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Top Stories in Science
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January 2007 Issue |
| [D] Defence and security |  |
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Doomsday clock The keepers of the Doomsday Clock have moved the hands two minutes closer to midnight. The clock now stands at five minutes to midnight, closer to doomsday than during most of the Cold War. The reasons include Iran's nuclear ambitions, North Korea's detonation of an atomic bomb, the continued presence of 26,000 launch-ready weapons owned by America and Russia, and the inability to secure and halt the international trafficking of nuclear materials such as highly enriched uranium and plutonium. The reasons also include the growing threat from climate change. The symbolic Doomsday Clock was first established in 1947 and was first positioned at 7 minutes to midnight. It advanced to two minutes before midnight in 1953 after the United States and the Soviet Union detonated hydrogen bombs. Since then it has moved backwards and forwards 16 times. Its furthest retreat was in 1991 when it was moved to 17minutes to midnight following the signing of the nuclear arms treaty. [D][E][X]
Food security According to a report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the livestock industry is one of the two or three top contributors to the most serious environmental problems at every scale - degrading land, polluting water resources, destroying biodiversity and contributing 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions – more than transport, which emits 13.5 percent. With global demand for meat expected to more than double by 2050, ways are needed to greatly reduce the environmental impact of livestock production. Major reductions could be achieved by properly pricing for the true costs of environmental damage. The core problem is the amount of land that livestock production consumes, but over-concentration of industrialised production is also damaging. [D][E][R][W][X]
Food security A hectare of paddy fields in Asia provides enough rice to feed 27 people. But by around 2050 it may need to cater for over 40 people. Available land could diminish as it is consumed by urban sprawl, and drought and flooding due to global warming are likely to reduce yields of existing rice. Scientists at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) believe that the only salvation is through genetic engineering. This has already produce rice that can survive sustained immersion due to flooding. But the biggest goal is to fundamentally change the process of photosynthesis in rice, from so-called C3 photosynthesis to C4 photosynthesis, which works much more efficiently at higher temperatures. [D][E][G][T][X]
Darfur relief Fourteen UN aid agencies working in Darfur have warned that their relief operations will collapse unless security improves. The UN said that millions of lives are at risk. The humanitarian operations in Darfur, which employ almost 14,000 aid workers and cost more than $1bn, have saved hundreds of thousands of lives since mid-2004. [D][E][H]
Military doctrine The US military has released a new manual on counter-insurgencies - its first guide on the topic for 20 years. The manual, which contains chapters on intelligence and ethics in war, draws on lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan. It underlines the need for troops to win the trust of local people. [D][X]
2006 security roundup The BBC Global Security Roundup for 2006 highlights four areas of greatest risk: Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and Iran. [D][X] |
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| [A] Aeronautics and space | |
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Joint Strike Fighter The full production version of the Anglo-American F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has successfully completed its maiden test flight. The single-engined fighter is designed to replace the US's aging F-16s and F/A-18 Hornets. A jump-jet version of the F-35 is planned to be deployed by the RAF and Royal Navy, but there has been a serious risk of the UK pulling out of the project. This is because of a dispute between London and Washington over British access to the key technical details needed to own and operate the highly complex aircraft independently of the US. The US is reported to have now agreed to share the necessary information with British counterparts. [A][D][K][W][X]
Hypersonic missiles Ultrafast missiles designed to strike targets around the globe will be the first technologies to use hypersonic flight, according to plans announced by the US and Australia. Early prototypes are set to begin flight tests during 2007. [A][D][P]
Air travel carbon trading To help reduce the increasing burden of air travel on global warming, the European Commission (EC) has announced that air travel to, from and within the EU will be brought under the EU carbon trading scheme. The emissions caps will apply to flights within the EU from 2011 and will be extended to include international flights from 2012. The EC will set the free credits allowed to airlines by taking an average of emissions from 2004 to 2006. These allowances can be traded between airlines and with other industries on the European emissions trading market. [A][E][P]
Space laser communications Artemis, ESA's geostationary Advanced Relay and Technology Mission Satellite, has successfully demonstrated the feasibility of laser communication links between geostationary satellites and aircraft in flight. Optical data relay offers several advantages: high data rates with low mass, low power terminals, and secure, interference-free communications. [A][E][I][O][R]
Record solar outburst Several major solar outbursts occurred in early December that disrupted communications and GPS receivers worldwide. One of these on 6 December is reported to have produced a radio noise level of around 1 million solar flux units, more than 10 times stronger than the highest previous record. This outburst lasted more than an hour and was produced by a complex sunspot and a large solar flare. It is surprising that such a massive outburst has occurred at the minimum of the 11-year sunspot cycle. However, evidence is mounting from analysis of historical records and from computer modelling of the Sun's interior that the new sun spot cycle, which is due to peak in 2010 or 2011, is likely to be one of the most intense since record-keeping began almost 400 years ago. [A][I][R]
Predicting space weather Space weather depends on the strength of the solar wind, but some scientists argue that it depends even more on the rate at which the magnetic fields within the solar wind merge with the Earth's magnetic field. Rapid changes in these fields can sweep charged particles from the solar wind into the radiation belts that surround the Earth. From an analysis of data collected by terrestrial and space-based observatories, researchers at John Hopkins have been able to develop a single formula through which the rate of merging provides a good prediction of various indicators of space weather and also of the strength of auroras. Finding this single formula tends to confirm that the rate of merging is a key factor in space weather. [A][I][R]
Life on Mars According to US and German scientists, the Viking Mars landers may have found life on Mars in the late 1970s but may have failed to recognise it. The Viking experiments were designed to detect water-based life like life on Earth. But microbes living in the very cold dry conditions on Mars might instead use a mixture of water and hydrogen peroxide as their internal fluid. Such a mixture has a freezing point as low as -56.5 degrees C, depending on the concentration of hydrogen peroxide, and it does not form cell-destroying crystals when is freezes, as water ice does. Hydrogen peroxide is also hygroscopic and would enable microbes to extract available water vapour from the Martian atmosphere. The researchers say that whilst this is only a hypothesis it would explain all the somewhat puzzling results from the Viking experiments. [A][F]
Comet Wild-2 dust Comets are thought to be the oldest objects in the Solar System and should provide a record of the processes that formed the planets over four and a half billion years ago. The first analyses of dust fragments from Comet Wild-2, captured by NASA's Stardust spacecraft and brought to Earth in January 2006, have revealed a surprisingly diverse range of mineral compositions. Some particles formed at very high temperatures close to the Sun; others originated from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Since the comet originally formed in the outer Solar System, the presence of material from the inner Solar system suggests there was massive turbulent churning in the solar nebula prior to the formation of the planets. This view is quite different from the conventional view that the solar nebula gently collapsed inwards to form the Sun and the planets. The dust from Comet Wild-2 has also been found to contain pre-solar materials and large, complex carbon-rich molecules of the type that could have been important precursors for the development of life on Earth. [A][F][G]
Titan methane cycle By performing a careful analysis of radar data taken from NASA's Cassini-Huygens mission, researchers have confirmed that numerous dark patches known to exist at high latitudes in Titan's northern hemisphere are in fact lakes of methane. Some of these lakes could be fed by both rivers and rainfall, while others could be fed by a methane "groundwater table". Titan seems therefore to have a methane cycle similar to the water cycle on Earth. [A][F][R] |
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| [U] Unmanned vehicles and robotics | |
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Amphibious robot Researchers in the US have developed a biomimetic amphibious robot that swims underwater via the motion of its legs rather than using thrusters and control surfaces for propulsion. It can also walk along the shore, swim along the surface in open water, or walk on the bottom of the ocean. The vehicle uses a variety of sensors that estimate its position with respect to local visual features and provide a global frame of reference. [U][E][P][R]
