GEN-ERIC News

This umbrella has been injected with some wonderful technology in the handle. A built-in wireless receiver gets a daily weather forecast from Accuweather.com, and blue LEDs will flash to let you know if the forecast is rain or snow. The LEDs located at the bottom of the handle will flash in proportion to the chance of precipitation for your area; if there is a 100% chance, it will flash quickly, and if a 10% chance, it will flash slowly.

A tiny “electronic nose” that MIT researchers have engineered with a novel inkjet printing method could be used to detect hazards including carbon monoxide, harmful industrial solvents and explosives. Led by MIT professor Harry Tuller, the researchers have devised a way to print thin sensor films onto a microchip, a process that could eventually allow for mass production of highly sensitive gas detectors. “Mass production would be an enormous breakthrough for this kind of gas sensing technology,” said Tuller, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The prototype sensor consists of thin layers of hollow spheres made of the ceramic material barium carbonate, which can detect a range of gases. Using a specialized inkjet print head, tiny droplets of barium carbonate or other gas-sensitive materials can be rapidly deposited onto a surface, in any pattern the researchers design. The miniature, low-cost detector could be used in a variety of settings, from an industrial workplace to an air-conditioning system to a car’s exhaust system, according to Tuller.

High-definition movie files can decimate the free space on your computer, but scientists are working to turn bacteria into a hard drive with nearly infinite capacity. This past spring, a group led by scientists at Keio University’s Institute for Advanced Biosciences at the Shonan Fujisawa campus near Tokyo announced that they had inscribed the phrase “E=MC² 1905!” onto bacterial DNA as a tribute to Albert Einstein. More than just parchment for simple messages, bacteria have the potential for massive data storage. In fact, a single bacterium could store more than 400 copies of this article. The scientists demonstrated the technology by converting the tribute phrase into binary code and then into a specific sequence of DNA nucleotides, which they spliced into the bacteria’s genome. To keep the data intact, the researchers used Bacillus subtilis, a species that has very slow mutation rates and resists most viruses. They also inserted their message into several spots of the genome as backups within the backup. The potential uses for this type of organic hard drive go far beyond data storage. Project adviser Yoshiaki Ohashi says that pharmaceutical companies could “stamp” their drugs to thwart counterfeiters, or spies could carry bacteria encoded with confidential information in tiny vials.

The case is Eros vs. Simon. Eros is a virtual sex shop, and is one of six plaintiffs in the case. Thomas Simon is accused of using a hack to “clone” products from the plaintiffs, including virtual sex toys. Despite the fact that this is, quite honestly, an online game, the players (or inhabitants if you will) pay real money for clothes and other items and services, including prostitutes. Because of this, the case does have some actual merit. And in fact, since companies such as IBM, Dell, Circuit City and even Reuters have opened stores and bureaus in Second Life, some prefer to call it a “platform” and not a game. It gets still stranger though, as Simon says the evidence gathered against him was obtained by Eros “breaking into” his virtual house which, in real-life, without a search warrant, would be inadmissible.

Australian engineers have found a way to use the elasticity of carbon nanotubes to not only stop bullets penetrating material but actually rebound their force. Their anti-ballistic carbon nanotubes are very different from the current materials used to design bullet-proof jackets, such as Kevlar, Twaron or Dyneema fibers. Current jackets can stop bullets, but the users can still be severely wounded by the strength of the impacts. On the contrary, these future nanotechnology-based jackets not only stop the bullets, but they repel them, thus avoiding ‘blunt force trauma.’

Ants not only work hard and are prepared to lay down their lives for their fellow ants, they also take bigger risks for the good of the colony as they get older – and they can even assess how much time they have left in life. Dawid Moron and his colleagues at Jagiellonian University in Poland have carried out a set of laboratory experiments showing that ants have the ability to gauge the end of their lifespan and to use their assessment of imminent mortality to take bigger risks with their ageing lives. It is well established that worker ants tend to take greater risks as they get older. Scientists have shown that this behavioural trait benefits the colony because certain risky activities, such as foraging far from the nest, are best done by ants coming to the end of their useful lives – it doesn’t pay to put young workers in high-risk jobs. As a result, younger ants tend to do housekeeping chores around the nest, which is inherently safer than travelling further afield. One remaining question, however, was whether ants had some internal mechanism that told them how old they were and how much time they had left before dying. Dr Moron believed that it might be possible to manipulate an ant’s lifespan artificially, and to observe changes to its risk-taking behaviour as a result. His study, published in the latest issue of the journal Animal Behaviour.

Scientists at North Carolina State University have a few more genetic clues behind why some flies are more sensitive to alcohol than others. And the results might lead to more knowledge about alcoholism in humans. After genetically modifying fruit flies to be either extremely sensitive or extremely resistant to alcohol – lightweights or lushes – the NC State scientists found that a number of fruit fly genes undergo changes when sensitivity to alcohol changes. A number of these genes, the researchers report, are similar to genes found in humans, suggesting that they may be good targets to study human predisposal to alcoholism. The research is published in the November edition of Genome Biology.

The area of the brain that processes sounds entering the ears also appears to process stimulus entering the eyes, providing a novel explanation for why many viewers believe that ventriloquists have thrown their voices to the mouths of their dummies. More generally, these findings from Duke University Medical Center offer new insights into how the brain takes in and assembles a multitude of stimuli from the outside world. By studying monkeys, the researchers found that auditory and visual information is processed together before the combined signals make it to the brain’s cortex, the analytical portion of the brain that assembles the stimuli from all the senses into coherent thoughts. “The prevailing wisdom among brain scientists has been that each of the five senses – sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste – is governed by its own corresponding region of the brain,” said Jennifer Groh, Ph.D., a neurobiologist in Duke’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. “The view has been that each of these areas processes the information separately and sends that information to the cortex, which puts it all together at the end. “Now, we are beginning to appreciate that it’s not that simple,” Groh continued. “Our results show that there are interactions between the sensory pathways that occur very early in the process, which implies that the integration of the different senses may be a more primitive process and one not requiring high-level brain functioning.” The results of Groh’s experiments were published early online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Bacterium that can eat sugar or sludge; must be team player or electrochemically active; ability to survive without oxygen, a plus. Thus might read the bacterial “job description” posted by Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and Washington University (WU) scientists, who are collaborating on ways to make microbial fuel cells more efficient and practical. According to Mike Cotta, who leads the ARS Fermentation Biotechnology Research Unit, Peoria, Ill., the project with WU arose from a mutual interest in developing sustainable methods of producing energy that could diminish U.S. reliance on crude oil. Cotta’s team specializes in using bacteria, yeasts or other microorganisms inside bioreactors to do work, such as ferment grain sugars into fuel ethanol. At WU in St. Louis, Mo., assistant professor Lars Angenent is investigating fuel cell systems that use mixtures of bacteria to treat organic wastewater and catalyze the release of electrons and protons, which then can be used to produce electricity or hydrogen fuel.

