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Utah’s Great Salt Lake is the defining physical feature of its arid Western state. Seventy-five miles long and nearly 35 miles wide, the salt water remnant of ancient Lake Bonneville teems with aquatic life, serves as a critical flyway for millions of migratory birds and provides economic value of $1.32 billion per year for mineral extraction, brine shrimp cyst production and recreation.

Demonstrating a strategy that could form the basis for a new class of electronic devices with uniquely tunable properties, researchers at Kyushu University were able to widely vary the emission color and efficiency of organic light-emitting diodes based on exciplexes simply by changing the distance between key molecules in the devices by a few nanometers.

New ultra-thin, patterned graphene sheets will be essential in designing future technologies such as ‘smart wallpaper’ and internet-of-things applicationsAdvanced Technology Institute uses moth-inspired ultrathin graphene sheets to capture light for use in energy production and to power smart sensorsGraphene is traditionally an excellent electronic material, but is inefficient for optical applications, absorbs only 2.3% of the light incident on it. A new technique enhances light absorption by 90%.

An Ibero-American team of scientists decoded the Mesoamerican variety of the bean genome coinciding with the celebration of the International Year of Pulses, as designated by the United Nations. Sequencing such a common source of plant-based proteins for people around the globe will be key not only for improving beans production but also for a better conservation of Ibero-American genetic varieties

A diverse team of atmospheric chemists, meteorologists and modelers, including scientists from NASA, has traced the origins of mysterious pockets of high ozone concentrations and low water vapor in the air above the western Pacific Ocean near Guam to fires burning in Southeast Asia and in Africa, half a world away.

(Phys.org)—A trio of Australian researchers is proposing in a paper they have had published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, that using a technique developed to prevent the spread of wildfires might also help slow the spread of an invasive species. They have created a computer model that shows that using backburning inhibits the spread of a virtual organism.

The county government that owned the iPhone in a high-profile legal battle between Apple Inc. and the Justice Department paid for but never installed a feature that would have allowed the FBI to easily and immediately unlock the phone as part of the terrorism investigation into the shootings that killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California.

Eyes are the window between an animal and its environment, and if your environment has changed as much as a whale’s has over the last 50 million years, they tell an intriguing story about your evolutionary history. As marine mammals that descended from terrestrial ancestors, whales and dolphins have many adaptations for aquatic living, including underwater vision, but we still know very little about how these adaptations evolved at the genetic level.

New research finds there is a distinct sound coming from a massive community of fish, shrimp, jellies and squid as they travel up and down from the depths of the ocean to the water’s surface to feed. This sound could be serving as a “dinner bell” for these deep-water organisms that play a key role in ocean food webs and the global carbon cycle, and could help scientists better understand this mysterious ecosystem, according to new research being presented here Monday.

(Phys.org)—Quantum entanglement—which occurs when two or more particles are correlated in such a way that they can influence each other even across large distances—is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon, but occurs in various degrees. The more a quantum state is entangled with its partner, the better the states will perform in quantum information applications.