New Power Suit Amplifies Human Strength

By Tariq Malik LiveScience Staff Writer posted: 28 September 2006 03:21 pm ET

NEW YORK—Engineers in Japan are perfecting a wearable power suit that amplifies human strength to help lift hospital patients or heavy objects. Driven by portable batteries, micro air pumps and small body sensors that pick up even the slightest muscle twitch, the Stand-Alone Wearable Power Assist Suit is designed to help nursing home workers lift patients of up to 180 pounds while cutting the amount of strength required in half, project researcher Hirokazu Noborisaka told LiveScience today. At Wired Magazine's NextFest new-technology forum here, researchers demonstrated walking [Image] and lifting weights [image] in the 66-pound suit, which was developed at the High-Tech Research Center of Japan's Kanagawa Institute of Technology. "When I wear it, I don't feel that it's heavy at all," said project team member Hiroe Tsukui after stepping out of the power suit. "The sensors can tell the muscle power needed to lift an object." A network of sensors track the wearer's upper arms and legs and waist-muscle activity, then relay the data to an onboard microcomputer that regulates air flow into a series of inflatable cuffs which expand to amplify lifting strength. The suit supports its own weight and carries a battery lifetime of about 30 minutes. "We think that 30 minutes is enough time to lift a patient from one place to another," said Noborisaka, who engineered the sensor computing system used in the suit, adding that future versions could help the elderly or disabled walk. The current model—known as the 2nd Stand-Alone Power Assist Suit—is stronger and more compact than its predecessor, researchers said. Designer Mineo Ishii said that the next step is to further reduce the size of the power assist suit to make it more practical for use by hospital staff. "It needs to be more flexible so for more easy movement," Ishii said, adding that a protective cover that shrouds the suit's sensitive or sharp areas, is also required.

Advance of Dip-Pen Nanolithography

Ever since the invention of the first scanning probe microscope in 1981, researchers have believed the powerful tool would someday be used for the nanofabrication and nanopatterning of surfaces in a molecule-by-molecule, bottom-up fashion. Despite 25 years of research in this area, the world has hit a brick wall in developing a technique with commercial potential -- until now.
Northwestern University researchers have developed a 55,000-pen, two-dimensional array that allows them to simultaneously create 55,000 identical patterns drawn with tiny dots of molecular ink on substrates of gold or glass. Each structure is only a single molecule tall.

This advance of a patterning method called Dip-Pen Nanolithography (DPN), which was invented at Northwestern in 1999, was published online Monday (Sept. 25) by the journal Angewandte Chemie.

To demonstrate the technique's power, the researchers reproduced the face of Thomas Jefferson from a five-cent coin 55,000 times, which took only 30 minutes. Each identical nickel image is 12 micrometers wide -- about twice the diameter of a red blood cell -- and is made up of 8,773 dots, each 80 nanometers in diameter.

The parallel process paves the way for making DPN competitive with other optical and stamping lithographic methods used for patterning large areas on metal and semiconductor substrates, including silicon wafers. The advantage of DPN, which is a maskless lithography, is that it can be used to deliver many different types of inks simultaneously to a surface in any configuration one desires. Mask-based lithographies and stamping protocols are extremely limited in this regard.

"This development should lead to massively miniaturized gene chips, combinatorial libraries for screening pharmaceutically active materials and new ways of fabricating and integrating nanoscale or even molecular-scale components for electronics and computers," said Chad A. Mirkin, director of Northwestern's International Institute for Nanotechnology and George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry, who led the research.

"In addition, it could lead to new ways of studying biological systems at the single particle level, which is important for understanding how cancer cells and viruses work and for getting them to stop what they do," he said. "Essentially one can build an entire gene or protein chip that fits underneath a single cell."

Source: Northwestern University

This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago Unveils World’s First “Bionic Woman"

First Use of Bionic Arm Technology in a Female Patient
                                                                                   
WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), the leading physical medicine and rehabilitation hospital in the country, today extended its leadership in engineering and rehabilitation science by introducing Claudia Mitchell, the first woman to be successfully fit with RIC's original Bionic Arm technology.  The most advanced prosthesis of its kind, the RIC neuro-controlled Bionic Arm allows an amputee to move his or her prosthetic arm as if it is a real limb simply by thinking.  The arm also empowers patients with more natural movement, greater range of motion and restores lost function.

The technology was developed by Todd Kuiken, M.D., Ph.D., director of RIC's Neural Engineering Center for Bionic Medicine, and a team of leading rehabilitation experts with the support of grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"It is so rewarding for me as a physician and a scientist to lead research with the potential to positively impact the lives of amputees, including our U.S. service men and women," said Dr. Kuiken.  "On behalf of RIC, my team and I consider it a great honor to be able to serve our country and the individuals with disabilities around the world in this way."

To provide the neuro-controlled movement of RIC's Bionic Arm technology, nerves located in the amputee's shoulder, which once went to the amputated arm, are re-routed and connected to healthy muscle in the chest.  This surgical process is called targeted muscle reinnervation.  The muscle reinnervation procedure allows the re-routed nerves to grow into the chest muscle and direct the signals they once sent to the amputated arm instead to the robotic arm via surface electrodes.  Then, when the patient thinks about moving his or her arm, the action is carried out as voluntarily as it would be in a healthy arm allowing for smoother and easier movement of the prosthetic. 

In other words, the sensation nerves to the hand have been re-routed to a patch of skin on her chest.  Now when Ms. Mitchell is touched on this skin, she feels that her hand is being touched.  This will eventually let her 'feel' what she is touching with an artificial hand, as if she were touching it with her own hand.

Currently available artificial arms have only up to three motors.  RIC's revolutionary Bionic Arm technology includes a six-motor arm developed in collaboration with researchers around the world.  With a six-motor arm, patients have greater motion in the shoulder and forearm and are able to use several parts of the prosthesis simultaneously to produce the more natural arm movements.  Using key learnings from the first successful Bionic Arm recipient, former power lineman and double amputee from Tennessee, Jesse Sullivan, Dr. Kuiken and his team also have made significant advancements in the area of sensory feedback so that the patient can actually feel if they are touching hot or cold objects.

Ms. Mitchell, of Ellicott City, Maryland, is a former U.S. Marine Corps officer whose left arm was severed at the scene of a motorcycle accident in 2004.  After reading about Mr. Sullivan in a magazine, Ms. Mitchell undertook her own research and was put in touch with Dr. Kuiken.  After an evaluation by Dr. Kuiken and his staff, she was found to be a strong candidate and successfully underwent the surgery in 2005.

"RIC is proud to play such a significant role in changing the face of research and advancing technology to improve the lives of individuals with disabilities throughout the world," said Joanne C. Smith, M.D., interim president and CEO of RIC.

Because of the Bionic Arm, Ms. Mitchell has been able to live a more functional and fulfilling life. She is able to give to her passion, the U.S. Marine Corps, through mentoring junior officers and making regular visits to veterans in the amputee units at the National Naval Medical Center and Walter Reed Army Medical Center.  Through her volunteer efforts, she shares her message of personal gratitude and hope to troops who have returned from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Before the surgery, I doubted that I would ever be able to get my life back," said Ms. Mitchell. "But this arm and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago have allowed me to return to a life that is more rewarding and active than I ever could have imagined. I am happy, confident and independent.  As a military veteran, I am also hopeful that the Bionic Arm technology may provide benefits to amputees returning from war."

To date, more than 400 amputee patients who have served in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been treated in Army hospitals.  RIC's Bionic Arm technology has the potential to benefit these amputees returning from war. 

A 21st Century Code Adam

[...]
under the new system, a network of dozens of video cameras feeds a constant flow of digital data to security.
When a parent reports a missing child, the system can—within a few minutes—locate the video of when the parent and the child were last together and then show footage of exactly where the child went and with whom, even showing where the child is at that moment, assuming the child has not left the store. If the child had left, it would show when and could even track the child to the parking lot, possibly capturing a license plate and footage of a car.

Shape-shifting lens mimics human eye

02 August 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Tom Simonite

SOMETIMES all it takes is a quick hug, and everything looks different.

Now a shape-shifting lens has been developed that alters its focal length when squeezed by an artificial muscle, rather like the lens in a human eye. The muscle, a ring of polymer gel, expands and contracts in response to environmental changes, eliminating the need for electronics to power or control the devices.

