Model for Implantable Artificial Kidney to Replace Dialysis Unveiled
Shuvo Roy, PhD
UCSF researchers today unveiled a prototype model of the first implantable artificial kidney, in a development that one day could eliminate the need for dialysis.
The device, which would include thousands of microscopic filters as well as a bioreactor to mimic the metabolic and water-balancing roles of a real kidney, is being developed in a collaborative effort by engineers, biologists and physicians nationwide, led by Shuvo Roy, PhD, in the UCSF Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences.
The treatment has been proven to work for the sickest patients using a room-sized external model developed by a team member in Michigan. Roy’s goal is to apply silicon fabrication technology, along with specially engineered compartments for live kidney cells, to shrink that large-scale technology into a device the size of a coffee cup. The device would then be implanted in the body without the need for immune suppressant medications, allowing the patient to live a more normal life.
“This device is designed to deliver most of the health benefits of a kidney transplant, while addressing the limited number of kidney donors each year,” said Roy, an associate professor in the UCSF School of Pharmacy who specializes in developing micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) technology for biomedical applications. “This could dramatically reduce the burden of renal failure for millions of people worldwide, while also reducing one of the largest costs in U.S. healthcare.” (more…)
Hurricane Earl Seen From the Space Station
Photographed by an Expedition 24 crew member on the International Space Station, this is an oblique view that shows the eye (just left of center) of Hurricane Earl (at this time a category 4 but later downgraded to a category 3), centered just north of the Virgin Islands near 19.3 north latitude and 64.7 west longitude packing 115-kilometer winds. A Russian Soyuz vehicle is docked to the station (foreground). The photo was taken with a digital still camera using a 55mm lens.
Helping Corn-Based Plastics Take More Heat
Your favorite catsup or fruit juice might be “hot-filled” at the food-processing plant—that is, poured into its waiting container while the catsup or juice is still hot from pasteurization. Current containers made from corn-based plastics literally can’t take the heat of hot-filling, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) chemist William J. Orts.
But Orts and a team of collaborators from Lapol, LLC, of Santa Barbara, Calif., hope to change that by making corn-derived plastics more heat-tolerant. Orts and Lapol co-investigators Allison Flynn and Lennard Torres are doing the work at the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Western Regional Research Center in Albany, Calif., where Orts leads the Bioproduct Chemistry and Engineering Research Unit. ARS is USDA’s principal intramural scientific research agency.
By boosting the bioplastics’ heat tolerance, the collaboration—under way since 2007—may broaden the range of applications for which corn-derived plastics could be used as an alternative to petroleum-based plastics. (more…)
Researchers Create ‘Quantum Cats’ Made of Light
NIST research associate Thomas Gerrits at the laser table used to create "quantum cats" made of light. (Credit: NIST)
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have created “quantum cats” made of photons (particles of light), boosting prospects for manipulating light in new ways to enhance precision measurements as well as computing and communications based on quantum physics.
The NIST experiments, described in a forthcoming paper,* repeatedly produced light pulses that each possessed two exactly opposite properties—specifically, opposite phases, as if the peaks of the light waves were superimposed on the troughs. Physicists call this an optical Schrödinger’s cat. NIST’s quantum cat is the first to be made by detecting three photons at once and is one of the largest and most well-defined cat states ever made from light. (Larger cat states have been created in different systems by other research groups, including one at NIST.)
A “cat state” is a curiosity of the quantum world, where particles can exist in “superpositions” of two opposite properties simultaneously. Cat state is a reference to German physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famed 1935 theoretical notion of a cat that is both alive and dead simultaneously.
“This is a new state of light, predicted in quantum optics for a long time,” says NIST research associate Thomas Gerrits, lead author of the paper. “The technologies that enable us to get these really good results are ultrafast lasers, knowledge of the type of light needed to create the cat state, and photon detectors that can actually count individual photons.” (more…)
Ultraviolet Source Helps NASA Spacecraft Measure the Origins of Space Weather
NIST’s unique 'sliding spark source' (inside the glass tubing) feeds ultraviolet (UV) light into NASA’s Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation instrument, designed to measure magnetic fields on the sun. (Credit: Reader/NIST)
With a brilliant, finely tuned spark of ultraviolet (UV) light, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) helped NASA scientists successfully position a crucial UV sensor inside a space-borne instrument to observe a “hidden” layer of the Sun where violent space weather can originate.
