Pinpointing how nature's benefits link to human well-being

May 22, 2013 ? What people take from nature -- water, food, timber, inspiration, relaxation -- are so abundant, it seems self-evident. Until you try to measure how and to what extent they contribute to humans.

Scientists at Michigan State University's Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability, in two parallel papers published in this week's journal PLOS ONE, develop a new integrated approach to measure human dependence on ecosystem services and human well-being so as to promote the understanding of the linkages between them -- an important step toward improved understanding, monitoring and management of coupled human and natural systems.

"Climate change, energy and food insecurity, biodiversity loss and water shortages all have raised the stakes," said Jianguo "Jack" Liu, Rachel Carson Chair in Sustainability and CSIS director. "If we can't quantify the complex relationships between ecosystem services and human well-being, both ecosystems and humans will suffer and will not be sustainable."

Wu Yang, a CSIS doctoral student, created two new index systems for measuring human dependence on ecosystem services and human well-being from ecosystem services. The trick, he said, was to come up with ways to represent the benefits people gained from these resources, as well as any socioeconomic benefits that are not gained specifically from nature. On the other hand, it was to design a reliable instrument to quantify different components of human well-being that could be linked and integrated with the index of dependence on ecosystem services in models.

"If you don't understand the linkages, you're not going to be able to sustain the flow of those benefits to human society," Yang said. "Thus, we've developed and validated our new methods. We made them as general as possible so they can be applied to many other coupled human and natural systems across the globe."

China's Wolong Nature Reserve served as an excellent laboratory to study coupled human and natural systems. The reserve was particularly suited for testing the new methods because it was close to the epicenter of a devastating earthquake in 2008, which dramatically changed local households' dependence on ecosystem services and human well-being in a short time. Because CSIS scientists had studied the area for almost two decades, they had rich long-term data and local knowledge to evaluate the relationships between people and ecosystem services.

Additional researchers contributing to the papers include Liu; Thomas Dietz, MSU professor of environmental science and policy, sociology, and animal studies; Wei Liu, former CSIS doctoral student now a postdoctoral fellow at IIASA in Laxenburg, Austria; Junyan Luo, CSIS research associate; Daniel Kramer, MSU associate professor in fisheries and wildlife and James Madison College; Xiaodong Chen, former CSIS doctoral student now on faculty at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, MSU AgBioResearch, MSU Graduate Office, and the MSU Environmental Science and Policy Program.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/living_well/~3/y_LFFTwrwME/130522180317.htm

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Daft Punk's Random Access Memories Wows Porter Robinson, Steve Aoki

'It's evolution, man,' Aoki says of Daft Punk's dramatic reinvention of dance.
By James Montgomery

Daft Punk's Random Access Memories album cover
Photo: Columbia

Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1707755/daft-punk-random-access-memories-porter-robinson-steve-aoki.jhtml

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Opening doors to foldable electronics with inkjet-printed graphene

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Imagine a bendable tablet computer or an electronic newspaper that could fold to fit in a pocket.

The technology for these devices may not be so far off. Northwestern University researchers have recently developed a graphene-based ink that is highly conductive and tolerant to bending, and they have used it to inkjet-print graphene patterns that could be used for extremely detailed, conductive electrodes.

The resulting patterns are 250 times more conductive than previous attempts to print graphene-based electronic patterns and could be a step toward low-cost, foldable electronics.

A paper describing the research, "Inkjet Printing of High Conductivity, Flexible Graphene Patterns," was published April 8 in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters.

"Graphene has a unique combination of properties that is ideal for next-generation electronics, including high electrical conductivity, mechanical flexibility, and chemical stability," said Mark Hersam, professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. "By formulating an inkjet-printable ink based on graphene, we now have an inexpensive and scalable path for exploiting these properties in real-world technologies."

Inkjet printing has previously been explored as a method for fabricating transistors, solar cells, and other electronic components. It is inexpensive, capable of printing large areas, and can create patterns on a variety of substrates, making it an attractive option for next-generation electronics.

Inkjet printing with graphene ? ultra-thin sheets of carbon with exceptional strength and conductivity ? is extremely promising, but it has remained a challenge because it is difficult to harvest a sufficient amount of graphene without compromising its electronic properties. Exfoliating, or breaking apart, materials such as graphite often require oxidizing conditions that make the resulting graphene oxide material less conductive than pure carbon. Pristine unoxidized graphene can be achieved through exfoliation, but the process requires solvents whose residues also decrease conductivity.

