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.

Experiment Opens Door for Quantum Encryption

Researchers at the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI), the University of Vienna, and the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona have achieved a new milestone in quantum physics: they were able to entangle three particles of light in a high-dimensional quantum property related to the "twist" of their wavefront structure. Just like Schrödinger's famous cat that is simultaneously dead and alive, all previous demonstrations of multi-particle entanglement have been with quantum objects in two discrete levels, or dimensions. The twisted photons used in the Vienna experiment have no such limit to their dimensionality, and can simultaneously exist in three or more quantum states. The three-photon entangled state created by the Vienna group breaks this previous record of dimensionality, and brings to light a new form of asymmetric entanglement that has not been observed before. The results from their experiment appear in the journal Nature Photonics.

Proton Imaging Helps Improve Cancer Treatment

The collaborative project between engineers at Lancaster University and scientists and clinicians at The University of Manchester, The Christie NHS Foundation Trust and CERN, will develop a prototype ‘X-band linac structure’ that can be retro-fitted on proton beam therapy equipment, which is used in complex radiotherapy treatments at over 50 hospitals around the world.

The technology will enable proton imaging of adults that can help improve the accuracy of proton therapy. Radiotherapy with protons is important in some cancer treatments as its greater treatment accuracy can reduce side effects, for example when treating some cancers in children. While two new NHS proton treatment centers are under construction in the UK that will provide state-of-the-art treatments, the proton imaging based on this prototype will enable the most accurate pre-treatment images of patients, improving on the imaging used today which is based on x-ray imaging.

Are Extraterrestrials Sending Broadcasts to Us?

Since its launch in 2009, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has been hunting for habitable exoplanets. To do this, the spacecraft utilizes the transit method of planet finding. It hones its sights on a distant star, and watches as a planet passes in front of the star. Based on the change in the star’s brightness, scientists are able to tell the planet’s size, and based on the time between transits, they can also estimate the orbit size and temperature.

Researchers from McMaster Univ. and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research are suggesting that extraterrestrials may utilize the same methods in their own search for “extraterrestrial life.”

Publishing in Astrobiology, René Heller and Ralph Pudritz suggest that humans should listen to Earth’s transit zone to see if extraterrestrials have sent broadcasts to the thin area in an attempt to contact humanity.

EPA Officials Collect Data on Flint Water Lead Levels

Federal officials are collecting data on the levels of lead in Flint's water system and hope to be able to share the findings in April, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy.

"Hopefully, by next month, we'll be able to give people news — whether that is a clean bill of health or not, I don't know," McCarthy told reporters after touring a food bank Tuesday in the city. "But again, the challenge with lead will still remain, because lead is in people's homes."

Flint was under state financial control in 2014, when officials switched its water service from Detroit's system to the Flint River. But state officials did not require Flint to add anti-corrosive chemicals when the city began drawing water from the river. The water caused lead to leach from aging pipes and water lines into some homes. Tests have shown high lead levels in some Flint children.

New Direction Urged to Improve Cancer Nanotechnology

Researchers involved in a national effort to develop cancer treatments that harness nanotechnology are recommending pivotal changes in the field because experiments with laboratory animals and efforts based on current assumptions about drug delivery have largely failed to translate into successful clinical results.

The assessment was advanced in a perspective piece that appeared in the National Cancer Institute's Cancer Nanotechnology Plan 2015, a 10-year roadmap concerning the use of nanotechnology to attack cancer.

Researchers are trying to perfect "targeted delivery" methods using various agents, including an assortment of tiny nanometer-size structures, to selectively attack tumor tissue. However, the current direction of research has brought only limited progress, according to the authors of the article.

"The bottom line is that so far there are only a few successful nanoparticle formulations approved and clinically used, so we need to start thinking out of the box," said Bumsoo Han, a Purdue University associate professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering.

One approach pursued by researchers has been to design nanoparticles small enough to pass through pores in blood vessels surrounding tumors but too large to pass though the pores of vessels in healthy tissue. The endothelial cells that make up healthy blood vessels are well organized with tight junctions between them. However, the endothelial cells in blood vessels around tumors are irregular and misshapen, with loose gaps between the cells.