Dark spots on the Sun release particles and electromagnetic fields into space. As these particles and fields pass through the Sun’s “transition region,” 5,000 kilometers above the surface, they can gather considerable steam, resulting in violent episodes of “space weather” that can damage Earth-orbiting satellites and disrupt electronic communications.
The powerful magnetic fields in the transition region can be studied indirectly, by observing the UV light emanating from that region. The fields slightly shift the colors (wavelengths) of UV light released by charged atoms (ions) in their vicinity. Measuring how much these wavelengths shift can yield information on the magnetic field’s strength.
The catch is you can’t do it from Earth, where the atmosphere absorbs the UV light, so a team at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., constructed a rocket-borne instrument, known as the Solar Ultraviolet Magnetograph Investigation (SUMI), designed to take pictures of these magnetic fields from space. (more…)
Researchers Discover How to Conduct First Test of ‘Untestable’ String Theory
Professor Michael Duff from Imperial College London. (Imperial College London)
Researchers describe how to carry out the first experimental test of string theory in a paper published tomorrow in Physical Review Letters.
String theory was originally developed to describe the fundamental particles and forces that make up our universe. The new research, led by a team from Imperial College London, describes the unexpected discovery that string theory also seems to predict the behaviour of entangled quantum particles. As this prediction can be tested in the laboratory, researchers can now test string theory.
Over the last 25 years, string theory has become physicists’ favourite contender for the ‘theory of everything’, reconciling what we know about the incredibly small from particle physics with our understanding of the very large from our studies of cosmology. Using the theory to predict how entangled quantum particles behave provides the first opportunity to test string theory by experiment.
“If experiments prove that our predictions about quantum entanglement are correct, this will demonstrate that string theory ‘works’ to predict the behaviour of entangled quantum systems,” said Professor Mike Duff FRS, lead author of the study from the Department of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London. (more…)
University of Colorado Students Help NASA Decommission Satellite
CU-Boulder student command controllers Melanie Dubin, left, and Andrew Berg, center, work with professional command controller Matt Dahl to upload commands to a satellite at the Mission Operations Center at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. (Credit: Photo by Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado)
University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates, who have been helping to control five NASA satellites from campus, participated in the unusual decommissioning of a functioning satellite with a failed science payload in recent days, bringing the craft into Earth re-entry to burn up yesterday.
The satellite, known as the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, orbited Earth for seven years, gathering valuable data on the polar regions and helping scientists develop a better understanding of ice sheets and sea ice dynamics. The CU-Boulder control team at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics — made up primarily of undergraduates who work side-by-side with LASP professionals — uploaded commands for the satellite to burn its remaining fuel and switched off the transmitter.
The satellite successfully re-entered Earth’s atmosphere Aug. 30 and largely burned up, with pieces of debris falling into the Barents Sea — which is part of the Arctic Ocean north of Norway and Russia — said LASP Missions Operations and Data Systems Director Bill Possel. Built by Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. of Boulder, the ICESat spacecraft worked perfectly throughout the entire mission, said Possel. (more…)
Goodbye to Cold Nights
Farm in Candelario, Spain (G.Chris Clark)
Given the impact of climatic extremes on agriculture and health in Spain, researchers at the University of Salamanca (USAL) have analysed the two factors most representative of these thermal extremes between 1950 and 2006 – warm days and cold nights. The results for mainland Spain show an increase in the number of warm days greater than that for the rest of the planet and a reduction in the number of cold nights.
Few studies to date have focused on climatic extremes and the changes occurring in maximum and minimum temperatures and in warm day and cold night variables. Until now, most research studies had analysed average temperature changes on a global scale. These results indicated an increase “most probably” caused by human factors.
