News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Access to green spaces in metro areas--parks, trails, even the tree cover in a neighborhood - is largely associated with income and race, new research indicates. Researchers combined census-block-group demographic and socio-economic data with satellite imagery to analyze access to green spaces and vegetation in two metropolitan areas: Columbus, Ohio, and Atlanta, Georgia. Their study appears in the August issue of the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

Published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, their research examined the role of social network brokers - well-connected individuals within a community - in the adoption of innovative farming practices in Battambang Province in North-Western Cambodia. The authors, Dr Petr Matous, Junjian Zhang and Associate Professor Daniel Tan found that less popular farmers were better influencers, compared to their more popular peers.

The study may suggest new strategies to limit virus attacks and prevent or combat diseases like Sars and Covid-19 based on biomedical and engineering principles. The research was conducted by the University of Trento and by the University of Napoli Federico II, in collaboration with researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and at the University of Pittsburgh, in the USA, and with the universities of Palermo and Ferrara, where experiments were carried out

The latest report from the National Institute for Transportation and Communities (NITC), by Marc Schlossberg and Heather Brinton of the University of Oregon, is a guide for city staff and leadership on adopting local policy and code to respond to the emergence of emerging transportation technologies and encourage their responsible use.

Researchers at Linköping University, Sweden, are attempting to convert carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, to fuel using energy from sunlight. Recent results have shown that it is possible to use their technique to selectively produce methane, carbon monoxide or formic acid from carbon dioxide and water. The study has been published in ACS Nano.