The Northwestern researchers have developed a new method for mass-producing graphene that maintains its conductivity and can be carried out at room temperature using ethanol and ethyl cellulose to exfoliate graphite. This relatively clean process minimizes residues and results in a powder with a high concentration of nanometer-sized graphene flakes, which is then mixed into a solvent to create the ink.

The researchers demonstrated printing the ink in multiple layers, each 14 nanometers thick, to create precise patterns. The ink's conductivity remains virtually unchanged, even when bent to a great degree, suggesting that graphene inks could be used to create foldable electronic devices in the future.

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Northwestern University: http://www.northwestern.edu

Thanks to Northwestern University for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/128321/Opening_doors_to_foldable_electronics_with_inkjet_printed_graphene

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S_47P::::10 Things to Know for Today

Your daily look at late-breaking news, upcoming events and the stories that will be talked about today:

1. GOP LOOKS TO CAPITALIZE ON OBAMA WOES

Many Republicans would like to deny the president a victory in immigration reform, which is being considered by the Senate today.

2. FIERCE FIGHTING ON BORDER AS KERRY PRESSES FOR PEACE IN SYRIA

Twenty-three fighters from the militant Hezbollah group were killed in a fight for a strategic town near Lebanon on the day Kerry is flying to the Middle East.

3. TORNADOES LASH MIDWEST

An Oklahoma trailer park was destroyed and one man killed as the dangerous storms moved east.

4. THE TOLL OF MILITARY SEX ABUSE

The AP reports that more than 85,000 veterans were treated last year for injuries or illnesses stemming from sex assault or harassment at work.

5. HOW MUCH POWERBALL JACKPOT COULD BUY

The $590.5 million winning ticket, which was bought in Zephyrhills, Fla., but hasn't been claimed, could pay for the small Florida city's budget 12 times over.

6. SPLIT-SECOND DECISION BEFORE A HOSTAGE WAS KILLED

A Long Island police officer fired when a masked man holding the college student in a headlock pointed the gun at him, killing the gunman and the 21-year-old hostage.

7. HOT AIR BALLOONS COLLIDE

The two balloons crashed in Turkey during a sightseeing tour of volcanic rock formations, killing a Brazilian tourist and injuring over 20.

8. WHY MEASLES ARE SURGING IN THE UK

Officials attribute the spike in cases to the parents who declined vaccines more than a decade ago because of research that suggested a link to autism.

9. TAYLOR SWIFT NABS 8 TROPHIES AT BILLBOARD AWARDS

Justin Bieber and Madonna were also big winners, but the country star won for top artist and top Billboard 200 album for "Red."

10. WHO'S FOOTING THE BILL FOR SOCHI OLYMPICS

The Russian government has gotten state-controlled companies and tycoons to cover more than half of the $51 billion price tag for the 2014 Winter Games.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/10-things-know-today-101340019.html

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Prince reigns over own music releases in new deal

LONDON (Reuters) - Singer Prince has signed a new deal with Kobalt Music Group to market and distribute his future work without giving up control over his rights, the company said on Monday.

The singer-songwriter, who is famed for changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol in a wrangle over musical rights, will release his own work as well as a slate of new music by other artists that he produces, Kobalt said.

The announcement came just hours after the 54-year-old Prince was given a Billboard Icon Award (lifetime achievement) and rocked the Billboard Music Awards ceremony with a version of his "Let's Go Crazy" dressed in electric green trousers and sporting an Afro hair style.

Kobalt, which is also a global independent music publishing company, launched an artist and label services division in 2012, allowing artists to maintain ownership of their work and control over when, how and where they will release their music.

Traditional labels often take ownership or part-ownership of the artist's material and often dictate how it is used, an increasingly important sticking point in an industry where digital music can be instantly available.

"This new venture gives Prince the flexibility and freedom he's always sought in a label partner," Kobalt President Richard Sanders said in a statement.

The Grammy award-winning singer will also provide artist development and recording services for newly signed artists that Kobalt will market and distribute.

Kobalt was set up in 2000 by Swedish businessman Willard Ahdritz and its publishing roster includes former Beatle Paul McCartney, Icelandic singer Bjork and Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder.

(Reporting by Paul Casciato; Editing by Michael Roddy)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/prince-reigns-over-own-music-releases-deal-165736937.html

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Myanmar leader vows justice over communal violence

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Myanmar President Thein Sein says that all perpetrators of inter-communal violence in the country will be brought to justice.

Thein Sein made the comments Monday in a speech at a university in Washington after meeting President Barack Obama.