"The lenses harness the energy around them to control themselves," says lead researcher Hongrui Jiang at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, US, where the device has been developed (Nature, vol 442, p 551). "This would be useful for environments where it's not easy to use electronics and conditions are not constant." The devices could simplify medical imaging equipment and biosensors, he says.

The lenses themselves, which are around 4 millimetres in diameter, use a glass-oil-water interface (see Diagram). The artificial muscle encloses the watery side of the lens. The gel expands or contracts in response to environmental changes such as a rise in temperature, forcing the water to bulge into the film of oil. This changes the lens's shape and thus its focal length.

Different polymer gels can be used to create a lens that responds to changes in acidity, temperature, light, electric fields or even certain proteins. In tests of one temperature-responsive lens, the device was able to focus on objects around 20 millimetres away at 50°C, and on objects 50 millimetres away when the temperature changed to 35°C.

Adaptable liquid lenses are already used in devices such as cellphones, but these are controlled by an electric current, requiring the use of bulky and power-hungry electronics. "The lenses would be useful for medical imaging because in the right environment they could scan different depths autonomously," says Jiang. For example, a lens designed to respond to a particular protein could be implanted into the body. As levels of the protein fluctuated throughout the day, the lens would change its focus, giving doctors a changing view of the area under observation.

The lens could also be combined with a light source and simple light detector to build a sensor. Changes in the way the lens focused light in response to, say, acidity, would then be picked up by the detector.

"The technology could be very useful for temperature sensing in systems of biosensors," says Tracy Melvin, who works on biophotonics at the University of Southampton, UK. "The lenses are currently a bit big for a micro-device, but they would be easy to make smaller."

If they can be reduced in size, the lenses could dramatically simplify micro-sensors, she says, but adds that making micro-lenses out of responsive polymer gels might be simpler still. Polymer gel contact lenses that darken when the wearer's glucose levels fall have already been developed, but no one has yet built them at the micro-scale.

Revolutionary Stem Cell Transplant in Athens a World First

Athens News Agency
26 July 2006

Revolutionary stem-cell transplant in Athens a world first A baby-girl born in Athens last week will become the donor of stem cells taken from the umbilical cord that will be transplanted to her 4-year-old brother suffering from chronic granulomatous disease, a congenital heterogeneous immunodeficiency disorder resulting from the inability of phagocytes to kill intested microbes, resulting in increased susceptibility to severe infectionsthat ultimately leads to early death.
[...]

Cryonics

Things on the cryonics front are looking good.  With the advances Alcor has made in cryonics using their cryoprotectant that becomes glassy instead of cryatalline, and this new, we'll be looking real good before long

[...]

Long the domain of transhumanist nut-jobs, cryogenic suspension may be just two years away from clinical trials on humans (presuming someone can solve the sticky ethical problems). Trauma surgeons can’t wait – saving people with serious wounds, like gunshots, is always a race against the effects of blood loss. When blood flow drops, toxins accumulate; just five minutes of low oxygen levels causes brain death.

Chill a body, though, and you change the equation. Metabolism slows, oxygen demand dives, and the time available to treat the injury stretches. Alam has suspended 200 pigs for an hour each, and although experimental protocol calls for different levels of care for each pig, the ones that got optimal treatment all survived.  

Self driving car

Finally, I've been waiting for this forever.  It can't come soon enough for me.

German car giant Volkswagen has turned fiction into reality by unveiling a fully automatic car which really can drive itself - and at speeds of up to 150mph.

It can weave with tyres screeching around tricky bends and chicanes, and through tightly coned off tracks - without any help or intervention from a human.

[...]

The GTi has electronic 'eyes' that use radar and laser sensors in the grille to 'read' the road and send the details back to its computer brain. A sat-nav system tracks its exact position with pin-point precision to within an inch.

The car can then work out the twists and turns it has to negotiate - before setting off at break-neck speed through a laid out course on a test track.

On a race circuit, it drove itself faster and more precisely than the VW engineers could manage - and can accelerate independently up to its top speed of 150mph.

To prove it is no trick, guests were invited to design for themselves a variety of different courses - using road cones - and then watch the car fly around them on its own at a test track near their world headquarters in Wolfsburg in northern Germany.

[...]

'The computer calculates where and at what speed the GTi has clearance between the cones. The GPS satellite enables navigation to within less than an inch.'

---

Find this story at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=393401&in_page_id=1770
©2006 Associated New Media

Slow-frozen people

Good news for cryonics:

WASHINGTON – The latest research on water - still one of the least understood of all liquids despite a century of intensive study – seems to support the possibility that cells, tissues and even the entire human body could be cryopreserved without formation of damaging ice crystals, according to University of Helsinki researcher Anatoli Bogdan, Ph.D.

He conducted the study, scheduled for the July 6 issue of the ACS Journal of Physical Chemistry B, one of 34 peer-review journals published by the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

In medicine, cryopreservation involves preserving organs and tissues for transplantation or other uses. Only certain kinds of cells and tissues, including sperm and embryos, currently can be frozen and successfully rewarmed. A major problem hindering wider use of cryopreservation is formation of ice crystals, which damage cell structures.

cryopreservation may be most familiar, however, as the controversial idea that humans, stricken with incurable diseases, might be frozen and then revived years or decades later when cures are available.

Bogdan's experiments involved a form of water termed "glassy water," or low-density amorphous ice (LDA), which is produced by slowly supercooling diluted aqueous droplets. LDA melts into highly viscous water (HVW). Bogdan reports that HVW is not a new form of water, as some scientists believed.

"That HVW is not a new form of water (i.e., normal and glassy water are thermodynamically connected) may have some interesting practical implications in cryobiology, medicine, and cryonics." Bogdan said.

"It may seem fantastic, but the fact that in aqueous solution, [the] water component can be slowly supercooled to the glassy state and warmed back without the crystallization implies that, in principle, if the suitable cryoprotectant is created, cells in plants and living matter could withstand a large supercooling and survive," Bogdan explained. In present cryopreservation, the cells being preserved are often damaged due to freezing of water either on cooling or subsequent warming to room temperature.

"Damage of the cells occurs due to the extra-cellular and intra-cellular ice formation which leads to dehydration and separation into the ice and concentrated unfrozen solution. If we could, by slow cooling/warming, supercool and then warm the cells without the crystallization of water then the cells would be undamaged."

Half-terahertz performance

A research team from IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology has demonstrated the first silicon-germanium transistor able to operate at frequencies above 500 GHz. Though the record performance was attained at extremely cold temperatures, the results suggest that the upper bound for performance in silicon-germanium devices may be higher than originally expected.

Ultra-high-frequency silicon-germanium circuits have potential applications in many communications systems, defense systems, space electronics platforms, and remote sensing systems. Achieving such extreme speeds in silicon-based technology – which can be manufactured using conventional low-cost techniques – could provide a pathway to high-volume applications. Until now, only integrated circuits fabricated from more costly III-V compound semiconductor materials have achieved such extreme levels of transistor performance.

[...]

Looks like there's still some kick in the old technology yet.  The frequency difference between this and what is in our desktops now is like the difference between a 286 and an old pentium.  I'd say we can squeeze a few more generations out of the old fab techniques yet.

Anything Into Oil

Original article here.
Turkey guts, junked car parts, and even raw sewage go in one end of this plant, and black gold comes out the other end.

This is just too excellent.  You get generator grade oil from waste streams, in addition to solid and liquid fertilizer that is better than any others out there.