Power line inspecting robot Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a robot that can inspect power cables for incipient failures. The robot, which looks like an insect and can negotiate tight curves, rides along the insulated distribution cable scanning for internal damage. It uses three sensors: a heat sensor that detects heat dissipation; an acoustic sensor that listens for partial electrical discharge; and a third sensor that detects filaments of water that have seeped into the insulation. Engineers can monitor the robot via wireless connection and watch the robot's surroundings through a front-mounted video camera. [U][P][R][S][W]
Robotic hand A new type of robotic hand has been developed at the University of Southampton that uses an array of sensors to enable it to manipulate objects without crushing them or letting them slip from its grasp. Pressure sensors in each fingertip connect to a control system that maintains the hand's grip, and slip sensors detect the vibration as an object starts to slip through the fingers. [U][H][S][V][W]
Future of robotics The January issue of Scientific American contains an article by Bill Gates on the emergence and future of the robotics industry. Gates argues that the robotics industry faces many of the same challenges that the personal computer business faced 30 years ago. The lack of common standards and platforms means that designers usually have to start from scratch when building their machines as designers did with the early PCs. Recent decreases in the cost of processing power and sensors is enabling robots to quickly sense and react to their environments, and, as with PCs, the greater challenge now lies in improving software. New software tools are making it easier to write programs that work with different kinds of hardware. Networks of wireless robots can tap into the power of desktop PCs to handle tasks such as visual recognition and navigation. [U][C][I][R][S][T] |
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| [P] Propulsion and energy | |
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Carbon capture and sequestration The UK Treasury has published a consultation report on the potential for carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) using the oil and gas fields in the North Sea. The report finds no major problems in the UK adopting CCS other than the cost and the availability of skilled people to handle the scale of construction work that would be needed. [P][E][W][X]
Hydrogen based ships Shipping is becoming a serious source of air pollution and in Europe the emissions of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from ships is projected to exceed land-based emissions by 2020. Using hydrogen to power ships provides a possible way forward. An EU-funded study has found that there are a number of challenges but no major barriers. The design of a fuel cell for ships would have to take into account the saltiness of the sea air. Storing enough hydrogen to propel a large ship on a long voyage requires advanced in storage technology. A collision at sea might cause a hydrogen explosion on the ship. New regulations, codes and standards for using and carrying hydrogen fuel would be needed. [P][E][M]
4th generation nuclear power France plans to build a fourth generation nuclear reactor by 2020. Proponents of fourth generation nuclear power say that it would provide significant improvements in economics, safety, reliability and sustainability. France is the biggest producer of nuclear power in Europe, having constructed dozens of reactors since the 1970s oil crises. Some 78 percent of France's electricity is supplied by nuclear power, and the country is a major exporter of electricity and nuclear technology. [P][E][X]
Biofuel super-yeast A novel genetic engineering technique has been used to enable yeast to withstand higher levels of alcohol. Researchers say that this could dramatically boost the efficiency of generating ethanol-based fuels from corn and plant waste. Normal yeast is killed by alcohol concentrations of 12 to 15 percent. The researchers believe the modified yeast could perhaps survive in several times this concentration. Also, the modified yeast produced 50 percent more ethanol during a 21-hour period than normal yeast. [P][E][G]
Grass as a biofuel Researchers at the University of Minnesota claim that biodiverse grass grown on degraded land could be used to produce biofuel and could yield substantially more energy per hectare than conventional energy crops such as corn or soya. Furthermore, because of the large amounts of carbon stored in the grass roots and soil, the process produces a net carbon capture of 4.1 tons per hectare per year even after the grass has been used as fuel and after allowing for the carbon-based energy costs of growing, harvesting and transporting the grass, and operating the biofuel facility. The researchers found that the biodiversity of the grassland is key: experimental plots with 16 plant species generated on average 2.4 times more energy than plots that had just one type of plant. [P][E]
Trees as carbon offsets Offsetting carbon emissions by planting trees may not work as well as hoped, at least if the trees are planted in temperate latitudes, according to researchers at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. They used a computer model to determine the impact that forests in different parts of the planet would have on temperature. Forests can cool the Earth by absorbing carbon dioxide and by increasing cloud cover through transpiration to reflect more solar radiation back into space. However, the modelling suggests that in temperate latitudes this benefit is roughly cancelled by the greater amount of sunlight absorbed by darker foliage of the trees. [P][E] |
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| [M] Materials, structures and surfaces | |
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Shock-resistant materials Several teams of researchers over the past five years have shown both theoretically and experimentally that granular systems composed of tapered chains of spheres of gradually reduced size are very effective in absorbing shock. This could considerably improve the blast resistance of structures and armour. Researchers at the University of Buffalo have now shown by computer simulations that the shock resistance can be improved further by incorporating many tiny interstitial grains between the spheres in the tapered chain. These smaller grains rattle between their larger neighbours, thereby dissipating much of the shock-wave energy as heat and sound. [M][D][E][P]
Ultrastrong glass US researchers have created a novel glass that is stronger and more stable than glass made in traditional ways. Normally, a piece of glass is allowed to cool all at once and the inner molecules form a highly disordered structure that makes the glass less stable and durable. The researchers showed that by using vapour deposition to grow the glass layer by layer, each sheet of particles can move into a more organized arrangement before solidifying. Though the new glasses do not reach the precision of crystals, they are denser and far stronger than traditional glass. The technology has potential for surface coatings and drug therapy. The researchers have successfully made stable glass with an anti-inflammatory drug called indomethacin. [M][H]
Thermally insulating material A new insulation material with the lowest thermal conductivity ever measured for a fully dense solid has been created at the University of Oregon. The researchers used a novel approach to synthesize various thicknesses of tungsten diselenide, producing a random stacking of tungsten-diselenide planes. The material had a thermal conductivity 30 times smaller than that for single-crystal WSe2 and a factor six smaller that the minimum level predicted by theoretical computations for the cross-plane thin films used in the experiments. Producing a fully disordered structure by bombarding the films with ions to destroy the planar structure was found to increase the thermal conductivity. So, possibly the planar structure is causing localization of lattice vibrations. The researchers say that the new material would not be practical for insulating a refrigerator, the wall of a house or parts inside a turbine engine. But the new physical properties displayed by this material might point the way toward methods of creating more effective practical insulations. [M][P]
3-D tissue scaffolds For complex cellular processes such as tissue regeneration, 3-D scaffolds provide better simulated environments than the ubiquitous 2-D petri dish. In a petri dish, cell clusters spread out on the surface of a medium. This causes all the cell's adhesion receptors to migrate to one side of the cell, which dramatically changes its metabolic functions and growth patterns. 3-D scaffolds have in the past had pore sizes very much larger than the size of a cell, making them similar to a petri dish, or else they have been of doubtful safety for therapeutic use. Researchers at MIT have now found how to use safe self-assembling peptides to make scaffolds with the right properties. They also found that incorporating some bone marrow homing peptides into the structure greatly encouraged progenitor cells to differentiate into mature cells. [M][G][H][N]
Vortices and zonal flow Researchers at Australian National University have come closer to understanding how energy is retained in turbulent systems that self-organise - such as the atmosphere, the universe and plasma. Vortices can self-organise to form much larger vortices and this causes the fluid to develop powerful regions of ‘zonal flow’. These, in turn, create transport barriers that are particularly important for plasma fusion reactors since they help to maintain the plasma confinement at very high temperature. In a similar way, turbulent water flow around the Antarctic prevents the freezing waters from escaping north and preserves the Antarctic ice cap. Zonal flows are also observed in the atmospheres of most of the planets in the Solar System. [M][A][E][P]