“The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance.”

MIT researchers have created a new structured gel that can rapidly change color in response to a variety of stimuli, including temperature, pressure, salt concentration and humidity. Among other applications, the structured gel could be used as a fast and inexpensive chemical sensor, said Edwin Thomas, MIT’s Morris Cohen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. One place where such an environmental sensor could be useful is a food processing plant, where the sensor could indicate whether food that must remain dry has been overly exposed to humidity. Thomas is senior author of a paper on the work to be published in the Oct. 21 online edition of Nature Materials. Structured gels are those that feature an internal pattern such as layers. A critical component of the structured gel developed at MIT is a material that expands or contracts when exposed to certain stimuli. Those changes in the thickness of the gel cause it to change color, through the entire range of the visible spectrum of light. Objects that reflect different colors depending on which way you look at them already exist, but once those objects are manufactured, their properties can’t change. The MIT team set out to create a material that would change color in response to external stimuli.

Genuine mood lighting just took a step closer. A shape-shifting lampshade can monitor brightness and movement in a room and then gently adjust the amount and quality of light it emits. Brainchild of London-based designer Assa Ashuach, the AI Light consists of a light bulb surrounded by a flexible nylon “skeleton” that forms two lobes. Thin rods running through the centre of each lobe are controlled by built-in motors. They can rotate and bend to shape the skeleton in different ways. More light shines through areas where the skeleton is spread out, while squashed regions emit less. So different combinations of rod position create a range of light quality.

Microscopic particles can be steered through the tiny channels of a microfluidic chip using light, US researchers have shown. They modified standard piece of lab equipment to direct particle traffic using light, and say the trick could prove vital for rapid chemical and biological analysis with handheld devices. Microfluidic chips contain microscopic tubes that can be used to ferry cells and particles around for chemical or biological experimentation. Controlling fluids and particles at small scales is difficult, however. The US team, led by David Erickson and Michal Lipson at Cornell University, Ithaca, US used light to control these unruly particles. They constructed a microfluidic chip with “waveguides” built into the walls of each fluid channel. The waveguides were designed to act like leaky pipes: as laser light passes through, it does not bounce perfectly off the inside walls, and a weak electromagnetic field – called the evanescent field – leaks out. Mystery ‘cushion’Particles that flow across a waveguide’s path are captured by its electromagnetic field and pulled along in the same direction as the light inside the waveguide. The approach can even steer particles around a bend.

Researchers at The University of Manchester have developed high-tech battery-powered textile yarns that can be used to make clothing glow in the dark. Current high visibility products – such as those used by emergency services, cyclists and highway maintenance workers – depend on external light sources to make them visible. They can be ineffective in low light situations and require a light source from something like vehicle headlights to make them visible. The latest development, made from electroluminescent (EL) yarns, allows the wearer to be permanently visible and therefore improves personal safety. EL yarn is a novel technology, which emits light when powered by a battery. Its development has been based on thin film electroluminescent technology. The yarn consists of an inner conductive core yarn, coated with electroluminescent ink – which means it emits light when an electric current is passed through it – and a protective transparent encapsulation, with an outer conductive yarn wrapped around it. When the EL yarn is powered with an inverter the resultant electrical field between the inner and outer conductor causes the electroluminescent coating to emit light. The emission of light occurs between the contact points between the outer yarn and the inner yarn.

A university professor of physics has made a radio out of a single carbon nanotube that’s about 10,000 times thinner than a human hair. It runs on batteries and you need headphones to use it, but it tunes in stations on the FM dial. Radio has gone nano. Electrical engineers at the University of California, Irvine, have built a radio receiver that uses a carbon nanotube as a key component. Peter J. Burke and Chris Rutherglen employed the nanotube as a demodulator—a device that translates radio waves into sound. The UC Irvine team grew nanotubes on high-resistivity silicon and then grafted palladium electrodes onto the wafer using optical lithography. For the demodulator, the researchers selected devices in which a lone nanotube bridges the gap between electrodes. They then incorporated the nanotube demodulator into an AM radio receiver. Using an iPod and an AM signal generator as their broadcasting system, Burke and Rutherglen showed they could wirelessly transmit music to the nanotube receiver system while maintaining high audio quality.

Syrdec, a Princeton, N.J.-based company is working on a material that, when combined with another substance, will generate electricity with ambient room heat, Andrew Surany, the company’s president, told CNET News.com this week. Conceivably, one could take that material and fashion it into a passive fuel cell that can create power by just sitting in an ordinary room heated to about 72 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to self-charging electronic devices. “It derives heat from the environment” and converts it to electricity, Surany said. “I’m talking about embedding cells into doors or the panels on a car. In a laptop, I am talking about embedding cells into the case.”

Two regions of the brain linked to optimism have been discovered by researchers. The identification of the sites that signal positive thinking could shed light on the causes of depression, they say. The US team says that the act of imagining a positive future event – such as winning an award or receiving a large sum of cash – activates two brain areas known as the amygdala and the rostral anterior cingulated cortex (rACC). The finding lends weight to earlier studies that suggested these brain regions malfunction in depression and hint at new ways of diagnosing the disorder.

Feeling like playing hooky, but nervous about getting caught? The Excused Absence Network has your back. For about $25, students and employees can buy excuse notes that appear to come from doctors or hospitals. Other options include a fake jury summons or an authentic-looking funeral service program complete with comforting poems and a list of pallbearers. Some question whether the products are legal or ethical - or even work - but the company’s owners say they’re just helping people do something they would have done anyway. “Millions of Americans work dead-end jobs, and sometimes they just need a day off,” said John Liddell, co-founder of the Internet-based company Vision Matters, which sells the notes as part of its Excused Absence Network.

Angela Belcher leans in to watch as a machine presses down slowly on the plunger of a syringe, injecting a billion harmless viruses into a clear liquid. Instead of diffusing into the solution as they escape the needle, the viruses cling together, forming a wispy white fiber that’s several centimeters long and about as strong as a strand of nylon. A gradu­ate student, Chung-Yi Chiang, fishes it out with a pair of tweezers. Then he holds it up to an ultra­violet light, and the fiber begins to glow bright red. In producing this novel fiber, the researchers have demonstrated a completely new way of making nanomaterials, one that uses viruses as microscopic building blocks. Belcher, a professor of materials science and biological engineering at MIT, says the approach has two main advantages. First, in high concentrations the viruses tend to organize themselves, lining up side by side to form an orderly pattern. Second, the viruses can be genetically engineered to bind to and organize inorganic materials such as those used in battery electrodes, transistors, and solar cells. The programmed viruses coat themselves with the materials and then, by aligning with other viruses, assemble into crystalline structures useful for making high-­performance devices.