HealthFirst-Repairing humans

By Leslie LoBue
(05/18/06)-- Over the years, we've heard miraculous stories about people getting artificial arms, legs, even hearts.
Some doctors say they can create artificial brains, or at least brain parts, that may help millions of people with diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and epilepsy.
The future of the human race is about to take a turn.
"I think all human beings have wanted to be better than well. we have always wanted to transcend the limitations of the human condition," said James Hughes, the executive director of the World Transhumanist Association.
Hughes believes the world is headed for a superhuman future. "We have continued to invent new technologies to extend the reach of the human body.  New tools and new ways of modifying the way the body works."
In Los Angeles, neuroscientist Theodore Berger has developed the first artificial brain part - a hippocampus to help people with Alzheimer's form new memories. "There's no reason why we can't think in terms of artificial brain parts in the same way we can think in terms of artificial eyes and artificial ears," Berger said.
Information would come into the brain the same way, but would be re-routed to a computer chip, bypassing the damaged area of the hippocampus.  "What we're hoping to do is replace at least enough of that function, so there's a significant improvement in the quality of life."
The technology could also help stroke, epilepsy and Parkinson's patients.
At the medical college of Wisconsin, Doctor Jay Neitz  is also on the super-human frontier. "Since we are human beings and we like to try new things, we could say 'Wow, wouldn't it be cool if we had a whole other dimension of vision?'"
Primates and humans have three photo-receptors and can see four basic colors - red, green, blue and yellow. Here's a newsflash: Birds, fish and reptiles have four photo-receptors.
"It is clear that it does allow them to see things that we cannot see. they must have this whole extra dimension of color that we miss out on."
Neitz is studying gene therapy to give humans that extra dimension. By injecting modified genes directly into the eyes of colorblind monkeys, he expects to change their world. "It's hard to imagine that you would even know what it would be like to have this extra dimension of vision," he said.
Neitz says we could see ultraviolet, infrared and all the new shades we'd get by combining them. "I personally, I like the idea of being able to make ourselves better."
"I think this is an intrinsic part of human nature, of the human condition that we see that we are limited. we live in a limited world, and we are trying to push beyond those limits," Hughes said.
Now, it's up to technology to see how far beyond  those limits we can go.

Nanotubes Might Not Have the Right Stuff

By Bill Christensen posted: 02 June 2006 06:27 am ET

Scientists and science fiction fans alike have big plans for carbon nanotubes; it has been hoped that a cable made of carbon nanotubes would be strong enough to serve as a space elevator. However, recent calculations by Nicola Pugno of the Polytechnic of Turin, Italy, suggest that carbon nanotube cables will not work.
American engineers worked on the problem in the mid-1960's. What type of material would be required to build a space elevator? According to their calculations, the cable would need to be twice as strong as that of any existing material including graphite, quartz, and diamond.
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke recognized the materials problem; his ingenuity was equal to the task of creating just such a material. In his excellent 1978 novel The Fountains of Paradise, he thought up a special form of carbon, something called a "continuous pseudo-one dimensional diamond crystal," to serve as the cable material. To the delight of sf fans and aerospace engineers, Japanese researcher Sumio Iijima (at NEC) discovered carbon nanotubes, which are one-dimensional carbon fibers exhibiting strength 100 times greater than that of steel at one sixth the weight, and high strain to failure.
In something of a "downer" for space elevator fans, Pugno has calculated that inevitable defects will greatly reduce the strength of any manufactured nanotubes. Laboratory tests have demonstrated that flawless individual nanotubes can withstand about 100 gigapascals of tension; however, if a nanotube is missing just one carbon atom, it can reduce its strength by as much as thirty percent. Bulk materials made of many connected nanotubes are even weaker, averaging less than 1 gigapascal in strength.
In order to function, a space elevator ribbon would need to withstand at least 62 gigapascals of tension. It therefore appears that the defects described above would eliminate carbon nanotubes as a usable material for a space elevator cable. Pugno will publish his paper in the July edition of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter. Nanotube enthusiasts counter that ribbons made of close-packed long nanotubes would demonstrate cooperative friction forces that could make up for weaknesses in individual nanotubes.
Read more about Arthur C. Clarke's one-dimensional diamond crystal; in Carbon Nanotube Ribbon for Space Elevator a method of creating meter-long nanotube ribbons is described. A robotic lifter that would traverse a space elevator ribbon has also been tested. Read more about the current controversy at Nature.


I think we will be able to overcome the defect problem, at least to the point where we will be able to create the Elevator.  I think the benefits we would reap from this will drive us to do so no matter the cost.

Sensors Without Batteries

In the future, the environment could be pervaded by sensors using the same power-scavenging techniques as RFID tags.
By Kate Greene
Some technologists believe that in the future, seemingly invisible computers will be embedded everywhere, collecting data about the environment and making it useful to decision makers. One way to achieve this sort of ubiquitous computing is to disperse tiny sensors that measure, for instance, light, temperature, or motion.
But without a persistent power source, such sensors would need their batteries replaced every few months. In other words, ubiquitous sensors could also mean "ubiquitous dead batteries," says Josh Smith, a researcher at Intel Research in Seattle.
Smith and his team are addressing this problem not by working on longer-lasting batteries but by trying to eliminate the need for batteries altogether. Instead, their prototype devices employ the same power-scavenging technique used by battery-free radio frequency identification (RFID) tags.
The concept of throwing out the sensor battery is not new. Researchers have proposed capturing energy from environmental vibrations or ambient light to power a sensor (see "Free Electricity from Nano Generators"). But it is unclear whether technology that captures ambient energy can be inexpensively integrated into a sensing device.
By contrast, the technology used in RFID tags, which transmit a few bits of information when scanned by an RFID reader, is cheap enough to integrate into sensors and be mass produced; they're already widely used to track livestock and cargo, as well as cars passing through "easy pass" lanes on highways.
Smith explains that Intel's sensor devices use off-the-shelf components: an antenna to send and receive data and collect energy from a reader, and a sensor-containing microcontroller -- a tiny computer that requires only a couple hundred microwatts of power to collect and process data.
The antenna harvests this power directly from the radio waves emitted by an RFID reader. When a tag comes within range of a reader, the reader's radio signal passes through the antenna, generating a voltage that activates the tag. The tag is then able to send information to the reader through a process called backscattering, in which the antenna essentially reflects a data-encoded variation of the received radio signal.
The microcontroller that Smith's team added to the RFID antenna includes a 16-bit microprocessor, 8 kilobytes of flash storage, and 256 bytes of random-access memory.
One of the microcontroller's main jobs is to ensure that information is transmitted to the reader error-free, which requires more computation than a conventional RFID tag can handle. In a typical tag, the error-checking information is precomputed and stored on the chip; but for a sensor, Smith says, this information needs to be computed in real-time as data is gathered.
Just like RFID tags, the battery-free sensors turn on only when they encounter a reader. As long as the RFID reader is within range of the device, Smith says, it can collect data and send it to the reader.
Battery-free sensors could be useful in many areas, including medicine, says Zeke Mejia, chief technology officer of St. Paul-based Digital Angel, an RFID tag maker. They could "check the status and certain conditions in the body" at any moment, Mejia says, from glucose levels in people with diabetes to the pH of blood and other body fluids.
In their current form, Intel's sensors need to be within about a meter of a reader to be activated. That's closer than would be ideal for some applications, such as measuring the temperature of foods packed in large crates or vibrations in thick walls. The problem is that while the microcontroller needs only a milliwatt of power to run, it needs three volts of electricity to turn on, and the sensor has to be within a meter of an industry-standard RFID reader to generate that much energy. But with minor changes to the way the microcontroller processes data, Smith says, the group could reduce the voltage requirement to 1.8 volts, thus extending the range to about five meters.
The team's latest prototype incorporates a light sensor, temperature sensor, and even a tilt sensor into one battery-free device. The researchers are working on ways to integrate the microcontroller and antenna into a single chip that would be easier to install in the field. In the meantime, they have developed a visual demonstration of just how much energy an RFID antenna can garner from a reader: they've used it to power the second hand on a wristwatch.
"It's surprising to people that this invisible form of energy –- radio waves -– can actually make a watch hand move," Smith says. And a single tick of a second hand, Smith says, takes about as much energy as sending one bit of data from his sensor.

Robot carries out operation by itself

MILAN, Italy, May 18 (UPI) -- For the first time, a robot surgeon in Italy has carried out a long-distance heart operation by itself.
"This operation has enabled us to cross a new frontier," said Carlo Pappone, who initiated and monitored the surgery on a PC in Boston, ANSA reported. Pappone is head of Arrhythmia and Cardiac Electrophysiology at Milan's San Raffaele University.
The 50-minute surgery, which took place in a Milan hospital, was carried out on a 34-year-old patient suffering from atrial fibrillation. Dozens of heart specialists attending an international congress on arrhythmia in Boston also watched.
Pappone has used the robot surgeon in at least 40 operations.
"It has learned to do the job thanks to experience gathered from operations on 10,000 patients," Pappone said, pointing out that the robot carries the expertise of several human surgeons used to boost its software.

