Daily Popular
- Enhancer RNA (eRNA): More powerful than previously thought
- lincRNA: A recently discovered RNA organizes stem cell differentiation
- Histones: DNA packaging and much more
- Four-letter codons: A new synthetic biology playground
- Hoogsteen base pairs: An alternate structure in DNA
- New for epigenetics: Active pseudogenes and RNA as gene regulator
- Back to the Future: Cars with hub motors
- Biogeology: A deep subject
- Sci-Fi movie review: Splice
- Stem cell injection improves aging cells in mice
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Category Archives: News
Human genetics: The mysterious unequal mutation by sex
By the numbers, geneticists thought about mutations like this: There are six billion pieces (nucleotides) of genetic information in the genome. Three billion provided by the mother and three billion from the father. Based on evolutionary studies, previous estimates reckoned about 100-200 mutations would be passed on to each child. It was assumed that because [...]
Posted in News: DNA Decoding Tagged DNA, genetics, genome, heredity, mutation, sequencing 2 Comments
New elements: ununquadium (114) and ununhexium (116)
Since it doesn’t happen very often, it’s worth noting that two more basic elements of the universe were added to mankind’s chart of such things, the periodic table of the elements. Don’t be put off by the unun, that’s just a placeholder prefix for an element admitted to the periodic table of elements that doesn’t [...]
Posted in News: Nuclear Physics Tagged elements, island of stability, nuclear physics, periodic table, ununhexium, Ununquadium Leave a comment
Better communications: One laser – 26 Terabits per second, a new record
Imagine transmitting the content of the entire Library of Congress in ten seconds. Yes, that’s fast. That communication speed translates to 26 terabits per second, which is, for now, the fastest speed attained by a communication system using a single laser beam and optical fiber. Actually not so long ago people could barely imagine transmitting [...]
Posted in News: Communications Tagged communications, FFT, frequency comb, Karlsruhe, laser, Leuthold, optics, photonics, Terabit Leave a comment
Synthetic biology: Improve photosynthesis
Eighteen blue-ribbon scientists from all over the world agree: We need to improve on Mother Nature. Oh? Well, yes. Nature only extracts energy from the Sun in a couple of band gaps (otherwise known as colors), mostly green, some blue. We can do better than that. We can engineer plants to absorb photons from the [...]
Posted in News: Synthetic Biology Tagged algae, alternative energy, band gap, biomass, color, photosynthesis, photovoltaic, solar energy, synthetic biology Leave a comment
World population estimate for 2100 revised – up
Ask around about the ‘overpopulation issue.’ The reply is likely to be: What overpopulation issue? For anyone cognitively aware before 1990, that was one of the biggest issues of the era, right up there with the means of reducing the surplus population, which was called global thermonuclear war. For recent generations, it is hardly a [...]
Posted in News: Overpopulation Tagged 2100, Central Africa, Malawi, Nigeria, overpopulation, population report, U.N., world population 2 Comments
New solar heat technology: Make electricity and hot water
Solar panels that directly capture energy from the sun and convert it into electrical energy are well known and recognized as a major source of alternative energy. Solar panels that make hot water are popular in some parts of the world (China, Europe, Brazil, India) and the technology is well known. Solar panels that use [...]
Posted in News: Alternative Energy Tagged alternative energy, Chen, flat-panel, MIT, Seebeck, solar energy, solar panel, thermoelectric, water heater 5 Comments
Graphene transistor: Two layers may be better than one
One of the characteristics of clever science is to look at a new material from every which way. So it is with graphene. Graphene is a sheet of carbon atoms, in a layer one atom thick, arranged in the pattern of a honeycomb. It sounds simple, and is anything but. Its super-thinness in this precise [...]