Normally when the topic of pollution, consumption, and alternative fuels comes up, most people are talking about automobiles. We’ll talk about the Toyota Prius, perhaps, and the Chevy Volt. Not today. Not in Korea. In an effort to go green, Samsung Electro-Mechanics is working on a micro-fuel cell and hydrogen generator for mobile devices like cell phones. The kicker is that it runs completely on water. The generator has already been developed, it seems, and as they iron out the kinks and improve the system, they hope to launch a mobile phone powered by water some time in 2010.

Scientists have figured out a way to trick plants into doing the dirty work of environmental cleanup, US and British researchers reported on Monday. Researchers at the University of Washington have genetically altered poplar trees to pull toxins out of contaminated ground water, offering a cost-effective way of cleaning up environmental pollutants. A group of British researchers, meanwhile, has developed genetically altered plants that can clean residues of military explosives from the environment. “Our work is in the beginning stages, but it holds great promise,” said Sharon Doty, an assistant professor of forest resources at the University of Washington, whose study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Some people like my advice so much that they frame it upon the wall instead of using it.”

The agreement, under which a commercial licence will be negotiated, sets out a codevelopment program for condoms with a VivaGel® coating. Undisclosed fees are payable to Starpharma under the co-development agreement, which also provides for the commencement of regulatory and market development activities by the two parties. SSL is the world’s largest manufacturer of condoms with approximately 30% share of the global market for branded condom sales, selling into over 100 countries around the world. Global condom retail sales in 2005 were approximately $3.2 billion, with the top four companies representing as much as 70% of the market. “We are delighted to be working with SSL, whom we believe will be an excellent codevelopment partner for VivaGel® as a condom coating,” said Starpharma’s Chief Executive Officer, Dr Jackie Fairley. “In addition to SSL’s unparalleled global commercial position and the strength of the Durex® brand, Starpharma also values the organisation’s innovative approach, and its social-marketing program.

Worker ants accurately gauge their life expectancy, regardless of their actual age, and take on riskier tasks as they feel their days ebbing away. In social insects such as ants, bees and wasps, workers change tasks depending on their age. Older workers do the relatively risky foraging outside the nest, while younger ones engage in safer maintenance tasks within it. By extending the workers’ average life span, this fine-tuning helps to maximise the fitness of the colony. However, no one knew whether the division of labour in ants was activated by age-related physiological changes or through some other mechanism.

Despite its deadly reputation, the gas carbon monoxide (CO) could actually save lives and boost health in future as a result of leading-edge UK research. Chemists at the University of Sheffield have discovered an innovative way of using targeted small doses of CO which could benefit patients who have undergone heart surgery or organ transplants and people suffering from high blood pressure. Although the gas is lethal in large doses, small amounts can reduce inflammation, widen blood vessels, increase blood flow, prevent unwanted blood clotting – and even suppress the activity of cells and macrophages* which attack transplanted organs. The researchers have developed innovative water-soluble molecules which, when swallowed or injected, safely release small amounts of CO inside the human body. Research carried out in the last decade had already highlighted possible advantages, as CO is produced in the body as part of its own natural defensive systems. However, the problem has been finding a safe way of delivering the right dose of CO to the patient. Conventional CO inhalation can run the risk of patients or medical staff being accidentally exposed to high doses. Now for the first time, thanks to chemistry, an answer appears to have been found.

While developing new lenses for next-generation sensors, researchers have crafted a layered material that causes light to refract, or bend, in a manner nature never intended. Refraction always bends light one way, as one can see in the illusion of a “bent” drinking straw when observed through the side of a glass. A new metamaterial crafted from alternating layers of semiconductors (indium-gallium-arsenic and aluminum-indium-arsenic) acts as a single lens that refracts light in the opposite direction. Refraction is the reason that lenses have to be curved, a trait that limits image resolution. With the new metamaterial, flat lenses are possible, theoretically allowing microscopes to capture images of objects as small as a strand of DNA. The current metamaterial lens works with infrared light, but the researchers hope the technology will expand to other wavelengths in the future.

MIT scientists propose that blood may help us think, in addition to its well-known role as the conveyor of fuel and oxygen to brain cells. “We hypothesize that blood actively modulates how neurons process information,” Christopher Moore, a principal investigator in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, explained in an invited review in the October issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology. “Many lines of evidence suggest that blood does something more interesting than just delivering supplies. If it does modulate how neurons relay signals, that changes how we think the brain works.” According to Moore’s Hemo-Neural Hypothesis, blood is not just a physiological support system but actually helps control brain activity. Specifically, localized changes in blood flow affect the activity of nearby neurons, changing how they transmit signals to each other and hence regulating information flow throughout the brain. Ongoing studies in Moore’s laboratory support this view, showing that blood flow does modulate individual neurons. Moore’s theory has implications for understanding brain diseases such as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis and epilepsy.

The Army has turned to a Honolulu company for Doppler radar and advanced algorithm technology to be able to detect and monitor multiple subjects based on their heart rate, even through walls. This means that soldiers will be able to detect someone hiding in a room before the door is kicked in, the company claims, and medics will be able to remotely perform triage and diagnoses or monitor casualties right through their flack jackets. It may also have homeland security and interrogation applications by allowing personnel to screen and identify individuals who may merit the third degree based on a guilty heart rate. Kai Sensors’ proprietary radar technology called LifeReader accurately detects and monitors heart and respiration activity wirelessly, remotely and with no contact with the subjects by using microwave, Doppler radar and digital signal processing, according to the company. LifeReader is the product of four years of research at the University of Hawaii’s electrical engineering department.

You’ve got a file on your laptop that you need to access — but you don’t want to wait for your laptop to boot up to get at it. New technology from the company Silicon Storage Technology will make the contents of a hard drive accessible via a computer’s USB port even when the computer is powered down. ‘FlashMate combines hardware, firmware and software in a system application subsystem that manages a notebook computer’s hard drive. It is based on SST’s expertise in NAND flash controllers and memory subsystem design with Insyde Software’s expertise in PC BIOS, system software and power management. FlashMate can work in conjunction with features such as Windows Vista ReadyDrive and serve as nonvolatile cache for the hard disk drive, thus enabling a standard hard disk drive to function as a hybrid drive.’

