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Categories: Energy: Fossil Fuels, Physics: Acoustics and Ultrasound

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Researchers have discovered a new process that uses fuel to control non-living materials, similar to what living cells do. The reaction cycle can easily be applied to a wide range of materials and its rate can be controlled -- a breakthrough in the emerging field of such reactions. The discovery is a step towards soft robotics; soft machines that can sense what is happening in their environment and respond accordingly.

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Researchers have developed a proof-of-concept system to autonomously detect compressed air leaks on trains and relay the location of the leaks to mechanical personnel for repair. The automated system could reduce the time, costs and labor needed to find and repair air leaks, and it could lower the locomotive industry's overall fuel consumption and exhaust emissions.

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To find out how different aspects of music influence the body, researchers turned a live electronic music concert into a lab study. By introducing levels of bass over speakers that were too low to hear and monitoring the crowd's movements, scientists found that people danced 11.8 percent more when the very low frequency bass was present.

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The forensic-voice-comparison system, based on state-of-the-art automatic-speaker-recognition technology, outperformed all the listeners.

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A simple material can separate carbon dioxide from other gases that fly out of the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants. It lacks the shortcomings that other proposed carbon filtration materials have, rivaling designer compounds in its simplicity, overall stability and ease of preparation.

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Researchers have developed a machine-learning technique that captures and models the underlying acoustics of a scene from a limited number of sound recordings. The system can accurately simulate what any sound, like a song, would sound like if a person were to walk around to different locations in a scene.

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When two musical notes are played simultaneously, the human ear can perceive weak additional tones called combination tones. While less perceivable, objective combination tones are also generated by some musical instruments. Researchers have now used violins to explore these rarely studied objective combination tones. They found that the combination tones produced by higher-quality violins were much stronger and clearly audible and powerful air resonance and violin sound quality are linked. The higher-quality violins produced a stronger air resonance due to several factors, including structural material and crafting techniques.

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Researchers have created a newborn hearing screening system that uses cheap earbuds and a smartphone instead of an expensive commercial device.

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Researchers have made a serendipitous scientific discovery that could potentially revolutionize the way water is broken down to release hydrogen gas -- an element crucial to many industrial processes. The team found that light can trigger a new mechanism in a catalytic material used extensively in water electrolysis, where water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. The result is a more energy-efficient method of obtaining hydrogen.

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A research team has developed a skin-attachable auditory sensor, which recognizes human voices in noisy environments and when users wear facemasks. The new sensor will be useful in microphones that facilitate communication in disaster situations and for healthcare devices that diagnose respiratory diseases.

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Study shows that not only are loud vehicles flying overhead a cause of noise pollution-related stress, the effect of that stress remains on the body even after noise levels have decreased.

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Jazz must swing -- jazz musicians agree on that. However, even 100 years after the beginnings of jazz, it is still unclear what exactly constitutes the swing feel. With a sophisticated experiment and data analyses on more than 450 well-known jazz solos, physicists together with psychologists have unraveled a secret of swing. They were able to demonstrate that certain systematic deviations in timing are a key component of swing. These microtiming deviations are so small that they are not perceived as such even by professional jazz musicians, who nonetheless are using them unconsciously.

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Synthetic fuels produced from renewable sources, so-called refuels, are deemed potential game changers in fighting climate change. Refuels promise to reduce CO2 emissions by up to 90% compared to conventional fuels and they allow for the continued use of existing vehicle fleets with combustion engines and of the refueling infrastructure, from fuel production to transport to sales. Researchers carried out extensive fleet tests in a large-scale project with industry partners and proved that refuels can be used in all vehicles and produced in large quantities in the foreseeable future.

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Using a new power sector model, a team of researchers has proposed a method for Europe to eliminate natural gas imports from Russia.

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A new study identifies the political factors that allow some countries to lead in adopting cleaner sources of energy while others lag behind. By analyzing how different countries responded to the current energy crisis and to the oil crisis of the 1970s, the study reveals how the structure of political institutions can help or hinder the shift to clean energy. The findings offer important lessons as governments race to limit the impacts of climate change.

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Polyethylene plastics -- single-use bags and general-purpose bottles -- are indestructable forever plastics. That also makes them hard to recycle. Chemists have found a way to break down the polymer -- a chain of about a thousand ethylene molecules -- into three-carbon molecules, propylene, which are in high demand for making another plastic, polypropylene. The process could turn waste plastic into high-value feedstocks and reduce the need for fossil fuels to make propylene.

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Turning plastic waste into useful products through chemical recycling is one strategy for addressing Earth's growing plastic pollution problem. A new study may improve the ability of one method, called pyrolysis, to process hard-to-recycle mixed plastics -- like multilayer food packaging -- and generate fuel as a byproduct, the scientists said.

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An underutilized natural resource could be just what the airline industry needs to curb carbon emissions. Researchers report success in using lignin as a path toward a drop-in 100% sustainable aviation fuel. Lignin makes up the rigid parts of the cell walls of plants. Other parts of plants are used for biofuels, but lignin has been largely overlooked because of the difficulties in breaking it down chemically and converting it into useful products.

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The risk of transmission from an infected person on a wind instrument is generally much lower than for people who sing or speak, provided that one spends the same amount of time in their vicinity, according to a new study.

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Electricity-generating rooftop solar cells not only save on planet-warming carbon emissions, they also save a significant amount of water. Water consumption is tightly bound to energy use, because without water we cannot mine, drill, frack, or cool thermoelectric and nuclear plants. A given household may save on average 16,200 gallons of water per year by installing rooftop solar.