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How Arizona Turned the Self Driving Car Into Its Golden Goose

2017-01-18T10:07:00.001-08:00

How Arizona Turned the Self Driving Car Into Its Golden Goose

Scientists 'Herd' Cells Using New Method for Tissue Engineering

2014-03-12T08:45:00.002-07:00

33rd Square | Scientists 'Herd' Cells Using New Method for Tissue Engineering

Nanotechnology Used To Find Marjorana Fermion

2012-04-27T21:47:00.001-07:00

Researchers at TU Delft’s Kavli Institute and the Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM Foundation) have succeeded for the first time in detecting the Majorana particle. In the 1930s, the brilliant Italian physicist Ettore Majorana reasoned from quantum theory the possibility of the existence of a very special particle, a particle that is its own anti-particle: the Majorana fermion. The ‘Majorana’ borders between matter and anti-matter.

The Italian physicist Ettore Majorana was a brilliant theorist who showed great insight into physics at a young age. He discovered a hitherto unknown solution to the equations from which quantum scientists deduce elementary particles: the Majorana fermion. Practically all theoretic particles that are predicted by quantum theory have been found in the last decades, with just a few exceptions, including the enigmatic Majorana particle and the well-known Higgs Boson.

Nanoscientist Leo Kouwenhoven already caused great excitement among scientists in February by presenting the preliminary results at a scientific congress. On 12 April, the scientists published their research in Science.

Majorana fermions are very interesting – not only because their discovery opens up a new and uncharted chapter of fundamental physics, but they may also play a role in cosmology.

A proposed theory assumes that the mysterious dark matter, which forms the greatest part of the universe, is composed of Majorana fermions. Furthermore, scientists view the particles as potential building blocks for a quantum computer. Such a computer would be far more powerful than the best supercomputer, but only functionally exists in theory so far (or until very recently). Contrary to an ‘ordinary’ quantum computer, a quantum computer based on Majorana fermions is exceptionally stable and barely sensitive to external influences.

For the first time, scientists in Leo Kouwenhoven’s research group managed to create a nanoscale electronic device in which a pair of Majorana fermions ‘appear’ at either end of a nanowire. They did this by combining an extremely small nanowire, made by colleagues from Eindhoven University of Technology, with a superconducting material and a strong magnetic field. ‘The measurements of the particle at the ends of the nanowire cannot otherwise be explained than through the presence of a pair of Majorana fermions’, says Leo Kouwenhoven.

It is theoretically possible to detect a Majorana fermion with a particle accelerator such as Large Hadron Collider at CERN. The current Large Hadron Collider appears to be insufficiently sensitive for that purpose but, according to physicists, there is another possibility: Majorana fermions can also appear in properly designed nanostructures.

"What’s magical about quantum mechanics is that a Majorana particle created in this way is similar to the ones that may be observed in a particle accelerator, although that is very difficult to comprehend", explains Kouwenhoven.

"In 2010, two different groups of theorists came up with a solution using nanowires, superconductors and a strong magnetic field. We happened to be very familiar with those ingredients here at TU Delft through earlier research." Microsoft approached Leo Kouwenhoven to help them lead a special FOM programme in search of Majorana fermions, resulting in a successful outcome.

Artificial DNA Called XNA May Create Synthetic Life

2012-04-20T22:31:00.000-07:00

Researchers moved a step closer to creating new life forms in the laboratory after they demonstrated an artificial genetic material called XNA can be replicated in the test tube much like real DNA. X, which in this case stands for "xeno" indicates the replacement of the helical backbone of the new molecule.

Scientists at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in the U.K. demonstrated for the first time a way to extract information from the artificial genetic molecules and mass produce copies of them.

The research, published today in the journal Science, shows that DNA and its sister molecule RNA may not be the only chemical structures upon which a living unit can be based.

“Life is based on this amazing ability of DNA and RNA to store and propagate information,” said Philipp Holliger, a Medical Research Council molecular biologist and senior author on the study. “We have shown that the basic functions of DNA and RNA can be recapitulated” with new artificial molecules.

Vitor Pinheiro and colleagues from Philipp's group used sophisticated protein engineering techniques to adapt enzymes, that in nature synthesise and replicate DNA, to establish six new genetic systems based on synthetic nucleic acids. These have the same bases as DNA but the ribose linkage between them is replaced by quite different structures.

