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Two newly-developed systems for driverless cars can identify a user’s location and orientation in places where GPS does not function, and identify the various components of a road scene in real time on a regular camera or smartphone, performing the same job as sensors costing tens of thousands of pounds.

If the Netherlands together with Germany, France, Poland and Hungary would choose for an opt-out of the use of genetically modified (GM) soy in animal feed, then the current use of soy products in animal feed in these five countries must decrease by 40 to 50 percent to ensure that the demand for non-GM soy from the European Union (EU) does not exceed the available amount on the world market.

(Phys.org)—An international team of astronomers, led by Markus Janson of Stockholm University in Sweden, has discovered mysterious sharp symmetric features around young double star, named AK Sco. The discovery is baffling scientists as they are still unsure about the nature of these features, pondering the possibilities that they are highly eccentric rings or two separate spiral arms in the disk around the star.

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, and a major component of stars such as the Sun, as well as gas-giant planets such as Jupiter and Saturn. In recent years, hydrogen’s behavior at high temperature and high pressure has been in the realm of interest not only for planetary science, but also for fields such as materials science for the purpose of achieving a hydrogen energy society.

Plasmons, which may be thought of as clouds of electrons that oscillate within a metal nanocluster, could serve as antennae to absorb sunlight more efficiently than semiconductors. Understanding and manipulating them is important for their potential use in photovoltaics, solar cell water splitting, and sunlight-induced fuel production from CO2.

In search of ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, engineers are investigating the feasibility of sequestering carbon dioxide in saltwater aquifers deep underground. New Penn State research suggests that cracks in abandoned oil and gas wells, depending on their size and other factors, may impede sequestration efforts.

Using new, high-resolution global satellite maps of air quality indicators, NASA scientists tracked air pollution trends over the last decade in various regions and 195 cities around the globe. The findings were presented Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Los Alamos National Laboratory’s portable MRI was named one of the Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year by Physics World, the member magazine of the Institute of Physics. Portable MRI, also called Battlefield MRI (bMRI), uses ultra-low-field magnetic resonance imaging to create images of injured soft tissues, such as the brain.

Louisiana State University paleoclimatologist Kristine DeLong contributed to an international research breakthrough that sheds new light on how the tilt of the Earth affects the world’s heaviest rainbelt. DeLong analyzed data from the past 282,000 years that shows, for the first time, a connection between the Earth’s tilt called obliquity that shifts every 41,000 years, and the movement of a low pressure band of clouds that is the Earth’s largest source of heat and moisture—the Intertropical Convergence Zone, or ITCZ.