Seafarers’ Scourge Provides Hope for Biofuel Future
A close-up of the gribble. (Credit: Dr. Simon Cragg/Graham Malyon -- Institute of Marine Sciences, School of Biological Sciences)
For centuries, seafarers were plagued by wood-eating gribble that destroyed their ships, and these creatures continue to wreak damage on wooden piers and docks in coastal communities.
But new research by scientists at the BBSRC Sustainable Bioenergy Centre at the Universities of York and Portsmouth is uncovering how the tiny marine isopod digests the apparently indigestible.
By examining genes that are expressed in the guts of gribble, the researchers have demonstrated that its digestive system contains enzymes which could hold the key to converting wood and straw into liquid biofuels.
In research published today, a team headed by Professor Simon McQueen-Mason and Professor Neil Bruce at York, and Dr Simon Cragg at Portsmouth reveal that the gribble digestive tract is dominated by enzymes that attack the polymers that make up wood. One of the most abundant enzymes is a cellulose degrading enzyme never before seen in animals.
The research is published in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS). (more…)
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A High-Tech Handrest for Surgeons, Machinists, Artists
University of Utah mechanical engineer Will Provancher uses his right hand to demonstrate the Active Handrest he and his students developed to make it easier for doctors, artists, machinists, electronics repair people and others to operate, paint, fix equipment or do other work requiring precise hand movements. The device expands the so-called "dexterous workspace" -- the range over which you can move your fingers and be very precise. It does that by re-centering the hand repeatedly so the fingers are always in the right place to work precisely. (University of Utah)
University of Utah engineers developed a computer-controlled, motorized hand and arm support that will let doctors, artists and others precisely control scalpels, brushes and tools over a wider area than otherwise possible, and with less fatigue.
“We’ve invented a new device – the Active Handrest – that’s useful for aiding people in performing precision tasks with their hands such as surgery, painting, electronics repair or other tasks that require precise control of the fingertips,” says William Provancher, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering.
A patent on the device is pending, and Provancher says he may form a spin-off company to commercialize it, or may license it to companies that produce touch-feedback devices, make robotic surgery equipment, produce art or refurbish electronics.
Provancher will discuss development and testing of the Active Handrest on March 25, during the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Haptics Symposium in Waltham, Mass. Haptics is to the sense of touch as optics is to the sense of sight. (more…)
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Like Little Golden Assassins, ‘Smart’ Nanoparticles Identify, Target and Kill Cancer Cells
Project director Carl Batt, left, is the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor in Cornell's Department of Food Science. (Richard Killen/University Photography)
Another weapon in the arsenal against cancer: Nanoparticles that identify, target and kill specific cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone.
Led by Carl Batt, the Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of Food Science, the researchers synthesized nanoparticles – shaped something like a dumbbell – made of gold sandwiched between two pieces of iron oxide. They then attached antibodies, which target a molecule found only in colorectal cancer cells, to the particles. Once bound, the nanoparticles are engulfed by the cancer cells.
To kill the cells, the researchers use a near-infrared laser, which is a wavelength that doesn’t harm normal tissue at the levels used, but the radiation is absorbed by the gold in the nanoparticles. This causes the cancer cells to heat up and die.
“This is a so-called ‘smart’ therapy,” Batt said. “To be a smart therapy, it should be targeted, and it should have some ability to be activated only when it’s there and then kills just the cancer cells.”
The goal, said lead author and biomedical graduate student Dickson Kirui, is to improve the technology and make it suitable for testing in a human clinical trial. The researchers are now working on a similar experiment targeting prostate cancer cells. (more…)
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From 2-Trillion-Degree Heat, Researchers Create New Matter — and New Questions
A view of the superconducting magnets at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. As gold particles zip along the collider's 2.4 mile long tunnel at nearly the speed of light, 1,740 of these magnets guide and focus the particle beams.
A worldwide team of researchers, including 10 from Texas A&M University, have for the first time created a particle that is believed to have been in existence immediately after the creation of the universe – the so-called “Big Bang” – and it could lead to new questions and answers about some of the basic laws of physics because in essence, it creates a new form of matter.
