Market Pulse: Oil's Sliding Scale, But Gas Producers Look to Bright Future

The R&D Index: Market Watch for the week ending Feb. 26, 2016, closed at 1,390.53 for the 25 companies in the R&D Index. The Index was up 0.46 percent (or slightly more than 6 basis points) over the week ending Feb. 19, 2016.  The stocks were mostly split with 14 R&D Index members seeing increases for the week from 0.49 percent (Oracle) to 4.45 percent (Qualcomm) and 11 members seeing declines for the week from -0.13 percent (Toyota) to -2.28 percent (Novartis).

Oil and natural gas executives (both OPEC and non-OPEC) met last week in Houston for the annual IHS CERAWeek (Cambridge Energy Research Associates) to discuss the current energy situation. The consensus at the end of the week was that the oil situation has been created by pure economics with North American shale oil creating a large surplus in supply that has driven down prices. Saudi Arabia stated that it will not cut production waiting on the fallout from the high-priced shale oil producers to reduce the surplus and raise the prices. But, they similarly note that when prices do go back up, the shale oil producers will similarly get back to work.

Scientists Uncover 520-Million-Year-Old Nervous System

It’s not unusual for researchers to stumble upon the remains of hard body parts, such as skeletons, exoskeletons, and teeth. What is much rarer is finding fossilized evidence of soft tissue. But sometimes scientists during an excavation get lucky. As was the case with a 520-million-year-old crustacean-like animal that was found in southern China.

Modernizing a Technology From the Vacuum-Tube Era to Generate Cheap Power

When scientists Daniel Riley and Jared Schwede left Stanford University last year to join Cyclotron Road, a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) program for entrepreneurial researchers, their vision was to take thermionics, an all-but-forgotten technology, and develop it into a clean, compact, and efficient source of power.

Little did they know that soon after arriving, a collaboration with a Berkeley Lab scientist would allow their research to take a big shortcut, providing them with unprecedented insight into the inner workings of thermionic devices.

“It turns out, by almost fortuitous coincidence, that a microscope we have is supremely sensitive to a material property these guys were after,” said Andreas Schmid, a scientist with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division. “Once we had that conversation, it dawned on us, this is a match made in heaven.”

Riley and Schwede’s thermionics collaboration was recently awarded $3.8 million from the Department of Energy’s Advance Research Projects Agency­–Energy (ARPA-E), which they will share with Schmid at Berkeley Lab, as well as with collaborators from Stanford, UC Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania. Their goal is to develop an entirely new type of generator that can produce clean power from any fuel source at high efficiency, all in a quiet and scalable package.

Why Do Celestial Bodies Come in Different Sizes?

Our solar system contains one massive object—the sun—and many smaller planets and asteroids. Now, researchers from Duke University in Durham, NC. have proposed a new explanation for the size diversity, which is found throughout the universe and is called hierarchy. The researchers report their finding in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing.

“Since the 1700s, scientists have known that gravity causes objects in the universe to get bigger, but the phenomenon of growth does not explain the hierarchy,” said Adrian Bejan, a professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University. “To my huge surprise this question has been overlooked.”

Army Shoots for Laser Weapons by 2023

Last week, at the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Technology, the deputy secretary of the Army for Research and Technology indicated that laser weapons development will be a program of record by 2023.

“Lasers have been promised for a long time, but they’ve never held up and delivered what was asked for, so the operators are rightfully skeptical,” said Deputy Secretary Mary J. Miller, noting that that’s why extended testing is occurring. But “there will be steps along the way where we spin off lesser capable laser systems that can do good things on smaller platforms. Those will come out soon.”

Researchers Simulate Traffic of the Future

Noise is disturbing and can be harmful to health. Empa researchers have now succeeded in simulating road noise by means of “auralization.” The aim is to make noise audible along traffic routes that are merely in the planning stage—and thus include countermeasures at the same time.

Auralization is understood as making audible those sound events that will only occur in the future. Until a few years ago, it was mainly used by interior designers for optimizing room acoustics. In Empa's “TAURA” project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) a research team around Reto Pieren is now working on an auralization model, which simulates the noise of a car accelerating past an observer. This model, thus, makes it possible to take account of precautions to reduce noise, even in the planning of road construction projects.

Water Battery Created with Floating Water Bridge

Until its scientific rediscovery in 2007 at TU Graz, the “water bridge” phenomenon, discovered in the 19th century, had sunk into oblivion. If extremely pure water, in other words water that has been distilled many times, is placed in two beakers and subject to a high voltage, the fluid moves up the side of each beaker and forms a floating water bridge between the two vessels. The water in this bridge flows in both directions and is in a completely new state with its own special properties of density and structure. A research group of TU Graz and the Wetsus research Centre in The Netherlands has now demonstrated that this floating water bridge produces electrically charged water and stores the charge at least for a short time.