In doing this they showed that there is no functional imperative limiting genetic information storage to RNA and DNA. Therefore, the discovery has implications for the understanding of life on Earth. As other informational molecules can be robustly synthesised and replicated, the emergence of life on Earth is likely to reflect the abundance of RNA (and DNA) precursors in early Earth.

The scientists invented a lab method for making copies of synthetic DNA. They also developed a way to make XNA fragments that evolve with desired properties.

The work may give scientists a new method for creating designer drugs and diagnostic tools. “There are a whole host of opportunities in biotechnology which now become possible,” Holliger said. In particular, they created XNA fragments that could bind with great specificity to a molecular target in the HIV virus.

XNA-based drugs “might have a future to rival antibodies,” he said. Antibody drugs, such as Roche Holding AG (ROG)’s Avastin for cancer and Abbott Laboratories’ (ABT) Humira for autoimmune diseases, have become some of the biggest selling therapies in recent years.

DNA, deoxyribonucleic acid, is the hereditary molecule at the center of our cells. It contains code, in the form of chemical letters A, T, C and G, that tells the body how to make proteins that perform numerous bodily functions such as regulating blood sugar or fighting infections.

For medical use, the development of functional nucleic acids, called aptamers, with diagnostic, therapeutic and analytical applications. Aptamers can have a number of significant advantages over the current small molecule and antibody-based therapies. For example, they bind their target molecule with high specificity (like antibodies) but being smaller they are expected to have better tissue penetration. They have low-toxicity and low-immunogenicity and they can be chemically modified to improve their stability and pharmacokinetic properties.

XNAs, or xeno-nucleic acids, maintain the same four-letter chemical code while altering the backbone of the DNA “double helix” molecule to add properties such as acid resistance.

“It’s a breakthrough,” said Gerald Joyce of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who was not involved in the study—“a beautiful paper in the realm of synthetic biology.”

While researchers have been working for years on therapies based on DNA and RNA, a limitation is that the nucleic acids break down easily in the body, and need to be modified to make them more stable, said Joyce.

One limitation of the new method is that it isn’t entirely artificial, and natural DNA is still required as an intermediate step in the XNA copying process.

The XNA work provides a new way of developing designer nucleic acid drugs that could resist breakdown, or have other desirable properties, such as the ability to slip from the bloodstream into diseased cells, said Holliger.

It also could help drug researchers working on so-called small interfering RNAs, he said. Companies working on such drugs include Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc. (ALNY) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. RNA is a similar molecule to DNA that transports genetic information from the cell nucleus to the molecular factories where proteins are made.

In the field of synthetic biology, this represents a breakthrough, and might change our understanding of life itself. The implications of the study will likely prove to be vast for a multitude of fields of study.

33rd Square

Baboons Learn Word Recognition

2012-04-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

Scientists report that they trained six Guinea baboons (Papio papio) to distinguish real, four-letter English words such as "done" and "vast" from non-words such as "dran" and "lons." After six weeks, the baboons learned to pick out dozens of words — as many as 308 in the case of the clever Dan, and 81 for Violette — from a sea of 7,832 non-words.

The study was published in Nature.

Each of the monkeys performed significantly better than 50 percent, which they would have scored by randomly guessing which letters formed words or non-words. They averaged almost 75 percent right, with some scoring 90.

The study is "extraordinarily exciting," said cognitive psychologist Stanislas Dehaene of the College de France in Paris, an expert on the neural basis of reading who was not involved in the research, and author of, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. "For the first time, we have an animal model of a key component of literacy, the recognition of the visual word form."

The study was intended less to probe animal intelligence than to explore how a brain might learn to read. It suggests that, contrary to prevailing theory, a brain can take the first steps toward reading without having language, since baboons don't. A similar hypothesis has been put forward by Dr. Robert Titzer, developer of the Your Baby Can Read: Early Language Development System system, that uses the pattern recognition ability of infants and toddlers as a base to learn word recognition, and accelerate reading in children.

"Their results suggest that the basic biological mechanisms required for reading have deeper evolutionary roots than anyone thought," said neuroscientist Michael Platt of Duke University, who co-authored an analysis of the study. "That suggests that reading draws on much older neurological mechanisms" and that apes or monkeys are the place to look for them.