Cooling large molecules Although single atoms and very small molecules can be cooled to just a few thousandths of a degree above absolute zero, it has proved very difficult to cool big molecules much below about 10 degrees Kelvin. This is because the many degrees of freedom in big molecules give them a large internal energy. Now, using a technique called sympathetic cooling, researchers at the Heinrich-Heine University in Düsseldorf have succeeded in cooling a molecule with 42 atoms to less than 0.1 degrees K. Achieving temperatures this low will allow scientists to study molecular structures and chemical processes with unprecedented precision, and perhaps allow them to explore fundamental phenomena such as parity violation. The researchers believe that sympathetic cooling should work with proteins and other biomolecules. [M][F][N][O] |
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| [E] Environment, transport and marine | |
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Aerosols and climate change US and French scientists have developed a method using Antarctic ice cores to determine the influence of past volcanic eruptions on climate and on the chemistry of the upper atmosphere. Measuring the ratio of sulphur isotopes in the fallout trapped in the ice reveals how high the volcanic material reached in the atmosphere. Sulphur that rises as high as the stratosphere, above the ozone layer, is exposed to short wavelength ultraviolet light that creates a characteristic ratio of sulphur isotopes. The new technique should help in understanding better how atmospheric particles at different altitudes affect climate. This is of key importance for improving climate models. [E][A]
Polar bears and carbon emissions The Bush administration has decided that polar bears may be facing extinction and should be on the US endangered species list. This decision could presage a policy shift on global warming. Listing polar bears as threatened would force US government agencies to ensure they take no action that jeopardizes the animal's existence. That in turn could pressure the government to consider tougher measures on carbon emissions. There will now be a period of public consultation before the final decision in 12 months over whether to list the polar bear as threatened. The only wild polar bears in the US live in Alaska and unlike the Canadian polar bears, which are in rapid decline, the Alaskan bears have not declined to any statistically significant extent. [E][P]
Ocean warming and wildfires By combining tree-ring records stretching back 450 years as well as fire-scar data from more than 4,700 burned trees, scientists have now created an extended log of the climate in the western US and its attendant wildfires. This record shows that warmer temperature in the waters of the northern Atlantic help increase the scale and intensity of wildfires in the US West. As weather generally flows from west to east, this link is surprising. One possible cause could be the impact of North Atlantic temperature on circumpolar circulation, which could affect moisture flowing over the continent from the north. Another could be the impact on the Bermuda High, which would affect moisture flowing over the continent from the south. [E]
Permian climate change In the mid-Permian period, 300 million years ago, the Earth was in an ice age. Miles-thick ice sheets covered much of the southern continent, and floating pack ice probably covered the northern polar ocean. The tropics were dominated by lush rainforests, now preserved as coal beds. Forty million years later, all the ice was gone. The world was a hot, dry place, vegetation was sparse, soils little more than drifts of wind-blown dust. However, during the transition period the climate swung wildly and carbon dioxide levels varied from 250 parts per million (70 percent of current levels) to as high as 2000 ppm. On scales of a few thousand years, lush forests of tree ferns in cool, wet periods alternated with conifers and other plants adapted to a harsher, drier and warmer climate. Whilst the findings cannot be applied in any direct sense to current global warming, they show that climate change may not proceed smoothly and may involve large fluctuations. [E][X]
Global warming and fish stocks Different species of fish have different 'thermal windows' for efficiently transporting oxygen around the body. If sea temperatures rise too high this affects muscular activity, behaviour, growth and reproduction and could also make the fish more sensitive to predation, starvation and disease. The problem is compounded because warmer water contains less dissolved oxygen. As many species become affected by rising temperature, this alters the food webs. German researchers have studied these effects by looking at the relationship between seasonal sea temperatures and the population of the eelpout (Zoarces viviparus) in the southern North Sea. They say that this temperature effect may play as big a role as overfishing in the decline of species such as the Atlantic cod. [E]
Tracking ocean changes In order to make the most of all satellite information available on ocean colour and sea-surface temperature, ESA is merging data from state-of-the-art instruments aboard different satellites. Colour and temperature are two key oceanic variables that will help track how organisms in the ocean such as phytoplankton are responding to global warming. [E][A][R]
Global warming in China Global warming threatens to intensify natural disasters and water shortages across China and to drive down the country's food output, according to dire warnings from the Chinese government. Chinese President Hu Jintao has called for intensified efforts to save energy by using price, tax and other financial measures to promote energy saving and curb wasteful use. The first official assessment of the effects of climate change has concluded that in the agricultural regions in northern China the hotter weather and increased evaporation will outweigh greater rain and snowfall. In the country's south, heavier rainfalls could trigger more landslides and mudslides. The Tibetan plateau, which makes up nearly a quarter of China's area, is experiencing accelerating glacial melt and desertification. [E][D][X] |
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| [R] Remote sensing and sensor systems | |
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MARSIS data The MARSIS sub-surface sounding radar on board ESA’s Mars Express orbiter is revealing that Mars has an older, craggier surface buried beneath its outer layer of lava and sediment. Impact craters ranging from about 130 to 470 km in diameter are present under much of the smooth northern lowlands. This shows that the underlying crust must be very ancient, dating back to the Early Noachian epoch when impact cratering was very intense across the Solar System. This epoch lasted from the planet's birth to about 4 billion years ago. The MARSIS radar can not only reveal surface and sub-surface morphology, but also give indications about the composition of the materials. [R][A]
Extremely large telescopes Design is to go ahead for the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and the hope is that the facility will be operational in about 2018. According to the present concept, the telescope will feature a primary mirror of 42 metres diameter, around four times larger than any other currently in existence. One innovation to be tested by the E-ELT would be to create an artificial reference star for the adaptive optics needed to remove the fuzziness caused by atmospheric turbulence. The artificial star will be created by firing a laser into the night sky. The US NSF is currently evaluation designs for two other very large telescopes with mirror diameters of 24 metres and 30 metres. All of these terrestrial telescopes will operate in conjunction with space-based telescopes. [R][O]
Passive acoustic imaging Scientists in Israel have developed a medical imaging technique called vibrational response imaging that provides a new way to examine the lungs. It uses an array of microphones hung over the patient's back to record vibrations made by air passing through the bronchial tubes. Background noises and heartbeats are filtered out and the remaining data are processed by an algorithm that can recognise individual noises as they arrive at different microphones and determine their origin from their relative times of arrival. The resolution is sufficient to pick up abnormalities in the composition of lung tissue and to show unusual patterns of airflow that might be caused by disease. As the imaging is passive it is totally harmless, unlike x-rays, and can be used repeatedly on the same patient. [R][H]
Synthetic aperture ladar Synthetic Aperture Laser Detection and Ranging (SAL) is the optical analogue of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). In early 2006, researchers proved that SAL images could be taken successfully from an aircraft. A programme funded by DARPA has now led into flight trials of two complementary approaches to test what SAL is capable of achieving. Compared to SAR, SAL produces photo-realistic images that are easier to interpret. Speed is another advantage: SAL images can be formed in milliseconds whereas SAR images takes several seconds or minutes. However, aircraft vibration is a major challenge for SAL technology because the platform’s motion combined with atmospheric turbulence affects the system’s fidelity. [R][D][S]
Landmine detection Zapping buried landmines with powerful sound waves and listening to them vibrate could reveal their location, according to research at MIT. The acoustic array, about the size and shape of a dart board and studded with small canisters, emits a highly concentrated beam of ultrasound that is aimed at the minefield. The air in front of the beam converts the ultrasound to lower frequency audible sound as it travels over a distance of about 10 metres. This is then able to propagate through the ground. Tests at a US Army land mine facility indicated that the prototype system could reveal hidden mines more accurately than the devices currently in use. [R][D][S]
Smelling underwater A study at the University of Nashville has found that some mammals are able to smell under water. They accomplish this by rapidly exhaling and quickly re-inhaling air bubbles from their nostrils five to ten times a second. When the air bubbles touch target underwater objects they pick up odours. These are conveyed to the nose when the bubble is re-inhaled. [R][E] |
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| [S] Sensor devices | |
