relief that the tracking experience was over.

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University at Buffalo researchers illustrate how smartphones, due to their ubiquity and sophisticated gadgetry, can easily hack 3-D printers by measuring ‘leaked’ energy and acoustic waves that emanate from the printers. The work is eye-opening because it shows how anyone with a smartphone — from a disgruntled employee to an industrial spy — might steal intellectual property from an unsuspecting business.

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Researchers at The Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation are working to harness the power of endophytes. The initiative, Forage365, aims to help farmers provide livestock with year-round grazing.

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"Interscatter" communication developed by University of Washington engineers allows power-limited devices such as brain implants, contact lenses, credit cards and smaller wearable electronics to talk to everyday devices such as smartphones and watches.

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Scientists at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have revealed the network infrastructure used by Netflix for its content delivery, by mimicking the film request process from all over the world and analysing the responses.

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At the USENIX Security Conference in Austin, Texas, a team of University of Washington researchers on Aug. 12 presented the first-ever comprehensive analysis of third-party web tracking across three decades and a new tool, TrackingExcavator, which they developed to extract and analyze tracking behaviors on a given web page. They saw a four-fold increase in third-party tracking on top sites from 1996 to 2016, and mapped the growing complexity of trackers stretching back decades.

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Scientists, in three plenary talks, will explore a variety of subjects related to the “Chemistry of the People, by the People, for the People” theme of the 252nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, the world’s largest scientific society. The meeting will take place August 21-25 in Philadelphia.

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Oranges and other citrus fruits are good for you — they contain plenty of vitamins and substances, such as antioxidants, that can help keep you healthy. Now a group of researchers reports that these fruits also help prevent harmful effects of obesity in mice fed a Western-style, high-fat diet.

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Indoor air pollution is an important environmental threat to human health, leading to symptoms of “sick building syndrome.” But researchers report that surrounding oneself with certain house plants could combat the potentially harmful effects of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), a main category of these pollutants. Interestingly, they found that certain plants are better at removing particular harmful compounds from the air, suggesting that, with the right plant, indoor air could become cleaner and safer

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What do squid and jellyfish skin have in common with human skin? All three have inspired a team of chemists to create materials that change color or texture in response to variations in their surroundings. These materials could be used for encrypting secret messages, creating anti-glare surfaces, or detecting moisture or damage, they say.

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Most people start racking up scars from an early age with scraped knees and elbows. While many of these fade over time, more severe types such as keloids and scars from burns are largely untreatable. These types of scars are associated with permanent functional loss and, in severe cases, carry the stigma of disfigurement. Now scientists are developing new compounds that could stop scars from forming in the first place.

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Whether severe trauma occurs on the battlefield or the highway, saving lives often comes down to stopping the bleeding as quickly as possible. Many methods for controlling external bleeding exist, but at this point, only surgery can halt blood loss inside the body from injury to internal organs. Now, researchers have developed nanoparticles that congregate wherever injury occurs in the body to help it form blood clots, and they’ve validated these particles in test tubes and in vivo.

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Non-toxic, edible batteries could one day power ingestible devices for diagnosing and treating disease. One team reports new progress toward that goal with their batteries made with melanin pigments, naturally found in the skin, hair and eyes.

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Scientists may be closing in on a way to let consumers savor the sweet taste of cake, cookies and other culinary delights without the sugar rush. In preliminary tests using a new device developed in-house that allows them to screen for odor compounds in real foods, they have isolated several natural aromatic molecules that could be used to trick our brains into believing that desserts and other foods contain more fat, sugar or salt than they actually do.

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The developing world is awash in substandard, degraded or falsified medications, which can either directly harm users or deprive them of needed treatment. And with internet sales of medications on the rise, people everywhere are increasingly at risk. So, a team of researchers has developed a simple, inexpensive paper-based device to screen suspicious medications.

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Scrap tires have been on environmentalists’ blacklist for decades. They pile up in landfills, have fed enormous toxic fires, harbor pests and get burned for fuel. Scientists trying to rid us of this scourge have developed a new way to make synthetic rubber. And once this material is discarded, it can be easily degraded back to its chemical building blocks and reused in new tires and other products.

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Car emissions is a high-stakes issue, as last year’s Volkswagen scandal demonstrated. Pressure to meet tightening standards led the carmaker to cheat on emissions tests. But wrongdoing aside, how are automakers going to realistically meet future, tougher emissions requirements to reduce their impact on the climate? Researchers report today that a vehicle’s cold start — at least in gasoline-powered cars — is the best target for future design changes.

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Although rechargeable batteries in smartphones, cars and tablets can be charged again and again, they don’t last forever. Old batteries often wind up in landfills or incinerators, potentially harming the environment. And valuable materials remain locked inside. Now, a team of researchers is turning to naturally occurring fungi to drive an environmentally friendly recycling process to extract cobalt and lithium from tons of waste batteries.

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Using a unique technique to fight nerve gas and setting up a genetic code for synthetic materials will be the topics of a pair of Kavli Lectures at the 252nd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society. The meeting will take place August 21-25 in Philadelphia.

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A future of soft robots that wash your dishes or smart T-shirts that power your cell phone may depend on the development of stretchy power sources. But traditional batteries are thick and rigid — not ideal properties for materials that would be used in tiny malleable devices. In a step toward wearable electronics, a team of researchers has produced a stretchy micro-supercapacitor using ribbons of graphene.

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Every day, millions of Americans with diabetes have to inject themselves with insulin to manage their blood-sugar levels. But less painful alternatives are emerging. Scientists are developing a new way of administering the medicine orally with tiny vesicles that can deliver insulin where it needs to go without a shot. Today, they share their in vivo testing results.