The new study, published in the journal Climatic Change, has made it possible to analyse the causes of the variations in climatic extremes from a physical point of view, in other words “which changes are taking place in the air masses reaching the Iberian Peninsula, as well as sea temperature”, as Concepción Rodríguez, lead author of the study and a researcher at the General and Atmospheric Physics Department at the USAL, tells SINC. (more…)
Off-the-shelf Dyes Improve Solar Cells
Like most technologies, work on solar devices has proceeded in generational waves. First came bulk silicon-based solar cells built with techniques that borrowed heavily from those used to make computer chips. Next came work on thin films of materials specifically tailored to harvest the sun’s energy, but still more or less borrowed from the realm of microelectronics manufacturing. Then came the third generation, described by one researcher and blogger as “the wild west,” which among other objectives aims to build inexpensive next-generation solar cells by relying on decidedly low-tech wet chemistry.
In a paper in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, which is published by the American Institute of Physics, Ram Mehra of Sharda University in Greater Noida, India, reports success in boosting the ability of zinc oxide solar cells to absorb visible light simply by applying a blended mixture of various off-the-shelf dyes commonly used in food and medical industries. Working with colleagues from the University of Delhi, Mehra doused cells with a variety of dyes in a soak-then-dry procedure not unlike that used to color a tee-shirt in a home washing machine. (more…)
IceCube Neutrino Observatory Nears Completion
Signals from the sensors are carried by cables to the IceCube counting house that houses a large cluster of computers to reconstruct in real time some 2,000 muon tracks every second. (Photo by J. Haugen)
In December 2010, IceCube — the world’s first kilometer-scale neutrino observatory, whiuch is located beneath the Antarctic ice — will finally be completed after two decades of planning. In an article in the AIP’s Review of Scientific Instruments, Francis Halzen, the principal investigator of the IceCube project, and his colleague Spencer Klein of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provide a comprehensive description of the observatory, its instrumentation, and its scientific mission—including its most publicized goal: finding the sources of cosmic rays.
“Almost a century after their discovery, we do not know from where the most energetic particles to hit the Earth originate and how they acquire their incredible energies,” says Halzen, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
After light, neutrinos, which are created in the decay of radioactive particles, are the most abundant particles in the universe. High-energy neutrinos are formed in the universe’s most violent events, like exploding stars and gamma ray bursts. Because the neutrino has no charge, essentially no mass, and only interacts weakly with matter, trillions of neutrinos pass through our bodies each day, without effect. On extremely rare occasions, a neutrino will strike the nucleus of an atom, creating a particle, called a muon, and blue light that can be detected with optical sensors. The trick is spying those collisions—and, in particular, the collisions of high-energy neutrinos. IceCube does it by sheer virtue of its size. (more…)
Climate Change Implicated in Decline of Horseshoe Crabs
Horseshoe crabs congregate annually at Delaware Bay. (Greg Breese, , U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service )
A distinct decline in horseshoe crab numbers has occurred that parallels climate change associated with the end of the last Ice Age, according to a study that used genomics to assess historical trends in population sizes.
The new research also indicates that horseshoe crabs numbers may continue to decline in the future because of predicted climate change, said Tim King, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and a lead author on the new study published in Molecular Ecology.
While the current decline in horseshoe crabs is attributed in great part to overharvest for fishing bait and for the pharmaceutical industry, the new research indicates that climate change also appears to have historically played a role in altering the numbers of successfully reproducing horseshoe crabs. More importantly, said King, predicted future climate change, with its accompanying sea-level rise and water temperature fluctuations, may well limit horseshoe crab distribution and interbreeding, resulting in distributional changes and localized and regional population declines, such as happened after the last Ice Age. (more…)
Electric Cars ‘Greener’ Than Expected in Europe
Opel Ampera at EU conference in Spain promoting electric vehicles.
It is not an easy task to compare the environmental effects of battery powered cars to those caused by conventionally fuelled automobiles. The degree to which manufacture, usage and disposal of the batteries used to store the necessary electrical energy are detrimental to the environment is not exactly known. Now, for the first time, a team of Empa scientists have made a detailed life cycle assessment (LCA) or ecobalance of lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries, in particular the chemically improved (i.e. more environmentally friendly) version of the ones most frequently used in electric vehicles.