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Quantum smell receptors The sense of smell is still a mystery and it is not clear what property of an odorant is detected by the receptors in the nose. It is widely thought that it is the molecular shape of the odorant, but this does not explain why some nearly identically shaped molecules smell vastly different. Another hypothesis suggested in 1996 is that the receptors also detect the molecular vibration frequency. Researchers at UCL have now shown how this might be achieved by the so-called G-protein coupled receptors that project from olfactory cells inside the nose. Their model is that the odorant fits into a spot between a site that donates an electron and one that receives the electron. The receptor switches on when an electron hops from donor to acceptor by quantum tunnelling through the barrier imposed by the odorant. [S]
Weighing individual viruses A method for weighing individual viruses with an unprecedented precision of 1 percent has been developed at the Institute of Atomic and Molecular Science in Taiwan. It involves confining a virus inside an ion trap and bombarding it with laser light. The way the laser light is scattered reveals how the virus oscillates within the ion trap's electric field and hence its mass. The technique could help to quickly determine the structure and genetic properties of different specimens, and it may also be possible to do experiments on single viruses or particles held inside the trap. [S][G][H][O]
PicoNewton force sensor Researchers at Sandia have devised a cheap sensor to measure picoNewton (pN) forces. This is the level of force typically involved in cell biology: for example, the force applied by the kinesin molecular motor protein to transport vesicles is 6 pN and the force needed to unzip a DNA molecule at room temperature is 9-20 pN. The sensor works in water and uses a spring one millimetre long and one micron thick, fabricated using a standard polysilicon micromachining process. The spring can be entrained to move with the push or pull of a biological sample or it can be made sensitive to magnetic fields and so function as a field sensor. The displacement of the spring is about 1 nm per picoNewton. [S][G][J][N]
Chem-bio nanosensors Researchers have developed nanoscale sensors capable of detecting trace amounts of chemical and biological agents. The tiny devices can be placed on microchips, creating the potential for highly accurate networked sensors embedded in a variety of equipment and systems. [S][D][E][H][N][T][W]
Nanoscale thermal detector Researchers in France have modified a scanning tunnelling microscope so that it can detect near-field thermal radiation from surfaces with a resolution of around 100 nm. The microscope consists of an atomic force microscope (AFM) with a hot sample holder, an infrared optical microscope and a cadmium-mercury-telluride infrared detector. The AFM's tungsten tip acts as a scattering centre that picks up the infrared evanescent fields emitted by the surface and radiates a related signal in the far field. [S][N][O]
Observing attosecond processes Researchers at Imperial College London have unveiled a new technique for characterizing the light within ultrashort infrared laser pulses only a few wavelengths long. The relative position of the waveform within the pulse envelope, which is called the carrier-envelope phase (CEP), has a significant effect on how the pulse interacts with electrons in atoms and molecules. Hence, the CEP affects the use of ultrashort pulses to probe electrons in atoms and molecules and to study chemical reactions on attosecond timescales. The new technique enables the CEP to be measured to a precision of 50 attoseconds and it works for individual pulses rather than needing to average over many pulses. [S][M][N][O]
Ultrafast electron microscopy By using coincident ultrashort electron and laser pulses, physicists at Caltech have taken an ultrafast sequence of images of vanadium and oxygen atoms rearranging themselves in a “first-order” phase transition. The rearrangement can take as little as 100 femtoseconds and was followed with a precision of a few femtoseconds by controlling the relative timing of the electron and laser pulses. The researchers believe that this new form of electron microscopy can be applied to a very wide range of materials, from semiconductors and metals to organics and biological assemblies. [S][M][N][O] |
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| [O] Optoelectronics, optics and lasers | |
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Cloaking Cloaking has so far been demonstrated for passive objects. A new mathematical theory of cloaking suggests that it may also be possible to hide actively radiating objects like a flashlight or cell phone. [O][D][M][R]
Negative refractive index material Researchers at Ames Laboratory and the University of Karlsruhe have developed a metamaterial with a negative refractive index for visible light. The material could lead to a wide range of new applications as varied as ultrahigh-resolution imaging systems and cloaking devices. The material has a “fishnet” structure produced by etching an array of holes roughly 100 nm wide into layers of silver and magnesium fluoride on a glass substrate. [O][M][R][S]
Superior nonlinearity Quantum mechanics limits how strongly light interacts with matter and hence the maximum level of nonlinear optical susceptibility that can be achieved. This limit, known as the Kuzyk limit, is around 30 times higher than the best values actually observed in real molecules. Theoretically, it should be possible to develop materials much closer to the Kuzyk limit and this would greatly improve the efficiency and speed of optical processing systems. Researchers in China and Belgium have now produced a new class of molecules with 50 percent higher nonlinear susceptibility than any previous material. This improvement was achieved by incorporating non-carbon atom "bumps" into the carbon bridge between the two ends of the molecule. The atoms in the bump constrain the waveforms of the electrons in the carbon bridge, preventing the electrons from interfering with each other and making them more sensitive to the light waves. The researchers hope that adding more bumps may produce even better materials. [O][I][M]
Stable monoenergetic wakefield accelerator Plasma wavefields are thousands of times stronger than fields in conventional accelerators and this offers the potential to reduce the size of particle accelerators to "tabletop" dimensions. But the problem has been how to control the beam energy and stability. Researchers at the École Polytechnique in Palaiseau have now made an important breakthrough by using two laser pulses instead of one. The first laser pulse creates the plasma and drives the wavefield; the second pulse runs in the opposite direction and pre-accelerates electrons before they enter the wakefield. The electrons are then accelerated in just over 2 mm, producing a monoenergetic beam that is stable enough for applications such as radiotherapy and radiography. The precise beam energy can be tuned in the range 50 to 250 MeV by altering the delay between the two laser pulses. [O][H][P][R][W]
Measuring the gravitational constant Researchers at Stanford have shown that they can measure the gravitational constant G by using a 540 kg lead weight to deflect a laser beam and thereby alter an interference pattern. This may provide a way of measuring G far more accurately than using conventional methods that measure the gravitational attraction between masses. [O][F]
Optical buffer chip To build optical computers with the same flexibility as electronic computers requires having optical buffers that can delay light signals in a compact and controllable way. Long delays can be achieved by passing light through optical fibres, but this is far too bulky. For practical on-chip integration, the area of a delay line should be well below one square millimetre and its construction should be compatible with current chip manufacturing techniques. IBM researchers have now developed a prototype optical microchip that uses a silicon-based optical delay line built of up to 100 cascaded "micro-ring resonators," made with CMOS fabrication tools. The light circles multiple times in each ring. The chip can briefly store 10 bits of optical information within an area of 0.03 square millimetres. [O][C][I][J] |
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| [I] IT, communications, networking and secure systems | |
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Telecoms innovations In its review of "winners" for 2007, IEEE Spectrum highlights two important innovations in telecoms. The first is the transformation of the entire UK phone network to internet protocol (IP), which started in November 2006 and will create the most comprehensive IP network in the world. Under this initiative, called the 21st Century Network (21CN), BT plans by 2012 to shut down all 16 of its legacy networks, replacing them with a single network serving the entire UK, including its 22.5 million households. 21CN will be a single global network including BT facilities in 170 countries. The second IEEE "winner" is the launch of the first cellular base station that can simultaneously process two waveforms - CDMA and GSM - all in software running on off-the-shelf computer servers. This is a first step towards realising the dream of software-based mobile phones. [I][T]
Multi-gigabit wireless comms CSIRO has set a new record for high speed wireless comms, transmitting over six gigabits per second over a point to point 85 GHz wireless connection with the highest efficiency (2.4bits/s/Hz) ever achieved for such a system. Multi-gigabit wireless is suitable for situations where a high speed link is needed but where it is too expensive or logistically difficult to lay fibre, such as in congested urban environments or across valleys and rivers. [I]
100 Gbit/sec comms Siemens has set a new speed record for electrical processing of data through a fibre-optic cable. The data was processed using exclusively electrical means at 107 gigabits per second and sent over a single optical fibre channel in a 100 mile-long US network, the first time this has been done outside of a laboratory. This achievement is particularly relevant for the future 100-gigabit ethernet. [I][O]
