Tag Archives: Research

Wireless Power

An end to spaghetti power cables by Maggie Shiels, BBC News

Mr Rattner envisaged a scenario where a laptop’s battery could be recharged when the machine gets within several feet of a transmit resonator which could be embedded in tables, work surfaces, picture frames and even behind walls.

Intel’s technology relies on an idea called magnetic induction. It is a principle similar to the way a trained singer can shatter a glass using their voice; the glass absorbs acoustic energy at its natural frequency. At the wall socket, power is put into magnetic fields at a transmitting resonator – basically an antenna. The receiving resonator is tuned to efficiently absorb energy from the magnetic field, whereas nearby objects do not.

Intel’s demonstration has built on work done originally by Marin Soljacic, a physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, researcher Alanson Sample showed how to make a 60-watt light bulb glow from an energy source three feet away. This was achieved with relatively high efficiency, only losing a quarter of the energy it started with.

Don’t expect to see this available commercially this year, they estimate it is at least 5 years away. Though this is not university and business collaboration in the sense they are working together, it is in the sense that Intel is building upon the work MIT did. See other posts on university and business collaboration.

DNA Passed to Descendants Changed by Your Life

How your behaviour can change your children’s DNA

Until recently that would also have been the opinion of most scientists. Genes, it was thought, were highly resilient. Even if people did wreck their own DNA through bad diet, smoking and getting fat, that damage was unlikely to be passed to future generations.

Now, however, those assumptions are being re-examined. At the heart of this revolution is a simple but controversial idea: that DNA can be modified or imprinted with the experiences of your parents and grandparents.

According to this new science, known as epigenetics, your ancestors’ diet, smoking habits, exposure to pollutants and levels of obesity could be affecting you today. In turn, your lifestyle could affect your children and grandchildren.
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If we drink heavily, take drugs, get fat or wait too long to reproduce, then epigenetics might start tying up some of the wrong genes and loosening the bonds on others. Sometimes those changes will affect sperm and egg cells.

It seems to me this area is still far from having conclusive proof. But it is another great example of scientists seeking to improve our knowledge of how things work.

$1 Billion for Life Sciences in Massachusetts

Petri dish for economic growth

So far, the signs are good. The bill commits $500 million for research facilities, infrastructure improvements, and other capital projects; $250 million for tax credits; and $250 million for research grants. The plan is flexible enough to support research at private institutions while making major investments at public universities. Patrick and legislators fended off the most flagrant attempts to divert money into political pet projects with little direct relevance to the biotech industry, such as $49.5 million for a science building at a state college with no graduate science programs.

As I have mentioned many times the centers of scientific excellence are important for economic success. Massachusetts has some great advantages with MIT, Harvard, many biotech companies… but still must continue to focus on staying a center of excellence.

Cloak of Silence

Experts unveil ‘cloak of silence’

“The mathematics behind cloaking has been known for several years,” said Professor John Pendry of Imperial College London, UK, an expert in cloaking. “What hasn’t been available for sound is the sort of materials you need to build a cloak out of.”
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The Spanish team who conducted the new work believe the key to a practical device are so-called “sonic crystals”. These artificial composites – also known as “meta-materials” – can be engineered to produce specific acoustical effects.
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The research builds on work by scientists from Duke University in North Carolina, US, and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Earlier this year, independent teams from the two institutions demonstrated the mathematics necessary to create an acoustic cloak. Other scientists have shown that objects can be cloaked from electromagnetic radiation, such as microwaves.

New Iron Based Superconductors

Research Suggests Novel Superconductor Is in a Powerful Class All its Own

discovered surprising magnetic properties in the new superconductors that suggest they may have very powerful applications — from improved MRI machines and research magnets, to a new generation of superconducting electric motors, generators and power transmission lines. The research also adds to the long list of mysteries surrounding superconductivity, providing evidence that the new materials, which scientists are calling “doped rare earth iron oxyarsenides,” develop superconductivity in quite a new way
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Early this year, Japanese scientists who had been developing iron-based superconducting compounds for several years, finally tweaked the recipe just right with a pinch of arsenic. The result: a superconductor, also featuring oxygen and the rare earth element lanthanum, performing at a promising -413 degrees F (26 K). The presence of iron in the material was another scientific stunner: Because it’s ferromagnetic, iron stays magnetized after exposure to a magnetic field, and any current generates such a field. As a rule, magnetism’s effect on superconductivity is not to enhance it, but to kill it.

Iron based superconductors might resist magnetic fields over 100 Tesla

The new superconductors seem like they will be able to make improved MRI machines and research magnets, a new generation of superconducting electric motors, generators and power transmission lines. Tesla is a unit of magnetic field strength; the Earth’s magnetic field is one twenty thousandth of a tesla.

Molecular Action May Help Keep Birds on Course

Four decades after scientists showed that migratory birds use Earth’s magnetic field to orient themselves during their seasonal journeys, researchers have at last found a molecular mechanism that may explain how they do it.

If the hypothesis is true, the planet’s magnetic field lines — which arch around Earth from north to south — may be plainly visible to birds, like the dashed line in the middle of a road.

The work, described online yesterday in the journal Nature, was conducted in a test tube and does not prove that birds actually use the mechanism. And researchers aligned with a competing model say they are not convinced.

But by identifying for the first time a molecule that reacts to very weak magnetic fields, the experiments prove the plausibility of a long-hypothesized method of avian navigation that has had a credibility problem because no one had ever found a molecule with the required sensitivity.