Researchers Carl Gagliardi, Saskia Mioduszewski, Robert Tribble, Matthew Cervantes, Rory Clarke, Martin Codrington, Pibero Djawotho, James Drachenberg, Ahmed Hamed and Liaoyuan Huo, all affiliated with the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute, along with numerous researchers from universities and labs all over the world, have created the anti-hypertriton – a never-before-seen particle – by colliding gold nuclei at extremely high speeds. Their work is published in the current issue of Science Express.
Using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., the team used particles of gold and collided them just short of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). More than 100 million collisions were made to collect the data.
“We know that some new particles of matter were formed immediately after the Big Bang, but they were gone within a millionth of a second or so,” explains Gagliardi. (more…)
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New Evidence Asteroid Impact Caused Mass Extinction 65.5 Million Years Ago
This is a photo of scientists on a 2003 deep sea expedition looking at a sediment core containing a record of a 65.5 million year old asteroid impact. Scripps paleoceanographer Richard Norris is third from left. (Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego)
Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, paleoceanographer Richard Norris is one of 41 scientists presenting evidence that an asteroid impact really did kill off dinosaurs and myriad other organisms 30 years after the theory was first proposed.
The researchers are authors of a review paper being released Friday in the journal Science that represents a new salvo in an ongoing controversy over the cause of the mass extinction. Norris’ contribution to the paper was evidence in seafloor sediment records that indicate how deep-sea life was profoundly reshaped by the impact.
“The story is a lot stronger now than 30 years ago, when it was admittedly a little more speculative,” said Norris. “Since 1980, we have accumulated an overwhelming amount of evidence that there was an impact. We also think the evidence is overwhelming that there was a mass extinction as a direct result of this event.”
In that year, father and son researchers Luis and Walter Alvarez first proposed the notion that an asteroid impact killed off the dinosaurs. They had discovered that high levels of iridium, an element rare on Earth but common on extraterrestrial objects like meteors, were uniformly present in sedimentary samples that could be dated back to the extinction event, which marked the transition between two geologic periods. (more…)
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Trapping Sunlight with Silicon Nanowires In Search of 20 Percent Efficiencies
by
Peidong Yang (Photo by Roy Kaltschmidt, Berkeley Lab Public Affairs)
Solar cells made from silicon are projected to be a prominent factor in future renewable green energy equations, but so far the promise has far exceeded the reality. While there are now silicon photovoltaics that can convert sunlight into electricity at impressive 20 percent efficiencies, the cost of this solar power is prohibitive for large-scale use. Researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), however, are developing a new approach that could substantially reduce these costs. The key to their success is a better way of trapping sunlight.
“Through the fabrication of thin films from ordered arrays of vertical silicon nanowires we’ve been able to increase the light-trapping in our solar cells by a factor of 73,” says chemist Peidong Yang, who led this research. “Since the fabrication technique behind this extraordinary light-trapping enhancement is a relatively simple and scalable aqueous chemistry process, we believe our approach represents an economically viable path toward high-efficiency, low-cost thin-film solar cells.”
Yang holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division, and the University of California Berkeley’s Chemistry Department. He is a leading authority on semiconductor nanowires – one-dimensional strips of materials whose width measures only one-thousandth that of a human hair but whose length may stretch several microns. (more…)
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‘World’s Most Useful Tree’ Provides Low-Cost Water Purification Method for Developing World
Standing by the Moringa oleifera trees.
A low-cost water purification technique published in Current Protocols in Microbiology could help drastically reduce the incidence of waterborne disease in the developing world. The procedure, which uses seeds from the Moringa oleifera tree, can produce a 90.00% to 99.99% bacterial reduction in previously untreated water, and has been made free to download as part of access programs under John Wiley & Sons’ Corporate Citizenship Initiative.
A billion people across Asia, Africa, and Latin America are estimated to rely on untreated surface water sources for their daily water needs. Of these, some two million are thought to die from diseases caught from contaminated water every year, with the majority of these deaths occurring among children under five years of age. Michael Lea, a Current Protocols author and a researcher at Clearinghouse, a Canadian organisation dedicated to investigating and implementing low-cost water purification technologies, believes the Moringa oleifera tree could go a long way to providing a solution.