Organizing dumbbells for nanotech devices

A team of chemists from France, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US are working together to bridge the gap between nanoscience and nanotechnology. They have now devised a method that could allow them to organize tiny molecular machines on a surface and so build devices that pack in thousands of times as many switching units, for instance, than is possible with a conventional silicon chip.
Chemist Fraser Stoddart, now at the University of California Los Angeles, and his co-workers have designed and made numerous molecules based on hanging ring-shaped molecules on other chain-like molecules and loops. By incorporating functional chemical groups along the length of the chain or around these loops, they have shown that it is possible to make the molecular beads switch between these various functional groups using heat, light, or electricity. The ultimate aim of creating such molecular-scale devices is to use them as switching units or logic gates in a future computer based on molecules instead of silicon chips.
[...]

New technology will allow for flexible television and computer screens

Organic light emitting diodes (OLED) are the technology used in making light emitting fabrics used in cell phones and televisions. The fabrication of flexible OLEDs has up to now been held back by the fragility of the brittle indium tin oxide layer that serves as the transparent electrode. But researchers at the Regroupement Québecois sur les Matériaux de Pointe (RQMP) have found a solution which they published in the May online issue of Applied Physics Letters.


"Organic light emitting diodes have in recent years emerged as a promising low cost technology for making large area flat panel displays and flexible light emitting fabrics," explains Richard Martel, professor at the Université de Montréal's chemistry department. "By using carbon nanotubes, a highly conductive and flexible tube shaped carbon nanostructure, thin sheets a few tens of nanometers in thickness can be fabricated following a procedure akin to making paper. These sheets preserve the conductivity and flexibility of the carbon nanotubes and are thin enough to be highly transparent."

By following the fabrication procedure they developed, the researchers succeeded in producing a high-performance OLED on this new electrode material. In their work they also outline the parameters that can be further optimized in order improve the performance of their design. "In addition to their flexibility, carbon nanotube sheets exhibit a number of properties that make them an attractive alternative to transparent conducting oxides for display and lighting applications," says Carla Aguirre, a researcher at the École Polytechnique affiliated with the Université de Montréal. "By applying the appropriate chemical treatment they can in principle be also made to replace the metal electrode in order to make OLEDs that emit light from both sides."

The potential market applications of this technology are many. From rolled-up computer screens to light emitting clothes, this technology will find many uses.

The research Group included: Carla Aguirre and Patrick Desjardins from École Polytechnique, Stéphane Auvray and Richard Martel from Université de Montréal, S. Pigeon from OLA Display Corporation and R. Izquierdo from Université du Québec à Montréal.

Source: University of Montreal

This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

For a Bigger Hard-drive, Just Add Water

Imagine having computer memory so dense that a cubic centimeter contains 12.8 million gigabytes of information. Imagine an iPod playing music for 100 millennia without repeating a single song or a USB thumb-drive with room for 32.6 million full-length DVD movies. Now imagine if this could be achieved by combining a computing principle that was popular in the 1960s, a glass of water and wire three-billionths of a meter wide. Science fiction? Not exactly.

Ferroelectric materials possess spontaneous and reversible electric dipole moments. Until recently, it was technologically difficult to stabilize ferroelectricity on the nano-scale. This was because the traditional process of screening the charges was not completely effective. However Jonathan Spanier from Drexel University and his research colleagues have proposed a new and slightly unusual mechanism stabilizing the ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials: surrounding the charged material with fragments of water.

All ferroelectric materials, even Spanier’s wires that are 100,000 times finer than a human hair, need to be screened to ensure their dipole moments remain stable. Traditionally this was accomplished using metallic electrodes, but Spanier and his team found that molecules such as hydroxyl (OH) ions, which make up water, and organic molecules, such as carboxyl (COOH), work even better than metal electrodes at stabilizing ferroelectricity in nano-scaled materials, proving that sometimes water and electricity do mix.

“It is astonishing to see that molecules enable a wire having a diameter equivalent to fewer than ten atoms to act as a stable and switchable dipole memory element,” said Spanier, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Drexel.

If commercialized, ferroelectric memory of this sort could find its way into home computers, rendering traditional hard-drives obsolete. The extreme capacity offered by such a device could easily put a room full of hard-drives and servers into a jacket pocket, but this idea can be applied to other computer components, such as ferroelectric RAM.

RAM is necessary in a computer because it stores information for programs that are currently running. As this news release was written, RAM stored the words in a file. Because RAM can transfer files faster than a hard-drive, it is used to handle running programs. However most RAM is volatile, and if the computer loses power all the information in RAM is lost. This is not the case with ferroelectric memory.

Ferroelectric memory is non-volatile, so it is entirely possible for files to be stored permanently in a computer’s RAM. Applying nano-wires and the new stabilization method to existing ferroelectric RAM would deal a double blow to hard-drives in size and speed.

Spanier and his colleagues, Alexie Kolpak and Andrew Rappe of the University of Pennsylvania and Hongkun Park of Harvard University, are excited about their findings, but say significant challenges lie ahead, including the need to develop ways to assemble the nanowires densely, and to develop a scheme to efficiently write information to and read information from the nanowires. In the interim, Spanier and his colleagues will continue to investigate the role of molecules on ferroelectricity in nanowires and to develop nano-scaled devices that exploit this new-found mechanism.

Source: Drexel University

This news is brought to you by PhysOrg.com

Wise nano

Just thought I'd give a plug for the wise nano project.

http://wise-nano.org/w/Main_Page

Scientists demonstrate a breakthrough in fabricating molecular electronics

Scientists from Philips Research and the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) have for the first time fabricated arrays of molecular diodes on standard substrates with high yields. The molecular diodes are as thin as one molecule (1.5 nm), and suitable for integration into standard plastic electronics circuits. Based on construction principles known as molecular self-organization, molecular electronics is a promising new approach for manufacturing electronics circuits in addition to today’s conventional semiconductor processing. Details of the technology are presented in the 4 May 2006 issue of Nature.


Although still a relatively new field, molecular electronics can be regarded as the next evolutionary stage for plastic electronics. Molecular electronics holds the potential to fabricate elements for electronics circuits with a functionality that is embedded in just a single layer of molecules.

Instead of using photolithography or printing techniques to etch or print nano-scale circuit features, molecular electronics can be engineered to use organic molecules that spontaneously form the correct structures via self-organization. Nature provides the inspiration by being very efficient at using self-organized structures for conducting charge – e.g. in the photosynthesis in plants and nerve systems in mammals – and assembling such structures with precision beyond the capabilities of any man-made machine or process.

“Molecular electronics will not compete with current silicon-based IC technologies,” explains Dago de Leeuw, a Research Fellow within Philips Research and member of the joint research team that made the breakthrough. “Molecular electronics could be an interesting option for manufacturing plastic electronics. Plastic electronics is very promising for the manufacture of electronics where low temperature or low cost in-line processing techniques are required.”

While there have been many research activities in this field over the last 10 to 20 years, a reliable way of building molecular electronics had not been found. Well-defined molecular-electronics-based diodes can only be realized when the molecules are sandwiched between two metallic (e.g. gold) electrodes. To this end functional molecules are used that (under the proper conditions) spontaneously form a densely-packed monolayer on the bottom electrode. Many approaches have attempted to simply deposit a metal electrode directly on to this monolayer. However, this approach results in shorting, caused by contacts forming between the electrodes, since the monolayer is only 1 to 2-nm thick.

The technology developed by the scientists at the University of Groningen and Philips Research uses monolayers that are confined to predefined holes in a polymer that has been applied on top of the bottom electrode. The key to their success is the deposition of an additional plastic electrode layer on to the monolayer prior to the deposition of the metallic electrode. The plastic electrode protects the monolayer and as such enables a non-detrimental deposition of the gold electrode.

“Based on a molecular self-assembly process we have developed a reliable way to fabricate well-defined molecular diodes,” says Dr Bert de Boer, the Assistant Professor within the Materials Science CentrePlus at the University of Groningen that leads the joint research team. “It will enable us, for the first time, to do reliable and reproducible measurements on molecular junctions, which is essential for the exploration of the potential applications of molecular electronics.”