Reading has long puzzled neuroscientists. Once some humans started doing it (about 5,000 years ago in the Middle East), reading spread across the ancient world so quickly that it cannot have required genetic changes and entirely new brain circuitry. Those don't evolve quickly enough. Instead, its rapid spread suggests that reading co-opted existing neural structures.

To be sure, other animals have learned to recognize letters. In a 1982 experiment, for instance, pigeons were able to identify all 26 letters of the English alphabet.

But the baboons were not simply memorizing which strings of letters were words, said Grainger. When shown a word for the first time, they identified it correctly about 70 percent of the time, suggesting the animals were applying the statistical rules they had inferred.

The word-savvy baboons may be drawing on "more generalized learning mechanisms and visual processing abilities rather than specialized mechanisms unique to humans," said Diana Reiss of Hunter College in New York, who has done pioneering work in animal intelligence.

A prime candidate for those processing abilities lies in a region of the brain that becomes active when people read. Discovered by Dehaene, it is called the "visual word form area" and is located behind the left ear. It recognizes strings of letters, and the more active it is in 7- to-18-year-olds, studies show, the better readers they tend to be.

"Neuroimaging shows that this region is specific for words and not meaningless strings of letters," said Duke's Platt.

Since reading arrived on the scene a mere blink of the eye ago, evolutionarily speaking, the visual word form area cannot have developed in order to support reading. If baboons or human ancestors also had this structure, the question becomes what they used it for. Best guess: recognizing objects by visually assembling their parts, such as tall cylinder + bushy top = tree.

Among the many surprises in the study is that it involved baboons rather than a primate known for braininess.

"Guinea baboons have a lot of social savvy, since they have to learn about complex male-male and male-female interactions in their troop," said primate curator Craig Demitros of the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago. "They're smart, but not at the level of chimps."

Apart from the glimpses it provides into the evolution of the brain's ability to read, the study has implications for education. "You might conclude that phonics doesn't work" as well as teaching children to read by recognizing the entire word, said Platt. "This study suggests that reading is all about pattern recognition and not working out phonemes."

The team next plans to try to teach the baboons an artificial alphabet. This would give greater control over the visual information that defines individual letters, Grainger explains, and would provide a more precise idea of how baboons master word recognition.

33rd Square

MIT Creates 'Smart Sand' Replicator Concept Microrobotic System

2012-04-03T12:03:00.000-07:00

Image Source: M. Scott Brauer

In the future, you may have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a chair. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size version, ready to use. The "smart sand" will have assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model.

That may sound like a scene from a science fiction novel, but it’s the vision animating a research project at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. At the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in May — the world’s premier robotics conference — DRL researchers will present a paper describing algorithms that could enable such “smart sand.” They also describe experiments in which they tested the algorithms on somewhat larger particles — cubes about 10 millimeters to an edge, with rudimentary microprocessors inside and very unusual magnets on four of their sides.

Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method, akin to snapping toy blocks together. A heap of smart sand would be analogous to the rough block of stone that a sculptor begins with. The individual grains would pass messages back and forth and selectively attach to each other to form a three-dimensional object; the grains not necessary to build that object would simply fall away. When the object had served its purpose, it would be returned to the heap. Its constituent grains would detach from each other, becoming free to participate in the formation of a new shape.

Technically the, the main software challenge in developing smart sand is that the individual grains would have very few computational resources. “How do you develop efficient algorithms that do not waste any information at the level of communication and at the level of storage?” asks Daniela Rus, a professor of computer science and engineering at MIT and a co-author on the new paper, together with her student Kyle Gilpin. If every grain could simply store a digital map of the object to be assembled, “then I can come up with an algorithm in a very easy way,” Rus says. “But we would like to solve the problem without that requirement, because that requirement is simply unrealistic when you’re talking about modules at this scale.” Furthermore, Rus says, from one run to the next, the grains in the heap will be jumbled together in a completely different way. “We’d like to not have to know ahead of time what our block looks like,” Rus says.

To attach to each other, to communicate and to share power, the cubes use 'electropermanent magnets,' materials whose magnetism can be switched on and off with jolts of electricity.