Posted in News: Nanotechnology Tagged band gap, bandgap, bilayer, electronics, graphene, graphene transistor, NIST, semiconductor, silicon Leave a comment
Laser sparkplugs: off the drawing board
In the never ending search to squeeze energy savings out of old technology, in this case the internal combustion engine, researchers working with Takunori Taira at the Japanese National Institute of Natural Sciences have developed what appears to be a production capable laser sparkplug. Let’s unpack the last four words: Sparkplug – those are the [...]
Posted in News: Clean Transport Tagged fuel efficiency, ignition, laser, sparkplug, Taira, YAG Leave a comment
New technology: An optical microscope without lenses
Say ‘microscope’ and most people think of the models they had in school. Those microscopes had lenses and used visible light (either natural light or a bulb of some kind). Generically they’re called optical microscopes. So what’s a microscope called if it doesn’t have any lenses? Try lens-free optical tomographic microscope. And this means what? [...]
Posted in News: Scientific Instruments Tagged AFM, digital, holograph, lab on a chip, lens-free, microscope, optical microscope, Ozcan, STM, tomography Leave a comment
Graphene gets spintronics
The basis of microelectronics is the manipulation of charged electrons. The basis of spintronics is the conversion of electricity to magnetism and vice versa in order to manipulate the spin of electrons. Both approaches can produce transistors and other elements used in electronics (computers et al), but spintronics has advantages: Unlike the charge of electrons, [...]
Posted in News: Nanotechnology Tagged carbon, Dirac point, Geim, graphene, magnetic, Novoselov, spintronics Leave a comment
No WIMPS in the Xenon
It is a strange headline – No WIMPS in the Xenon, but then Dark Matter is strange. It supposedly must exist, in fact, it makes up 25% of the material in the universe. However, it has never been seen. Not seen even by the latest super high sensitivity detector project called XENON100. Located at the [...]
Posted in News: Nuclear Physics Tagged cosmology, dark energy, dark matter, Gran Sasso, Large Hadron Collider, LHC, nuclear physics, supersymmetry, SUSY, WIMP, xenon, XENON100, XENON1T Leave a comment
Stem cell research: Synthetic retina tissue
This is a ‘Don’t jump to conclusions story.’ Scientists working with the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (Kobe, Japan) and published in the journal Nature, 6 April 2011, Paywall [Self-organizing optic-cup morphogenesis in three-dimensional culture] have announced that mouse embryonic stem cells have been induced to grow a retina-like structure. Let’s parse that last statement: [...]
Posted in News: Synthetic Biology Tagged embryonic stem cells, eye, morphogenesis, optic cup, retina, RIKEN, synthetic biology Leave a comment
NEWS: Short List
Restraining and studying molecules, two at a time – Photonics | The usual way of studying how molecules react to a catalyst is to put them into a solution and observe – typically huge numbers of reactions. This works to a point, the point being the amount of detail that can be surmised from so [...]
Posted in News: Tagged Agol, Bada, exogenous life, life origin, Miller, nanomedicine, photonics Leave a comment
Connecting to neurons with semiconductor nanotubes
“Patching into the brain” is a staple of science fiction and you hear about it fairly often in neuroscience; connecting ‘wires’ into the brain somehow seems routine. It’s not. Scientists and sometimes doctors do lots of things with reading or probing the brain with external (on the skin) sensors. They also occasionally do neural implants [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Tagged brain implant, Justin Williams, nanotechnology, nanotubes, neuron connection, neuroscience, prosthetic connection Leave a comment
NEWS: Short List
Targeting cancer with magnetic microcarrier – Nanomedicine | As a rule chemotherapy is like using a blunderbuss against cancer. ‘Chemo’ is administered through the bloodstream, which of course goes everywhere in the body. While the anti-cancer chemistry can be targeted to a certain extent, it almost always has toxic side effects with other organs and [...]
