Recent News
- Found: Another molecule needed at the origin of life
- For real: A new way to produce electricity
- New: Single molecule sensor array
- Finally(?)…artificially making blood stem cells in quantity
- Update: Chinese space station
- Looking at the strange face of antimatter
- Life on Mars, if it exists, is below the surface
- A different kind of lens for time
- Oh please, “skinput”
- Update: More Moon water
- Cutting cancer cell immortality short
- First time: Watching the unfolding story of proteins in living cells
- Newly named: Copernicum (element 112)
- Making jet fuel from biomass
- Nanobubbles are really slick
Category Archives: News
For real: A new way to produce electricity
It’s not every day that a new way to produce electricity is discovered…although it does seem there is a multitude of approaches. This one involves carbon nanotubes, those jacks-of-all-trades in the nanotech business, nanometer sized tubes of pure carbon. (In this case, think of them as ‘wires’ one-hundred thousandth of the thickness of human hair.) [...]
Posted in News: Energy Storage Tagged battery, electricity, lithium-ion, nanotechnology, nanotube, Seebeck effect, thermopower wave Leave a comment
New: Single molecule sensor array
If there is a spectrum that can be detected by sensors, from very small to very big, then the sensor array built by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, Cambridge, USA) can stake a claim for the very smallest – a single molecule. The array uses carbon nanotubes, which are rapidly becoming the [...]
Posted in News: Cell Biology Tagged biomolecule, carbon nanotube, cell biology, cell growth, hydrogen peroxide, nanobiology, nanomedicine, nanosensor Leave a comment
Finally(?)…artificially making blood stem cells in quantity
This story begins with an insight: The cells of a vascular system (veins, arteries, capillaries) – called endothelial cells – do more than make up the tissue that transports blood; they also play a role in maintaining blood (hematopoietic) stem cells by producing novel stem-cell-growth factors. A research team at the Ansary Stem Cell Institute [...]
Posted in News: Stem Cells Tagged adult cells, endothelial cells, genetic modification, hematopoietic, stem cells, vascular Leave a comment
Update: Chinese space station
The China National Space Administration has announced plans to launch the first module of a space station in 2011. The station, named Tiangong “Heavenly Place”, will consist of several modules, the first being Tiangong-1. The first module, weighing 8.5 tons and launched aboard a modified China’s Long March 2F rocket, will be unmanned. Over the [...]
Posted in News: Space Exploration Tagged China, China Space Agency, Mir, Shenzhou, space station, Tiangong Leave a comment
Looking at the strange face of antimatter
Scarcely three weeks ago, it was reported that the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory had achieved the all time (laboratory) high temperature record of 4 trillion degrees Centigrade. [SciTechStory: Taking the temperature of the Big Bang + milliseconds] The significance was that in colliding atoms of gold and producing such [...]
Posted in News: Nuclear Physics Tagged anti-nucleus, anti-strange quark, antimatter, Big Bang, neutron, nuclear physics, proton, quark, RHIC, strange quarks Leave a comment
Life on Mars, if it exists, is below the surface
Is there life on Mars? We don’t know yet. If there is, it isn’t very big. In fact, if there’s (still) any life at all, it will be bacteria or something even more primitive and small. Whatever there is, it’s also not likely to be on the surface. That’s not because of the cold; it’s [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Tagged astrobiology, bacteria, DNA, environment, extremophiles, LUCA, Mars, microbes, panspermia, UV Leave a comment
A different kind of lens for time
In the sense that a lens refracts (bends) light, you could say that using galaxies as a lens is reasonable – if the scale of measurement is nothing less than the age of the universe. It never hurts to have confirmation (in science and a lot of other things). While we know from various studies [...]
Posted in News: Cosmology Tagged cosmology, galaxies, gravitational lensing, Hubble constant, Hubble Space Telescope, Keck Telescope, universe age Leave a comment
Oh please, “skinput”
Research work from a collaboration between Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University (USA) has resulted in an armband that can sense taps on human skin (the arm in this case) and uses sound vibration detection (an acoustic biosensor) to determine the location for a kind of crude ‘button’ or ‘keyboard’ arrangement. It also uses a picoprojector [...]
Posted in News: Computer Power Tagged acoustic, biosensor, buttons, computer, keyboard, picoprojector, skinput Leave a comment
Update: More Moon water
Last year, in a flurry of “NASA Bombs Moon!” stories, the NASA LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite) project deliberately crashed into a deeply shadowed crater to kick up dust and test its contents – looking particularly for water. They found it. [SciTechStory: On the Moon or elsewhere follow the water] The quantities found [...]
