A promising push toward a novel, biologically-inspired chemical computer
has begun as part of an international collaboration. The wet computer
incorporates several recently discovered properties of chemical systems that can be hijacked to engineer computing power. The team’s approach mimics some of the actions of neurons in the brain. The 1.8m-euro project will run for three years, funded by an EU emerging technologies programme
This month, at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, physicists and engineers built tracks inside one of its fusion reactors and ran a toy train on them for three days. It was not an exercise in silliness, but in calibration. The modified model of a diesel train engine was carrying a small chunk of californium-252, a radioactive element that spews neutrons as it falls apart
A novel — and natural — way of creating new bones for humans could be just a few years away. Scientists in Italy have developed a way of turning rattan wood into bone that is almost identical to the human tissue. At the Istec laboratory of bioceramics in Faenza near Bologna, a herd of sheep have already been implanted with the bones
Aker University Hospital is a dingy place to heal. The floors are streaked and scratched. A light layer of dust coats the blood pressure monitors. A faint stench of urine and bleach wafts from a pile of soiled bedsheets dropped in a corner. Look closer, however, at a microscopic level, and this place is pristine. There is no sign of a dangerous and contagious staph infection that killed tens of thousands of patients in the most sophisticated hospitals of Europe, North America and Asia this year, soaring virtually unchecked. The reason: Norwegians stopped taking so many drugs
Researchers believe they have identified the source of fatal tumours that threaten to wipe out the wild population of Tasmanian devils
The Pyrenean ibex, a form of wild mountain goat, was officially declared extinct in 2000 when the last-known animal of its kind was found dead in northern Spain. Shortly before its death, scientists preserved skin samples of the goat, a subspecies of the Spanish ibex that live in mountain ranges across the country, in liquid nitrogen. Using DNA taken from these skin samples, the scientists were able to replace the genetic material in eggs from domestic goats, to clone a female Pyrenean ibex, or bucardo as they are known. It is the first time an extinct animal has been cloned. Sadly, the newborn ibex kid died shortly after birth due to physical defects in its lungs. Other cloned animals, including sheep, have been born with similar lung defects. But the breakthrough has raised hopes that it will be possible to save endangered and newly extinct species by resurrecting them from frozen tissue
Several teams of scientists and engineers have been trying for years to produce a practical retinal prosthesis for people afflicted by a progressive loss of photoreceptor cells. One problem all the researchers face is how to get power and data to a retinal chip that’s implanted at the back of a person’s eye. Some groups’ implants, such as those from the University of Southern California’s Doheny Eye Institute and an MIT-Harvard team get their power and data from RF signals beamed in from the outside, while other groups, including one at the University Eye Hospital in T?ºbingen, Germany, are working on getting the data as light entering the eye using RF energy to beam in the power. But a team from Stanford University has been working on what might seem like the obvious solution: using light entering the eye for both power and data
Nearly 62 years after researchers at Bell Labs demonstrated the first functional transistor, scientists say they have made another major breakthrough. Researchers showed the first functional transistor made from a single molecule. The transistor, which has a benzene molecule attached to gold contacts, could behave just like a silicon transistor
There is a current mass market for cognitive enhancement
products — and arguments about the black market potential for neurostim. The same neurostim device that uses electric impulses from a brain implant to treat people with Parkinson’s Disease can be tweaked by a few millimeters and pulse rates to make cocaine addicts feel like they are high all the time… Mix the glamour of surgical self-improvement with the geekiness of high-tech gadget fetishism and you have a niche cosmetic neurostim market waiting to be tapped… — via Slashdot
Diabetics are saddled with the unenviable task of checking their blood sugar levels constantly, usually through a repeated ritual of pin-pricks and blood drawing. But a new non-invasive technology developed by a biochemical engineer at the University of Western Ontario lets diabetics keep tabs on their glucose levels with contact lenses that change colours as their blood sugar rises and falls
Sonitus Medical of San Mateo in California has created a small device that wraps around the teeth. It picks up the sounds detected from a tiny microphone in the deaf ear and transforms them into vibrations. These then travel through the teeth and down the jawbone to the cochlea in the working ear, where they are transmitted to the brain providing stereo sound. The same process of bone conduction
explains how we hear our own voices, and why they sound different when they are recorded and played back to us. Some existing hearing aids also use bone conduction to transmit sounds to the cochlea, but these either require a titanium post to be drilled into the skull, or rely on cumbersome headsets. It also differs from conventional hearing aids, which employ air conduction to simply turn up the volume of sound travelling into the ear. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio voted Sonitus’s device its top medical innovation for 2010
Scientists have identified a novel antifreeze molecule in a freeze-tolerant Alaska beetle able to survive temperatures below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike all previously described biological antifreezes that contain protein, this new molecule, called xylomannan, has little or no protein. It is composed of a sugar and a fatty acid and may exist in new places within the cells of organisms
For 80 years, it has eluded the finest minds in science. But tonight it appeared that the hunt may be over for dark matter, the mysterious and invisible substance that accounts for three-quarters of the matter in the universe. In a series of coordinated announcements at several US laboratories, researchers said they believed they had captured dark matter in a defunct iron ore mine half a mile underground. The claim, if confirmed next year, will rank as one the most spectacular discoveries in physics in the past century
Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto’s business practices reveal how the world’s biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found. With Monsanto’s patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts
A Californian company is aiming to capture sunlight in space to generate a regular supply of electricity on Earth. There are significant obstacles to overcome, like the high cost of launching things into space, but California’s largest utility has already agreed to buy the power. The chief executive officer of Solaren Corporation, Gary Spirnak, says satellites which carry TV signals are already generating small amounts of electricity
Waste plastic from throwaway
carrier bags can be readily converted into carbon nanotubes. The chemist who developed the technique has even used the nanotubes to make lithium-ion batteries. This is called upcycling
— converting a waste product into something more valuable. Finding ways to upcycle waste could encourage more recycling: for instance, bacteria can convert plastic drinks bottles into a more expensive plastic. The carrier-bag-to-nanotube technique was developed by Vilas Ganpat Pol at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and converts high or low-density polyethylene (HDPE and LDPE) into valuable multiwalled carbon nanotubes
Germany has unveiled the world’s most powerful weather supercomputer that scientists hope will provide critical data on global warming for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Weighing in at 35 tonnes and using 50 kilometres of cables, the supercomputer named Blizzard
is capable of 158 teraflops, or 158 trillion calculations, per second
An Arizona State University research team has developed a process that removes a key obstacle to producing lower-cost, renewable biofuels. The team has programmed a photosynthetic microbe to self-destruct, making the recovery of high-energy fats — and their biofuel byproducts — easier and potentially less costly
How far would you go to help save an endangered animal? How about allowing someone to jab ink into your skin with tiny needles, 150 times a second? That’s exactly what hundreds of volunteers signed up for last weekend at ExtInked, where people came from far and wide to have one of Britain’s most endangered species permanently tattooed on their body, making them a life long ambassador for that species
An online database, ArachnoServer, will catalogue the venom components of hundreds of spiders and help scientists investigate how their toxins could be used, for example as natural insect sprays or painkillers
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