A Brussels think-tank has accused the US government of reneging on commitments made to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) over internet gaming. Panellists at a trade forum levelled harsh criticism at the US, focusing on a burgeoning trade clash between the US and Europe over internet gaming. The forum believes that the US could be liable for up to US$100 billion in trade concessions to European industries after placing illegal discriminatory trade restrictions on European gaming operators. The disputed concessions arise from Antigua’s victory earlier this year when the WTO ruled that the US violated its treaty obligations by excluding online Antiguan gaming operators, while allowing domestic operators to offer various forms of online gaming. Instead of complying with the ruling, the Bush administration withdrew the sizeable gambling industry from its free trade commitments. As a result, all 151 WTO members are considering seeking compensation for the withdrawal equal to the size of the entire US land-based and online gaming market, estimated at nearly US$100 billion.

Death comes in many guises, but one way or another it is usually a lack of oxygen to the brain that delivers the coup de grâce. Whether as a result of a heart attack, drowning or suffocation, for example, people ultimately die because their neurons are deprived of oxygen, leading to cessation of electrical activity in the brain - the modern definition of biological death. If the flow of freshly oxygenated blood to the brain is stopped, through whatever mechanism, people tend to have about 10 seconds before losing consciousness. They may take many more minutes to die, though, with the exact mode of death affecting the subtleties of the final experience. If you can take the grisly details, read on for a brief guide to the many and varied ways death can suddenly strike.

Innovalight creates nanoparticles of silicon that it uses to make ink “and we can end up with something that looks not very different from what a solar cell looks like today, except we got there substantially faster and cheaper, and we use less material,” he said. The goal is to achieve “double digit” efficiency, higher than current levels for other thin-film-based solar cells, although Burke wouldn’t reveal a specific number. The industry standard is 14 or 15 percent, although some companies talk about reaching 20 percent efficiency. Efficiency measures the percentage of absorbed light converted to electricity.

A 6-year-old Park Slope girl is facing a $300 fine from the city for doing what city kids have been doing for decades: drawing a pretty picture with common sidewalk chalk. Obviously not all of Natalie Shea’s 10th Street neighbors thought her blue chalk splotch was her best work — a neighbor called 311 to report the “graffiti,” and the Department of Sanitation quickly sent a standard letter to Natalie’s mom, Jen Pepperman. Can somebody stop these bureaucrats before they Kafka again? “PLEASE REMOVE THE GRAFFITI FROM YOUR PROPERTY,” the Sanitation Department warning letter read. “FAILURE TO COMPLY … MAY RESULT IN ENFORCEMENT ACTION AGAINST YOU.” Since when is a kid’s chalk drawing “graffiti”? Since the City Council passed local law 111 in 2005, which defined “graffiti” as “any letter, word, name, number, symbol, slogan, message, drawing, picture, writing … that is drawn, painted, chiseled, scratched, or etched on a commercial building or residential building.” In other words, Natalie Shea is not an artistic little girl, but a graffiti scofflaw?

For the first time, scientists have linked the all-too-human preference for a food — chocolate — to a specific, chemical signature that may be programmed into the metabolic system and is detectable by laboratory tests. The study by Swiss and British scientists breaks new ground in a rapidly emerging field that may eventually classify individuals on the basis of their metabolic type, or metabotype, which can ultimately be used to design healthier diets that are customized to an individual’s needs. Sunil Kochhar and colleagues studied 11 volunteers who classified themselves as ‘chocolate desiring’ and 11 volunteers who were ‘chocolate indifferent.’ In a controlled clinical study, each subject — all men — ate chocolate or placebo over a five day period while their blood and urine samples were analyzed. The ‘chocolate lovers’ had a hallmark metabolic profile that involved low levels of LDL-cholesterol (so-called ‘bad’ cholesterol) and marginally elevated levels of albumin, a beneficial protein, the scientists say. The chocolate lovers expressed this profile even when they ate no chocolate, the researchers note. The activity of the gut microbes in the chocolate lovers was also distinctively different from the other subjects, they add. “Our study shows that food preferences, including chocolate, might be programmed or imprinted into our metabolic system in such a way that the body becomes attuned to a particular diet,” says Kochhar, a scientist with Nestlé Research Center in Switzerland.

A new membrane that mimics pores found in plants has applications in water, energy and climate change mitigation. Announced today in the international journal Science, the new plastic membrane allows carbon dioxide and other small molecules to move through its hourglass-shaped pores while preventing the movement of larger molecules like methane. Separating carbon dioxide from methane is important in natural gas processing and gas recovery from landfill. The new material was developed as part of an international collaboration involving researchers from Hanyang University in Korea, the University of Texas and CSIRO, through its Water for a Healthy Country Flagship. “This plastic will help solve problems of small molecule separation, whether related to clean coal technology, separating greenhouse gases, increasing the energy efficiency of water purification, or producing and delivering energy from hydrogen,” Dr Anita Hill of CSIRO Materials Science and Engineering said. “The ability of the new plastic to separate small molecules surpasses the limits of any conventional plastics. “It can separate carbon dioxide from natural gas a few hundred times faster than current plastic membranes and its performance is four times better in terms of purity of the separated gas.”

U.S. scientists have overcome a problem involved in optical technology by creating a way to predict the behavior of light emitted on the nanoscale. Nanolight behaves much differently as its wavelength is interrupted, producing unstable waves called evanescent waves. The direction of those unpredictable waves can’t be calculated, so researchers must design nanotechnologies to work with the tiny, yet potentially useful, waves of light. Georgia Institute of Technology scientists have discovered a way to predict the behavior of light waves during nanoscale radiation heat transfer, thus opening the door to the design of a spectrum of new nanodevices and nanotechnologies, including solar thermal energy technologies. This discovery gives us the fundamental information to determine things like how far apart plates should be and what size they should be when designing a technology that uses nanoscale radiation heat transfer, said Professor Zhuomin Zhang, a lead researcher on the project. “Understanding the behavior of light at this scale is the key to designing technologies to take advantage of the unique capabilities of this phenomenon.

Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who’ve invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from “Beowulf” to “Canterbury Tales” to “Harry Potter.” Writing this week in the journal Nature, Erez Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel, and colleagues in Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, led by Martin A. Nowak, conceive of linguistic development as an essentially evolutionary scheme: Just as genes and organisms undergo natural selection, words – specifically, irregular verbs that do not take an “-ed” ending in the past tense – are subject to powerful pressure to “regularize” as the language develops. “Mathematical analysis of this linguistic evolution reveals that irregular verb conjugations behave in an extremely regular way – one that can yield predictions and insights into the future stages of a verb’s evolutionary trajectory,” says Lieberman, a graduate student in applied mathematics in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, and an affiliate of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. “We measured something no one really thought could be measured, and got a striking and beautiful result.” “We’re really on the front lines of developing the mathematical tools to study evolutionary dynamics,” says Michel, a graduate student in systems biology at Harvard Medical School and an affiliate of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. “Before, language was considered too messy and difficult a system for mathematical study, but now we’re able to successfully quantify an aspect of how language changes and develops.” Lieberman, Michel, and colleagues built upon previous study of seven competing rules for verb conjugation in Old English, six of which have gradually faded from use over time. They found that the one surviving rule, which adds an “-ed” suffix to simple past and past participle forms, contributes to the evolutionary decay of irregular English verbs according to a specific mathematical function: It regularizes them at a rate that is inversely proportional to the square root of their usage frequency.

Tooth loss may predict the development of dementia late in life, according to research published in the October issue of The Journal of the American Dental Association (JADA). Numerous past studies have shown that patients with dementia are more likely than patients without the condition to have poor oral health. Few researchers, however, have examined the relationship from the opposite direction, to determine whether poor oral health actually may contribute to the development of dementia. To that end, researchers from the University of Kentucky College of Medicine and College of Dentistry, Lexington, studied data from 144 participants in the Nun Study, a study of aging and Alzheimer’s disease among Catholic sisters of the School Sisters of Notre Dame. The researchers used dental records and results of annual cognitive examinations to study participants from the order’s Milwaukee province who were 75 to 98 years old. “Of the participants who did not have dementia at the first examination, those with few teeth (zero to nine) had an increased risk of developing dementia during the study compared with those who had 10 or more teeth,” the authors write.

The reason why even professional basketball and soccer players sometimes miss an easy shot may be partly explained by spontaneous fluctuations of electrical activity within the brain, a study suggests. An experiment conducted by researchers at Washington University, in Missouri, US, found that fluctuations in brain activity caused volunteers to subconsciously exert slightly less physical force when pressing a button on cue. Crucially, this activity is independent of any external stimulus and does not appear related to attention or anticipation. The scientists involved say it is the first direct evidence that internal instabilities – so-called “spontaneous brain activity” – may play an important role in the variability of human behaviour. From the mid-1990s onwards, brain-scanning techniques have revealed variable brain activity that appears unrelated to external stimuli and occurs even when a person is asleep or anaesthetized.

When Jamie Howard knocked on Paul Sucher’s door six months ago, he was trying to sell him a new vacuum cleaner. He ended up giving him one of his kidneys. The chance encounter with Howard, a travelling salesman for the Kirby Co., led to transplant surgery in August. Now, the colour is returning to Sucher’s cheeks and he is recovering. Sucher, 35, suffered kidney failure three years ago because of high blood pressure, forcing him to undergo dialysis. When Howard came by on a sales call, he learned that Sucher couldn’t afford a new vacuum cleaner because of the illness. He also learned Sucher had O-positive blood - the same as his.

Scientists have come up with a new currency to be used by inter-planetary travellers. The Quasi Universal Intergalactic Denomination, or Quid, is made from a polymer used in non-stick pans and is designed to withstand the stresses of space travel. Bearing a striking resemblance to the Drogna - the currency used in The Adventure Game - the Quid has no chemicals or sharp edges that could pose a potential problem to space goers should the “coins” accidentally float free in zero gravity. It was designed for foreign exchange company Travelex by scientists from the National Space Centre and the University of Leicester. They predict that regular trips into space will be considerably more commonplace within the next five years and that holiday facilities on the Moon are a possibility within the next 50 years. The issue of currency has long featured in science fiction, from the all-encompassing “credit” to the Altarian Dollar, the Triganic Pu, or even where money doesn’t exist at all as is the case in Star Trek. Professor George Fraser from the University of Leicester told BBC News: “With an inflatable space hotel from Bigelow Aerospace under development in the US, and Virgin Galactic developing SpaceShipTwo, there will be better access to space than there has been. “In the fullness of time we will have to adopt a universal currency if we are going to carry out serious commerce in space. It’s an interesting initiative.”

Among biology’s more riveting inquiries is the investigation of gene-environment interactions – the demonstration that a person’s genes constantly react to experience in a way that changes behavior, which in turn shapes environment, which in turn alters gene expression and so on. As David Olds described a few weeks ago, this new subdiscipline is yielding startling insights about how nature and nurture mix to help determine one’s health and character. This week reviewer Charles Glatt reviews a study that takes this investigation a level deeper, examining how two different gene variants show their power – or not – depending on whether a child is abused, nurtured, or both. As Glatt describes, this study, despite its grim subject, suggests promising things about the power of nurture to magnify nature’s gifts or lift its burdens.

Researchers have found a surprising diversity of hardy bacteria in a seemingly unlikely place — the so-called sterile clean rooms where NASA assembles its spacecraft and prepares them for launching. Samples of air and surfaces in the clean rooms at three National Aeronautics and Space Administration centers revealed surprising numbers and types of robust bacteria that appear to resist normal sterilization procedures, according to a newly published study. The findings are significant, the researchers report, because they can help reduce the chances of stowaway microbes contaminating planets and other bodies visited by the spacecraft and confounding efforts to discover new life elsewhere. “These findings will advance the search for life on Mars and other worlds both by sparking improved cleaning and sterilization methods and by preventing false-positive results in future experiments to detect extraterrestrial life,” said the leader of the study, Dr. Kasthuri Venkateswaran, a microbiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

A group of scientists, led by mathematicians, has taken on the challenge of building a common model of immune responses. Their work will radically improve our understanding of the human immune system by allowing all the scientific disciplines working on it to have a common reference point and language. The mathematicians, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), will investigate how the different cellular components of the immune system work together and devise a theoretical and computational model that can be used by immunologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and engineers. The model promises to help a multi-disciplinary research community work together to bring about medical advances for patients. The project, the Immunology Imaging and Modelling (I2M) Network, is highlighted in the quarterly research highlights magazine of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) this week. The immune system is one of the most fascinating and complex systems in the human body and scientists still do not fully understand how it works. Immunology has traditionally been a qualitative science, describing the cellular and molecular components of the immune system and their functions. However, to advance our understanding of how the body fights disease there is a pressing need to better understand how the components work together as a whole and provide this information in a quantitative format which can be accessed by the entire scientific community.