Posted in News: Tagged computer power, H1N1, microcarrier, nanomedicine, Nanotiles, pandemics, photonics, processor, quantum switch, swine flu, synthetic biology, synthetic urethra, W.H.O. Leave a comment
Ocean on Enceladus has built-in heater
Surface eruption on Enceladus, Saturn in the background….Credit : NASA/JPL About this time last year the American space agency NASA reported on new data from the Cassini mission to the planet Saturn confirming that one of Saturn’s moons, Enceladus, has liquid water and probably an ocean. [SciTechStory post: Enceladus has at least a sea, possibly [...]
Posted in News: Exogenous Life Tagged Cassini, Dione, Enceladus, infrared spectrometer, life, NASA, oceans, Saturn, Saturn moons, tidal stress, tiger stripes Leave a comment
NEWS: Short List
3-D Printing of living tissues – Synthetic Biology | Perhaps you’ve heard of three-dimensional (3-D) printing. The printing devices lay down one thin layer of a material (usually a plastic) at a time, and guided by computer they can build-up a fully three-dimensional object. This technology is already used commercially. It’s not a stretch of [...]
Posted in News: Tagged degrading oceans, major disease cures, photonics, scientific instruments, synthetic biology Leave a comment
Mapping the impact of climate change
Climate change vulnerability: Red=high, Blue=low, White=few people….Credit: McGill University Researcher Jason Samson at McGill University (Ontario, Canada) used sampling and statistical techniques originally designed to study animal migration due to climate change. He reasoned that human populations will also be forced to move (emigration/immigration) for many of the same factors, especially those relating to scarcity [...]
Posted in News: Climate Change Tagged Africa, Arabian Peninsula, climate change, climate vulnerability, global warming, Samson Leave a comment
The visual cortex can learn to do speech and language
It’s been known for well over a century that different parts of the brain handle different tasks. This was certainly true for the autonomous functions, such as breathing and hormone activity, but it was also apparently true for higher level functions such as speech and language. Two regions of the brain, Broca’s area and Wernicke’s [...]
Posted in News: Neuroscience Tagged Bedny, brain, brain regions, Broca, fMRI, language processing, MIT, neuroscience, senses, visual cortex, Wernicke Leave a comment
Can the Earth feed 9 billion people?
Less than twenty years ago if you asked almost anybody – “Is there enough food for everybody on Earth?” – answering would not even elicit a scratch of the head. Obviously, it can and does. This was the era of the green revolution, when a combination of new crop varieties, pesticides, fertilizers and agricultural management [...]
Posted in News: Overpopulation Tagged agriculture, biofuels, Earth population, Economist, food industry, food production, food shortage, Green Revolution, overpopulation 1 Comment
NEWS: Short List
Tunable antilaser good for a switch – Photonics | In science (as in life) it’s sometimes useful to go against the flow, to experiment with the reverse. Take lasers, for example. Excite some atoms into making a beam of photons and you’ve got a laser. Now go the other way: Start with a laser beam; [...]
Posted in News: Tagged BCI, Body Implants, online information, overpopulation, photonics, quantum effects, virtual reality, VR Leave a comment
Evolutionary robotics: Learning to walk in stages
Nobody remembers how they learned to walk, but parents know: Babies don’t walk right out of the chute (so to speak), first they roll around, and then their arms get involved in pushing more or less forward. Next comes the crawl, which gradually gets faster and lifts the body higher off the floor, then there’s [...]
Posted in News: Robotics Tagged Bongard, evolutionary robotics, learning, Lego, locomotion, robot, simulation, walking Leave a comment
NEWS: Short List
Transcranial direct current stimulation: Stoking the brain with electricity – Brain Enhancement | While most likely the majority of neuroscientists conduct experiments to read the electrical activity in the brain, there are some interested in stimulating the brain with electricity. With modern techniques this stimulation has become more precise, and the monitoring of reactions (that’s [...]
Posted in News: Tagged alternative energy, brain enhancement, nanotechnology, origin of life, photonics, synthetic biology Leave a comment
BioBolt: A semi-invasive skull implant