25.01.2010

“[...] Dubbed a “spaser”, this minuscule lasing object is the latest by-product of a buzzing field known as nanoplasmonics. Just as microelectronics exploits the behaviour of electrons in metals and semiconductors on micrometre scales, so nanoplasmonics is concerned with the nanoscale comings and goings of entities known as plasmons that lurk on and below the surfaces of metals. [...]“

Source/article: New Scientist

25.01.2010

“Researchers in Manchester have successfully carried out the first rewire of genetic switches, creating what could be a vital tool for the development of new drugs and even future gene therapies. [...]“

Source/article: PhysOrg

25.01.2010

“A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion — the process that generates the sun’s prodigious output of energy. [...]“

Source/article: Innovations Report

22.01.2010

“The world should organise its defences now in case an asteroid is found on a collision course with Earth, says a group of US scientists.

There are huge numbers of asteroids that come close to Earth’s orbit, called near-Earth asteroids (NEAs). Millions of them are large enough to do serious damage in an impact, including the asteroid Apophis, which has a small chance of hitting Earth in 2036. [...]“

Source/article: New Scientist

22.01.2010

“A study published in today’s online edition the American Journal of Human Genetics, allowed the first identification of a new form of adult onset muscular dystrophy. [...]“

Source/article: Innovations Report

22.01.2010

“Analysis of MRSA starts to reveal its journey around the globe–and within a hospital.

By sequencing the entire genome of numerous samples of the notorious MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) bacteria–a drug-resistant strain of staph responsible for thousands of deaths in the United States each year–researchers at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom have gained clues as to how the superbug travels both around the globe and in local hospitals. Scientists say the approach will shed light on the epidemiology of the troublesome bacteria and help public health programs target their prevention efforts most effectively. [...]“

Source/article: Technology Review

22.01.2010

“Stem cell advance will help drug development.

Last month, Madison, WI-based Cellular Dynamics International (CDI) began shipping heart cells derived from a person’s own stem cells. The cells could be useful to researchers studying everything from the toxicity of new or existing drugs to the electrodynamics of both healthy and diseased cardiac cells. [...]“

Source/article: Technology Review

19.01.2010

“The pipeline linking ecological discovery to bioengineering insight. [...]

Many bioengineering applications of natural products take place long after the basic science discovery of the product itself. For example, Osamu Shimomura, who first isolated GFP from jellyfish in the 1960s, and who won a share of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, once explained: “I don’t do my research for application, or any benefit. I just do my research to understand why jellyfish luminesce.” [...]

very gene product is a potential tool for perturbing or observing a biological process, as long as bioengineers proactively imagine and explore the significance of each finding in order to convert natural products into tools.

Conversely, many bioengineering needs are probably satisfied, at least in part, by a process found somewhere in nature–whether it’s making magnetic nanoparticles, or sensing heat, or synthesizing structural polymers, or implementing complex computations. The question in basic science often boils down to how generally important a process is across ecological diversity, but a bioengineer only needs one example of something to begin copying, utilizing, and modifying it. [...]“

Source/article: Technology Review

23.01.2010

“The Food and Drug Administration has approved the drug fampridine-SR for the treatment of multiple sclerosis. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) have been evaluating the effects of the drug in MS for more than 10 years- it is the first medication shown to enhance some neurological functions in people with the disease – and their efforts helped pave the way for today’s action by the FDA. [...]“

Source/article: PhysOrg

22.01.2010

“Since their initial discovery in 1973, dendritic cells, the sentinels of the immune system, have turned up in a number of places other than the immune organs. They stand guard in the heart, for instance, and in 2008, the first population native to the brain was identified. New research shows that dendritic cells are not only present in the brain, but active, too. They confront foreign substances and seem to form a barrier between healthy and stricken brain tissue following a stroke. [...]“

Source/article: PhysOrg

25.11.2009

“One way to squeeze more power out of sunlight is to ensure that it always hits a solar panel at the ideal angle. This means either tracking the sun and maneuvering a panel to face it, or using complex optics to redirect the sun’s rays to hit the panel’s surface from above. Researchers at the University of Illinois have now come up with self-assembling spherical solar cells capable of capturing more sunlight than flat ones. The shape is a simpler way to make more use of the sun’s rays, but has been difficult to realize in a solar cell. These new microscale solar cells are made using conventional lithography combined with self-assembly. If they prove practical, the devices could be wired up into large arrays that have the same power output as conventional cells, but that save on materials costs by using less silicon. [...]“

Source/article: Technology Review

23.11.2009

“Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have built a machine that uses the sun’s energy to convert carbon dioxide waste from power plants into transportation fuels such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel. [...] When the scientists heat the inside of one chamber to 1,500C with a solar concentrator, the iron oxide undergoes a thermo-chemical reaction where it gives up oxygen molecules. [...] When carbon dioxide is pumped into this chamber, the iron oxide retrieves oxygen molecules from the carbon dioxide, transforming it into carbon monoxide. The carbon monoxide could then serve as a building block to create a liquid combustible fuel. [...] It will probably take 15-20 years before the technology is ready for the market, with the biggest challenge being to increase the system’s efficiency. [...]“

Source/article: PhysOrg

Milchsäurebakterium bringt Karieserreger zum Verklumpen

“Schmerzhafte Löcher in den Zähnen und Bohren beim Zahnarzt – Karies hat fast jeder schon einmal gehabt. Schuld an der Misere sind Bakterien. Der Keim Streptococcus mutans (grün) setzt sich an der Oberfläche von Zähnen fest. Dort nutzt er Zucker als Nährstoff und produziert daraus Säuren, die den Zahnschmelz angreifen und zerlöchern. Zukünftig könnte er jedoch Konkurrenz bekommen – zum Wohl der Zähne.