“Moringa oleifera is a vegetable tree which is grown in Africa, Central and South America, the Indian subcontinent, and South East Asia. It could be considered to be one of the world’s most useful trees,” said Lea. “Not only is it drought resistant, it also yields cooking and lighting oil, soil fertilizer, as well as highly nutritious food in the form of its pods, leaves, seeds and flowers. Perhaps most importantly, its seeds can be used to purify drinking water at virtually no cost.” (more…)
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Evidence of Increasing Antibiotic Resistance
Soil contains microbes that are increasingly resistant to antibiotics, a finding that could have broad consequences to public health. (iStock)
A team of scientists in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands are reporting disturbing evidence that soil microbes have become progressively more resistant to antibiotics over the last 60 years. Surprisingly, this trend continues despite apparent more stringent rules on use of antibiotics in medicine and agriculture, and improved sewage treatment technology that broadly improves water quality in surrounding environments. Their report appears in ACS’ bi-weekly journal Environmental Science and Technology.
David Graham and colleagues note that, although scientists have known for years that resistance was increasing in clinical situations, this is the first study to quantify the same problem in the natural environment over long time-scales. They express concern that increased antibiotic resistance in soils could have broad consequences to public health through potential exposure through water and food supplies. Their results “imply there may be a progressively increasing chance of encountering organisms in nature that are resistant to antimicrobial therapy.” (more…)
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Vigilance Needed in Nanotechnology
David Cramb
University of Calgary chemistry professor David Cramb is a step closer to helping solve a complex problem in nanotechnology: the impact nanoparticles have on human health and the environment.
Cramb, director of the Faculty of Science’s nanoscience program, and his researchers have developed a methodology to measure various aspects of nanoparticles in the blood stream of chicken embryos. Their discovery is published in the March online edition of Chemical Physics Letters.
“With the boom in nanomaterials production there is an increasing possibility of environmental and/or human exposure. Thus there is a need to investigate their potential detrimental effects,” says Cramb. “We have developed very specialized tools to begin measuring such impacts.”
Nanoparticles are particles or groups of atoms or molecules nanometers in size. One millimetre (or the diameter of the head of a pin) is equal to one-million nanometres. Nanoparticles are already used in the cosmetics industry and are being developed for drug delivery, diagnostic imaging and tissue engineering, to name only a few applications. It is estimated investments in nanotechnology globally will reach about $12 trillion US by 2012.
Cramb is looking for ways to help answer questions including: If embryos are exposed to nanoparticles, where will the nanoparticles go? How will the embryo respond? What regulatory approaches can be recommended to mitigate accidental exposure? How can nanotechnology be made green and sustainable? (more…)
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‘Microrings’ Could Eliminate Wires for Communications in Homes & Offices
The wireless house of the future might use a system being developed at Purdue University that could eliminate wires for communications in homes, businesses and cars. The researchers designed and built a miniature device capable of converting ultra fast laser pulses into bursts of radio-frequency signals using innovative "microring resonators." Such an advance could enable all communications, from high-definition television broadcasts to secure computer connections, to be transmitted from a single base station. (Purdue University, Michael Esposito)
Purdue University researchers have developed a miniature device capable of converting ultrafast laser pulses into bursts of radio-frequency signals, a step toward making wires obsolete for communications in the homes and offices of the future.
Such an advance could enable all communications, from high-definition television broadcasts to secure computer connections, to be transmitted from a single base station, said Minghao Qi, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
“Of course, ideas about specific uses of our technology are futuristic and speculative, but we envision a single base station and everything else would be wireless,” he said. “This base station would be sort of a computer by itself, perhaps a card inserted into one of the expansion slots in a central computer. The central computer would take charge of all the information processing, a single point of contact that interacts with the external world in receiving and sending information.”