The investigation shows that if the power used to charge the battery is not derived from purely hydroelectric sources, then it is primarily the operation of the electric car, which has an environmental impact, exactly as is the case with conventionally fuelled automobiles. The size of the environmental footprint depends on which sources of power are used to “fuel” the e-mobile. The Li-ion battery itself has, in contrast, a limited effect on the LCA of the electric vehicle. This is contrary to initial expectations that the manufacture of the batteries could negate the advantages of the electric drive. (more…)
Mars’s Mysterious Elongated Crater
Orcus Patera is an enigmatic elliptical depression located between the volcanoes of Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons. This well-defined depression extends approximately 380 km by 140 km in a NNE–SSW direction. It has a rim that rises up to 1800 m above the surrounding plains, while the floor of the depression lies 400–600 m below the surroundings. The straight graben that cut across its rim are clearly seen in this image. (Credits: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum))
Orcus Patera is an enigmatic elliptical depression near Mars’s equator, in the eastern hemisphere of the planet. Located between the volcanoes of Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons, its formation remains a mystery.
Often overlooked, this well-defined depression extends approximately 380 km by 140 km in a NNE–SSW direction. It has a rim that rises up to 1800 m above the surrounding plains, while the floor of the depression lies 400–600 m below the surroundings.
The term ‘patera’ is used for deep, complex or irregularly shaped volcanic craters such as the Hadriaca Patera and Tyrrhena Patera at the north-eastern margin of the Hellas impact basin. However, despite its name and the fact that it is positioned near volcanoes, the actual origin of Orcus Patera remains unclear
Aside from volcanism, there are a number of other possible origins. Orcus Patera may be a large and originally round impact crater, subsequently deformed by compressional forces. Alternatively, it could have formed after the erosion of aligned impact craters. However, the most likely explanation is that it was made in an oblique impact, when a small body struck the surface at a very shallow angle, perhaps less than five degrees from the horizontal. (more…)
Students Design Unmanned Drone to Take Action Against Terrorist Activity
Kevin Kochersberger, director of the Unmanned Systems Laboratory at Virginia Tech, looks at the current design of an unmanned vehicle built by mostly undergraduate engineering students. (Virginia Tech Photo)
In less than two years, an unmanned aircraft search and rescue competition will be happening in a remote area in Australia. Kevin Kochersberger, director of the Unmanned System Lab (USL) at Virginia Tech, hopes to take a student design team and believes they have an excellent shot at winning the $50,000 prize money.
Kochersberger of Blacksburg, Va., has reason to have a lot of faith in his student design teams. When he assumed responsibility for the USL, his first team won second place in the 2008 outdoor aerial robotic competition. The pot was sweet then, too. They came home with $17,000 in prize money, partially because no team among the 40 entrants was awarded a prize for first.
The Association of Unmanned Vehicle System International altered the competition the next year to an indoor event. The entrants must fly their autonomous unmanned vehicle, a quad-rotor vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, safely into and through a building. Each year, the students are building upon the previous teams’ research.
In 2012, the sixth international competition will be based on the following real-life scenario. Credible information from an intelligence agency indicates that highly sensitive information detailing plans to sabotage the control of the Eurasian banking system is contained on an unsecured USB flash drive kept in a remote and highly secured office. The mission of the autonomous vehicle is to remove the flash drive by entering through an identified upper-story broken window. Added to the complicated task, the vehicle must be able to read Arabic, and then decide how to proceed once inside the building. (more…)
‘Dry Water’ Could Store Carbon Diioxide Commercially
Powdered material called "dry water" could provide a new way to store carbon dioxide in an effort to fight global warming. (Credit: Ben Carter)
An unusual substance known as “dry water,” which resembles powdered sugar, could provide a new way to absorb and store carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming, scientists reported here today at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
The powder shows bright promise for a number of other uses, they said. It may, for instance, be a greener, more energy-efficient way of jumpstarting the chemical reactions used to make hundreds of consumer products. Dry water also could provide a safer way to store and transport potentially harmful industrial materials.