Nach dem Prinzip „Gleiches mit Gleichem bekämpfen“ haben Forscher von BASF gemeinsam mit dem Kollegen von Organobalance aus Berlin jetzt einen Gegenspieler für die Karies entwickelt: Lactobacillus paracasei (blau) ist ebenfalls ein Bakterium und gehört zur Gruppe der probiotischen Milchsäurebakterien. Im Mund ist es völlig harmlos, sorgt aber bei den Karieserregern für Ärger: Denn Lactobacillus erkennt die Kariesbakterien, dockt an ihnen an und verklumpt mit ihnen. Diese Bakterienklumpen können sich dann nicht mehr an die Zahnoberfläche anheften und werden mit dem Speichel oder beim Zähneputzen aus der Mundhöhle gespült.

Noch befindet sich dieser neue biologische Wirkmechanismus in der Entwicklung. Zukünftig soll Lactobacillus paracasei aber zum Beispiel in Zahnpasta, Mundspülungen und Kaugummis zum Einsatz kommen.”

Source/article: Scinexx

22.11.2009

“or decades, the world’s supercomputers have been the tightly guarded property of universities and governments. But what would happen if regular folks could get their hands on one?

The price of supercomputers is dropping quickly, in part because they are often built with the same off-the-shelf parts found in PCs, as a supercomputing conference here last week made clear. Just about any organization with a few million dollars can now buy or assemble a top-flight machine. [...]“

Source/article: NY Times

19.22.2009

“Scientists at Cornell University report they can now use a light beam carrying a single milliwatt of power to move objects and even change the optical properties of silicon from opaque to transparent at the nanometric scale. Such an advancement could prove very useful for the future of micro-electromechanical (MEMS) and micro-optomechanical (MOMS) systems. [...]“

Source/article: Gizmag

22.11.2009

“At I.B.M., a team of nearly 100, including mathematicians and software developers, is working on a project to create an automatic translation tool, so-called machine translation, that has the speed and accuracy to be used in instant-messaging between speakers of two different languages.

The project, called n.Fluent, is intended to teach the computer terminology that is specific to I.B.M.’s businesses, and, more significantly, allow the computer to learn what it has been doing wrong. To that end, the company is extracting and organizing contributions from I.B.M.’s 400,000-member work force spread across more than 170 countries, adding a human touch to the project. [...]“

Source/article: NY Times

20.11.2009

“s it an elegant solution to pressing problems related to the food supply, or another example of putting too much faith in technology?

That’s a tough question to answer. But what is clear right now is that vertical farming is in its infancy.

The idea is to grow food inside buildings — not conventional greenhouses, but multi-storey buildings, quite likely in cities — in closed ecosystems using hydroponics rather than soil, and without the use of pesticides. [...]“

Source/article: CBC News

23.11.2009

“Henry Markram leads the Blue Brain project that successfully simulated a self-organizing slice of rat brain at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. He has issued a point-by-point denouncement of the cat claim that bubbles with outrage at IBM Almaden’s Dharmendra Modha.
“There is no qualified neuroscientist on the planet that would agree that this is even close to a cat’s brain,” Markram writes in his e-mail to IBM. [...]
Markram calls the IBM simulation a “hoax and a PR stunt” that any parallel machine cluster could replicate. [...]“

Source/article:PopSci

Related article:

17.11.2009

“Los Angeles, California—If you’re under age 30, it is likely that you will be able to live as long as you want. That is, barring accidents and wars, you have centuries of healthy life ahead of you. So the participants in the Longevity Summit convened in Manhattan Beach, California, contend. Over the weekend Maximum Life Foundation president David Kekich gathered a group of scientists, entrepreneurs, and visionaries to meet for three days with the goal of developing a scientific and business strategy to make extreme human life extension a real possibility within a couple of decades. Kekich dubbed the effort the Manhattan Beach Project.

Tech entrepreneur and futurist Ray Kurzweil opened the conference with a virtual presentation on exponential technology trends that are bringing the prospect of achieving longevity escape velocity ever closer. “We are very close to the tipping point in human longevity,” asserted Kurzweil to the conferees. “We are about 15 years away from adding more than one year of longevity per year to remaining life expectancy.” This has been labeled by summiteer and life-extension guru Aubrey de Grey as longevity escape velocity. Achieving escape velocity, according to Kekich, would mean that “your projected day of reckoning moves further away from you rather than closing in on you.” [...]“

Source/artucle: Reason Magazine

17.11.2009

“Long-lived nuclear batteries powered by hydrogen isotopes are in testing for military applications.

Batteries that harvest energy from the nuclear decay of isotopes can produce very low levels of current and last for decades without needing to be replaced. A new version of the batteries, called betavoltaics, is being developed by an Ithaca, NY-based company and tested by Lockheed Martin. The batteries could potentially power electrical circuits that protect military planes and missiles from tampering by destroying information stored in the systems, or by sending out a warning signal to a military center. The batteries are expected to last for 25 years. The company, called Widetronix, is also working with medical-device makers to develop batteries that could last decades for implantable medical devices. [...]“

Source/article: Technology Review