Ordinarily, the continuous waves of conventional radio-frequency transmissions encounter interference from stray signals reflecting off of the walls and objects inside a house or office. However, the pulsing nature of the signals produced by the new “chip-based spectral shaper” reduces the interference that normally plagues radio frequency communications, said Andrew Weiner, Purdue’s Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. (more…)
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New Device for Ultrafast Optical Communications
This optical chip can convert light pulses into digital signals faster and more efficiently than existing technology. (Ryan Scott, UC Davis photo)
A new device invented by engineers at UC Davis could make it much faster to convert pulses of light into electronic signals and back again. The technology could be applied to ultrafast, high-capacity communications, imaging of the Earth’s surface and for encrypting secure messages.
“We have found a way to measure a very high capacity waveform with a combination of standard electronics and optics,” said S.J. Ben Yoo, professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Davis. A paper describing the technology was published Feb. 28 in the journal Nature Photonics.
The device is up to 10,000 times faster than existing technologies for measuring light pulses, Yoo said. It overcomes the limitations of existing approaches, by measuring both the amplitude (intensity) and the phase of a pulse at the same time, and can measure information capacity into the 100 terahertz range in real time. Current electronics are limited to information capacity in tens of gigahertz bandwidth.
Higher-frequency pulses can pack more information into a given length of time. By making it possible to take a complex waveform and quickly decode it into a digital electronic signal, the device would make it possible to pack more data into optical signals. (more…)
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Discovery in Legumes Could Reduce Fertilizer Use, Aiding the Environment
Sharon Long, professor in Biological Sciences (right), with postdoctoral fellow Raka Mitra. (Photo: L.A. Cicero/Stanford University)
Nitrogen is vital for all plant life, but increasingly the planet is paying a heavy price for the escalating use of nitrogen fertilizer.
Excess nitrogen from fertilizer runoff into rivers and lakes causes algal blooms that create oxygen-depleted dead zones, such as the 6,000 to 7,000 square mile zone in the Gulf of Mexico, and nitrogen in the form of nitrous oxide is a potent greenhouse gas.
But new findings by Stanford researchers that reveal the inner workings of nitrogen-producing bacteria living inside legumes such as soybeans could enable researchers to blunt those negative effects and aid efforts to make agriculture more sustainable.
“We have discovered a new biological process, by which leguminous plants control behavior of symbiotic bacteria,” said molecular biologist Sharon Long. “These plants have a specialized protein processing system that generates specific protein signals. These were hitherto unknown, but it turns out they are critical to cause nitrogen fixation.” (more…)
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Atmospheric Nanoparticles Impact Health & Weather Professor Says
Layers of Earth's atmosphere, brightly colored as the sun rises over central Asia. (NASA)
Nanoparticles are atmospheric materials so small that they can’t be seen with the naked eye, but they can very visibly affect both weather patterns and human health all over the world – and not in a good way, according to a study by a team of researchers at Texas A&M University.
Researchers Renyi Zhang, Alexei Khalizov, Jun Zheng, Wen Xu, Yan Ma and Vinita Lal in the Departments of Atmospheric Sciences and Chemistry say that nanoparticles appear to be growing in many parts of the world, but how they do so remains a mystery.
Their work is published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience and was funded by the National Science Foundation and The Welch Foundation.
The team looked at how nanoparticles are formed and their relationship with certain organic vapors responsible for additional growth.
“This is one of the most poorly understood of all atmospheric processes,” Zhang says. “But we found that certain types of organics tend to grow very rapidly. When this happens, they scatter light back into space, and that definitely has a cooling effect – sort of a reverse ‘greenhouse effect.’ It can alter Earth’s weather patterns and it also tends to have a negative effect on human health.” (more…)
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Physicists Build Basic Quantum Computing Circuit
W-Madison physics professor Mark Saffman.
Exerting delicate control over a pair of atoms within a mere seven-millionths-of-a-second window of opportunity, physicists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison created an atomic circuit that may help quantum computing become a reality.
Quantum computing represents a new paradigm in information processing that may complement classical computers. Much of the dizzying rate of increase in traditional computing power has come as transistors shrink and pack more tightly onto chips — a trend that cannot continue indefinitely.
“At some point in time you get to the limit where a single transistor that makes up an electronic circuit is one atom, and then you can no longer predict how the transistor will work with classical methods,” explains UW-Madison physics professor Mark Saffman. “You have to use the physics that describes atoms — quantum mechanics.”