Wheat Rust Research

By increasing the production of wheat it is said Norman Borlaug has saved more lives than anyone else who ever lived, for which he was awarded the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. See his New York Times opinion piece: Stem Rust Never Sleeps

Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world’s people. The world wheat harvest now stands at about 600 million metric tons.

In the last decade, global wheat production has not kept pace with rising population, or the increasing per capita demand for wheat products in newly industrializing countries. At the same time, international support for wheat research has declined significantly. And as a consequence, in 2007-08, world wheat stocks (as a percentage of demand) dropped to their lowest level since 1947-48. And prices have steadily climbed to the highest level in 25 years.

The new strains of stem rust, called Ug99 because they were discovered in Uganda in 1999, are much more dangerous than those that, 50 years ago, destroyed as much as 20 percent of the American wheat crop. Today’s lush, high-yielding wheat fields on vast irrigated tracts are ideal environments for the fungus to multiply, so the potential for crop loss is greater than ever.

If publicly financed international researchers move together aggressively and systematically, high-yielding replacement wheat varieties can be developed and made available to farmers before stem rust disease becomes a global epidemic.

The Bush administration was initially quick to grasp Ug99’s threat to American wheat production. In 2005, Mike Johanns, then secretary of agriculture, instructed the federal agriculture research service to take the lead in developing an international strategy to deal with stem rust. In 2006, the Agency for International Development mobilized emergency financing to help African and Asian countries accelerate needed wheat research.

But more recently, the administration has begun reversing direction. The State Department is recommending ending American support for the international agricultural research centers that helped start the Green Revolution, including all money for wheat research. And significant financial cuts have been proposed for important research centers, including the Department of Agriculture’s essential rust research laboratory in St. Paul.

This shocking short-sightedness goes against the interests not only of American wheat farmers and consumers but of all humanity. It is tantamount to the United States abandoning its pledge to help halve world hunger by 2015.

Sudden Oak Death

Sudden Oak Death pathogen is evolving, says new study that reconstructs the epidemic

The pathogen responsible for Sudden Oak Death first got its grip in California’s forests outside a nursery in Santa Cruz and at Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County before spreading out to eventually kill millions of oaks and tanoaks along the Pacific Coast, according to a new study led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. It provides, for the first time, evidence of how the epidemic unfolded in this state.
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The study, scheduled to appear later this month in the online early edition of the journal Molecular Ecology, also shows that the pathogen is currently evolving in California, with mutant genotypes appearing as new areas are infested.
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The most likely scenario, said Garbelotto, is that the pathogen arrived in California through the nursery trade, and that it then spread from the nursery in Santa Cruz to trees bordering the facility. While the site at Mt. Tamalpais is not adjacent to a nursery, there is anecdotal evidence of frequent use of ornamental plants from nurseries in landscaping projects in the area, said Garbelotto.

Biodegradable Plastic Bags and Bottles

researchers look to make environmentally friendly plastics

Every year, more than 30 billion water bottles are added to America’s landfills, creating a mountainous environmental problem. But if research at Missouri University of Science and Technology is successful, the plastic bottles of the future could literally disappear within four months of being discarded.

The Missouri S&T research team is constructing new breeds of biodegradable and bioavailable plastics in an effort to reduce the tons of plastic waste that ends up in the nation’s landfills each year. Bioavailable plastics contain substances that can be absorbed by living systems during their normal physiological functions.

By combining and modifying a variety of bio-based, oil-based and natural polymers, the team seeks to create optimal blends that can be used to make agricultural films, bottles, biomedical and drug delivery devices, and more.
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As polylactic acid degrades, the material reacts with water to decompose into small molecules, which are then mineralized into water and carbon dioxide.

“In general, the main end products of polymer degradation are water and carbon dioxide,” Shahlari explains. “Polylatic acid has the potential of replacing the regular water bottles, and we anticipate that our research could be incorporated into that field too.

It sure seems like they are saying these would really biodegrade. Plastic bags can photodegrade where they break down into small bits of plastic that might be hard to see but are still toxic that can be eaten by animals, and us. As one would figure – that is not a good thing. The ocean garbage floats are not huge amounts of plastic bags and bottles but instead huge amounts of small and tiny plastic particles. I know using corn based bags has been looked at previously and used.

Self-assembling Nanofibers Heal Spinal Cords in Mice

Self-assembling Nanofibers Heal Spinal Cords by Prachi Patel-Predd

An engineered material that can be injected into damaged spinal cords could help prevent scars and encourage damaged nerve fibers to grow. The liquid material, developed by Northwestern University materials science professor Samuel Stupp, contains molecules that self-assemble into nanofibers, which act as a scaffold on which nerve fibers grow.

Stupp and his colleagues described in a recent paper in the Journal of Neuroscience that treatment with the material restores function to the hind legs of paralyzed mice.
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The new work is the first test for the material to heal spinal cord injuries in animals. And Kessler says that it worked better than the researchers expected. The researchers stimulated a spinal cord injury in mice and injected the material 24 hours later. They found that the material reduced the size of scars and stimulated the growth of the nerve fibers through the scars. It promoted the growth of both types of nerve fibers that make up the spinal cord: motor fibers that carry signals from the brain to the limbs, and sensory fibers that carry sense signals to the brain. What is more, the material encouraged the nerve stem cells to mature into cells that create myelin–an insulating layer around nerve fibers that helps them to conduct signals more effectively.