Network resilience Communications in SE Asia and Australia were disrupted by an earthquake that hit Taiwan on 26 December 2006. The disruption demonstrated the vulnerability of current communication networks that rely very heavily on underwater fibre-optic cables that often run along and over geological faults. Because of relative cheapness compared to Satcom, undersea fibre-optic cables now account for more than 95 percent of international telecommunications. Many countries and global companies are now dependent on the resilience of these networks. [I][C][E][R][X]
Surging spam Spam is again threatening to overwhelm the internet. According to two estimates, in October 2006 an average of 61 billion spam messages was sent each day, accounting for around 91 percent of all email. Security experts cite two key reasons for the recent surge: spammers are using ever larger networks of hijacked computers to send out junk messages; secondly, they are using more sophisticated techniques to dodge filtering systems, most notably the use of "image spam" in which messages are contained in images designed to foil text-based filters. Even filters that use optical recognition have become less effective against the newest form of spam that exploits advanced graphical techniques such as random modification of image pixels and dynamic construction of images from multiple components. [I][K]
Re-engineering the Internet The growing proliferation of malware is raising doubts about the Internet's future. The risk is that the Internet will fragment with high value traffic moving to private networks. The problem is that current security measures implemented by Internet service providers (ISPs) predominantly target inbound traffic, and there is no economic incentive to control outbound traffic. This lack of clear lines of accountability derives from the decentralized nature of datagram routing and organizational structure of the Internet. A possible solution could be to introduce a certification mechanism that induces service providers to voluntarily accept some degree of accountability, without interfering with the underlying decentralized protocols. Game theory calculations suggest that this type of approach could provide the right balance of incentives. [I][K][X]
Quantum key distribution Scientists at Los Alamos and NIST have demonstrated unconditionally secure quantum key distribution (QKD) over a record 107 km of optical fibre. They believe they will be able to extend the system to distances of over 250 km. The QKD protocol used ultra low noise, high-efficiency transition-edge sensor photodetectors, developed at NIST, to generate a secure key by implementing a three-level decoy state protocol. This protocol is similar to one demonstrated by researchers at the University of Toronto, but uses a one-way QKD system instead of a two-way QKD system, which is more susceptible to an adversary's manipulation. [I][O] |
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| [K] Knowledge, information and technology management | |
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Faceprint search A Swedish company, Polar Rose, is releasing free software that makes it possible to find photographs of faces on the Web. The software analyzes digital photos to locate faces, then converts the data from two-dimensional images into 3D models. These skeletal models can be rendered into "faceprints", and the stored faceprint summaries can be compared with other faceprints. Users can also annotate photos with descriptive details to assist the search. Critics say that the technology raises major issues of personal privacy. The company also plans to extend the capabilities beyond faces to recognize objects like landmarks, or dogs and cats, and also to search videos. [K][D][R]
Reading list assistant Software that uses Wikipedia links to generate a list of reading material tailored to a person's individual interests has been developed by a PhD student at Harvard. It advises a user on which Wikipedia articles to read and in what order. [K]
Codifying tacit knowledge Complicated skilled tasks such as a surgical operation unfold in a series of steps that resemble the way that words, sentences and paragraphs are used to convey language, according to computer scientists at Johns Hopkins. Borrowing ideas from speech recognition research, they have built mathematical models to represent the safest and most effective ways to perform surgery, including tasks such as suturing, dissecting and joining tissue. They hope to be able to recognize when a surgical task is being performed well and also to identify which movements can lead to problems. This may provide a way to streamline the training of surgeons as well as improving surgical outcomes. [K][H]
Better e-tutoring Researchers in China and the UK are testing tutoring software that measures students' physical signs of emotion to detect when they are losing interest in a lesson. The software can then vary the speed and content of the lesson to keep them on track. The student wears a ring fitted with sensors that monitor heart rate, blood pressure and changes in electrical resistance caused by perspiration. The ring transmits the data via Bluetooth to the computer, which assesses the student's state. The aim is that this technology can be used to improve electronic tutoring. [K][I][V]
Mood and creativity Experiments at the University of Toronto support the view that people are more creative when they are in a happy mood. The researchers found that an upbeat mood seems to make people more receptive to information of all kinds and better able to think laterally. In contrast, a negative mood is more helpful when people need to focus on specific task and avoid distraction. [K][B]
Science and the Social Web The January issue of Physics World discusses how the increasing use of the Web as a social network - loosely known as "Web 2.0" - is affecting science. Blogs, wikis and other novel publishing tools allow information to be shared, commented upon and adapted online. This can lead to new ideas and forms of thinking, particularly in interdisciplinary research. Popular scientific blogs can place scientific research in a wider context and provide a forum for debates that could not otherwise happen. Wikipedia has developed into a very valuable repository of information and is almost as accurate for science as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, according to a study by Nature in 2005. Wiki technology assists collaboration by providing a way to disseminate tacit knowledge and "tricks of the trade", especially when collaborators are spread over the world and cannot take part in coffee-room discussions. Online publication and review is steadily replacing conventional peer-reviewed publication through paper journals, allowing papers to be refined through online discussion. [K][T][V][W][X]
Growth of the social Web More than half of all net-using American teenagers use social networking sites, according to a study for the Pew Internet Project. Based on a sample of 935 teenagers, the study estimated that 55 percent of American youths aged 12-17 had accounts at sites such as MySpace and Facebook. [K][I][V]
Logistics tracking IBM has developed a technology that uses RFIDs to track drugs from the manufacturer right through the supply chain, checking authenticity and updating the inventory system. Retailers and distributors can communicate with manufacturers over secure networks to check that each package is genuine and not a counterfeit that has somehow made its way into the supply chain. [K][D][H][I][R]
Services science The services sector now accounts for 60 to 80 percent of GDP in developed countries. But very little research or education is directed specifically at service improvement. An initiative to change this has been launched by IBM, which is the only one of the world's 100 top R&D spending companies that derives a large percentage of its revenue from services. IBM is strongly promoting a new academic discipline that it calls "services science, management, and engineering" (SSME). A quarter of IBM's research budget is now devoted to SSME, and to test whether SSME R&D makes good sense, IBM is evaluating its SSME research projects to the same standards as its other R&D initiatives. [K][T] |
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| [C] Computing, supercomputing, modelling and simulation | |
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IT priorities in 2007 A survey of senior IT executives by McKinsey in October 2006 reveals that two trends are becoming increasingly important in 2007: a migration to service-oriented architectures and the introduction of lean-manufacturing principles to data centre operations. Service-oriented architectures, which improve communication and integration between IT systems regardless of their underlying technologies, are a response to the widespread adoption of global Web services standards. [C][I][K][T][W]
Future of open source Ten years after its birth, the open source movement has come of age. Open source software is no longer just a free, second-place substitute for proprietary systems. Its growing maturity, particularly in the ‘LAMP’ architecture of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP technologies, has made it a viable alternative to proprietary software. Furthermore, the success of application software, such as OpenOffice and Mozilla’s Firefox browser, is giving open source software a visible presence throughout the entire organisation. Increasingly, software is hybrid - a mix of open source and proprietary. [C][I][K][T][W]
Data centres Radical changes in server technology are redefining the requirements of most data centres. Where once the primary consideration was physical space, today’s priorities are now about power, cooling and energy efficiency. This reflects the rising cost of energy and of new environmental regulations. [C][E][I][K][T]
High integrity privacy As more and more personal data is held in information systems, there is a very serious issue of how to rigorously protect privacy and avoid personal information being misused or falling into the wrong hands. Computer scientists at Stanford are using the concept of "contextual integrity" to describe issues of personal privacy in ways that may make protection easier. Contextual integrity relies on four classes of variable. These are: the context of a flow of information, the capacities in which the individuals sending and receiving the information are acting, the types of information involved, and what is called the “principles of transmission”. The Stanford researchers have used linear temporal logic to translate the principles of transmission into formal expressions that can be included in computer code to automatically provide appropriate privacy protection. Linear temporal logic is a system of mathematical logic that can express detailed constraints on the past and the future. It is used for safety critical and high integrity software. [C][H][I][K]