At that point, he says, “you open up completely new possibilities for processing information. There are certain calculational problems… that can be solved exponentially faster on a quantum computer than on any foreseeable classical computer.”
With fellow physics professor Thad Walker, Saffman successfully used neutral atoms to create what is known as a controlled-NOT (CNOT) gate, a basic type of circuit that will be an essential element of any quantum computer. As described in the Jan. 8 issue of the journal Physical Review Letters, the work is the first demonstration of a quantum gate between two uncharged atoms. (more…)
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What Happened to the Flu Pandemic?
Normally, this is the peak period for the flu in the United States. But that just doesn’t seem to be the case this year.
The number of states reporting widespread cases of the flu mysteriously plunged from 49 at the end of October to zero at the beginning of the January, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the beginning of March, most states are only reporting sporadic cases of the flu.
It seems only a few short weeks ago when medical authorities declared a flu pandemic, the first in more than 40 years, and warned that because of the simultaneous existence of both the H1N1 and regular seasonal flu strains, the 2009-10 flu season could wind up as one of the worst on record.
So what happened?
Only time will tell, said Dr. Michael Koller, associate professor, in Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine, Maywood. Flu pandemics are highly unpredictable and no one can say for certain when one will start, when it will end and how severe it may be. A particular flu strain can go “poof” and disappear, or it could mutate and ramp up with a deadly vengeance, as has happened in the past. (more…)
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Introducing RoSS, A “Flight Simulator” for Robotic Surgery
A collaboration between the Center for Robotic Surgery at Roswell Park Cancer Institute (RPCI) and the University at Buffalo (UB)’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has produced one of the world’s first simulators that closely approximates the “touch and feel” of the da Vinci robotic surgical system.
The most widely used system of its kind in the world, the da Vinci robotic surgical system affords all the features that an experienced surgeon needs to ensure equivalent or superior outcomes to conventional surgery.
But such a surgical system, like an aircraft, “is only as good as the pilot, and the current training required for proficiency in robot-assisted surgery is unfortunately less than ideal,” said Khurshid A. Guru, MD, Director of the Center for Robotic Surgery and Attending Surgeon in the Department of Urology, RPCI. “While surgical practice does make perfect, we believe that through better training tools, the early learning curve of robot-assisted surgery can be shortened without jeopardizing the safety and welfare of patients.”
The Robotic Surgical Simulator, or RoSS, addresses the quickly growing need for a realistic training environment for robot-assisted surgery, a field that is rapidly expanding and which is expected to constitute a significant number of all surgeries within the next five to seven years. The RoSS will play a critical, educational role for RPCI, and other similar institutions involved in robot-assisted surgical systems. Creation of the RoSS is an example of how RPCI and UB research can be commercialized and brought to the marketplace to benefit society. (more…)
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Researchers Measure Impacts of Changing Climate on Ocean Biology
A bongo net, used to capture plankton, is recovered aboard the Delaware II. (Credit: Jerry Prezioso, NOAA)
A three-year field program now underway is measuring carbon distributions and primary productivity in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean to help scientists worldwide determine the impacts of a changing climate on ocean biology and biogeochemistry. The study, Climate Variability on the East Coast (CliVEC), will also help validate ocean color satellite measurements and refine biogeochemistry models of ocean processes.
Researchers from NOAA, NASA and Old Dominion University are collaborating through an existing NOAA Fisheries Service field program, the Ecosystem Monitoring or EcoMon program. The EcoMon surveys are conducted six times each year by the Northeast Fisheries Science Center (NEFSC) at 120 randomly selected stations throughout the continental shelf and slope of the northeastern U.S., from Cape Hatteras, N.C., into Canadian waters to cover all of Georges Bank and the Gulf of Maine. This area is known as the Northeast U.S. continental shelf Large Marine Ecosystem.
The climate study team will participate in three annual EcoMon cruises aboard the 155-foot NOAA Fisheries Survey Vessel Delaware II, based at the NEFSC’s laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. The most recent cruise returned to Woods Hole on February 18.