The success of this research project is further proof of the leading position that the University of Groningen and Philips Research have in plastic electronics research. It also provides a strong foundation to develop new applications for electronic elements in which the functionality has been confined to only one molecular layer.

Source: Philips Research

Carnegie Mellon researchers say use of switchgrass could solve energy woes

Alternative energy solutions
PITTSBURGH-- Carnegie Mellon University researchers say the use of switchgrass could help break U.S. dependence on fossil fuels and curb costly transportation costs.
"Our report indicates the time is right for America to begin a transition to ethanol derived from switchgrass," said Scott Matthews, an assistant professor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. A 25 percent hike in gas prices at the pump since December adds to the researchers' call for more ethanol derived from switchgrass, a perennial tall grass used as forage for livestock. Gasoline prices in the U.S. are approaching an average of $3 a gallon. The Carnegie Mellon findings were published in the May 1 issue of the American Chemical Society's Journal "Environmental Science and Technology."
Matthews, along with W. Michael Griffin, executive director of the Green Design Institute at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, and William R. Morrow, a researcher in the university's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said using switchgrass as a supplement to corn to make ethanol would help ensure the availability of large volumes of inexpensive ethanol to fuel distributors and consumers.
"We need to be thinking about how we can make and deliver ethanol once our corn and land resources are maxed out. Switchgrass can be that next step," Griffin said.
The Carnegie Mellon report also found that ethanol derived from the dry, brown switchgrass, a cellulosic ethanol, could be made in sufficient quantities to deliver 16 percent ethanol fuel to all consumers in the U.S. Researchers said this would likely lead to significant decreases and stability in the price of gasoline.
"It's a renewable resource," Griffin said. "Rather than taking a depletable resource from the ground, switchgrass can be grown again and again."
In a recent address, President George W. Bush made a plea for increased focus on renewable energy, mentioning switchgrass by name.
Scientists have long known how to use enzymes and microorganisms to mine the carbon from carbohydrates to make industrial products. But for decades the technology didn't go very far commercially because fossil fuel – hydrocarbon – was a far cheaper carbon source.
Now that oil prices have climbed roughly 35 percent over the past year, cellulosic fermentation technology is becoming economical.
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization said last week that biofuels may supply 25 percent of the world's energy needs in 15 to 20 years.
"This shift from using hydrocarbons to carbohydrates could revolutionize many industries, including the nation's huge agricultural sector," Griffin said.
While the Carnegie Mellon researchers think switchgrass can be the source of large volumes of inexpensive ethanol in the future, they are concerned about the potential costs and siting concerns of using pipelines, the most cost-effective way to deliver fuels.
The U.S. has 100,000 miles of pipelines dedicated to transporting petroleum. But Carnegie Mellon researchers say the pipelines can't be efficiently used because impurities from the petroleum would adversely mix with the ethanol. "In the long run, our goal would be to make petroleum pipelines obsolete; which raises questions about whether ethanol pipelines should ever be built," Matthews said.
To avoid potential issues with pipelines, the authors expect regional solutions to dominate, such as widespread adoption of 85 percent ethanol delivered by rail or truck in the Midwest. American automakers already sell flexible-fuel vehicles (that can run on ethanol or gasoline) that can be purchased in the U.S.
Much of the discussions today about alternatives to gasoline, such as hydrogen, have similar issues related to infrastructure. "Unfortunately, most of the research time and money is being spent on the fuels without adequate consideration to how we will get it to consumers cost-effectively," Griffin said.

Nanopore will make for speedy DNA sequencing

17:15 10 April 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Tom Simonite

A new technique harnessing a “nanopore” to detect electrical changes as a strand of DNA is passed through it could speed up DNA sequencing more than 200 times. The system could process the human genome in hours, researchers claim, compared with the 6 months it would take in today's best labs.
The technique has been tested theoretically by US physicists using a detailed computer simulation of over 100,000 interacting atoms. The DNA-sequencing nanopore is yet to be built, but you can view the simulation, here (mpeg format).
The device would work by running an electric current across a DNA strand as it is drawn through a nanopore, using electrodes built into the pore's sides. Detecting the changes in current that correspond to the four different bases, or "letters", that make up DNA would read off the sequence as it passed.
"Because we're all physicists working on this we've started at the very bottom – with atoms," explains Johan Lagerqvist, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, US, who worked on the simulation. Lagerqvist and colleagues tested a virtual version of the system by modelling how 100,000 atoms in a short DNA strand, the silicon nitride nanopore, its electrodes and the surrounding chemical solution would all interact.
Multiple measurements
Because DNA is a kind of acid, it has a negative charge and can be drawn through a nanopore by a positive electrode on the other side. But the researchers found that to accurately record the sequence of the strand as it passes through, electrodes on the inside of the pore have to scan each base many times.
"The changes each base causes in the current are not always identical," explains Lagerqvist. "They overlap a little, but we can get around this by taking more than one measurement for each base as it passes." Taking the average of 70 readings from each base made the scanner 99.9% accurate.
In a lab dish, a piece of DNA like that used in the virtual model would take just microseconds to pass through a pore, but modelling the process took 40 high-powered computers around a week. "At a scale this small, each and every atom matters," said Lagerqvist. "We were able to prove that this system could work, and the components to make it already exist, all that's needed now is to put them together."
Nanotubes in nanopores
In fact, a separate team at Harvard University, Massachusetts, US, has been trying build such a nanopore. "Using a nanopore with a current running across it to look at DNA has enormous potential," says Daniel Branton, group leader of the nanopore group at Harvard.
"This technique could also be used for other polymers like proteins or for artificial molecules. And that information has all kinds of valuable uses. We and other groups have been interested in this for some time, but this new simulation gives specifics about how such a device might be used."
The Harvard group are experimenting with adding a carbon nanotube inside a nanopore – a pore left behind after depositing silicon nitride in a way that leaves a pore behind. The carbon nanotube would act as an electrode inside the pore. "We've managed to articulate these tubes and pores together," says Branton. "Because of the favourable electrical properties of the tubes they can function as the electrodes to run current across the molecule passing through the pore."
But although results are promising, rapid scanning of DNA is still dependent on solving a still difficult construction problem. "We have measured some proof of principle signals from molecules in pores," says Branton, "but we're talking about putting things together at the nano level, which is not easily done."

Scientists are meeting the technical challenges of OLED

In the race to create the roll-up TV (and a host of other devices), scientists are continually manipulating organic light-emitting diode (OLED) technology. Recently, researchers from Korea have designed a technique that is rigid enough to allow extremely high resolution and flexible enough to cover a large area in a simple process.


Because OLED technology is one of the newer methods to enter the flat panel display market, analysts initially predicted that OLED would have some catching up to do to compete with the popularity of LEDs, LCDs (liquid crystal devices) and plasma screens. However, scientists are meeting the technical challenges of OLEDs and designing technology that proves its worth in many regards: it’s brighter, faster, lighter, cheaper, bigger and smaller than other technologies in certain areas.

OLEDs, like LEDs, are electroluminescent, meaning they generate light when electrically stimulated. As opposed to LEDs that use superconductors to enable electron-hole recombination, OLEDs use carbon-based molecules (which vary depending on desired color). However, the two most prominent OLED techniques have limitations: the pattern transfer method has color constraints, and the shadow mask method can only cover small areas.

In a recent issue of Nanotechnology, scientists Jun-ho Choi et al. present a simple and effective method for OLED displays using rigiflex lithography, a technique that members of the team introduced last year.

“While the rigid nature of the rigiflex mould allows resolution down to the sub-100 nm range, the flexible nature of the mould makes it possible for the transfer to be applied to large areas,” wrote the scientists. “A flat substrate is not necessarily flat in that there is always roughness at the nanometer scale if not the micrometer level….A flexible mould can make intimate contact with the underlying surface over a large area because of the flexibility, which makes large area applications possible.”

To enable large area applications, the method uses low pressure for the transfer of a mold made of poly (urethane acrylate) (PUA). After depositing organic multilayers on the mold, the design is transferred to a glass-coated (indium tin oxide) surface by a simple process based on the adhesion difference between the mold and the surface.

