GEN-ERIC News

The burgeoning population of road vehicles in Bangalore is widely seen as a sign of the change in its economic landscape. In the literal sense, though, the landscape has posed a string of issues for governance, the traffic police on the ground and the common man. But, as most analysts have stated in recent times, the lack of a single view among governing bodies is a critical factor that has compounded traffic management. Given this backdrop, the Bangalore Traffic Information System is a fresh project that is expected to provide a far more accurate definition of the traffic problem. It could go some way toward developing a common view of the issue before arriving at micro and holistic solutions. Little wonder that M.N. Reddi, additional commissioner of police-traffic in Bangalore City, is excited about the latest public-private initiative. Reddi researched similar projects that provide live information via text messages about traffic-congested zones, speeds of vehicles in certain areas and directions from one point in the city to another. As a city synonymous with India’s IT industry, the technology application seemed almost inevitable in Bangalore, says Reddi.

“The nanotubes are microscopic carbon cylinders, thousands of times smaller than a human hair that can be easily taken up by human cells,” said Elimelech. “We wanted to find out more about where and how they are toxic.” This “nanoscience version of a David-and-Goliath story” was hailed in an ACS preview of the work as the first direct evidence that “carbon nanotubes have powerful antimicrobial activity, a discovery that could help fight the growing problem of antibiotic resistant infections.” Using the simple E. coli as test cells, the researchers incubated cultures of the bacteria in the presence of the nanotubes for up to an hour. The microbes were killed outright – but only when there was direct contact with aggregates of the SWCNTs that touched the bacteria. Elimelech speculates that the long, thin nanotubes puncture the cells and cause cellular damage.

Federal offices owe some $45 million in delinquent withholding taxes and the Internal Revenue Service needs to do more to ensure that the government lives up to its taxpaying obligations, according a report issued today. The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, who oversees IRS operations, also found that as of January this year delinquent state and local government accounts totaled $254 million. “It is outrageous that government entities are failing to pay their employment taxes,” Inspector General George J. Russell said in a statement. “It is especially troubling that federal organizations are a part of this problem. The IRS must develop comprehensive procedures to remedy this inexcusable situation.” Government offices, like any private employer, must meet employment tax deposit and reporting requirements. Some 86,000 federal, state and local entities file and pay employment taxes for some 23 million employees, 20 percent of the U.S. work force. These offices pay wages of more than $760 billion and employment taxes of more than $200 billion annually.

University of Pennsylvania researchers have designed a nanoscale system to observe and measure how individual cells react to external forces. By combining microfabricated cantilevers and magnetic nanowire technology to create independent, nanoscale sensors, the study showed that cells respond to outside forces and demonstrated a dynamic biological relationship between cells and their environment. The study also revealed that cells sense force at a single adhesion point that leads not to a local response but to a remote response from the cell’s internal forces, akin to tickling the cell’s elbow and watching the knee kick. “The cell senses the force that we apply and adjusts its own internal forces to compensate,” Chris Chen, an associate professor in the Department of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Penn, said. “This suggests that either the cell’s cytoskeleton dictates the reaction or the cell organizes a biochemical response. In either instance, cells are adapting at the microscale.”

DNA is one of the most popular building blocks of nanotechnology and is commonly used to construct ordered nanoscale structures with controlled architectures. For the most part, DNA is looked upon as a promising building block for fabricating microelectronic circuits from the bottom up. Now a team of researchers at Young propose the marriage of DNA self-assembly with standard microfabrication and lithography tools to form features such as nanochannels, nanowires, and nanoscale trenches. This discovery may open up new avenues for nanofabrication at dimensions not accessible by conventional optical lithography. Adam Woolley and Héctor Becerril have developed a method to use DNA molecules as templates to define patterns on substrates. The researchers deposit metal films over DNA molecules aligned on a substrate. The DNA molecules essentially act as nanostencils to define sub-10-nm-sized patterns on the substrate. The researchers call this process “DNA shadow nanolithography” because the metal film is deposited at an angle and the shadow cast by the DNA molecules defines the dimensions of the features on the substrate.

To protect against a nuclear bomb, a plague, a natural disaster, an asteroid collusion or some other doomsday event, scientists are lobbying to have a reserve library of human scientific and cultural achievements built and maintained on the moon. Jim Burke, a retired long-time NASA expert now working at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, warned that a doomsday asteroid or comet could annihilate global civilization and that something should be done to insure against the wholesale loss of human achievement. Burke suggests a project to create a “lunar biological and historical archive,” which would include samples and a record of human scientific and cultural achievements. The idea for what Burke calls a “space-age Noah’s Ark” is one shared by the Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC), which also seeks to include backups of Earth’s biological heritage and diversity in a permanently manned lunar facility.

Fluid from the stomach of cows could help power alternative fuel cells, new research shows. Electricity is generated in the new fuel cells by the breakdown of cellulose, which can be found in waste paper, other wood products and in the corn leaves and stalks that farms generate after a harvest. Using cellulose as an ethanol fuel source has been proposed as an alternative to using corn. Cows come into the picture because the fluid in their rumen (the largest chamber of their stomach) is rich in microbes that break down cellulose. Fuel cells are energy conversion devices like batteries, except they consume a reactant that must be replenished, whereas batteries store electrical energy chemically in a closed system. Various fuels can be used, including hydrogen, hydrocarbons and alcohols. The new fuel cell contains two compartments, one of which is filled with cellulose and rumen fluid. As the microbes break down the cellulose, electrons are created, which flow into the other chamber of the fuel cell, creating an electric current. “Energy is produced as the bacteria break down cellulose, which is one of the most abundant resources on our planet,” said study team leader Hamid Rismani-Yazdi, a graduate student at Ohio State University.

When Tim Brom 07’ set out to build a budget supercomputer with Calvin computer science professor Joel Adams, he didn’t know the product of his efforts might end up in his checked baggage headed for England. Brom, now a graduate student at the University of Kentucky continuing his studies in computer science, worked with Adams to build Microwulf, a machine that is among the smallest and least expensive supercomputers on the planet. “It’s small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk,” said Brom. This may prove useful next summer when Brom and others from his graduate program travel to England to do work that will require “a significant amount of computing power.” And as the price of commercial supercomputers is often prohibitive for many educational institutions, bringing a “personal” supercomputer like Microwulf could be a cost-effective solution for the group of graduate researchers. “So far as we can tell, this is the first supercomputer to have this low price/performance ratio—the first to cost less than $100/Gflop,” said Adams. This is a significant achievement considering that Microwulf is more than twice as fast as Deep Blue, the IBM-created supercomputer that beat world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, and cost only a fraction of the $5 million spent to build Deep Blue.

A man on a stolen bulldozer rammed the town police station early Friday, heavily damaging the building. Stanley Burt, 34, is charged with criminal mischief, reckless conduct with a deadly weapon and driving and probation violations. No one was inside at the time and no one was hurt. Police say Troy officer Kevin Stone pulled into the station parking lot just before 12:30 a.m. and saw the bulldozer repeatedly smashing into the front of the building.