A single solar cell produces a relatively low output – it’s a case of strength in numbers. Tiny strips of metal are used to link cells together. If the laser soldering temperature is too high, the solder joint may fracture. A new system provides automatic temperature regulation. Teamwork is what matters – even in the case of solar cells: To obtain sufficient power to operate a pocket calculator, parking ticket dispenser or photovoltaic module, sunlight has to be captured simultaneously by an array of cells. They are connected in series using tiny strips of metal known as stringers. Each stringer has to be positioned in precisely the right spot, then its solder coating is melted using a hot electrode. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology have developed a non-contact soldering system in which the temperature is constantly monitored.

Almost immediately after it is donated, human blood begins to lose a key gas that opens up blood vessels to facilitate the transfer of oxygen from red blood cells to oxygen-starved tissues. Thus, millions of patients are apparently receiving transfusions with blood that is impaired in its ability to deliver oxygen, according to Duke University Medical Center researchers, who reported the results of their studies in two separate papers appearing early on-line in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They also found that adding this gas back to stored blood before transfusion appears to restore red blood cells’ ability to transfer oxygen to tissues. These studies go a long way toward answering a major problem which many physicians are beginning to appreciate – blood transfusions with banked human blood may do more harm than good for a majority of patients, according to the researchers. Over the past five years, many studies, including some performed at Duke, have demonstrated that patients who receive blood transfusions have higher incidences of heart attack, heart failure, stroke and even death. While it is known that the banked blood is not the same as blood in the body, the reasons behind blood’s association with worse outcomes have not been well-understood. The key to the current findings is that nitric oxide in red blood cells is crucial to the delivery of oxygen to tissues. Nitric oxide keeps the blood vessels open. The new studies demonstrated that nitric oxide in red blood cells begins breaking down almost immediately after red blood cells leave the body.

Inside the cell nucleus, all our genetic information is located on twisted, double stranded molecules of DNA which are packaged into chromosomes. At the end of these chromosomes are telomeres, zones of repeated chains of DNA that are often compared to the plastic tips on shoelaces because they prevent chromosomes from fraying, and thus genetic information from getting scrambled when cells divide. The telomere is like a cellular clock, because every time a cell divides, the telomere shortens. After a cell has grown and divided a few dozen times, the telomeres turn on an alarm system that prevents further division. If this clock doesn’t function right, cells either end up with damaged chromosomes or they become “immortal” and continue dividing endlessly – either way it’s bad news and leads to cancer or disease. Understanding how telomeres function, and how this function can potentially be manipulated, is thus extremely important. The DNA in the chromosome acts like a sort of instruction manual for the cell. Genetic information is transcribed into segments of RNA that then go out into the cell and carry out a variety of tasks such as making proteins, catalyzing chemical reactions, or fulfilling structural roles. It was thought that telomeres were “silent” – that their DNA was not transcribed into strands of RNA. The researchers have turned this theory on its head by discovering telomeric RNA and showing that this RNA is transcribed from DNA on the telomere.

Good news for your Viagra-using hamster—on his next trip to Europe, he’ll bounce back from jet lag faster than his unmedicated friends. The researchers who revealed that bizarre fact earned one of ten Ig Nobel prizes awarded on Thursday for quirky, funny and sometimes legitimate scientific achievements, from the mathematics of wrinkled sheets to the US military’s efforts to make a ‘gay bomb’. The recipients of the annual award handed out by the annals of Improbable research magazine were honoured at Harvard University’s Sanders Theater. A team at Quilmes National University in Buenos Aires, Argentina, came up with the jet lag study which found that hamsters given the anti-impotence drug needed 50% less time to recover from a six-hour time zone change. Of course, they didn’t fly rodents to Paris. They just turned the lights off and on at different times. Odd as it may be, that research might have implications for millions of humans.

You arrive home from work, drop your mobile phone, MP3 player and camera on the kitchen table and pour yourself a well-earned drink. Immediately, the music on your MP3 player begins blaring from your hi-fi, photos start downloading to your PC and texts and emails start flashing up on your TV screen. What’s going on? The phone, MP3 player and camera are sending information to the table, which passes it to the walls, which in turn route it to the hi-fi, television and PC. Takao Someya, Tsuyoshi Sekitani and colleagues at the University of Tokyo, Japan, have developed a flexible, plastic electronic sheet that can be embedded in tables, walls and floors. Plastic transistors and copper wires that snake through the sheets allow gadgets placed on them to form spontaneous connections and swap data.

A paper that recently appeared in the journal Neuron sets up an interesting dichotomy in describing how to view the function of the brain. One option it presents is that the brain is an input-output device: give it a stimulus, and it will process it and respond. The alternative view is that the brain is simply doing its own thing, and stimuli act to modulate its activity, rather than direct it. Since the first perspective is an easier one to approach experimentally, it has received most of the attention, but the paper presents evidence that the alternative view shouldn’t be ignored. The experiments in the paper are built around two observations. The first is that just about every measure of brain function detects spontaneous, organized activity even when the owner of the brain doesn’t appear to be doing anything—in fact, this kind of activity has been detected when people are under anesthesia. The second key observation is that, even on the simplest tests, the same individual will perform differently when the test is repeated. The authors simply asked if these two were linked: is human action influenced by spontaneous brain activity?

“Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.”

Some scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for your gut. That’s the theory from surgeons and immunologists at Duke University Medical School, published online in a scientific journal this week. For generations the appendix has been dismissed as superfluous. Doctors figured it had no function. Surgeons removed them routinely. People live fine without them. And when infected the appendix can turn deadly. It gets inflamed quickly and some people die if it isn’t removed in time. Two years ago, 321,000 Americans were hospitalized with appendicitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most are good and help digest food. But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged. Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix’s job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

An innovative and inexpensive way of making nanomaterials on a large scale has resulted in novel forms of advanced materials that pave the way for exceptional and unexpected optical properties. The new fabrication technique, known as soft lithography, offers many significant advantages over existing techniques, including the ability to scale-up the manufacturing process to produce devices in large quantities. The research, led by Northwestern University chemist Teri Odom, appears as the cover story in the September 2007 issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology. The optical nanomaterials in this research are called ‘plasmonic metamaterials’ because their unique physical properties originate from shape and structure rather than material composition only. Two examples of metamaterials in the natural world are peacock feathers and butterfly wings. Their brightly colored patterns are due to structural variations at the hundreds of nanometers level, which cause them to absorb or reflect light. Through the development of a new nanomanufacturing technique, Odom and her colleagues have succeeded in making gold films with virtually infinite arrays of circular perforations as small as 100 nanometers in diameter – 500 to 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair. On a magnified scale, these perforated gold films look like Swiss cheese except the perforations are well-ordered and can spread over macroscale distances. The researchers’ ability to make these optical metamaterials inexpensively and on large wafers or sheets is what sets this work apart from other techniques.