Conveying shape information to the heap with a simple physical model — such as the tiny chair — helps address both of these problems. To get a sense of how the researchers’ algorithm works, it’s probably easiest to consider the two-dimensional case. Picture each grain of sand as a square in a two-dimensional grid. Now imagine that some of the squares — say, in the shape of a footstool— are missing. That’s where the physical model is embedded.

According to Gilpin-author on the new paper, the grains first pass messages to each other to determine which have missing neighbors. (In the grid model, each square could have eight neighbors.) Grains with missing neighbors are in one of two places: the perimeter of the heap or the perimeter of the embedded shape.

Once the grains surrounding the embedded shape identify themselves, they simply pass messages to other grains a fixed distance away, which in turn identify themselves as defining the perimeter of the duplicate. If the duplicate is supposed to be 10 times the size of the original, each square surrounding the embedded shape will map to 10 squares of the duplicate’s perimeter. Once the perimeter of the duplicate is established, the grains outside it can disconnect from their neighbours.

The same algorithm can be varied to produce multiple, similarly sized copies of a sample shape, or to produce a single, large copy of a large object. “Say the tire rod in your car has sheared,” Gilpin says. “You could duct tape it back together, put it into your system and get a new one.” The technology might therefore be used in the future as a form of rapid prototyping.

The cubes — or “smart pebbles” — that Gilpin and Rus built to test their algorithm enact the simplified, two-dimensional version of the system. Four faces of each cube are studded with so-called electropermanent magnets, materials that can be magnetized or demagnetized with a single electric pulse. Unlike permanent magnets, they can be turned on and off; unlike electromagnets, they don’t require a constant current to maintain their magnetism. The pebbles use the magnets not only to connect to each other but also to communicate and to share power. Each pebble also has a tiny microprocessor, which can store just 32 kilobytes of program code and has only two kilobytes of working memory.

The pebbles have magnets on only four faces, Gilpin explains, because, with the addition of the microprocessor and circuitry to regulate power, “there just wasn’t room for two more magnets.” But Gilpin and Rus performed computer simulations showing that their algorithm would work with a three-dimensional block of cubes, too, by treating each layer of the block as its own two-dimensional grid. The cubes discarded from the final shape would simply disconnect from the cubes above and below them as well as those next to them.

True smart sand, of course, would require grains much smaller than 10-millimeter cubes. But according to Robert Wood, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University, that’s not an insurmountable obstacle. “Take the core functionalities of their pebbles,” says Wood, who directs Harvard’s Microrobotics Laboratory. “They have the ability to latch onto their neighbors; they have the ability to talk to their neighbors; they have the ability to do some computation. Those are all things that are certainly feasible to think about doing in smaller packages.”

“It would take quite a lot of engineering to do that, of course,” Wood cautions. “That’s a well-posed but very difficult set of engineering challenges that they could continue to address in the future.”

MIT News

33rd Square

New Frog Species Discovered - In New York City

2012-03-15T07:56:00.001-07:00

A Northern Leopard Frog, similar to the newly discovered species

We tend to think of the discovery of a new species as requiring a trip to a remote and exotic location. But our ability to use DNA to determine how closely populations are related has revealed an unexpected fact: lots of plants and animals that look indistinguishable to the human eye are actually quite distant from each other genetically, often far enough to merit a new species designation. In the latest example, researchers have found that a population of leopard frogs that make their home in the New York City area are probably a newly discovered species.

According to the press release accompanying the new paper, the leopard frogs in the region were noted as having a croak that was quite distinct from those of the two species that inhabit the northern and southern parts of the East Coast. (A researcher involved in the finding described the other species as having a "long snore" or a "rapid chuckle.") Speculation had focused on the possibility that the New York frogs were a hybrid of the two species, but molecular evidence shows that they are distant from both.

Although New York City has probably not been especially kind to the frogs—any appropriate habitat for them in Manhattan is probably long gone—they still survive in a number of areas nearby, including New Jersey, Staten Island, and the Bronx. The researchers suggest that their range is probably centered on Yankee Stadium. Given the molecular evidence, the team that found the species (which has members in New Jersey, Alabama, and California) are now going back to study it more closely so that they can give it a formal description.

