Category Archives: Research

Sea Urchin Genome

Sea Urchin photo

Sea Urchin Genome Reveals Striking Similarities to Humans by Stefan Lovgren, National Geographic News:

The scientists identified more than 23,000 genes in the 814 million base pairs, or “letters,” of DNA code taken from the sea urchin.

The sea urchin represents the first sequenced genome from the echinoderms, which are the closest known relatives of the chordates, the group that includes vertebrates, animals with spinal columns. The genome includes analogs to many essential human genes that were previously thought to be exclusive to vertebrates.
…
The eyeless sea urchin also has genes associated with taste, smell, hearing, balance—and surprisingly, even vision.

How Our Brain Resolves Sight

Brain Pathway Brings Order to Visual Chaos

The world you see around you appears perfectly stationary, even though your eyes dart back and forth two to three times every second in little hops called saccades. For more than a century researchers have assumed that the brain must keep track of the impulses that cause these tiny motions, so as to subtract their effect from our visual awareness. Now researchers have identified a circuit in the monkey brain that seems to play this role.

Web Science

MIT and University of Southampton launch World Wide Web research collaboration:

The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) will generate a research agenda for understanding the scientific, technical and social challenges underlying the growth of the web. Of particular interest is the volume of information on the web that documents more and more aspects of human activity and knowledge. WSRI research projects will weigh such questions as: How do we access information and assess its reliability? By what means may we assure its use complies with social and legal rules? How will we preserve the web over time?

Commenting on the new initiative, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a founding director of WSRI, said, “As the web celebrates its first decade of widespread use, we still know surprisingly little about how it evolved, and we have only scratched the surface of what could be realized with deeper scientific investigation into its design, operation and impact on society.

Tim Berners Lee continues to show great insight. Continue reading →

Physicists Observe New Property of Matter

Physicists Observe New Property of Matter by Kim McDonald

Physicists at UC San Diego have for the first time observed the spontaneous production of coherence within “excitons,” the bound pairs of electrons and holes that enable semiconductors to function as novel electronic devices.

Scientists working in the emerging field of nanotechnology, which is finding commercial applications for ultra-small material objects, believe that this newly discovered property could eventually help the development of novel computing devices and provide them with new insights into the quirky quantum properties of matter.
…
“What is coherence and why is it so important?” said Butov. “To start with, modern physics was born by the discovery that all particles in nature are also waves. Coherence means that such waves are all ‘in sync.’ The spontaneous coherence of the matter waves is the reason behind some of the most exciting phenomena in nature such as superconductivity and lasing.”

Programing Bacteria

Duke Packard Fellow to Examine Processing Speed of “Reprogrammed” Bacteria:

research into the development of synthetic gene circuits, carefully designed combinations of genes that can be “loaded” into bacteria or other cells, directing their activity in much the same way that a basic computer program directs a computer. Such re-programmed bacteria might eventually serve in a wide variety of applications, including biocomputing, medical treatments, and environmental cleanup
…
The research now, however, is in its very early stages, You said. So far, E. coli bacteria have been programmed to grow in numbers until a certain population size is reached. The bacteria then kill themselves off, growing again only after their numbers dwindle sufficiently.

The relatively simple program takes advantage of bacteria’s ability to communicate with one another, a process known as “quorum sensing,” and essential genetic pathways that control cell death.

Educating Scientists and Engineers

Business Week has an articles discussing what business would like to see from graduates, Biotech’s Beef:

The problem is a disconnect between what universities are teaching and what biotech wants. “The focus of academia is getting basic and theoretical knowledge in place,”
…
There are several weaknesses. First, recent grads lack the technical knowledge to carry out applied research in areas that straddle engineering, math, and computers. Second, job candidates have little awareness of what the Food & Drug Administration is looking for when it considers whether or not to approve a drug. Recent grads simply aren’t familiar with issues such as quality control and regulatory affairs.

This general idea is not new. But, as always (and probably more so if the nature of what is needed is changing faster today than in the past) the changing environment does require universities (and students, at least those that want to work in industry) to adapt.

But with H-1B quotas filling up earlier every year, Invitrogen has chosen to do more drug development in Japan, China, and India. It may also open facilities in Korea and Singapore, says Rodney Moses, Invitrogen’s vice-president of talent acquisition. Compensation in China and India is lower than in the U.S., but that’s not what motivates the move offshore, says Moses. “If the talent is located in Singapore, it’s just easier for us to go there.”

U.S. colleges take the problem seriously. State university systems in California, Wisconsin, and elsewhere are adding more industry-oriented classes.

Antibiotic Research

anti-microbial ‘grammar’ posits new language of healing

“In the last 40 years, there have been only two new classes of antibiotic drugs discovered and brought to the market,” said graduate student Christopher Loose, lead author of a paper on the work that appears in the Oct. 19 issue of Nature. “There is an incredible need to come up with new medicines.”
…
focusing their attention on antimicrobial peptides, or short strings of amino acids. Such peptides are naturally found in multicellular organisms, where they play a role in defense against infectious bacteria.

See previous post on the paucity of new antibiotic discoveries

Open Access Engineering Journals

Engineering Economics – Kaunas University of Technology, Lithuania
Crosstalk – the Journal of Defense Software Engineering – United States Government
Information Technology Journal – ANSInet
BioMedical Engineering OnLine – BioMed Central
Electronic Journal of Structural Engineering – The University of Melbourne, Australia
International Journal of Online Engineering
Journal of Chemical Engineering of Japan – The Society of Chemical Engineers, Japan
Electronic Journal of Geotechnical Engineering
International Commission of Agricultural Engineering – CIGR

Continue reading →

Inside Live Red Blood Cells

Technique reveals inner lives of red blood cells:

For the first time, researchers at MIT can see every vibration of a cell membrane, using a technique that could one day allow scientists to create three-dimensional images of the inner workings of living cells.
…
Soon, the researchers hope to extend their view beyond the cell membrane into the cell, to create images of what is happening inside living cells — including how cells communicate with each other and what causes them to become cancerous.

“One of our goals is create 3D tomographic images of the internal structure of a cell,” said Michael Feld, MIT professor of physics and director of the Spectroscopy Lab. “The beauty is that with this technique, you can study dynamical processes in living cells in real time.”

Example of what that will look like: The Inner Life of a Cell – Animation – ok actually that level of detail may still be fairly far away 🙂

Autonomous Flying Vehicles

Photo of Flying Robots

MIT’s intelligent aircraft fly, cooperate autonomously

Each UAV is networked with a PC. The setup allows a single operator to command the entire system, flying multiple UAVs simultaneously. Moreover, it requires no piloting skills; software flies the vehicles from takeoff to landing.

The vehicles in MIT’s test platform are inexpensive, off-the-shelf gadgets; they can be easily repaired or replaced with a new vehicle, just as might happen in a real-world scenario involving numerous small UAVs on a long-term mission. The researchers can thus experiment constantly without concern for mishaps with expensive equipment.
…
In addition, the team recently achieved a milestone in autonomous flight: landing on a moving surface. Using “monocular vision,” one of the quadrotors successfully landed on a moving vehicle — a remote-controlled lab cart. A video camera fastened to the UAV uses a visual “target” to determine in real time the vehicle’s distance relative to the landing platform. The ground station then uses this information to compute commands that allow the UAV to land on the moving platform. This technology could enable UAVs to land on ships at sea or on Humvees moving across terrain.

More cool stuff: La Vida Robot – Autonomous Vehicle Technology Competition – Robot Football (Soccer) – More Unmanned Water Vehicles