“There’s nothing else quite like it,” said Ben Carter, Ph.D., researcher for study leader Professor Andrew Cooper. “Hopefully, we may see ‘dry water’ making waves in the future.”
Carter explained that the substance became known as “dry water” because it consists of 95 percent water and yet is a dry powder. Each powder particle contains a water droplet surrounded by modified silica, the stuff that makes up ordinary beach sand. The silica coating prevents the water droplets from combining and turning back into a liquid. The result is a fine powder that can slurp up gases, which chemically combine with the water molecules to form what chemists term a hydrate. (more…)
Electricity Collected from the Air Could Become the Newest Alternative Energy Source
Powering homes with electricity collected from the air may be possible after scientists report solving a centuries old riddle about how moisture in the atmosphere becomes electrically charged. (Credit: Martin Fischer)
Imagine devices that capture electricity from the air ? much like solar cells capture sunlight ? and using them to light a house or recharge an electric car. Imagine using similar panels on the rooftops of buildings to prevent lightning before it forms. Strange as it may sound, scientists already are in the early stages of developing such devices, according to a report presented here today at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
“Our research could pave the way for turning electricity from the atmosphere into an alternative energy source for the future,” said study leader Fernando Galembeck, Ph.D. His research may help explain a 200-year-old scientific riddle about how electricity is produced and discharged in the atmosphere. “Just as solar energy could free some households from paying electric bills, this promising new energy source could have a similar effect,” he maintained.
“If we know how electricity builds up and spreads in the atmosphere, we can also prevent death and damage caused by lightning strikes,” Galembeck said, noting that lightning causes thousands of deaths and injuries worldwide and millions of dollars in property damage.
The notion of harnessing the power of electricity formed naturally has tantalized scientists for centuries. They noticed that sparks of static electricity formed as steam escaped from boilers. Workers who touched the steam even got painful electrical shocks. Famed inventor Nikola Tesla, for example, was among those who dreamed of capturing and using electricity from the air. (more…)
When Galaxies Collide: How the First Super-Massive Black Holes Were Born
In the image, the panel illustrates the complexity of dynamical evolution in a typical collision between two equal-mass disk galaxies. The simulation follows dark matter, stars, gas, and supermassive black holes, but only the gas component is visualized. Brighter colors indicate regions of higher gas density and the time corresponding to each snapshot is given by the labels. The first 10 panel images measure 100 kpc on a side, roughly five times the diameter of the visible part of the Milky Way galaxy. The next five panels represent successive zooms on the central region. The final frame shows the inner 300 pc of the nuclear region at the end of the simulation. (Credit: Ohio State University)
Astronomers believe they have discovered the origin of our universe’s first super-massive black holes, which formed some 13 billion years ago.
The discovery fills in a missing chapter of our universe’s early history, and could help write the next chapter — in which scientists better understand how gravity and dark matter formed the universe as we know it.
In the journal Nature, Ohio State University astronomer Stelios Kazantzidis and colleagues describe computer simulations in which they modeled the evolution of galaxies and black holes during the first few billion years after the Big Bang.
Our universe is thought to be 14 billion years old. Other astronomers recently determined that big galaxies formed much earlier in the universe’s history than previously thought — within the first 1 billion years, Kazantzidis explained.
These new computer simulations show that the first-ever super-massive black holes were likely born when those early galaxies collided and merged together.
“Our results add a new milestone to the important realization of how structure forms in the universe,” he said.
For more than two decades, the prevailing wisdom among astronomers has been that galaxies evolved hierarchically — that is, gravity drew small bits of matter together first, and those small bits gradually came together to form larger structures.
Kazantzidis and his team turn that notion on its head.
“Together with these other discoveries, our result shows that big structures — both galaxies and massive black holes — build up quickly in the history of the universe,” he said. “Amazingly, this is contrary to hierarchical structure formation.” (more…)
Plant Scientists Move Closer to Making Any Crop Drought-Tolerant
University of California, Riverside's Sean Cutler (Photo credit: UCR Strategic Communications)
Drought-tolerant crops have moved closer to becoming reality.