Myanmar has been roiled by unrest between Buddhists and minority Muslims over the past year that has left hundreds dead and displaced more than 100,000 people. Most of the victims have been Muslims.

Separately, Thein Sein expressed confidence of soon reaching a cease-fire with Kachin rebels, the main ethnic armed group still fighting the military.

Earlier, Obama said Thein Sein has shown leadership to move his country toward political and economic reforms.

It was the first time a Myanmar leader has visited the White House in 47 years.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/myanmar-leader-vows-justice-over-communal-violence-213629042.html

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Kinks and curves at the nanoscale: New research shows 'perfect twin boundaries' are not so perfect

May 19, 2013 ? One of the basic principles of nanotechnology is that when you make things extremely small -- one nanometer is about five atoms wide, 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair -- they are going to become more perfect.

"Perfect in the sense that their arrangement of atoms in the real world will become more like an idealized model," says University of Vermont engineer Frederic Sansoz, "with smaller crystals -- in for example, gold or copper -- it's easier to have fewer defects in them."

And eliminating the defects at the interface separating two crystals, or grains, has been shown by nanotechnology experts to be a powerful strategy for making materials stronger, more easily molded, and less electrically resistant -- or a host of other qualities sought by designers and manufacturers.

Since 2004, when a seminal paper came out in Science, materials scientists have been excited about one special of arrangement of atoms in metals and other materials called a "coherent twin boundary" or CTB.

Based on theory and experiment, these coherent twin boundaries are often described as "perfect," appearing like a perfectly flat, one-atom-thick plane in computer models and electron microscope images.

Over the last decade, a body of literature has shown these coherent twin boundaries -- found at the nanoscale within the crystalline structure of common metals like gold, silver and copper -- are highly effective at making materials much stronger while maintaining their ability to undergo permanent change in shape without breaking and still allowing easy transmission of electrons -- an important fact for computer manufacturing and other electronics applications.

But new research now shows that coherent twin boundaries are not so perfect after all.

A team of scientists, including Sansoz, a professor in UVM's College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, and colleagues from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and elsewhere, write in the May 19 edition of Nature Materials that coherent twin boundaries found in copper "are inherently defective."

With a high-resolution electron microscope, using a more powerful technique than has ever been used to examine these boundaries, they found tiny kink-like steps and curvatures in what had previously been observed as perfect.

Even more surprising, these kinks and other defects appear to be the cause of the coherent twin boundary's strength and other desirable qualities.

"Everything we have learned on these materials in the past 10 years will have to be revisited with this new information," Sansoz says

The experiment, led by Morris Wang at the Lawrence Livermore Lab, applied a newly developed mapping technique to study the crystal orientation of CTBs in so-called nanotwinned copper and "boom -- it revealed these defects," says Sansoz.

This real-world discovery conformed to earlier intriguing theoretical findings that Sansoz had been making with "atomistic simulations" on a computer. The lab results sent Sansoz back to his computer models where he introduced the newly discovered "kink" defects into his calculations. Using UVM's Vermont Advanced Computing Center, he theoretically confirmed that the kink defects observed by the Livermore team lead to "rather rich deformation processes at the atomic scale," he says, that do not exist with perfect twin boundaries.

With the computer model, "we found a series of completely new mechanisms," he says, for explaining why coherent twin boundaries simultaneously add strength and yet also allow stretching (what scientists call "tensile ductility") -- properties that are usually mutually exclusive in conventional materials.

"We had no idea such defects existed," says Sansoz. "So much for the perfect twin boundary. We now call them defective twin boundaries."

For several decades, scientists have looked for ways to shrink the size of individual crystalline grains within metals and other materials. Like a series of dykes or walls within the larger structure, the boundaries between grains can slow internal slip and help resist failure. Generally, the more of these boundaries -- the stronger the material.

Originally, scientists believed that coherent twin boundaries in materials were much more reliable and stable than conventional grain boundaries, which are incoherently full of defects. But the new research shows they could both contain similar types of defects despite very different boundary energies.

"Understanding these defective structures is the first step to take full use of these CTBs for strengthening and maintaining the ductility and electrical conductivity of many materials," Morris Wang said. "To understand the behavior and mechanisms of these defects will help our engineering design of these materials for high-strength applications."

For Sansoz, this discovery underlines a deep principle, "There are all manner of defects in nature," he says, "with nanotech, you are trying to control the way they are formed and dispersed in matter, and to understand their impact on properties. The point of this paper is that some defects make a material stronger."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/physics/~3/ip39viNNKhI/130519190420.htm

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