North Carolina State University
Dangling a lucrative financial carrot at the end of a professional sport season can cause certain players to exert the effort necessary to put together a string of successful performances, sometimes known in sporting circles as a "hot hand" or "hot streak."
Is wood the new coal? Researchers at North Carolina State University think so, and they are part of a team working to turn woodchips into a substitute for coal by using a process called torrefaction that is greener, cleaner and more efficient than traditional coal burning.
A new study from North Carolina State University shows that painted road markings, such as the lines separating traffic lanes, are significantly better at reflecting headlights in the direction that the paint was applied. This finding will help determine how states comply with new federal safety regulations and save money on painting their roadways.
A new risk management tool can help software developers identify security vulnerabilities in their programs early in the planning process, effectively solving problems before they exist, simply by having the developers lay their cards on the table.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have developed a software tool that will make it faster and easier to translate video games and other software into different languages for use in various international markets -- addressing a hurdle to internationalization that has traditionally been time-consuming and subject to error.
Good news, dad! All those times your daughter appeared to be tuning you out? She was probably paying more attention than you thought. In fact, a new study co-authored by a researcher from North Carolina State University says the relationship between fathers and daughters is leading to an increase in the number of daughters who are pursuing careers in the same field as their dads.
Researchers at North Carolina State University have successfully modified a common plant virus to deliver drugs only to specific cells inside the human body, without affecting surrounding tissue.
Female water fleas have figured out how to survive -- and thrive -- without sex. In normal environmental conditions, they reproduce asexually, giving birth to large broods of about 30 females. Those females reproduce asexually and have even more females. But all good things must come to an end, says Dr. Gerald LeBlanc, professor of environmental and molecular toxicology at North Carolina State University. He says that during changes in the water fleas' environment -- when conditions become overcrowded, say, or when available amounts of food become depleted -- female water fleas begin giving birth to males. These males mate with the previously uncooperative females. The results of this "sex under stress" are eggs that are encased in a protective covering designed to withstand the environmental changes taking place.
Newly published North Carolina State University research into the evolution of birds shows the first definitive fossil proof linking close relatives of living birds to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Research by paleontologist Dr. Julia A. Clarke, an assistant professor in the marine, earth and atmospheric sciences department at NC State, and colleagues provides unprecedented fossil proof that some close cousins to living bird species coexisted with dinosaurs more than 65 million years ago. Information from a new avian species called Vegavis iaai indicates that these birds lived in the Cretaceous period and must have survived the Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) mass extinction event that included the disappearance of all other dinosaurs.
North Carolina State University chemical engineers have discovered a way to construct new microscopic devices that can act like tiny factories for materials with potential for a wide variety of chemical and biological uses. The NC State researchers, advised by Dr. Orlin Velev, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, include undergraduate student Jeffrey R. Millman and graduate students Ketan H. Bhatt and Brian G. Prevo. They created different types of tiny particles that could eventually be used in everything from drug delivery to determinations of the presence or concentration of biological molecules.
To get a better look at how proteins gather into clusters called amyloid fibrils -- which are associated with important human diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and the so-called prion diseases like Mad Cow -- researchers at North Carolina State University decided to make movies. They used a computer simulation technique, discontinuous molecular dynamics, to visualize the meanderings of small proteins called peptides. Movies of the simulation show that 96 randomly placed peptides spontaneously aggregate into what Hall calls a ''sandwich'' of layered protein sheets, similar to the amyloid fibrils discovered in diseased people and animals.
Using pulsed lasers, researchers have coaxed the metal nickel to self-assemble into arrays of nanodots -- each spot a mere seven nanometers (seven billionths of a meter) across -- one-tenth the diameter of existing nanodots. Because the method works with a variety of materials and may drastically reduce imperfections, the new procedure may also bolster research into extremely hard materials and efforts to develop ultra-dense computer memory. The researchers are working with an industry partner to apply the technique to development of next-generation light-emitting diodes (LEDs) -- the small, bright lights seen in traffic signals and luxury automobile brake lights. The experimental LEDs are already more efficient than existing devices, potentially lasting decades and using a fraction of the power of fluorescent bulbs.
Introductory college science courses, traditionally composed of impersonal "transmission-of-information" lectures and "cookbook" lab sessions, need to be completely overhauled. That's the recommendation of Dr. Robert Beichner, professor of physics at North Carolina State University, and a team of university researchers and administrators pressing for changes in the way science is taught at the college level. Eschewing traditional, more passive class formats, the researchers call for institutions of higher learning to implement inquiry-based, problem-solving, and active-learning strategies in introductory science courses.
Researchers in North Carolina have developed a data transfer protocol for the Internet that makes today's high-speed Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections seem lethargic. The protocol is named BIC-TCP, which stands for Binary Increase Congestion Transmission Control Protocol. In a recent comparative study run by the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), BIC consistently topped the rankings in a set of experiments that determined its stability, scalability and fairness in comparison with other protocols. The study tested six other protocols developed by researchers from schools around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and the University College of London. BIC can reportedly achieve speeds roughly 6,000 times that of DSL and 150,000 times that of current modems.
Fossilized bones found in Tierra del Fuego, Argentina, are likely those of the earliest known South American penguin, which probably lived 20 million years earlier than scientists had supposed. The new find doubles the known fossil record of penguins in South America. According to scientists, the specimen consists of parts of a pelvic girdle and a leg and dates to the Eocene epoch of Earth's history ? about 40 million years ago ? sometimes called the "early age of mammals."