Ars Technica

Woolly Mammoth To Be Cloned By Korean Scientists

2012-03-13T22:22:00.002-07:00

A Siberian woolly mammoth preserved in permafrost could walk the Earth again after 10,000 years, after Russian academics signed a deal with a controversial Korean scientist to clone the animal.

Hwang Woo-Suk of South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation -- who created the world’s first cloned dog, Snuppy, in 2005 -- will implant the nucleus from a mammoth cell into an elephant egg to create a mammoth embryo.

The embryo will then be implanted into an elephant’s womb. The Koreans say research could begin this year.

The woolly mammoth became mostly extinct about 11,000 years ago due to the rapidly changing environment and increasing human predation, according to the Canadian Museum of Nature. Some survived in Siberia, however, until about 3,700 years ago.

Before then, these massive hairy elephants roamed the northern tundra and cool steppe grasslands of Eurasia and North America, commonly feeding on tough dry grasses.

Specimens found in Yukon, Alaska and Siberia have allowed scientists to learn a great deal about the creature, which stood about three metres tall and had four-metre long tusks, the museum says.

33rd Square

Nanotechnology Research Aims To Create Artificial Photosynthesis

2012-03-11T13:25:00.003-07:00

Image Source: Wang Research Group, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Electrical engineers at the University of California, San Diego are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy without using fossil fuels and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Reporting in the journal Nanoscale, the team said nanowires, which are made from abundant natural materials like silicon and zinc oxide, also offer a cheap way to deliver hydrogen fuel on a mass scale.

“This is a clean way to generate clean fuel,” said Deli Wang, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

The trees’ vertical structure and branches are keys to capturing the maximum amount of solar energy, according to Wang. That’s because the vertical structure of trees grabs and adsorbs light while flat surfaces simply reflect it, Wang said, adding that it is also similar to retinal photoreceptor cells in the human eye. In images of Earth from space, light reflects off of flat surfaces such as the ocean or deserts, while forests appear darker.

Wang’s team has mimicked this structure in their “3D branched nanowire array” which uses a process called photoelectrochemical water-splitting to produce hydrogen gas. Water splitting refers to the process of separating water into oxygen and hydrogen in order to extract hydrogen gas to be used as fuel. This process uses clean energy with no green-house gas byproduct. By comparison, the current conventional way of producing hydrogen relies on electricity from fossil fuels

Schematic shows the light trapping effect in nanowire arrays. Photons on are bounced between single nanowires and eventually absorbed by them (R). By harvesting more sun light using the vertical nanotree structure, Wang’s team has developed a way to produce more hydrogen fuel efficiently compared to planar counterparts where they are reflected off the surface (L). Image Credit: Wang Research Group, UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

“Hydrogen is considered to be clean fuel compared to fossil fuel because there is no carbon emission, but the hydrogen currently used is not generated cleanly,” said Ke Sun, a PhD student in electrical engineering who led the project.

“We are trying to mimic what the plant does to convert sunlight to energy,” said Sun. “We are hoping in the near future our ‘nanotree’ structure can eventually be part of an efficient device that functions like a real tree for photosynthesis."

The team is also studying alternatives to zinc oxide, which absorbs the sun’s ultraviolet light, but has stability issues that affect the lifetime usage of the nanotree structure.

33rd Square

Dione, Saturn Moon Found To Have Oxygen Exosphere

2012-03-06T15:38:00.001-08:00

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has “sniffed” molecular oxygen ions around Saturn’s icy moon Dione, confirming the presence of a very tenuous atmosphere.

The discovery supports a theory that suggests all of the moons near Saturn and Jupiter might have oxygen around them.

Researchers say that their finding increases the likelihood of finding the ingredients for life on one of the moons orbiting gas giants.

The study has been published in Geophysical Research Letters."

"We now know that Dione, in addition to Saturn's rings and the moon Rhea, is a source of oxygen molecules," said Robert Tokar, a Cassini team member based at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, N.M., and the lead author of the paper. "This shows that molecular oxygen is actually common in the Saturn system and reinforces that it can come from a process that doesn't involve life."

Dione's oxygen appears to derive from either solar photons or energetic particles from space bombarding the moon's water ice surface and liberating oxygen molecules, Tokar said. But scientists will be looking for other processes, including geological ones, that could also explain the oxygen.