A collaborative team of scientists has made a significant advance on the discovery last year by the University of California, Riverside’s Sean Cutler of pyrabactin, a synthetic chemical that mimics a naturally produced stress hormone in plants to help them cope with drought conditions.
Led by researchers at The Medical College of Wisconsin, the scientists report in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology (online) on Aug. 22 that by understanding how pyrabactin works, other more effective chemicals for bringing drought-resistance to plants can be developed more readily.
Abscisic acid versus pyrabactin
Plants naturally produced a stress hormone, abscisic acid (ABA), in modest amounts to help them survive drought by inhibiting growth. ABA has already been commercialized for agricultural use. But it has at least two disadvantages: it is light-sensitive and costly to make.
Pyrabactin, on the other hand, is relatively inexpensive, easy to make, and not sensitive to light. But its drawback is that, unlike ABA, it does not turn on all the “receptors” in the plant that need to be activated for drought-tolerance to fully take hold. (more…)
Carnivore Species Shrank During Global Warming Event
by Leeann Bright
Stephen Chester (left) and Jon Bloch examine the jaw of a new species of carnivorous mammal at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the University of Florida campus on Aug. 18, 2010. The hyena-like animal, Palaeonictis wingi, is described in a new UF study now available online and scheduled to be published in the December print edition of the Journal of Mammalian Evolution. The study shows the species evolved to a smaller size during a global warming event that occurred 55 million years ago. Earth’s temperature increased about 15 degrees Fahrenheit during the 200,000 year period. (Photo by: Jennifer Duerden/University of Florida)
A new University of Florida study indicates extinct carnivorous mammals shrank in size during a global warming event that occurred 55 million years ago.
The study, scheduled to appear in the December print edition of the Journal of Mammalian Evolution and now available online, describes a new species that evolved to half the size of its ancestors during this period of global warming.
The hyena-like animal, Palaeonictis wingi, evolved from the size of a bear to the size of a coyote during a 200,000-year period when Earth’s average temperature increased about 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Following this global warming event, Earth’s temperature cooled and the animal evolved to a larger size.
“We know that plant-eating mammals got smaller during the earliest Eocene when global warming occurred, possibly associated with elevated levels of carbon dioxide,” said lead author Stephen Chester, a Yale University doctoral student who began the research at UF with Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “Surprisingly, this study shows that the same thing happened in some carnivores, suggesting that other factors may have played a critical role in their evolution.”
Researchers discovered a nearly complete jaw from the animal in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin in 2006 during a fossil-collecting expedition, led by Bloch, a co-author on the study. Bloch said the new findings could help scientists better understand the impact of current global warming. (more…)
Good Vibrations: New Atom-Scale Products on Horizon
A laser in Dr. Kambhampati's lab that is used to shine light on quantum dots.
The generation of an electric field by the compression and expansion of solid materials is known as the piezoelectric effect, and it has a wide range of applications ranging from everyday items such as watches, motion sensors and precise positioning systems. Researchers at McGill University’s Department of Chemistry have now discovered how to control this effect in nanoscale semiconductors called “quantum dots,” enabling the development of incredibly tiny new products.
Although the word “quantum” is used in everyday language to connote something very large, it actually means the smallest amount by which certain physical quantities can change. A quantum dot has a diameter of only 10 to 50 atoms, or less than 10 nanometres. By comparison, the diameter of the DNA double-helix is 2 nanometres. The McGill researchers have discovered a way to make individual charges reside on the surface of the dot, which produces a large electric field within the dot. This electric field produces enormous piezoelectric forces causing large and rapid expansion and contraction of the dots within a trillionth of a second. Most importantly, the team is able to control the size of this vibration.
Cadmium Selenide quantum dots can be used in a wide range of technological applications. Solar power is one area that has been explored, but this new discovery has paved way for other nanoscale device applications for these dots. This discovery offers a way of controlling the speed and switching time of nanoelectronic devices, and possibly even developing nanoscale power supplies, whereby a small compression would produce a large voltage. (more…)
Researchers Explore Physiological Effects of Space Travel
The final frontier may be no further than Manhattan, Kan., as a team of Kansas State University researchers launches a project funded by a $1.2 million grant from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
The team — composed of Thomas Barstow, professor of kinesiology; Steven Warren, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering; Russell Taylor, an engineer in the Electronics Design Laboratory; and Carl Ade, a doctoral student in anatomy and physiology, Salina — will research what physical characteristics are necessary for an astronaut to perform lunar tasks. The team also will study ways to assess whether a person has enough physical capacity to perform the tasks.