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More than a hundred years ago, Ivan Pavlov conducted what would become one of the most famous and influential psychology studies — he conditioned dogs to salivate at the ringing of a bell. Now, scientists are able to see in real time what happens in the brains of live animals during this classic experiment with a new technique. Ultimately, the approach could lead to a greater understanding of how we learn, and develop and break addictions.

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During a heart attack, clots or narrowed arteries block blood flow, harming or killing cells within the tissue. But the damage doesn’t end after the crushing pain subsides. Instead, the heart’s walls thin out, the organ becomes enlarged, and scar tissue forms. If nothing is done, the patient can eventually experience heart failure. But scientists now report they have developed gels that, in animal tests, can be injected into the heart to shore up weakened areas and prevent heart failure.

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At the grocery store, most foods — meats, breads, cheeses, snacks — come wrapped in plastic packaging. Not only does this create a lot of non-recyclable, non-biodegradable waste, but thin plastic films are not great at preventing spoilage. And some plastics are suspected of leaching potentially harmful compounds into food. To address these issues, scientists are now developing a packaging film made of milk proteins — and it is even edible.

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Large Hadron Collider (LHC) performance surpasses expectations; results confirm the Higgs particle, show "bump" appears to be a statistical fluctuation, and offer insight into quark-gluon plasma at high energies complementary to those explored at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

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Thanks to the work of a Missouri University of Science and Technology doctoral student in civil and environmental engineering and her faculty mentors, mine remediation of former mine tailings impoundments could receive an organic boost from a product most communities are eager to get rid of — sewage sludge from a municipal wastewater treatment plant.

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American Chemical Society (ACS) President Donna J. Nelson, Ph.D., will emphasize her theme of build­ing communities in chemistry at the ACS 252nd National Meeting & Exposition, August 21 to 25, in Philadelphia. The presidential events, which will also include other subjects of broad interest, will be held at the Pennsylvania Convention Center and the Philadelphia Marriott. All times listed are in EDT.

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Professors Chihiro Suzuki and Izumi Murakami's research group at the National Institute for Fusion Science, together with Professor Fumihiro Koike of Sophia University, injected various elements with high atomic numbers and produced highly charged ions(*1) in LHD plasmas. By measuring the emission spectrum of the extreme ultraviolet wavelength range, they discovered a new spectral line that had not been observed experimentally in the past. This result is not only significant for basic science research, it also is useful fundamental data for plasma application research such as the development of extreme ultraviolet lithography(*2) light sources. This research result was presented in an invited talk at the 43rd European Physical Society Conference on Plasma Physics, which was held from July 4, 2016, to July 8, 2016.

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Researchers at West Virginia University studied drilling wastes produced at two research wells near Morgantown and found they are well below federal guidelines for radioactive or hazardous waste.

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New research is casting doubt on a commonly held belief about how cells use DNA to make proteins, suggesting the genetic code is more diverse than previously thought.

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An out of this world experiment to grow large-volume protein crystals aboard the International Space Station has proven successful. These sorts of crystals, which may be used in everything from basic biomedical research to drug design, can be grown bigger and better in microgravity -- a finding that may help the pharmaceuticals industry ease a drug design bottleneck, since difficult-to-grow large crystals are sometimes needed for experiments on structure that can guide drug design.

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As climate change garners more attention around the world, scientists at the University of Virginia and Cornell University have made critical advances in understanding the physical properties of an emerging class of solar cells that have the potential to dramatically lower the cost of solar energy.

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How can we predict if a new haircut will look good without physically trying it? Or explore what missing children might look like if their appearance is changed? A new personalized image search engine developed by a University of Washington computer vision researcher lets a person imagine how they would look with different hairstyles or appearances.

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More than 1,350 physicists from around the world will converge in Chicago for the biennial International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) in August to share new research results, announce new projects, and talk about the most intriguing mysteries of the universe.

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At a special presentation on Sunday morning at IFT16: Where Science Feeds Innovation, IFT Immediate Past President Mary Ellen Camire announced and presented three companies—Bavaria Corporation, CSIRO, and Weber Scientific—with the 2016 IFT Food Expo Innovation Award. The winning entries offer solutions to today’s food issues and trends of clean label, sustainability, and food safety.

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Consumers are reaching for healthy oils in the grocery store aisles, and they’re looking for food products with “clean labels,” according to market researcher David Sprinkle at a July 17 symposium at IFT16: Where Science Feeds Innovation, hosted by the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT).

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New research presented at IFT16: Where Science Feeds Innovation found that animal foods (eggs, some meats and dairy products) that contain vitamin D also have another lesser known form of this nutrient that hasn’t been measured routinely in foods, according to Janet Roseland, a nutritionist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Nutrient Data Laboratory.

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The phrase “tipping point” passed its own tipping point and caught fire after author Malcolm Gladwell’s so-named 2000 book. It’s now frequently used in discussions about climate change, but what are “climate tipping points”? And what do they mean for society and the economy? Scientists at Rutgers University and Harvard University tackle the terminology and outline a strategy for investigating the consequences of climate tipping points in a study published online today in the journal Earth’s Future.

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Ransomware – what hackers use to encrypt your computer files and demand money in exchange for freeing those contents – is an exploding global problem with few solutions, but a team of University of Florida researchers says it has developed a way to stop it dead in its tracks.

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Astronomers at The University of Nottingham have released spectacular new infrared images of the distant Universe, providing the deepest view ever obtained over a large area of sky. The team, led by Omar Almaini, Professor of Astrophysics in the School of Physics and Astronomy, is presenting their results at the National Astronomy Meeting taking place this week at the University's Jubilee Campus.

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The Universe is becoming gradually cleaner as more and more cosmic dust is being mopped up by the formation of stars within galaxies, an international team of astronomers has revealed.