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(Phys.org) —A group of senior university officials suggests it is time to add faculty research activities that translate into patents, licensing and commercialization of products to the traditional model for faculty tenure and career advancement , which for years has been based primarily on research and publication in scientific journals.

To create more energy-efficient clouds and crunch Big Data faster, we need a new generation of technologies including novel transistors. But before we can put these future technologies into mass production, we need new techniques for prototyping below 30 nanometers—the size where prototyping becomes increasingly difficult.

NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) literally ‘saw the light’ just days before crashing into the lunar farside last Thursday April 17. Skimming just a few kilometers above the moon’s surface, mission controllers took advantage of this unique low angle to gaze out over the moon’s horizon in complete darkness much like the Apollo astronauts did from lunar orbit more than 40 years ago.

(Phys.org) —A team of researchers at the University of Minnesota, along with assistance from several African wildlife agencies, has found that contrary to popular belief, cheetahs are able to maintain population levels when sharing space with lions. In their paper published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, the team describes how they performed an analysis of cheetah and wild dog survivability in lion areas using data from prior field studies.

Treating cadmium-telluride (CdTe) solar cell materials with cadmium-chloride improves their efficiency, but researchers have not fully understood why. Now, an atomic-scale examination of the thin-film solar cells led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has answered this decades-long debate about the materials’ photovoltaic efficiency increase after treatment.

Cougars may have survived the mass extinction that took place about 12,000 years ago because they were not particular about what they ate, unlike their more finicky cousins—the saber-tooth cat and American lion. Both perished along with the woolly mammoth and many of the other supersized mammals that walked the Earth during the late Pleistocene.

Last month, scientists announced the first hard evidence for cosmic inflation, the process by which the infant universe swelled from microscopic to cosmic size in an instant. This almost unimaginably fast expansion was first theorized more than three decades ago, yet only now has “smoking gun” proof emerged.

Manure from dairy cows, which is commonly used as a farm soil fertilizer, contains a surprising number of newly identified antibiotic resistance genes from the cows’ gut bacteria. The findings, reported in mBio the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology, hints that cow manure is a potential source of new types of antibiotic resistance genes that transfer to bacteria in the soils where food is grown.

(Phys.org) —Google Trends has added a new service to its mix, where users can enter email subscriptions for Google Trends, and as a can be sent notifications on topics of interest, showing them what is popular around the web now and in the past. The email notification service offers people signing up to be notified by email periodically about the popularity of specified search terms.

(Phys.org) —The ability to stick objects to a wide range of surfaces such as drywall, wood, metal and glass with a single adhesive has been the elusive goal of many research teams across the world, but now a team of University of Massachusetts Amherst inventors describe a new, more versatile version of their invention, Geckskin, that can adhere strongly to a wider range of surfaces, yet releases easily, like a gecko’s feet.