Posted in News: Space Exploration Tagged Chandrayaan, craters, exploration, LCROSS, Moon, Moon base, NASA, north pole, satellite, water, water-ice Leave a comment
Cutting cancer cell immortality short
One of the characteristics of cancer cells is that they don’t die of old age. In a sense, they’re immortal – though of course they can be killed. The main reason for their longevity has been traced to telomeres a strip of non-coding genes at the ends of chromosomes. When normal cells replicate very often [...]
Posted in News: Major Disease Cures Tagged cancer, chromosomes, Fbx4, proteins, telomerase, telomeres, TIN2, TRF1 1 Comment
First time: Watching the unfolding story of proteins in living cells
Think of looking at cells in vitro (the biologists way of saying the cells are in a Petri dish or a test tube – ‘in glass’) as watching animals in a zoo. It looks relatively natural, but it isn’t. There could be differences, perhaps important differences between the way a cell behaves in vitro and [...]
Posted in News: Proteomics Tagged Fast Relaxation Imaging, fluorescence microscopy, in vitro, in vivo, protein folding, proteomics, UV Leave a comment
Newly named: Copernicum (element 112)
It’s official. The universe’s newest named element (the universe according to human perspective, of course) is: Copernicum – element 112. This isn’t the most important news in science, in fact, it’s not news since the element was discovered in Sigurd Hofmann’s lab at the Center for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt, Germany in 1996 – [...]
Posted in News: Nuclear Physics Tagged atomic mass, Copernicum, Copernicus, Darmstadt, element, super-heavy Leave a comment
Making jet fuel from biomass
One of the critical problems identified with ‘peak oil’ – that point where stocks of petroleum begin to inexorably decline – is the resultant shortage and expense of aviation jet fuel. As traditional jet fuel sources decline, it’s bad enough for a world that’s knit together by (relatively) inexpensive air travel, but there’s another problem [...]
Posted in News: Alternative Energy Tagged biomass, catalysts, formic acid, GVL, jet fuel, levulinic acid, peak oil Leave a comment
Nanobubbles are really slick
One thing nanotechnology can do, besides create new materials, is use some ‘old’ things in new ways. Take, for example, bubbles. Some bubbles are trapped air. Air repels water, or more specifically air and water don’t mix (immediately) so bubbles are formed. Thinking like a nanotechnologist: What if there were nano-sized bubbles trapped in a [...]
Posted in News: Nanotechnology Tagged nanobubbles, nanocavities, nanotechnology, Teflon, water-repellant, x-ray Leave a comment
Quantum physics (like life?) in higher temperature entanglement
It’s been ‘common knowledge’ in the physics community that experiments with quantum entanglement, that weird state where two objects share the same existence, can only take place at extremely low temperatures – roughly a maximum of 4 degrees Kelvin above absolute zero. (That’s about -457F or –272C.) It therefore gives physicists something like what Americans [...]
Posted in News: Quantum Physics Tagged absolute zero, entanglement, Heisenberg uncertainty, Kelvin, quantum oscillators, quantum physics 1 Comment
Ribozymes and the origin of life
It could be called the search for the origin of life, but instead of a sweeping theory (primordial soup and lightning), microbiologists are concentrating on the many pieces that, one way or another, came together to constitute ‘life.’ Some new research from a team at the University of Colorado (Boulder, USA) points to the smallest [...]
Posted in News: Origin of Life Tagged biochemistry, enzyme, microbiology, origin of life, primordial soup, proteins, ribozyme, RNA Leave a comment
New medical paradigm: Growing human organs in animals
The ability to manipulate genetics cuts in a number of ways. This way may sound a little strange: Take a mouse; implant human liver cells in it; watch them grow into a mouse-sized but human liver. It’s more complicated than that, but it works. There are reasons to do this. A lot of tests for [...]
Posted in News: Synthetic Biology Tagged DNA, genetics, Hepatitis-C, liver cells, microbiology, NBTC, synthetic biology Leave a comment
Follow-up: Another ‘junk DNA’ study
The blog Science Life (University of Chicago Medical Center) has an excellent follow-up piece to the story about the discovery of non-coding DNA that contributes to heart disease (SciTechStory: More ‘junk DNA’ that actually does something) The Science Life post mentions that work and details another study done by the University of Chicago and [...]
Posted in News: DNA Decoding Tagged base pairs, chromosomes, DNA, genetics, heart cells, junk DNA, sequence Leave a comment
Phonons in our future
Ever heard of a ‘phonon torpedo’? How about a ‘phonon laser’? Not that either? No wonder, they don’t exist. Although a phonon is to sound as the photon is to light, we do not know much about working with phonons. However, here is news concerning research that – one day – may bring about devices [...]
Posted in News: Quantum Physics Tagged laser, optical laser, phonon, phonon laser, photons, quanta, quantum mechanics, quantum wells Leave a comment
Found: Another molecule needed at the origin of life