“Space travel is inherently dangerous,” Barstow said. “The absence of gravity, which we call microgravity or zero gravity, causes our bodies to deteriorate in a variety of ways.”
A microgravity environment causes the weakening of muscles and the immune system, and it deteriorates the cardiovascular system’s ability to regulate blood pressure. Barstow said this can affect an astronaut’s ability to perform necessary tasks, such as climbing ladders, walking or opening doors. For the safety of the astronauts, NASA wants to make sure they are physically fit enough to perform those tasks during future missions to the moon and even Mars. (more…)
Self-Cleaning Technology From Mars Can Keep Terrestrial Solar Panels Dust Free
Researchers have developed technology for large-scale solar power installations to self-clean. (Credit: US Air Force)
Find dusting those tables and dressers a chore or a bore? Dread washing the windows? Imagine keeping dust and grime off objects spread out over an area of 25 to 50 football fields. That’s the problem facing companies that deploy large-scale solar power installations, and scientists today presented the development of one solution — self-dusting solar panels ? based on technology developed for space missions to Mars.
In a report at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), they described how a self-cleaning coating on the surface of solar cells could increase the efficiency of producing electricity from sunlight and reduce maintenance costs for large-scale solar installations.
“We think our self-cleaning panels used in areas of high dust and particulate pollutant concentrations will highly benefit the systems’ solar energy output,” study leader Malay K. Mazumder, Ph.D. said. “Our technology can be used in both small- and large-scale photovoltaic systems. To our knowledge, this is the only technology for automatic dust cleaning that doesn’t require water or mechanical movement.” (more…)
200-Fold Boost in Fuel Cell Efficiency Advances ‘Personalized Energy Systems’
A new catalyst could help speed development of inexpensive home-brewed solar energy systems for powering homes and plug-in cars during the day (left) and for producing electricity from a fuel cell at night (right). (Credit: Patrick Gillooly/MIT)
The era of personalized energy systems — in which individual homes and small businesses produce their own energy for heating, cooling and powering cars — took another step toward reality today as scientists reported discovery of a powerful new catalyst that is a key element in such a system. They described the advance, which could help free homes and businesses from dependence on the electric company and the corner gasoline station, at the 240th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, being held here this week.
“Our goal is to make each home its own power station,” said study leader Daniel Nocera, Ph.D. “We’re working toward development of ‘personalized’ energy units that can be manufactured, distributed and installed inexpensively. There certainly are major obstacles to be overcome — existing fuel cells and solar cells must be improved, for instance. Nevertheless, one can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic system.” (more…)
Drought Drives Decade-Long Decline in Plant Growth
by Kathryn Hansen
A snapshot of Earth's plant productivity in 2003 shows regions of increased productivity (green) and decreased productivity (red). Tracking productivity between 2000 and 2009, researchers found a global net decrease due to regional drought. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)
Global plant productivity that once was on the rise with warming temperatures and a lengthened growing season is now on the decline because of regional drought according to a new study of NASA satellite data.
Plant productivity is a measure of the rate of the photosynthesis process that green plants use to convert solar energy, carbon dioxide and water to sugar, oxygen and eventually plant tissue. Compared with a 6 percent increase in plant productivity during the 1980s and 1990s, the decline observed over the last decade is only 1 percent. The shift, however, could impact food security, biofuels and the global carbon cycle.
Researchers Maosheng Zhao and Steven Running of the University of Montana in Missoula discovered the global shift from an analysis of NASA satellite data. The discovery comes from an analysis of plant productivity data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA’s Terra satellite, combined with other growing season climate data, including temperature, solar radiation and water.
“We see this as a bit of a surprise, and potentially significant on a policy level because previous interpretations suggested global warming might actually help plant growth around the world,” Running said. (more…)
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