Science

A project to remove arsenic from groundwater in Bangladesh began by accident, when Dr Leigh Cassidy from Aberdeen University was working on technology to treat industrially contaminated water in the UK.

Cassidy, who was working on her Phd, thought draff, the residue of barley husks that is a byproduct of using grain in brewing alcohol products such as whisky, would act as a cleansing agent. The idea was brusquely dismissed by one colleague.

I was told ‘don’t be stupid it will never work’, Cassidy says. But someone else said to go ahead.

Cassidy did indeed go ahead, modifying the draff with a secret ingredient, transforming it into a cleansing agent. She is now credited as the inventor of the appropriately named Dram — she admits to trying to think of a clever name. Dram is short for device for the remediation and attenuation of multiple pollutants. Instead of using draff in Bangladesh, Dram will use local ingredients such as coconut shells or rice husks to act as the organic filter media that traps the arsenic.

The arsenic crisis in Bangladesh is considered by the World Health Organisation to be the largest mass poisoning of a population in human history. About 77 million people are at risk of arsenic poisoning despite the hundreds of millions of dollars spent in addressing the problem. One in five deaths in Bangladesh are due to arsenic poisoning — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The agave plant has long been used to make tequila, the drink often blamed for a big night, but it could now help produce a cost-effective biofuel for Australian farmers.

The plants are being grown at Central Queensland University in Rockhampton for a science project.

Scientists say the plants are hardy so they are well suited for drought conditions.

Associate Professor Nanjappa Ashwath says the stem of the plant is used to make alcohol but the discarded leaves could be used to make biofuel.

People have been using the stem for a long time, for decades, and nobody has used the leaves to produce bioethanol, he said.

It can take five to seven years for the plants to be ready for harvesting tequila, but researchers in Rockhampton hope the leaves will be harvested all year round to make bio ethanol — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Over the past few years, electronics have evolved way past the silicon wafer. Researchers have developed functional circuits that can meld with human tissue and dissolve when sprayed with water, and stretchable batteries that could soon power wearable gadgets.

Now, a group of Swiss scientists has revealed the latest in innovative electronics: a flexible, transparent circuit that is tiny and thin enough to fit on the surface of a contact lens.

The researchers put their new device on a contact lens as a proof-of-concept in a paper published today in Nature Communications—an electronically-enabled lens, they suggest, could be useful in monitoring the intraocular pressure of people with glaucoma, for instance—but they envision the circuitry someday being implanted in all sorts of biological contexts — via redwolf.newsvine.com

To understand the violent criminal, says Richard E Tremblay, imagine a 2-year-old boy doing the things that make the terrible twos terrible — grabbing, kicking, pushing, punching, biting.

Now imagine him doing all this with the body and resources of an 18-year-old.

You have just pictured both a perfectly normal toddler and a typical violent criminal as Dr Tremblay, a developmental psychologist at University College Dublin in Ireland, sees them — the toddler as a creature who reflexively uses physical aggression to get what he wants; the criminal as the rare person who has never learned to do otherwise.

In other words, dangerous criminals don’t turn violent. They just stay that way.

These findings have been replicated in multiple large studies by several researchers on several continents — via redwolf.newsvine.com

It’s long been known that texturing the surface of solar cells can help them retain light and get more efficient. Now, a group of researchers led by Imperial College, London, has found that nano-scale aluminium studs on a cell’s surface can improve its light-gathering by as much as 22 percent.

The team, which includes scientists from Belgium, China and Japan, says the idea is to reduce the cost of panels by reducing the area of absorbing material required for a given output since the absorbing material can make up half the cost of a panel.

As Dr Nicholas Hylton, of Imperial College London’s Department of Physics, explains: As the absorbing material alone can make up half the cost of a solar panel our aim has been to reduce to a minimum the amount that is needed.

The 100-nanometre rows of aluminium cylinders were attached to the top of the solar panel in an arrangement not unlike Lego. This structure helps reflect and trap individual rays of light in the absorbing material for longer, extracting more energy from the light — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Norway’s got a major corpse problem that isn’t going away anytime soon. Literally — they won’t rot. What’s the culprit behind this profusion of bodies that refuse to take their place in the circle of life? The same thing that’s also working to keep your sandwich fresh: plastic wrap.

For three decades following World War II, Norway’s burial practices involved wrapping their dead nice and tight in a layer of plastic before setting them into wooden coffins for the Big Sleep. Apparently, they believed it to be more sanitary. Hundreds of thousands of burials later, though, Norwegian funeral directors have found themselves in a bit of a tight spot. These non-rotting corpses are squatting on prime burial spots, leaving the newly deceased high and (figuratively) dry.

For smaller countries like Norway and a few other European states, land is a scarce commodity, so 20 years after a Norwegian is first buried, their plot opens up to let in a new inhabitant (unless the bereaved want to pay an annual fee to keep their loved ones roommate-free). With about 350,000 plastic-filled graves and politicians unwilling to give any extra land to the dead, one former graveyard worker, Kjell Larsen Ostbye, may have found the solution.

By relying on what he remembered from a past chemistry class, Ostbye came up with a technique for poking holes into the ground and through the plastic wrap, allowing him to inject a lime-based solution that would rapidly accelerate the decomposition process to no more than a year. It’s more than just being a great idea — it actually works. Ostbye has already treated over 17,000 Norwegian graves (which takes about 10 minutes each) in multiple cities, earning him about $US670 per plot — via redwolf.newsvine.com