According to co-author Andrew Coates of University College London, Dione has no liquid water and so does not have the conditions to support life. But it is possible that other moons of Jupiter and Saturn do.
"Some of the other moons have liquid oceans and so it is worth looking more closely at them for signs of life," Prof Coates said.

The discovery was made using the Cassini spacecraft, which flew by Dione nearly two years ago. Instruments on board the unmanned probe detected a thin layer of oxygen around the moon, so thin that scientists prefer to call it an "exosphere" rather than an atmosphere.

But the discovery is important because it suggests there is a process at work around the solar system's gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter, in which oxygen is released from their icy satellites.
It seems that highly charged particles from the planets' powerful radiation belts split the water in the ice into hydrogen and oxygen.

Dione's sister moon, Enceladus is thought to harbour a liquid ocean below its icy surface. The same is thought to be true of Europa, Callisto and Ganymede which orbit Jupiter.

Prof Coates is among a group of scientists lobbying the European Space Agency to send an orbiter to explore Jupiter's icy moons - known as the Juice mission.

"These are fascinating places to look for signs of life," he said.

As is Titan, Saturn's largest satellite. Its nitrogen and methane atmosphere is reminiscent of the early Earth, according to Prof Coates.

"It may be an Earth waiting to happen as the outer Solar System warms up," he said.

NASA is now developing a proposal to send a landing craft, or lander, to float on one of the satellite's oily lakes.

NASA JPL

IBM Scientists Image Charge Distribution in a Single Molecule

2012-02-27T07:16:00.000-08:00

Researchers at IBM were able to measure for the first time how charge is distributed within a single molecule.

This achievement promises to enable fundamental scientific insights into single-molecule switching and bond formation between atoms and molecules for future applications such as solar photoconversion, energy storage, or molecular scale computing devices, says IBM.

They directly imaged the charge distribution within a single naphthalocyanine molecule using a special kind of atomic force microscopy called Kelvin probe force microscopy at low temperatures and in ultrahigh vacuum.

“This work demonstrates an important new capability of being able to directly measure how charge arranges itself within an individual molecule”, states Michael Crommie, Professor for Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Berkeley. “Understanding this kind of charge distribution is critical for understanding how molecules work in different environments. I expect this technique to have an especially important future impact on the many areas where physics, chemistry, and biology intersect.”

In fact, the new technique together with STM and AFM provides complementary information about the molecule, showing different properties of interest. This is reminiscent of medical imaging techniques such as X-ray, MRI, or ultrasonography, which yield complementary information about a person’s anatomy and health condition.

“The technique provides another channel of information that will further our understanding of nanoscale physics. It will now be possible to investigate at the single-molecule level how charge is redistributed when individual chemical bonds are formed between atoms and molecules on surfaces. This is essential as we seek to build atomic and molecular scale devices,” explains Fabian Mohn of the Physics of Nanoscale Systems group at IBM Research- Zurich.

The technique could for example be used to study charge separation and charge transport in “charge-transfer complexes,” which consist of two or more molecules and are subject of intense research activity because they hold great promise for applications such as energy storage or photovoltaics.

IBM

Faster Than Light Neutrinos Disproven

2012-02-23T08:54:00.000-08:00

It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A loose connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame.

Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. Many other physicists suspected that the result was due to some kind of error, given that it seems at odds with Einstein's special theory of relativity, which says nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That theory has been vindicated by many experiments over the decades.

According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.

33rd Square

New Method for Regrowing Blood Vessels Developed

2012-02-20T21:04:00.000-08:00

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have demonstrated a new and more effective method for regrowing blood vessels in the heart and limbs — a research breakthrough that could have major implications for how we treat heart disease, the leading cause of death in the Western world.

The treatment method developed by Cockrell School of Engineering Assistant Professor Aaron Baker could allow doctors to bypass surgery and instead repair damaged blood vessels simply by injecting a lipid-incased substance into a patient. Once inside the body, the substance stimulates cell growth and spurs the growth of new blood vessels from pre-existing ones.