Transformation in computing Computing is on the threshold of unprecedented transformation, according to views at Microsoft. New processor technologies, huge leaps in aggregate complexity and processing power, the increasing scale of data centres, and the emergence of ubiquitous and even mobile broadband are all pushing computing into a period of unpredictable change. This transformation will pose a challenge to application writers and will require new software design methodologies. Foremost will be a transformation of the microprocessor with higher core count, more special-purpose cores, and maybe new memory hierarchy. The massive increase in local computing power will create a host of revolutionary capabilities and applications, including the ability to mine information out of higher scale amounts of data. Powerful computer vision and speech recognition will change the human-computer interface. Ad hoc mesh networking will become pervasive. Adoption of web server architectures will increase the problems of cyber security. [C][D][I][K][T][V][W] |
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| [W] Whole life engineering, manufacture and testing | |
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Designing multi-core software In its review of winning technologies for 2007, IEEE Spectrum highlighted the newly released RapidMind Development Platform 2.0 as the first software platform to help programmers write code for multicore microprocessor chips like the Cell. The increasing number of cores in microprocessor chips means that programmers now have to devise parallel algorithms. This is a disruptive change. Previously parallel programming was largely confined to niches in high-performance computing and academic computer science. Now it has become mainstream. For the Cell chip, developers largely coped by devising their own programming tools and methods to allocate different programming tasks to the nine cores. However, much greater parallelism is coming. In September 2006, Intel unveiled a prototype chip with 80 cores, part of a research project to create a chip capable of processing 1 trillion floating-point operations per second. This opens a huge market for programming support environments that can automatically parallelise applications across large numbers of cores. [W][C][I][K][T][V][X]
Speculative parallelisation Manual parallelisation of a sequential algorithm is still a difficult and error-prone task, despite the numerous parallel languages, parallel extensions to sequential languages, and library functions that are available for developing parallel code. The problem is that to take advantage of a parallel system's capabilities requires a deep understanding of the algorithm itself, the programming model being used, and the underlying architecture for specific optimizations. There is no universally accepted parallel model for programs or machines. There is also a huge amount of existing sequential code that needs converting to multicore parallel processors. This makes it extremely attractive to find techniques for automatic parallelisation. An article in the January issue of IEEE Computer magazine reviews the technique of speculative parallelisation, which is a promising technique for automatically parallelising loops when the system cannot determine at compile time whether or not loops are independent of each other. [W][C][T][X] |
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| [X] Systems, complexity and risk | |
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Modelling religious and ideological movements Belgian researchers have applied agent-based modelling to describe the rise and fall of religious movements. They have found that the number of adherents appears to follow a “growth-death law” that is similar to how crystals are nucleated and grow and shrink in some materials. In agent-based models, the agents are located in time and space in some form of network and they interact dynamically according to rules that can be expressed algorithmically. The models can describe complex behaviours similar to those seen in real social and ecological and systems and in self-organising networks such as the World Wide Web, and can show how individual interactions affect the overall, emergent system behaviour. As well as describing sociological systems, agent-based models can also describe physical systems such as atoms in a lattice and processes such as crystallisation. [X][C][D][I]
Transport system The UK government has published a report on the UK transport system. It identifies the challenges and priorities for the future and how to meet them, and benchmarks the UK’s transport networks against those in other countries. As well as showing why good transport systems are vital for economic success, the report highlights the need for future pricing of transport, including air travel, to reflect the true environmental cost. [X][A][D][E][I][K][P][T]
Mapping malaria Attempts to tackle malaria are hampered by the fact that in most third world countries data on the malaria deaths is extremely distorted or not reported at all. This makes it difficult to predict malaria outbreaks and give advanced warning, or to track whether interventions are being beneficial. The key parameter is the so-called basic rate of reproduction, which describes how many susceptible people, on average, will catch the disease for every person who already has it. In some places and seasons this can be as high as thousands. The Malaria Atlas Project is aiming to map this parameter globally by 2009 and to publish the map on Google Earth to make it readily available. [X][D][E][H][I][K][V] |
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| [V] Virtuality and human-machine interface | |
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Transparent electronics Northwestern University researchers report that they have produced transparent, high-performance transistors that can be assembled inexpensively on both glass and plastics, and that outperform amorphous silicon transistors currently used for flat screen displays. The transistors were produced by combined films of the transparent semiconductor indium oxide with a multilayer of self-assembling organic molecules that provides superior insulating properties. [V][J][M]
Printing organic circuits Researchers at Stanford and the University of California have made an important advance in the fabrication of low cost organic circuits for displays and flexible electronics. They have found how to grow single crystals on the surface only where needed rather than having to deposit semiconductor across the whole surface and then remove most of it. A polymer "printing block" is first used to stamp out the desired pattern of semiconducting crystals on top of a surface previously patterned with metal electrodes. The crystal pattern is printed in the form of an "ink" made from a crystal growth agent called octadecyltriethoxysilane. A vapour of organic semiconductor is then passed over the freshly printed material at several hundred degrees Celsius. This causes individual organic crystals to grow wherever there are dots of growth agent. [V][H][M][N]
Virtual space exploration NASA and Google have already collaborated to produce interactive maps of Mars and the Moon by combining Google software with NASA imagery. They have now entered into a larger agreement to make more of NASA's Moon and Mars imagery available for online exploration. Eventually it is hoped that as future robots explore the surface of Mars, this technology can provide real virtual reality, enabling people to feel the crunch of Martian soil underneath their feet as the robots move around and even the Martian wind on their face. [V][A][E][I][K] |
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| [B] Brain research and human science | |
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Imagining the future New fMRI studies show that envisioning the future involves precisely the same regions of the brain that are used for remembering the past. Indeed, every region of the brain involved in recollecting the past was also used in envisioning the future. The findings support the theory that the visual and spatial context for imagining the future is pieced together using past experiences, including memories of specific body movements and visual perspective changes. This explains why an amnesic person who cannot remember the past is also poor at thinking about what they might be doing tomorrow or envisioning any kind of personal future. They comprehend time and can consider the future in the abstract sense, such as that global warming is a concern for the future, but they cannot vividly envision themselves in a specific future scenario. [B]
Neuroeconomics of purchasing In conventional economic theory, it is assumed that consumers decide whether to make a particular purchase by choosing between the immediate pleasure of making a purchase and the delayed pleasures of alternative things for which the same money could be used. However, new fMRI studies of the brain areas involved in purchase decisions suggest instead that consumer trade off the immediate pleasure of making a purchase against the immediate pain of parting with money. This finding is in line with the perception that credit cards cause people to spend more freely because they reduce the immediate monetary pain. [B][X]
Brain repair Researchers at UCSF have found that the brain contains stem cells with a surprisingly powerful capacity for repair. By knocking out vital genes in particular parts of the brains of mice at birth, the researchers found the loss initially produced a large hole in the brain. However, two weeks later the hole was largely repaired. The researchers believe the repair was effected by neural stem cell "escapees" that had somehow retained or restored the activity of the knocked-out genes and, with it, their regenerative potential. The researchers suggest this surprising evidence of the brain's natural ability to heal might ultimately have clinical implications for the treatment of brain damage,. [B][G][H]