Compared with other OLED techniques, rigiflex lithography demonstrates equivalent luminance strength, but outperformed other techniques with its large size, flexibility and simplicity. The method allows a simple step-and-repeat transfer of each color (red, green and blue) OLED.

“There is no particular limit on the size in principle,” Hong Lee, coauthor, told PhysOrg.com. “With rigiflex OLED, you can 'print' the whole device in one process, whereas with other techniques, you have to do it one at a time, many times for many layers involved in the fabrication.”

Applications for OLED technology currently under investigation include "smart" light-emitting shades; video walls; and electronic displays on clothes, windshields and visors for pilots, drivers and scuba divers.

By Lisa Zyga, Copyright 2006 PhysOrg.com

Solar-powered retinal implant

AN IMPLANT that squirts chemicals into the back of your eye may not sound like much fun. But a solar-powered chip that stimulates retinal cells by spraying them with neurotransmitters could restore sight to blind people.
Unlike other implants under development that apply an electric charge directly to retinal cells, the device does not cause the cells to heat up. It also uses very little power, so it does not need external batteries.
The retina, which lines the back and sides of the eyeball, contains photoreceptor cells that release signalling chemicals called neurotransmitters in response to light. The neurotransmitters pass into nerve cells on top of the photoreceptors, from where the signals are relayed to the brain via a series of electrical and chemical reactions. In people with retinal diseases such as age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa, the photoreceptors become damaged, ultimately causing blindness.
Last year engineer Laxman Saggere of the University of Illinois at Chicago unveiled plans for an implant that would replace these damaged photoreceptors with a set of neurotransmitter pumps that respond to light. Now he has built a crucial component: a solar-powered actuator that flexes in response to the very low intensity light that strikes the retina. Multiple actuators on a single chip pick up the details of the image focused on the retina, allowing some "pixels" to be passed on to the brain.
The prototype actuator consists of a flexible silicon disc just 1.5 millimetres in diameter and 15 micrometres thick. When light hits a silicon solar cell next to the disc it produces a voltage. The solar cell is connected to a layer of piezoelectric material called lead zirconate titanate (PZT), which changes shape in response to the voltage, pushing down on the silicon disc. In future, a reservoir will sit underneath the disc, and this action will squeeze the neurotransmitters out onto retinal cells.

From here we just need to be able to generate the neurotransmitter in the device.

NEWS, but not as we know it

It will mean stories can be defined, on the fly, with a precision greater than a library's card catalogue.
The News Engine Web Services (NEWS) platform is aimed at news agencies, governments and large enterprises and will enable them to develop highly advanced analysis to raw text, with a vast number of potential applications.
News agencies will be able to automatically create very highly personalised news profiles for readers. Governments will be able to analyse social and political trends through newspaper reports, at a much higher level of detail than was possible previously, and large businesses will be able to study market and product developments.
The project that developed the platform even managed to develop a proof-of-concept service for analysing audio, by combining their system with a commercial voice recognition programme.
At the heart of this functionality is the powerful classification and ontology-based annotation system that can work across languages. "News classifications up to now typically consisted of about 12 terms, like sport, world news, finance, that a journalist knew off by heart," says Dr Ansgar Bernardi, deputy head of the Knowledge Management Group at DFKI, the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and coordinator of the IST-funded NEWS project.
"That's not very precise. Our system can automatically analyse a story and access 1300 classification terms to define it," says Bernardi.
What's more it can access a large ontology of terms related to the specific story definitions within a class, terms like president, head-of-state and government in the politics class, for example. The end result is a very large data set of standardised terms that define the story's content.
That data set can then be used in a huge variety of ways to potentially answer almost any query a user can imagine. A simple example: "Show me news items about the US president in January 2006" will deliver news items about George W. Bush in this time frame.
"We expect that platform users will take the basic functionality and develop around it to respond to the information they want to analyse," says Bernardi. The system also needs to be 'trained' for analysis of specific topics.
To avoid 'false positives', where two people of the same name are confused, for example, or where two cities have the same name, the NEWS team developed IdentityRank, an adaptive algorithm for instance disambiguation.
"It really started out as a by-product of our main work, but it works well and I think it may generate quite a bit of scientific interest," says Bernardi.
It's only one of NEWS' many achievements, and work will not stop there. "We have developed a great network during the project and the consortium has agreed to offer mutual support for a further two years. In the meantime we are pursuing commercial opportunities, several news agencies are interested in the platform, and we had a lot of exposure at CEBIT '05 and '06," says Bernardi

New and Improved Antimatter Spaceship for Mars Missions

Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason – it’s the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy).
However, in reality this power comes with a price. Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to be around. High-energy gamma rays can also make the engines radioactive by fragmenting atoms of the engine material.
The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy.
Antimatter is sometimes called the mirror image of normal matter because while it looks just like ordinary matter, some properties are reversed. For example, normal electrons, the familiar particles that carry electric current in everything from cell phones to plasma TVs, have a negative electric charge. Anti-electrons have a positive charge, so scientists dubbed them "positrons".
When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy. This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy.
Previous antimatter-powered spaceship designs employed antiprotons, which produce high-energy gamma rays when they annihilate. The new design will use positrons, which make gamma rays with about 400 times less energy.
The NIAC research is a preliminary study to see if the idea is feasible. If it looks promising, and funds are available to successfully develop the technology, a positron-powered spaceship would have a couple advantages over the existing plans for a human mission to Mars, called the Mars Reference Mission.
"The most significant advantage is more safety," said Dr. Gerald Smith of Positronics Research, LLC, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The current Reference Mission calls for a nuclear reactor to propel the spaceship to Mars. This is desirable because nuclear propulsion reduces travel time to Mars, increasing safety for the crew by reducing their exposure to cosmic rays. Also, a chemically-powered spacecraft weighs much more and costs a lot more to launch. The reactor also provides ample power for the three-year mission. But nuclear reactors are complex, so more things could potentially go wrong during the mission. "However, the positron reactor offers the same advantages but is relatively simple," said Smith, lead researcher for the NIAC study.
Also, nuclear reactors are radioactive even after their fuel is used up. After the ship arrives at Mars, Reference Mission plans are to direct the reactor into an orbit that will not encounter Earth for at least a million years, when the residual radiation will be reduced to safe levels. However, there is no leftover radiation in a positron reactor after the fuel is used up, so there is no safety concern if the spent positron reactor should accidentally re-enter Earth's atmosphere, according to the team.
It will be safer to launch as well. If a rocket carrying a nuclear reactor explodes, it could release radioactive particles into the atmosphere. "Our positron spacecraft would release a flash of gamma-rays if it exploded, but the gamma rays would be gone in an instant. There would be no radioactive particles to drift on the wind. The flash would also be confined to a relatively small area. The danger zone would be about a kilometer (about a half-mile) around the spacecraft. An ordinary large chemically-powered rocket has a danger zone of about the same size, due to the big fireball that would result from its explosion," said Smith.
Another significant advantage is speed. The Reference Mission spacecraft would take astronauts to Mars in about 180 days. "Our advanced designs, like the gas core and the ablative engine concepts, could take astronauts to Mars in half that time, and perhaps even in as little as 45 days," said Kirby Meyer, an engineer with Positronics Research on the study.
Advanced engines do this by running hot, which increases their efficiency or "specific impulse" (Isp). Isp is the "miles per gallon" of rocketry: the higher the Isp, the faster you can go before you use up your fuel supply. The best chemical rockets, like NASA's Space Shuttle main engine, max out at around 450 seconds, which means a pound of fuel will produce a pound of thrust for 450 seconds. A nuclear or positron reactor can make over 900 seconds. The ablative engine, which slowly vaporizes itself to produce thrust, could go as high as 5,000 seconds.
One technical challenge to making a positron spacecraft a reality is the cost to produce the positrons. Because of its spectacular effect on normal matter, there is not a lot of antimatter sitting around. In space, it is created in collisions of high-speed particles called cosmic rays. On Earth, it has to be created in particle accelerators, immense machines that smash atoms together. The machines are normally used to discover how the universe works on a deep, fundamental level, but they can be harnessed as antimatter factories.
"A rough estimate to produce the 10 milligrams of positrons needed for a human Mars mission is about 250 million dollars using technology that is currently under development," said Smith. This cost might seem high, but it has to be considered against the extra cost to launch a heavier chemical rocket (current launch costs are about $10,000 per pound) or the cost to fuel and make safe a nuclear reactor. "Based on the experience with nuclear technology, it seems reasonable to expect positron production cost to go down with more research," added Smith.
Another challenge is storing enough positrons in a small space. Because they annihilate normal matter, you can't just stuff them in a bottle. Instead, they have to be contained with electric and magnetic fields. "We feel confident that with a dedicated research and development program, these challenges can be overcome," said Smith.
If this is so, perhaps the first humans to reach Mars will arrive in spaceships powered by the same source that fired starships across the universes of our science fiction dreams.
Source: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, by Bill Steigerwald