Findings from the climate impact project, funded by NASA, will help scientists better understand how annual and decadal-scale climate variability affects the growth of phytoplankton, which is the basis of the oceanic food chain. The project will also examine organic carbon distributions along the continental margin of the East Coast and collect data for ocean acidification studies. (more…)
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Photonic Material May Facilitate All-Optical Switching
Georgia Tech professor Seth Marder is part of the team that developed a new photonic material that could facilitate all-optical signal processing. (Photo: Rob Felt)
A class of molecules whose size, structure and chemical composition have been optimized for photonic use could provide the demanding combination of properties needed to serve as the foundation for low-power, high-speed all-optical signal processing.
All-optical switching could allow dramatic speed increases in telecommunications by eliminating the need to convert photonic signals to electronic signals – and back – for switching. All-optical processing could also facilitate photonic computers with similar speed advances.
Details of these materials – and the design approach behind them – were reported February 18th in Science Express, the rapid online publication of the journal Science. Conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
“This work provides proof that at least from a molecular point of view, we can identify and produce materials that have the right properties for all-optical processing,” said Seth Marder, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and co-author of the paper. “This opens the door for looking at this issue in an entirely different way.” (more…)
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Bitter Melon Extract Attacks Breast Cancer Cells
Ratna Ray, Ph.D., professor in the department of pathology at Saint Louis University.
The extract from a vegetable that is common in India and China shows promise in triggering a chain of events that kills breast cancer cells and prevents them from multiplying, a Saint Louis University researcher has found.
Ratna Ray, Ph.D., professor in the department of pathology at Saint Louis University and lead researcher, said she was surprised that the extract from the bitter melon she cooks in stir fries inhibits the growth of breast cancer cells.
“To our knowledge, this is the first report describing the effect of bitter melon extract on cancer cells,” Ray said. “Our result was encouraging. We have shown that bitter melon extract significantly induced death in breast cancer cells and decreased their growth and spread.”
Ray said she decided to study the impact of bitter melon extract on breast cancer cells because research by others have shown the substance lowers blood sugar and cholesterol levels. Bitter melon extract is commonly used as a folk medicine to treat diabetes in China and India, she said.
Ray conducted her research using human breast cancer cells in vitro – or in a controlled lab setting. The next step, she says, is to test bitter melon extract in an animal model to see if it plays a role in delaying the growth or killing of breast cancer cells. If those results are positive, human trials could follow. (more…)
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Breakthrough Controllable Rubber Trailing Edge Flaps for Wind Turbine Blades
The blade profile, which measures approx. 2 x 1 metres, set up in a test stand in the open jet wind tunnel at the company Velux in Denmark. Two types of sensors for measuring wind loading are mounted on the leading edge of the blade profile.
For some years, the Wind Energy Division at Risø DTU has been working to develop a method for controlling the loads on large wind turbine blades using a flexible trailing edge made of an elastic material which can be controlled by means of compressed air or hydraulics. Now, the invention, which has been called CRTEF (Controllable Rubber Trailing Edge Flap), has been tested in a wind tunnel with promising results.
Today’s wind turbine blades, which can measure more than 60 metres in length, are subjected to enormous loads, which means that a blade can flex as much as 4-6 metres during strong gusts. However, the blades are also so long that there can be considerable differences in the loading from the gusts along the blade. In wind farms, surrounding wind turbines also exert considerable influence and generate turbulence, which has a more localised effect.
“It is these local influences which we hope our design will help mitigate. However, in addition to our rubber trailing edge, it also calls for effective sensors and control systems which can tell the system to regulate the flaps according to the local wind conditions along the blade. Right now we are looking at different types of sensors and a trailing edge made of plastic instead of rubber,” explains Research Specialist Helge Aagaard Madsen. (more…)
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New Method for Connecting Solar Panels May Increase Efficiency
Jonathan Kimball, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Missouri S&T, is working to improve the efficiency of solar arrays by connecting solar panels in parallel, rather than in a series. (B.A. Rupert, Missouri University of Science and Technology)
Solar arrays of the future may be more energy efficient and reliable, thanks to one researcher’s efforts to reconfigure the way panels are connected.