Unlike their sisters in the animal kingdom, human females don’t openly advertise their ovulation. But even without a human version of the baboon’s bright pink behind, signs of fertility sneak out, according to several studies. Subconsciously, women dress more provocatively and men find them prettier when it’s prime time for conception. And a report from the University of New Mexico demonstrates that the cyclic signs have economic consequences. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller and colleagues tapped the talent at local gentlemen’s clubs and counted tips made on lap dances. Dancers made about $70 an hour during their peak period of fertility, versus about $35 while menstruating and $50 in between. Miller links the wage fluctuations to changes in body odor, waist-to-hip ratio, and facial features. Despite operating at the upper limits of flirtatiousness already, he says there may also be subtle shifts in their behavior—"how they talk and move when enticing a customer to buy a dance, and how they perform the dance itself.” Women on the pill averaged $37 (and had no performance peak) versus $53 for women off-pill. The contraceptive produces hormonal cues indicating early pregnancy, not an enticing target for a would-be suitor. Birth control could lead to many thousands of dollars lost every year.

Using sunlight to liberate hydrogen from water is an appealing way to generate a clean-burning fuel from a renewable energy source. As a result, scientists have examined a variety of materials over the years in search of a suitable catalyst to accelerate the water-splitting reaction. Several candidates show some level of promise, yet each material suffers from shortcomings that would limit its applications. For example, some catalysts absorb solar radiation inefficiently, exhibit low activity, or are unstable or costly. Now, a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institutes for Bioinorganic Chemistry and for Coal Research, in Germany, report that titanium disilicide (TiSi2)—an abundant and inexpensive semiconductor not known previously to be a water-splitting catalyst—separates water into hydrogen and oxygen when reactors containing the powdered catalyst are illuminated with simulated sunlight.

By mimicking a brick-and-mortar molecular structure found in seashells, University of Michigan researchers created a composite plastic that’s as strong as steel but lighter and transparent. It’s made of layers of clay nanosheets and a water-soluble polymer that shares chemistry with white glue. Engineering professor Nicholas Kotov almost dubbed it “plastic steel,” but the new material isn’t quite stretchy enough to earn that name. Nevertheless, he says its further development could lead to lighter, stronger armor for soldiers or police and their vehicles. It could also be used in microelectromechanical devices, microfluidics, biomedical sensors and valves and unmanned aircraft. Kotov and other U-M faculty members are authors of a paper on this composite material, “Ultrastrong and Stiff Layered Polymer Nanocomposites,” published in the Oct. 5 edition of Science. The scientists solved a problem that has confounded engineers and scientists for decades: Individual nano-size building blocks such as nanotubes, nanosheets and nanorods are ultrastrong. But larger materials made out of bonded nano-size building blocks were comparatively weak. Until now.

Negligent homicide charges have been dropped against a former Lake Jackson woman who had been accused of killing her husband with a sherry enema that led to alcohol poisoning. Court records show the charge against Tammy Jean Warner, 45, of Texas City, was dismissed Aug. 31 because of insufficient evidence, the Houston Chronicle reported in its online edition Wednesday. Michael Warner, 58, died May 21, 2004. An autopsy showed he had been given an enema with enough sherry to have a blood alcohol level of 0.47 percent, almost six times the legal limit of .08 percent in Texas.

Washington, D.C. area commuters are going to be “scanned like groceries at the supermarket” in order to catch single-occupant vehicles who are illegally using carpool lanes. The article, from the Washington Post, says that infrared cameras capable of detecting human skin will be installed, rather than the visible-spectrum cameras in use today. So much for using dummies in the front seat.

Stem cells normally associated with potential cures and treatments can also promote the spread of cancer, scientists have shown. A study found that stem cells taken from bone marrow can drive breast cancer cells to invade other parts of the body. The good news is that the process is reversible, and understanding it may open the door to ways of reducing the metastasis, or spread, of cancer. Stem cells are immature cells not yet assigned a function that can develop into different kinds of tissue. Scientists hope in future they will be used to treat a host of diseases ranging from Parkinson’s to heart failure and type 1 diabetes. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are a type of stem cell from the bone marrow that can generate connective tissue, bone, fat, cartilage and muscle. The new research showed that when MSCs are mixed with human breast tumour cells they dramatically increase the potential of the cancer cells to metastasise.

A plant-like micro-organism mostly found in oceans could make the manufacture of products, from iridescent cosmetics, paints and fabrics to credit card holograms, cheaper and ‘greener’. The tiny single-celled ‘diatom’, which first evolved hundreds of millions of years ago, has a hard silica shell which is iridescent – in other words, the shell displays vivid colours that change depending on the angle at which it is observed. This effect is caused by a complex network of tiny holes in the shell which interfere with light waves. UK scientists have now found an extremely effective way of growing diatoms in controlled laboratory conditions, with potential for scale-up to industrial level. This would enable diatom shells to be mass-produced, harvested and mixed into paints, cosmetics and clothing to create stunning colour-changing effects, or embedded into polymers to produce difficult-to-forge holograms. Manufacturing consumer products with these properties currently requires energy-intensive, high-temperature, high-pressure industrial processes that create tiny artificial reflectors. But farming diatom shells, which essentially harnesses a natural growth process, could provide an alternative that takes place at normal room temperature and pressure, dramatically reducing energy needs and so cutting carbon dioxide emissions. The process is also extremely rapid – in the right conditions, one diatom can give rise to 100 million descendants in a month.

“Knot formation is important in many fields,” said Douglas Smith, an assistant professor of physics who was the senior author on the paper. “For example, knots often form in DNA, which is a long string-like molecule. Cells have enzymes that undo the knots by cutting the DNA strands so that they can pass through each other. Certain anti-cancer drugs stop tumor cells from dividing by blocking the unknotting of DNA.” Dorian Raymer, a research assistant working with Smith, initiated the study because he was interested in knot theory—the branch of mathematics that uses formulae to distinguish unique knots. “Very little experimental work had been done to apply knot theory to the analysis and classification of real, physical knots,” said Smith. “For mathematicians, the problem is very abstract. They imagine the types of knots that can form and then classify them. In our experiments, we produced thousands of different knots, used mathematical knot theory to analyze them, and then developed a simple physics model to explain our findings.” The experimental set up consisted of a plastic box that was spun by a computer-controlled motor. A piece of string was dropped into the box and tumbled around like clothes in a dryer. Knots formed very quickly, within 10 seconds. The researchers repeated the experiment more than 3,000 times varying the length and stiffness of string, box size and speed of rotation. They classified the resulting knots. “It is virtually impossible to distinguish different knots just by looking at them,” said Raymer. “So I developed a computer program to do it. The computer program counts each crossing of the string. It notes whether the crossing is under or over, and whether the string follows a path to the left or to the right. The result is a bunch of numbers that can be translated into a mathematical fingerprint for a knot.