Neurotransmitter flexibility In vertebrates, including frogs and humans, nerves communicate with muscles by using just a single neurotransmitter called acetylcholine. But, surprisingly, researchers have found that acetylcholine is only one of several neurotransmitters that nerve and muscle cells are actually capable of using for communicating. During development, the level of electrical activity in nerve cells determines which of many possible neurotransmitter languages will be used. It is not yet known whether the same flexibility continues to exist in adults, but if so, it might mean that suitable stimulation of nerve cells could activate other modes of communication and that this might be used to treat neurological diseases. [B][G][H]
Humans and sea slugs Researchers have found that human brains have more genes in common with the nervous system of the sea slug than with flies or worms. This seems surprising given that the ancestors of humans and sea slugs diverged some 530 million years ago. It suggests that modern animals must have had a common ancestor with a remarkably complex genome, whose descendants subsequently kept or lost various genes. The genes shared between humans and sea slugs include one that contributes to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. The findings could help in understanding these disorders as the small number and large sizes of brain cells in sea slugs make the animals ideal for brain research. [B][G]
Viruses and brain cancer Viruses are thought to be linked to many forms of cancer. Now, epidemiological evidence suggests that infections caught during childhood from younger siblings may lead to brain tumours. Analysis of the Swedish Family Cancer Database, which includes everyone born in Sweden since 1931, together with their parents even if born before that date, has revealed that elder children in families with five or more offsprings had twice the average chance of developing brain cancer over their lifetime compared with those who had no brothers and sisters at all. The statistics are even more striking for people who developed brain cancer as children or teenagers. Under-15s with three or more younger siblings were 3.7 times more likely than only children to develop a common type of brain cancer called a meningioma, and at significantly higher risk of every other form of the disease that the researchers considered. [B][H]
Emotion and health Positive emotions may stimulate the body to produce symptom-fighting substances, according to researchers at Carnegie-Mellon. Their experiments found that people with generally positive outlooks show greater resistance to developing cold symptoms. The protection depends strongly on the extent of positive emotions, but not of negative ones, and the protection is not against becoming infected but against developing cold symptoms when infected. The experiments also indicate that it is the positive emotions themselves that give protection rather than physical or psychological traits related to a positive emotional style, such as physical vigour or high self-esteem, extroversion, optimism, and a feeling of mastery over one's life. The findings may be relevant to reducing employee sickness. [B][H]
Wellness lifestyle Helping consumers to lead wellness lifestyles is becoming a major growth industry, particularly in the US. It is perceived that a holistic approach to healthy living can reduce the costs of healthcare and absenteeism from work and also meet the expressed needs of a large fraction of American consumers for a more "balanced" lifestyle. Wellness companies are offering a holistic mix including spas, traditional and alternative medicine, sickness prevention, behavioural therapy, spirituality, yoga, fitness, weight-reduction, nutrition, health cuisine, beauty, wellness at work, stress relief, and other products and services that make people feel their lives are better balanced. [B][H][K][T] |
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| [H] Healthcare and medicine | |
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Aneuploidy therapy It has been known for nearly a century that aneuploidy – the occurrence of one or more extra or missing chromosomes – is a common characteristic of cancer cells. The question has been whether aneuploidy is just a consequence of cancer or a cause. Now, researchers at UCSD have now found experimentally in mice that it seems to be a cause. However, they also found to their surprise that aneuploidy appears to sharply inhibit the growth of some cancers, specifically those cancers that are caused by mutations in tumour suppressor genes. Possibly this is because aneuploidy makes it more likely that uncontrolled growth in cancer cells causes the cells to die. The findings suggest that "aneuploidy therapy", using drugs that inhibit accurate delivery of the right number of chromosomes to each new tumour cell, could provide a radically new cancer treatment. [H][G]
Stem cell cancer therapy Invasive tumours tend to attract neural stem cells, and this might provide a way to treat cancers that have spread throughout the body, according to US researchers. They modified neural stem cells so that they would concentrate and activate chemotherapeutic drugs at invasive tumour sites. They then injected the stem cells into mice that had been given neuroblastoma tumours. After waiting a few days to allow the stem cells to migrate to the tumours, the researchers administered a precursor-drug. When this reached the stem cells, the drug interacted with an enzyme the stem cells expressed, and was converted into an active drug that killed surrounding tumour cells. The precursor-drugs were administered for two weeks; then after a two-week break, a second round of stem cells and drugs was administered. All of the treated neuroblastoma mice appeared healthy and tumour-free at six months, whereas untreated mice all died within two-and-a-half months. [H][G]
Dormant melanoma Malignant melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer because of its ability to spread around the body and to resist treatment. Researchers at the Marie Curie Research Institute have now found that malignant melanoma cells have the ability to change their behaviour and to mimic normal cells. They believe that conditions in the tumour cause this change by affecting the level of a cell chemical called Mitf. If the level of Mitf falls, the melanoma cells change shape, stop dividing rapidly and take on the appearance of normal skin pigment cells. This makes them immune to chemotherapy that targets only abnormal, fast-dividing cells. It also makes it easier for them to spread to new sites around the body. The conditions in the new site then determine whether cells remain dormant, or whether they start dividing again to form new tumours. It is possible that these findings could lead to a treatment using Mitf to prevent the tumour cells spreading and resisting chemotherapy. [H]
Obesity and gut microbes The relative abundance of common microbes living in the gut may contribute to obesity. Researchers studying the two major groups of bacteria - the Bacteroidetes and the Firmicutes - that together make up more than 90 percent of microbes found in the intestines of mice and humans, have found that obese individuals, whether mice or humans, have fewer Bacteroidetes and proportionately more Firmicutes. Comparative metagenomic studies revealed that the microbial community genome (microbiome) of obese mice had a greater capacity to digest complex carbohydrates. Transferring the gut microbial communities of obese and lean mice to mice that had been raised in a sterile environment, confirmed that the obese microbial community prompted a significantly greater gain in fat in the recipients. Experiments on human patients on weight-reducing diets found that as the patients lost weight, the abundance of the Bacteroidetes increased and the abundance of Firmicutes decreased. [H][G]
Prion filter UK and US researchers have identified a molecule which removes prion proteins from blood infected with scrapie - a prion disease similar to BSE and CJD. They screened millions of molecules and found that one, called L13, binds prion protein (PrP), removing it from the blood. L13 was also found to bind to prion protein from human infections of vCJD. The hope is that this may provide a way to filter donated human blood in order to remove the risk of vCJD being transmitted via blood transfusions. [H][G]
Type 1 diabetes In Type 1 diabetes, the body’s immune system seems to attack islet cells in the pancreas, eventually destroying their ability to produce insulin. The question has been what initiates this attack. It now seems from research at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto that certain sensory nerves of the pancreas might be involved. These nerves release a neuropeptide called "substance P" and are usually responsible for ensuring that islet cells produce the right amount of insulin. If the nerves are faulty and do not release enough substance P, this causes islet cells to overproduce insulin, leading to insulin-resistance and eventually islet-cell death and diabetes. The researchers found that a single injection of substance P directly into the pancreas of diabetic mice caused the diabetes to disappear overnight, and the mice then remained diabetes-free for weeks, and even months in some cases. This finding could open up a new treatment for diabetes. [H][B]
Heath R&D The UK government has published a review of UK health research funding. Among its conclusions the review found that the UK National Health Service needs a stronger culture to support research and a more systematic approach for assessing, adopting and diffusing new technologies and interventions. The UK government also needs a better way to signal its healthcare priorities to the health industry and to bring drugs that help UK health priorities to market faster. The analysis of current expenditure, including that by health charities, shows that if one compares relative spending on research in terms of likely patient benefit measured in terms of disability adjusted life years (DALYs), there is an argument for spending relatively more on respiratory and oral/gastrointestinal research. [H][T] |