The method has been tested successfully on rats, and findings of the study were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

33rd Square

Cancer Drug Used to Reverse Alzheimer's In Mice

2012-02-14T14:17:00.000-08:00

Neuroscientists at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine have made a dramatic breakthrough in their efforts to find a cure for Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers’ findings, published in the journal Science, show that use of a drug in mice appears to quickly reverse the pathological, cognitive and memory deficits caused by the onset of Alzheimer’s. The results point to the significant potential that the medication, bexarotene, has to help the roughly 5.4 million Americans suffering from the progressive brain disease.

Bexarotene has been approved for the treatment of cancer by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for more than a decade. These experiments explored whether the medication might also be used to help patients with Alzheimer’s disease, and the results were more than promising.

Alzheimer’s disease arises in large part from the body’s inability to clear naturally-occurring amyloid beta from the brain. In 2008 Case Western Reserve researcher Gary Landreth, PhD, professor of neurosciences, discovered that the main cholesterol carrier in the brain, Apolipoprotein E (ApoE), facilitated the clearance of the amyloid beta proteins. Landreth, a professor of neurosciences in the university’s medical school, is the senior author of this study as well.

Landreth and his colleagues chose to explore the effectiveness of bexarotene for increasing ApoE expression. The elevation of brain ApoE levels, in turn, speeds the clearance of amyloid beta from the brain. Bexarotene acts by stimulating retinoid X receptors (RXR), which control how much ApoE is produced.
In particular, the researchers were struck by the speed with which bexarotene improved memory deficits and behavior even as it also acted to reverse the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease. The present view of the scientific community is that small soluble forms of amyloid beta cause the memory impairments seen in animal models and humans with the disease. Within six hours of administering bexarotene, however, soluble amyloid levels fell by 25 percent; even more impressive, the effect lasted as long as three days. Finally, this shift was correlated with rapid improvement in a broad range of behaviors in three different mouse models of Alzheimer’s.

33rd Square

RFID Tags Printed On Paper

2012-02-13T09:35:00.000-08:00

For quite a few years now RFID tagging has been a popular engineering and design area of exploration. Tagging experiments have been undertaken for controlling grocery store inventories, monitoring documents and people.

Now, a technique for printing radio frequency identification (RFID) chips on paper has been developed by University of Montpellier researchers.

The technique uses a thermal evaporation process to deposit thin aluminium coil antennas on sheets of paper, which can later be used for packaging or printed material. The researchers claim this is a cheaper way to produce RFID tags, allowing the technology to replace both barcodes and QR codes.

The tags can both store information and provide a way to track the item to which the tag is attached. Unlike barcodes, they use radio signals, which can be detected over a short range, without a visual contact between the tag and the reader device.

RFID tags are not the only printable ultra-thin circuits. Last year, Norwegian technology company Thinfilm Film Electronics ASA developed a memory prototype embedded on a sheet of plastic.

33rd Square

Seagrass is Oldest Living Organism on Earth

2012-02-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

Australian scientists sequenced the DNA of samples of the giant seagrass, Posidonia oceanic, from 40 underwater meadows in an area spanning more than 2,000 miles, from Spain to Cyprus. It's big, it's old and it lives under the sea and now an international research collaboration with The University of Western Australia's Ocean's Institute has confirmed an ancient seagrass to hold the secrets of the oldest living organism on earth.

The analysis, published in the journal PLos ONE, found the seagrass was between 12,000 and 200,000 years old and was most likely to be at least 100,000 years old. This is far older than the current known oldest species, a Tasmanian plant that is believed to be 43,000 years old.

Prof Carlos Duarte, from the University of Western Australia, said the seagrass has been able to reach such old age because it can reproduce asexually and generate clones of itself. Organisms that can only reproduce sexually are inevitably lost at each generation, he added.

"They are continually producing new branches," he told The Daily Telegraph. "They spread very slowly and cover a very large area giving them more area to mine resources. They can then store nutrients within their very large branches during bad conditions for growth."

The researchers note that:

... estimates from field studies and models of the clonal growth of P. oceanica, we estimated these large clones to be hundreds to thousands of years old, suggesting the evolution of general purpose genotypes with large phenotypic plasticity in this species. These results, obtained combining genetics, demography and model-based calculations, question present knowledge and understanding of the spreading capacity and life span of plant clones.

The separate patches of seagrass in the Mediterranean span almost 10 miles and weigh more than 6,000 tons.