Dr. Jonathan Kimball, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, says the conventional method of connecting solar panels is in a series, one after the other. But just as one bad bulb in a string of Christmas lights can black out the entire set, so can a single solar panel disrupt the flow of electrical current through the other panels in a series, Kimball says.
“If one of the panels is shaded, dirty or damaged, it affects them all,” Kimball says. “The conventional approach to solar arrays inherently limits the amount of power they produce if there’s any variation in the panels.”
Rather than connecting solar panels in a series – where the electrical current must flow from one panel to get to the next – Kimball suggests parallel wiring for the panels. The parallel approach would connect each panel to its own power converter instead of sending the electrical current through a series of panels to a single converter. (more…)
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Orange Peels, Newspapers May Lead to Cheaper, Cleaner Ethanol Fuel
Dr. Henry Daniell in his lab at the University of Central Florida. (Credit: Jacque Brund)
Scientists may have just made the breakthrough of a lifetime, turning discarded fruit peels and other throwaways into cheap, clean fuel to power the world’s vehicles.
University of Central Florida professor Henry Daniell has developed a groundbreaking way to produce ethanol from waste products such as orange peels and newspapers. His approach is greener and less expensive than the current methods available to run vehicles on cleaner fuel – and his goal is to relegate gasoline to a secondary fuel.
Daniell’s breakthrough can be applied to several non-food products throughout the United States, including sugarcane, switchgrass and straw.
“This could be a turning point where vehicles could use this fuel as the norm for protecting our air and environment for future generations,” he said.
Daniell’s technique – developed with U.S. Department of Agriculture funding — uses plant-derived enzyme cocktails to break down orange peels and other waste materials into sugar, which is then fermented into ethanol. (more…)
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Exploring the Secrets of Dark Matter
Researchers work with detectors used in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment in Minnesota's Soudan mine in April 2009. (Photograph by Reidar Hahn, Fermilab)
Even the biggest Star Trek fan would probably have trouble understanding the technical details of the research done by Queen’s University Particle Astrophysics Professor Wolfgang Rau of Kingston, Canada.
Professor Rau is the only Canadian researcher among the group of 60 scientists involved in the Cryogenic Dark Matter Search experiment (CDMS) whose latest findings are published in the latest edition of Science magazine. Professor Rau says the project is among the top two or three most important experiments on this subject in the world.
He uses a simple analogy to explain his complex search for dark matter – the difficult-to-detect particles that played a central role in the evolution of the Universe and the formation of our galaxy.
“It’s kind of trying to find a needle in a haystack. But we tend to do things a little differently in science. Instead of just digging for the needle, we are looking at getting rid of some of the hay,” says Professor Rau, who also holds a Canada Research Chair position in particle astrophysics.
The needle would be an interaction between a dark matter particle with ordinary matter in a particle detector, while the hay would represent interactions of particles from other sources such as cosmic radiation, referred to as “background”. (more…)
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Understanding Global Climate Change Through New Breakthroughs in Polar Research
Headquarters of the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) in Cambridge. (William M. Connolley / GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2)
The latest findings from research on Antarctica’s rich marine life are presented this week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Marine Biologist Huw Griffiths from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) is involved in a major international investigation into the distribution and abundance of Antarctica’s vast marine biodiversity – the Census of Antarctic Marine Life (CAML).
Griffiths presents results from the census – which began in 2005 – and describes how the investigation provides the benchmark for future studies on how the extraordinary and diverse range of sea-floor creatures living in Antarctica’s chilly waters will respond to predicted environmental change.
More than 6,000 different species living on the sea-floor have been identified so far and more than half of these are unique to the icy continent. A combination of long-term monitoring studies, newly gathered information on the marine life distribution and global ocean warming models, enable the scientists to identify Antarctica’s marine ‘biodiversity hotspots’.
Griffiths describes how krill populations (the shrimp-like invertebrates eaten by penguins, whales and seals) are reducing as a result of a decrease in sea-ice cover. A much smaller crustacean (copepods) is dominating the area once occupied by them. This shifts the balance of the food web to favour predators, like jellyfish, that are not eaten by penguins and other Southern Ocean higher predators. Sea-ice reduction is also affecting penguins that breed on the ice. (more…)
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