Graphite-based circuitry may be foundation for devices that handle electrons as waves

New electronics

A study of how electrons behave in circuitry made from ultrathin layers of graphite – known as graphene – suggests the material could provide the foundation for a new generation of nanometer scale devices that manipulate electrons as waves – much like photonic systems control light waves.
In a paper published April 13 in Science Express, an online advance publication of the journal Science, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France report measuring electron transport properties in graphene that are comparable those seen in carbon nanotubes. Unlike carbon nanotubes, however, graphene circuitry can be produced using established microelectronics techniques, allowing researchers to envision a "road map" for future high-volume production.
"We have shown that we can make the graphene material, that we can pattern it, and that its transport properties are very good," said Walt de Heer, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics. "The material has high electron mobility, which means electrons can move through it without much scattering or resistance. It is also coherent, which means electrons move through the graphene much like light travels through waveguides."  The results should encourage further development of graphene-based electronics, though de Heer cautions that practical devices may be a decade away.
"This is really the first step in a very long path," he said. "We are at the proof-of principle stage, comparable to where transistors were in the late 1940s. We have a lot to do, but I believe this technology will advance rapidly."
The research, begun by de Heer's team in 2001, is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Intel Corporation.
In their paper, the researchers report seeing evidence of quantum confinement effects in their graphene circuitry, meaning electrons can move through it as waves. "The graphene ribbons we create are really like waveguides for electrons," de Heer said.
Because carbon nanotubes conduct electricity with virtually no resistance, they have attracted strong interest for use in transistors and other devices. However, the discrete nature of nanotubes – and variability in their properties – pose significant obstacles to their use in practical devices. By contrast, continuous graphene circuitry can be produced using standard microelectronics processing techniques.
"Nanotubes are simply graphene that has been rolled into a cylindrical shape," de Heer explained. "Using narrow ribbons of graphene, we can get all the properties of nanotubes because those properties are due to the graphene and the confinement of the electrons, not the nanotube structures."
De Heer envisions using the graphene electronics for specialized applications, potentially within conventional silicon-based systems.
"We have shown that we can interconnect graphene, put current into it, and take current out," he said. "We have a very promising electronic material. We see graphene as a platform, a canvas on which we can work."
De Heer and collaborators Claire Berger, Zhimin Song, Xuebin Li, Xiaosong Wu, Nate Brown, Tianbo Li, Joanna Hass, Alexei Marchenkov, Edward Conrad and Phillip First of Georgia Tech and Didier Mayou and Cecile Naud of CNRS start with a wafer of silicon carbide, a material made up of silicon and carbon atoms. By heating the wafer in a high vacuum, they drive silicon atoms from the surface, leaving a thin continuous layer of graphene.
Next, they spin-coat onto the surface a photo-resist material of the kind used in established microelectronics techniques. Using electron-beam lithography, they produce patterns on the surface, then use conventional etching processes to remove unwanted graphene.
"We are doing lithography, which is completely familiar to those who work in microelectronics," said de Heer. "It's exactly what is done in microelectronics, but with a different material. That is the appeal of this process."
Using electron beam lithography in Georgia Tech's Microelectronics Research Center, they've created feature sizes as small as 80 nanometers. The graphene circuitry demonstrates high electron mobility – up to 25,000 square centimeters per volt-second, showing that electrons move with little scattering. The researchers expect to see ballistic transport at room temperature when they make structures small enough.
So far, they have built an all graphene planar field-effect transistor. The side-gated device produces a change in resistance through its channel when voltage is applied to the gate. However, this first device has a substantial current leak, which the team expects to eliminate with minor processing adjustments.
The researchers have also built a working quantum interference device, a ring-shaped structure that would be useful in manipulating electronic waves.
The key to properties of the new circuitry is the width of the ribbons, which confine the electrons in a quantum effect similar to that seen in carbon nanotubes. The width of the ribbon controls the material's band-gap. Other structures, such as sensing molecules, could be attached to the edges of the ribbons, which are normally passivated by hydrogen atoms.
Beyond coherence and high electron mobility, the researchers note that the speed of electrons through the graphene is independent of energy – just like light waves. The electrons also possess the properties of Dirac particles, which allow them to travel significant distances without scattering.
Among the challenges ahead is improving the techniques for patterning the graphene, since electron transport is affected by the smoothness of edges in the circuitry. Researchers will also have to understand the material's fundamental properties, which could still contain "show-stoppers" that might make the material impractical.
De Heer has seen hints that graphene may offer some surprises. "We already have indications of some new and surprising electronic properties of this material," he said. "It is doing things that we have never seen in two-dimensional materials before."

Sonofusion in question

University to Investigate Fusion Study
by Kenneth Chang
The New York Times
Purdue University has opened an investigation into “extremely serious” concerns regarding the research of a professor who said he had produced nuclear fusion in a tabletop experiment, the university announced yesterday.
Fusion is the process the sun uses to produce heat and light, and scientists led by Rusi P. Taleyarkhan, a professor of nuclear engineering at Purdue, said they were able to achieve the same feat by blasting a container of liquid solvent with strong ultrasonic vibrations.
The vibrations, they said, collapsed tiny gas bubbles in the liquid, heating them to millions of degrees, hot enough to initiate fusion. If true, the phenomenon, often called sonofusion or bubble fusion, could have far-reaching applications, including the generation of energy.
The research first appeared in 2002 in the journal Science, but controversy had erupted even before publication. Dr. Taleyarkhan, then a senior scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, reported the detection of neutrons, which are the telltale signs of fusion, but two other scientists at Oak Ridge, using their own detectors, said they saw no signs of neutrons.
Dr. Taleyarkhan, who joined the Purdue faculty in 2003, and his colleagues have published two additional papers in major physics journals, amid the continuing skepticism of other scientists. No other scientists have been able to reproduce the findings.
The university began a review of the research and the accusations last week, Sally Mason, the university provost, said in a statement. “The research claims involved are very significant,” Dr. Mason said, “and the concerns expressed are extremely serious.”
Dr. Mason said that the review was being conducted by Purdue’s Office of the Vice President of Research and that the results would be announced publicly.
Dr. Taleyarkhan did not return phone calls or respond to an e-mail message seeking comment.
Meanwhile, Brian Naranjo, a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, said his analysis of data from the last scientific paper that was published by Dr. Taleyarkhan’s group showed a chance of less than one in 10 million that the emission pattern could have been generated by fusion.
Instead, Mr. Naranjo said that the pattern of particles seen in the experiment much more closely matched that given off by californium, a radioactive element that is used in Dr. Taleyarkhan’s laboratory. With $350,000 from the Defense Department, Seth J. Putterman, a professor of physics at U.C.L.A. and the thesis adviser to Mr. Naranjo, has tried to build a replica of Dr. Taleyarkhan’s apparatus and has not seen any signs of fusion.
Dr. Putterman said he told Dr. Taleyarkhan of the calculations last week on a visit to Purdue. “He didn’t have any clear answers,” Dr. Putterman said. “From my perspective, his answers were not satisfactory.”
Californium is present in Dr. Taleyarkhan’s laboratory, stored in a closet about 15 feet from the experiment – close enough to generate the results reported in Dr. Taleyarkhan’s paper if it had been stored improperly.