33rd Square

Researchers Convert Skin Cells into Neural Precursor Cells Directly

2012-02-01T10:02:00.000-08:00

Photo: courtesy Gabriela Cezar

Mouse skin cells can be converted directly into cells that become the three main parts of the nervous system, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
The finding is an extension of a previous study by the same group showing that mouse and human skin cells can be directly converted into functional neurons.

The multiple successes of the direct conversion method could refute the idea that pluripotency (a term that describes the ability of stem cells to become nearly any cell in the body) is necessary for a cell to transform from one cell type to another. Together, the results raise the possibility that embryonic stem cell research and another technique called “induced pluripotency” could be supplanted by a more direct way of generating specific types of cells for therapy or research.

This new study, published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a substantial advance over the previous paper in that it transforms the skin cells into neural precursor cells, as opposed to neurons. While neural precursor cells can differentiate into neurons, they can also become the two other main cell types in the nervous system: astrocytes and oligodendrocytes. In addition to their greater versatility, the newly derived neural precursor cells offer another advantage over neurons because they can be cultivated to large numbers in the laboratory — a feature critical for their long-term usefulness in transplantation or drug screening.

http://www.33rdsquare.com

Canadian Scientists May Wipe out HIV

2012-01-28T23:01:00.000-08:00

Canadian Scientists May Wipe out HIV: Canadian researchers working on a vaccine to prevent HIV announced Tuesday they have received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to begin clinical trials on humans in January.

X-Ray Lasers Produced at LLNL

2012-01-27T11:31:00.000-08:00

Lawrence Livermore Lab (LLNL) researchers and international collaborators have created the shortest, purest X-ray laser pulses ever achieved, realizing a 45-year-old prediction and ultimately opening the door to new medicines, devices and materials.

The researchers aimed radiation from the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), located at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), at a cell containingneon gas, setting off an avalanche of femtosecond-duration X-ray emissions to create a new “atomic X-ray laser” in the kiloelectronvolt energy regime.

“X-rays give us a penetrating view into the world of atoms and molecules,” said physicist Nina Rohringer, a former LLNL postdoc, now a group leader at Max Planck Society’s Advanced Study Group. She collaborated with researchers from SLAC, LLNL and Colorado State University.

33rd Square

Enhanced View of Muscles With New Breakthrough

2012-01-26T08:07:00.000-08:00

Fascinated with the mechanics of muscle movement in people and animals, Simon Fraser University associate professor James Wakeling has developed a novel method using ultrasound imaging, 3D motion-capture technology and proprietary data-processing software to scan and capture 3D maps of the muscle structure — in just 90 seconds.

Wakeling is adding to the arsenal of increasingly sophisticated medical imaging tools with a new signal-processing method for viewing muscle activation details that have never been seen before.
It’s a medical-imaging breakthrough because previous methods took 15 minutes to do the job—far too long to ask people to hold a muscle contraction.

33rd Square

Stem Cell Breakthrough

2012-01-24T07:55:00.000-08:00

Two women with untreatable eye diseases said they had dramatic improvements in their vision after injections of human embryonic stem cells, making it the first documented time these controversial cells have helped someone.

"This is a big step forward for regenerative medicine, said Dr. Steven Schwartz at UCLA's Jules Stein Eye Institute. "It's nowhere near a treatment for vision loss, but it's a signal that embryonic stem-cell based strategies may work."

Schwartz added several caveats - that the study was preliminary, only in two patients, and that it's difficult to measure vision in low-vision patients. But even so he was "thrilled and excited" about the study.
Schwartz and his colleagues published their study in The Lancet. For each patient, stem cells derived from an embryo were injected into their retinal tissue. They had to take anti-rejection drugs for a short period so their eyes wouldn't reject the foreign tissue.

33rd Square

Speeding Up AI

2012-01-19T22:23:00.000-08:00

Scientists at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid (UC3M) have presented a new technique based on Artificial Intelligence that can automatically create plans, allowing problems to be solved with much greater speed than current methods provide when resources are limited. This method can be applied in sectors such as logistics, autonomous control of robots, fire extinguishing and on-line learning.

http://www.uc3m.es/portal/page/portal/actualidad_cientifica/noticias/artificial_intelligence_technique