Plastic Bulb Could Be The Future

 

A US scientist has invented a new kind of light bulb that uses plastic polymers and nano materials to generate light that is more energy-efficient than current fluorescent lights and is easier on the eye.

Details of the new invention were published Monday on the website of Wake Forest University in North Carolina, where the inventor, physics professor David Caroll, is based.

The new plastic lighting uses the same amount of electricity as LED bulbs and half as much as fluorescent bulbs. The device is made of three layers of white-emitting polymer blended with a small amount of nano-materials that glow when stimulated with electrical current to create bright, perfectly white light similar to the sunlight human eyes prefer. It can be made in any colour or shape — from flat sheets to replace office lighting to standard bulbs in household lamps.

“People often complain that fluorescent lights bother their eyes, and the hum from the fluorescent tubes irritates anyone sitting at a desk underneath them,” said Dr. Carroll.

Dr.Caroll is the director of the Centre for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials. “The new lights we have created can cure both of those problems and more.”

Sea levels are rising 60 per cent faster than estimated

 

Sea levels are rising 60 per cent faster than the UN's climate panel forecast, scientists warn.

Satellite measurements show that sea levels are actually rising at an alarming rate of 3.2 mm a year compared to the estimate of 2 mm a year in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report (AR4), researchers said.

The researchers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Tempo Analytics and Laboratoire d'Etudes en Geophysique et Oceanographie Spatiales involved an analysis of global temperatures and sea-level data over the past two decades, comparing them both to projections made in the IPCC's third and fourth assessment reports.

Results were obtained by taking averages from the five available global land and ocean temperature series.

After removing the three known phenomena that cause short-term variability in global temperatures - solar variations, volcanic aerosols and El Nino/Southern Oscillation- the researchers found that the overall warming trend at the moment is 0.16 degree Celsius per decade, which closely follows the IPCC's projections.

Satellite measurements of sea levels showed a different picture, however, with current rates of increase being 60 per cent faster than the IPCC's AR4 projections.

Satellites measure sea-level rise by bouncing radar waves back off the sea surface and are much more accurate than tide gauges as they have near-global coverage; tide gauges only sample along the coast.

Tide gauges also include variability that has nothing to do with changes in global sea level, but rather with how the water moves around in the oceans, such as under the influence of wind.

 

Texting can improve your kid's writing skills: Study

LONDON: Parents might be puzzled by the modern day text lingo, however, using abbreviations like 'lol', 'gr8' and 'b4' can improve your child's writing skills, a new study has found.

According to a UK government research, there is a positive relationship between so-called "textisms" and pupils' ability to draft essays.

The study, commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE), found that mobile phone use required a "certain degree of phonological awareness" that could drive up standards of written work, 'The Telegraph' reported.

They also found that pupils who regularly wrote blogs and used social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter were "significantly better writers" than those who shunned the technology altogether.

Pupils often perform worse in writing than in reading, maths and science at all ages. Last year, a quarter of pupils in UK failed to hit national targets in writing at the age of 11, with boys lagging far behind girls, according to figures.

Critics have suggested that the influence of technology - particularly mobile phones and social networking websites - is fuelling a decline in pupils' written skills by blurring the boundaries between colloquialisms and standard English.

The DfE study, which was based on an analysis of existing international evidence on children's writing, admitted that technology was starting to have an impact on student's school work.

It quoted one that found "technology-influenced features" regularly appeared in essays and other written projects.

"For example, 50 per cent of teenagers said that they sometimes use informal writing styles instead of proper capitalisation and punctuation in their school assignments, and 38 per cent have used text shortcuts such as 'lol' (laugh out loud)," the study said.

The report said that text messaging was the most common form of writing used by school age children, employed at least once a month by 69 per cent of pupils.

As many as 52 per cent used social networking sites, 47 per cent used emails and 45 per cent used instant messaging.

However, the report found no evidence that "children's written language development is being disrupted by the use of text abbreviations".