Easy Up, Not-So-Easy Down - Composite bridge building

Using new fiberglass-polymer materials, contractors in Springfield, Mo., have just subjected a decaying, 70-year-old bridge to a makeover that was as quick as it was dramatic.
Instead of snarling traffic for two to three weeks while they repaired the crumbling deck, girders and guardrails by conventional methods--laying plywood, tying steel rebar and pouring concrete--the workers used pre-fabricated plates and cages developed by a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported university-industry partnership to finish the job in a mere five days. 
The NSF's Repair of Buildings and Bridges with Composites Industry-University Cooperative Research Center is based at the University of Missouri at Rolla and North Carolina State University.  The Missouri researchers joined with their industry partners and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison to develop the new construction solution.
The target of the makeover, an old bridge on Farm Road 148 near Springfield, was one of as many as 156,000 U.S. bridges in need of repair. In fact, it was posted, meaning that local officials had imposed a vehicle weight limit due to the dangerous bridge conditions. Now, however, a fresh layer of concrete conceals the technology responsible for the rapid replacement of the bridge’s crumbling deck and guardrails.
"A key to tackling the challenge of making thousands of deficient bridges in the nation fully operational and safe again is the development of convenient solutions for the rapid construction of long-lasting bridges," says Fabio Matta, a Ph.D. candidate in structural engineering who helped develop the new construction system.  "Advanced composites make the margin for improvements exceptional," he added.
The fiberglass-polymer composites are strong enough to endure several decades of traffic--and unlike steel, will resist the ravages of salt and other corrosive de-icers for just as long. Due to the lightweight and prefabricated nature of the materials, moreover, workers can put the structures in place quickly, saving both time and commuter headaches.
"Since its inception in 1998, we have worked with our NSF I/UCRC partners to provide solutions for our ageing infrastructure," says Antonio Nanni, director of the Missouri center.
"We have demonstrated the economical and technical feasibility of several very attractive technologies," Nanni added. "Their full deployment will become possible only with the modification of existing codes and standards.  It is a long process, but we are seeing light at the end of the tunnel."
The original news release can be found here.

Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century

from PhysOrg.com
With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade. [...]

Scientist Creates Liquid Crystals with High Metal Content

Researchers at North Carolina State University have successfully engineered liquid crystals that contain very high concentrations of metals – potentially paving the way toward the creation of “magnetic liquids” and liquid crystals that may have important ramifications for semi-conductor and solar energy research.

Dr. James Martin, professor of chemistry in NC State’s College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences, along with departmental colleague Dr. Jaap Folmer and a team of graduate students, engineered liquid crystals with an inorganic content of up to 80 percent, more than twice the ratio of previously observed organic liquid crystals with incorporated metals, or metallomesogens.

The findings appear in the April edition of Nature Materials.

Liquid crystals are prized for their unique optical and self-healing properties. They generally consist of toothpick- or pancake-shaped molecules that align in the liquid state because of their shape. By using electric fields to manipulate the orientation of liquid crystal molecules, scientists can control whether or not light can pass through the liquid crystalline material. Without such liquid crystals, everyday items we take for granted – such as flat-panel computer displays or LCD watches – would not exist.

The most commonly known liquid crystals are organic molecules composed of carbon,
nitrogen or oxygen. Adding inorganic materials, or metals, to these liquid crystals in order to potentially access electronic or magnetic properties was problematic because the structure of these molecules made it difficult to achieve a metallic concentration high enough to be useful.

Martin’s team recognized that to achieve high metal content in liquid crystals, it was necessary to start with an inorganic network from which liquid-crystalline molecules could be designed. They have achieved success with this strategy by using surfactants, like those in laundry detergent, to help engineer liquid crystalline structure from various inorganic networks. The ratios of surfactant and inorganic components used in preparation of these materials give the scientists a great deal of control over the structure of liquids.

The research could lead not only to the creation of new liquid crystals, but also to a new understanding of the ways in which all liquid structures – even membranes and proteins – are organized.

“Liquids are not random structures, but rather highly organized structures that we can control and shape at the atomic and molecular levels,” says Martin. “When we start exploring the ways in which we can organize these liquids, we can create totally new materials, and access different properties within each material.”

Source: North Carolina State University

Smart glasses switch focus in an instant

NewScientist.com news service
Stu Hutson

This prototype might get their wearer noticed, but future designs aim to be indistinguishable from regular glasses (Image: PixelOptics)
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Glasses that change from "long distance" to "reading" mode at the flick of a switch could prove a revelation for many wearers.
Researchers have developed a prototype that uses liquid crystals to change focus in an instant, thus preventing the eye strain induced by wearing conventional bifocal glasses. Focusing through specific portions of a bifocal lens causes many users to become dizzy or disoriented, while others report increased eye fatigue.
"Bifocals effectively work the same way they have since they were invented by Benjamin Franklin," says Nasser Peyghambarian, a professor of optical sciences at Arizona State University, US, who helped develop the "dynamic" glasses. "But as any of more than 40 million people in America who need bifocals know, they're a pain."
Fresnel lens
The dynamic glasses change focus using a 5-micron-thick layer of nematic liquid crystal, sandwiched between two pieces of glass. Molecules of the liquid crystal reorient themselves when exposed to an electric field and the researchers used this to create a type of dynamic Fresnel lens.
In a normal Fresnel lens, concentric rings are carved into a piece of glass causing light to become focused in a similar way to a conventional lens. Dynamic glasses mimic the Fresnel effect using concentric circles of clear electrodes on the pieces of glass containing the crystal. Activating these electrodes causes the liquid crystal to align into rings and focus light passing through the lens.
A company called PixelOptics, based in Virginia, US, plans to sell glasses containing dynamic lenses commercially within two years. "The prototype is pretty bulky, but when these hit the streets they’ll be virtually indistinguishable from other, very stylish glasses," says Ronald Blum, CEO of PixelOptics.
Infrared laser
PixelOptics first developed the idea of dynamic focusing while working on large lenses for computer screens. Ideally, these would have allowed near-sighted and far-sighted people to read their monitors without their spectacles. "As screens got thinner and thinner, though, the idea became less practical," Blum says. "So instead we decided to move the technology from the computer to the computer user."
The first commercial dynamic glasses will only be able to switch between a person’s normal vision and their "reading" prescription. However, by applying different voltages and by changing the number of current-carrying rings within each lens it should be possible to produce different magnifications using the same lens, researchers say.
Peyghambarian is now working on glasses that can dynamically refocus on whatever the wearer is looking at. These will most probably use an infrared laser built into the bridge of the glasses to determine how far away an object is. "The idea is to put the focusing power found in the lens of a camera on your face all the time," Peyghambarian told New Scientist.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0600850103)

New data transmission record - 60 DVDs per second

Sweet, when can I get one to my house?

New data transmission record - 60 DVDs per second
March 24, 2006
As the world's internet traffic grows relentlessly, faster data transmission will logically become crucial. To enable telecommunications networks to cope with the phenomenal surge in data traffic as the internet population moves past a billion users, researchers are focusing on new systems to increase data transmission rates and it's not surprising that the world data transmission record is continually under threat. Unlike records where human physical capabilities limit new records to incremental growth, when human ingenuity is the deciding factor, extraordinary gains are possible. German and Japanese scientists recently collaborated to achieve just such a quantum leap in obliterating the world record for data transmission. By transmitting a data signal at 2.56 terabits per second over a 160-kilometer link (equivalent to 2,560,000,000,000 bits per second or the contents of 60 DVDs) the researchers bettered the old record of 1.28 terabits per second held by a Japanese group. By comparison, the fastest high-speed links currently carry data at a maximum 40 Gbit/s, or around 50 times slower.
"You transmit data at various wavelengths simultaneously in the fiber-optic networks. For organizational and economic reasons each wavelength signal is assigned a data rate as high as possible", explains Prof. Hans-Georg Weber from the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut HHI in Berlin, who heads a project under the MultiTeraNet program funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
A few weeks ago the scientist and his team established a new world record together with colleagues from Fujitsu. Data is transmitted in fiber-optic cables using ultrashort pulses of light and is normally encoded by switching the laser on and off. A pulse gives the binary 1, off the 0. You therefore have two light intensity states to transmit the data. The Fraunhofer researchers have now managed to squeeze more data into a single pulse by packing four, instead of the previous two, binary data states in a light pulse using phase modulation."
"Faster data rates are hugely important for tomorrow's telecommunications", explains Weber. The researcher assumes the transmission capacity on the large transoceanic traffic links will need to increase to between 50 and 100 terabits per second in ten to 20 years. "This kind of capacity will only be feasible with the new high-performance systems."