Category Archives: Research

Micro-robots to ‘swim’ Through Veins

image of Escherichia coli bacterium with flagella

Micro-robots take off
Photo: Transmission Electron Microscopy photograph of an Escherichia coli bacterium with flagella. The micro-robots are being developed to mimic the swimming behaviour of E.coli.

Micro-robots that can ‘swim’ through the vascular and digestive systems of the human body to perform medical tasks via remote control and, in many cases, avoid invasive major surgery, are being developed at Monash University following today’s announcement that the project has been funded through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Projects scheme.

Physicists Find Long Sought Particle

Long the fixation of physicists worldwide, a tiny particle is found:

After decades of intensive effort by both experimental and theoretical physicists worldwide, a tiny particle with no charge, a very low mass and a lifetime much shorter than a nanosecond, dubbed the “axion,” has now been detected by the University at Buffalo physicist who first suggested its existence in a little-read paper as early as 1974.
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“We identified each vertex for each electron pair and we would not accept any electron pair unless we knew its vertex,” he said. “There was a congestion of all kinds of low mass particles, including axions, near the detector. The background has to be filtered out from this congestion in order to obtain the signal of the axion.”

Water flowed ‘recently’ on Mars

Two gullies that were originally photographed in 1999 and 2001, and imaged again in 2004 and 2005, showed changes consistent with water flowing down the crater walls, according to the study.

In both cases, scientists found bright, light-coloured deposits in the gullies that were not present in the original photos. They concluded that the deposits – possibly mud, salt or frost – were left there when water recently cascaded through the channels.

Other scientists think it possible that gullies like this were caused not by water but by liquid carbon dioxide.

Computer Image Tagging

Researchers Teach Computers How to Name Images By ‘Thinking’

Penn State researchers have “taught” computers how to interpret images using a vocabulary of up to 330 English words, so that a computer can describe a photograph of two polo players, for instance, as “sport,” “people,” “horse,” “polo.”
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More than half the time, the computer’s first tag out of the top 15 tags is correct. In addition, for 98 percent of images tested, the system has provided at least one correct annotation in the top 15 selected words. The system, which completes the annotation in about 1.4 seconds…

This seems to be interesting, but still has a long way to go. Google has been using a human based process for the last few month. They show two people the same image and if their tags match Google accepts that tag as good.

China’s Science and Technology Plan

Interesting article – China’s 15-year science and technology plan by Cong Cao, Richard P. Suttmeier, and Denis Fred Simon:

China initiated a 15-year “Medium- to Long-Term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology.” The MLP calls for China to become an “innovation-oriented society” by the year 2020, and a world leader in science and technology (S&T) by 2050
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China will invest 2.5% of its increasing gross domestic product in R&D by 2020, up from 1.34% in 2005; raise the contributions to economic growth from technological advance to more than 60%

Using Viruses to Construct Electrodes and More

She harnesses viruses to make things

Manufacturing was once the province of human hands, then of machines. Angela Belcher, professor of materials science and engineering and biological engineering at MIT, has pushed manufacturing in another, much smaller, direction: Her lab has genetically engineered viruses that can construct useful objects like electrodes and wires.
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Her lab employed this method to form an electrode that can be used in a lithium ion battery like the rechargeable ones used in electronics. The result looks like an innocuous length of celluloid tape, the sort you could use to wrap a package.

“It’s self-assembled,” says Belcher. “The viruses make these materials at room temperature.” So there’s little pollution.
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Belcher hopes to be making prototypes within the next two years. “Actual devices are five to 10 years off.”

New Understanding of Human DNA

Very interesting Genetic breakthrough that reveals the differences between humans (bozo website broke the link – poor usability):

The discovery has astonished scientists studying the human genome – the genetic recipe of man. Until now it was believed the variation between people was due largely to differences in the sequences of the individual ” letters” of the genome.

It now appears much of the variation is explained instead by people having multiple copies of some key genes that make up the human genome.

Until now it was assumed that the human genome, or “book of life”, is largely the same for everyone, save for a few spelling differences in some of the words. Instead, the findings suggest that the book contains entire sentences, paragraphs or even whole pages that are repeated any number of times.

Fascinating information that I must admit I am still trying to grok.

The studies published today have found that instead of having just two copies of each gene – one from each parent – people can carry many copies, but just how many can vary between one person and the next.

The studies suggest variations in the number of copies of genes is normal and healthy. But the scientists also believe many diseases may be triggered by an abnormal loss or gain in the copies of some key genes.

It will be very interesting to see how this understanding develops.

Nanotechnology Experiment Accidentally Discovers Forger Fix

Security that is small and imperfectly formed by Michael Pollitt:

“One day the chip fell off the paper backing that it was being tested on and the laser just hit the paper instead. Whereas we would have expected to have got no signal, we actually got a signal that had all of the right characteristics for a security device. That was enormously surprising,” says Cowburn.

Rather than reaching for the glue, Cowburn investigated further and found that ordinary paper gave robust security signatures. The random pattern of the paper fibres scattered back the laser beam to detectors, giving far better results than the microchip.

After tuning the laser system, he also discovered that the probability of two pieces of paper producing an identical reading was unimaginably remote.

Nanoscale Images Using an X-ray Laser

Scientists capture nanoscale images with short and intense X-ray laser

Using the free-electron laser at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Livermore scientists, as part of an international collaboration led by LLNL’s Henry Chapman and Janos Hajdu of Uppsala University, were able to record a single diffraction pattern of a nanostructured object before the laser destroyed the sample. A Livermore-developed computer algorithm was then used to recreate an image of the object based on the recorded diffraction pattern. This “lensless” imaging technique could be applied to atomic-resolution imaging because it is not limited by the need to build a high-resolution lens. The flash images could resolve features 50 nanometers in size, which is about 10 times smaller than what is achievable with an optical microscope.

Nanotechnology Research

Brave nano world by Nate Birt:

At the federal level, the National Nanotechnology Initiative has requested more than $1 billion for nanotechnology research and development in 2007. The initiative is a network of 25 federal organizations, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Defense, that fund nanotechnology research at their own labs and at universities around the country, including MU.

Former President Bill Clinton started the initiative in 2000, and it became a part of the federal budget in fiscal 2001. Back then, the federal government spent an estimated $464 million on nanotechnology