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| [G] Genomics, biotechnology and bioinformatics | |
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Mechanism of ageing Progeria is a rare inherited disease that cause victims to age rapidly and die prematurely. An international study has found that mice lacking a critical gene for repairing damaged DNA also grow old rapidly in the same way with physical, genetic and hormonal profiles very similar to mice that grow old naturally. A key similarity between these progeroid mice and naturally old mice is the suppression of genes that control metabolic pathways that promote growth, including those controlled by growth hormones. This response appears to have evolved to protect against stress caused by DNA damage or the wear-and-tear of normal living, and may allow individuals to live as long and as healthy a life as possible despite the accumulation of genetic damage. The findings suggest that two apparently conflicting hypotheses about ageing may both be correct, namely that lifespan and how well individuals age is determined by inherited genes, and also that lifespan and fitness in old age is determined by the accumulation of genetic damage in cells during life. [G][H]
Longevity gene A study of longevity genes in people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent has found that a variant in a single gene, CETP, which controls the size of cholesterol molecules in the bloodstream, appears to lead to longer life and also to better mental function in old age. Pharmaceutical companies are targeting drugs that mimic the effect of this gene variant. [G][B][H]
Amniotic stem cells The amniotic fluid that fills the womb in pregnancy contains a large number of cells, many of which come from the developing foetus. Researchers from Wake Forest University extracted these from fluid samples taken as part of unrelated diagnostic tests during pregnancy, and then encouraged them to grow in the laboratory. They found that the cells had the potential to turn into a wide variety of different cells - the hallmark of potentially useful stem cells. Such cells may hold potential for treatment particularly on the child from whose mother they were taken and for whom they are an exact tissue match. [G][H]
Parthenogenetic stem cells By tricking unfertilized mouse eggs into dividing, researchers have produced stem cells that are accepted by the immune system when transplanted back into mice. This may provide a better way of growing embryonic stem cells than using so-called therapeutic cloning, in which the nucleus of a donor's body cell is placed in an egg cell stripped of its nucleus. The problem with therapeutic cloning is that, based on results in cloning animals, the success rate for human egg cells is likely to be very low, requiring at least 100 donated egg cells to work even once. [G][H]
Research on stem cells Stem cells have proved very tricky to handle and control, but good progress is now being made. Researchers are teasing out the exact chemical preferences of stem cells, designing synthetic three-dimensional scaffolds to hold them, and learning to steer the differentiation of an embryonic stem cell into specific cell types using small molecules. Researchers are discovering new small molecules that achieve a form of cellular alchemy: the reprogramming of normal cells into stem cells. They are also unravelling the role of cancer stem cells and how these may lie at the root of all cancer. Stem cells may also provide a complementary alternative to animals as in vitro models of disease and for toxicological testing. [G][H][T]
MicroRNAs and cancer Researchers at Ohio State have discovered that two microRNA (miRNA) molecules help control the oncogene responsible for a dangerous form of B-cell chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (B-CLL), the most common human leukaemia. From these and other findings, microRNAs are emerging as powerful regulators of gene expression in cancer development, and could offer new targets for drug treatment. They are small single-stranded RNA molecules that can block transcription of genes by stopping them from producing messenger RNA, or can inhibit translation of the genes by blocking production of proteins from messenger RNA. Different miRNAs can act either to suppress or to enhance tumour development. [G][H]
Non-life DNA Researchers at the University of Boise have developed software that calculates all the possible sequences of nucleotides up to a certain length, and then scans DNA sequence databases to identify the smallest DNA or protein sequences that are not present in living organisms. These so-called "primes" may be absent because they are incompatible with life, for example because they bind some essential cellular component. The researchers hope to use "primes" to develop a DNA "safety tag" that could be added to voluntary DNA reference samples in criminal cases to distinguish them from forensic samples. Such tags would not necessarily have to consist of lethal sequences, but could be based on primes that would be easy to detect using a simple kit. Another possible application is to construct a "suicide gene" to code for deadly amino acid primes. It could be attached to genetically modified organisms and could be activated at a later date to destroy them if they turned out to be dangerous. [G][D][E]
The cell's transport system Biological cells contain a transport system made up of filaments called microtubules. These form a network along which cargos of molecules are moved around the cell. The microtubules constantly grow and shrink, and dynamically reassemble to connect to wherever a cargo needs to go. Researchers from EMBL have discovered that a protein, Mal3p, plays a crucial role in this process. The microtubules are formed from proteins called tubulins that assemble in a single line to form so-called protofilaments. Several protofilaments combine to build a large tubulin sheet that then folds into the tube-like microtubule structure. The researchers found that Mal3p binds in a single line along the tube's seam, sealing and stabilising it. With Mal3p present, microtubules grow into long filaments; without it, they are unstable and likely to disassemble. Controlling the level of Mal3p may therefore enable the cell to quickly rearrange its transport network. [G][B] |
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| [N] Nanotechnology and molecular technology | |
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Nanoparticle cancer sensor A tiny implant now being developed at MIT could one day help doctors rapidly monitor the growth of tumours and the progress of chemotherapy in cancer patients. The implant contains nanoparticles that can be designed to test for different substances, including metabolites such as glucose and oxygen that are associated with tumour growth. The implant could also reveal how much of a certain cancer drug has reached the tumour, helping doctors determine whether a treatment is working in a particular patient. Such nanoparticles have been used before, but for the first time, the MIT researchers have encased the nanoparticles in a silicone delivery device, allowing them to remain in patients' bodies for an extended period of time. [N][H][S]
Nanotubes in the environment Researchers at Georgia Tech have found that multiwalled carbon nanotubes, when mixed with natural organic matter in water from the Suwannee River - a relatively unpolluted waterway that originates in southern Georgia - remain suspended for more than a month. This makes them more likely to be transported in the environment and to be a biological hazard. [N][E][H]
Biomimetic photonic nanostructures By replicating the complex micron- and nanometre-scale photonic structures that help give butterfly wings their colour, researchers have demonstrated a new technique that uses biotemplates for fabricating nanoscale structures that could serve as optical waveguides, optical splitters and other building blocks of photonic integrated circuits. [N][O]
Photoconductive nanotubes Japanese researchers have produced self-assembling photoconductive nanotubes with a photocurrent on/off ratio greater than 10,000. The researchers hope that this very high ratio together with the one-dimensionality of the tubes will offer great potential in optoelectronic applications such as nanoscale photovoltaics and photo-detectors. [N][J][P][S]
Nanowelding and nanofabrication New techniques are enabling objects to be welded at the nanoscale. One technique, developed by Swiss and Chinese researchers, uses a carbon nanotube filled with copper inside a nanorobotic manipulator. A small current is run through the tube to melt the copper to form the weld. Another method, developed at Bath University, uses an electron microscope beam to convert carbon into an amorphous carbon nanoweld. The method can also be used for nanofabrication: the researchers have made nano-scalpels 10 nm by 20 nm across and just a few nanometres thick for cutting into living cells. [N][J][W]
Powering nano-robots It may be possible to power nano-robots by attaching photovoltaic nanocables to them that convert light into electricity, according to research at the University of Tokyo. The cables resemble the light-harvesting antennae used by some bacteria. [N][P][U]
Potential of nanotechnology The EU Commission has published an analysis of how the nanotechnology sector may develop. It projects that nanotechnology could generate the sixth Kondratieff wave, possibly in combination with biotechnology. Various studies have predicted that the world market for nanotechnology could grow to between 0.5 and 3 trillion dollars by 2015, creating employment for several million nanotech workers and 10 million related support jobs, particularly in the US, Japan, Germany and the UK. There is already a significant market for nanomaterials. But the growth potential is in other areas such as nanoelectronics, nanobiotechnology and nanomedicine, and in nanotools, nanoinstruments and nanodevices. [N][G][H][J][M][O][T][W]
ZnO nanowire LEDs Researchers at UCSD report that they have succeeded in making p-type zinc oxide nanowires. This should make it possible to produce LEDs using zinc oxide nanowires. Zinc oxide is a very good light emitter and zinc oxide nanowires are very cheap and easy to make. [N][J][M][O] Printing 3-D nanoelectronics A team from the University of Illinois has come up with a pri | ||