Engineers have shown how to grow forests of tiny cylinders called carbon nanotubes onto the surfaces of computer chips to enhance the flow of heat at a critical point where the chips connect to cooling devices called heat sinks. The carpetlike growth of nanotubes has been shown to outperform conventional “thermal interface materials.” Like those materials, the nanotube layer does not require elaborate clean-room environments, representing a possible low-cost manufacturing approach to keep future chips from overheating and reduce the size of cooling systems, said Placidus B. Amama, a postdoctoral research associate at the Birck Nanotechnology Center in Purdue’s [profile] Discovery Park. Researchers are trying to develop new types of thermal interface materials that conduct heat more efficiently than conventional materials, improving overall performance and helping to meet cooling needs of future chips that will produce more heat than current microprocessors. The materials, which are sandwiched between silicon chips and the metal heat sinks, fill gaps and irregularities between the chip and metal surfaces to enhance heat flow between the two.

“Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.”

With atoms and molecules in a gas moving at thousands of kilometres per hour, physicists have long sought a way to slow them down to a few kilometres per hour to trap them. A paper, published today in the Institute of Physics’ New Journal of Physics, demonstrates how a group of physicists from The University of Texas at Austin, US, have found a way to slow down, stop and explore a much wider range of atoms than ever before. Inspired by the coilgun that was developed by the University’s Center for Electromechanics, the group has developed an “atomic coilgun” that slows and gradually stops atoms with a sequence of pulsed magnetic fields. Dr. Mark Raizen and his colleagues in Texas ultimately plan on using the gun to trap atomic hydrogen, which he said has been the Rosetta Stone of physics for many years and is the simplest and most abundant atom in the periodic table.

“An adult-store owner had asked the justices to throw out the law as an unconstitutional intrusion into the privacy of the bedroom. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal, leaving intact a lower court ruling that upheld the law.
Sherri Williams, owner of Pleasures stores in Huntsville and Decatur, said she was disappointed, but plans to sue again on First Amendment free speech grounds. “My motto has been they are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand. I refuse to give up,” she said. Alabama’s anti-obscenity law, enacted in 1998, bans the distribution of “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for anything of pecuniary value.”

Eggs give many of us the fuel we need to start the day, but leftover eggshells of the future could provide fuel to start hydrogen cars. The fragile leftovers can be ground up and used to filter out carbon dioxide, a pesky by-product of hydrogen production, engineers said. “The key to making pure hydrogen is separating out the carbon dioxide,” said L.S. Fan, a chemical and biomolecular engineer at Ohio State University. Calcium carbonate—the main component in eggshells and antacid tablets—serves as the active ingredient in Fan and his team’s process when heated up. The material soaks up acidic carbon dioxide gas during hydrogen-producing reactions, making them more efficient. In fact, it’s now the most effective carbon dioxide absorber ever tested, Fan said.

The amount of dark matter left over from the early universe may be less than previously believed. Research published in the open access journal PMC Physics A shows that the “relic abundance” of stable dark matter particles such as the neutralino may be reduced as compared to standard cosmology theories due to the effects of the “dilaton"‘, a particle with zero spin in the gravitational sector of strings. Results were obtained by studying a special “off-shell” time-dependent term (due to the dilaton) in the Boltzmann equation that describes the evolution of hot matter density as the Universe cooled down. “The formalism that this work used was developed in partial collaboration with John Ellis of CERN and Vasiliki Mitsou of IFIC, Valencia, and is a version of ‘non-critical string theory’", said Mavromatos. All the matter and radiation in the universe is thought to have been created by the Big Bang. The radiation stopped interacting with the matter some 400,000 years later – when the universe had cooled down enough for electrons and protons to form hydrogen atoms. The density of dark matter particles such as the neutralino (a dark matter candidate favoured by many of the current “supersymmetric” approaches to particle physics) was therefore “frozen” at this time – the so-called relic abundance.

Three-dimensional drawing programs offer precision, but still require input in two dimensions. Now scientists have developed a software program that trades the keyboard and mouse for virtual reality goggles with feedback to illustrate objects in mid-air. The program, Drawing on Air, is meant to give scientists a better way to model complex ideas, and could eventually allow doctors to visualize a surgical procedure before they ever cut into a patient. It could also give artists an intuitive, simple way for moving from traditional freehand methods to computers. “It’s got ‘drawing’ in the title, but it’s very three-dimensional, so in many ways it’s more sculptural than it is drawing-based,” said Daniel Keefe, post-doctoral research associate in computer science at Brown University in Providence, RI.

Struggling with the new public smoking ban or simply fed up with being addicted to the evil weed? QuitmateME is a Java application which records each cigarette the user smokes and then calculates a quitting regime for them to follow. The smoker is then encouraged to beat targets set by the software to gradually reduce their daily intake. For instance a 20-a-day smoker could easily reduce their intake to 10 a day in just 10 days. Monthly, Daily, Hourly and AM/PM reports are provided help understand smoking patterns and motivate users to cut down on their smoking levels.

More than 5.5 million Filipinos now use their cell phones as virtual wallets, making the Philippines a leader among developing nations in providing financial transactions over mobile networks. Mobile banking services, which are also catching on in Kenya and South Africa, enable people who don’t have bank accounts to transfer money easily, quickly and safely. It’s spreading in the developing world because mobile phones are much more common than bank accounts. The system is particularly useful for the 8 million Filipinos – 10 percent of the country’s citizens – who work overseas and send money home.

A 51-year-old surrogate mother for her daughter has given birth to her own twin grandchildren in northeastern Brazil, the delivery hospital said. Rosinete Palmeira Serrao, a government health worker, gave birth to twin boys by Caesarean section on Thursday at the Santa Joana Hospital in the city of Recife, the hospital said in a statement on its Web site.

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is using randomization software to determine the location and timing of security checkpoints and patrols. The theory is that random security will make it impossible for terrorists to predict the actions of security forces. The ARMOR software, written by computer scientists at the University of Southern California, was initially developed to solve a problem in game theory. Doctoral student Praveen Paruchuri wrote algorithms on how an agent should react to an opponent who has perfect information about the agent’s choices.