science + technology news

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World first trial grows blood vessels from patient’s own skin

November 17, 2005

Scientists have successfully implanted blood vessels grown entirely from a patient’s own cells.

The veins were created in a laboratory by scientists at Cytograft Tissue Engineering before being transplanted into patients undergoing kidney dialysis to test whether they could withstand high blood pressures.

The team is now about to embark on an unprecedented trial at Papworth hospital in Cambridge, which will see lab-grown blood vessels used in heart… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity

Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes

November 17, 2005

“Are you ready to see the Net privatized from the bottom to the top? Are you ready to see the Net’s free and open marketplace sucked into a pit of pipes built and fitted by the phone and cable companies and run according to rules lobbied by the carrier and content industries?

“Do you believe a free and open market should be ‘Your choice of walled garden’ or ‘Your… read more

Topics: Internet/Cloud/Telecom

Ultra-sensitive microscope reveals DNA processes

November 16, 2005

A new microscope sensitive enough to track the real-time motion of a single protein, right down to the scale of its individual atoms, has revealed how genes are copied from DNA.

Topics: Biotech

Plastic diode could lead to flexible, low power computer circuits, memory

November 15, 2005

Ohio State University researchers have invented a new organic polymer tunnel diode, which could one day lead to plastic computer memory and plastic logic circuits on computer chips.

The diode design lends itself to easy, inexpensive manufacturing for smart cards and other memory devices.

Source: Ohio State University news release

Topics: Electronics

Googling Your Genes

November 15, 2005

“Sergey Brin and Larry Page have ambitious long-term plans for Google’s expansion into the fields of biology and genetics through the fusion of science, medicine, and technology…. ‘Too few people in computer science are aware of some of the informational challenges in biology and their implications for the world,’ Brin says….,” in The Google Story by David A. Vise.

“‘The ultimate search engine,’ says Page, ‘would understand exactly what… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Biotech

PET Imaging Reveals the Immune System at Work

November 14, 2005

Researchers at Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) at the University of California Los Angeles have taken a key step toward noninvasively viewing how a cell confronts disease by using positron emission tomography (PET) to observe key cells of the immune system as they responded to tumors in mice.

In their experiments, they were able to see the lymph nodes, which resided at some distance from the tumor, spring into… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity

Interview with Robert Freitas (Part 2)

November 14, 2005

Ray Kurzweil’s scenario of billions of nanorobots positioned in our brains, to create full-immersion virtual reality, will be feasible in the future, says Robert A. Freitas, Jr., author of Nanomedicine and other works.

He believes the achievement will require noninvasive neuroelectric monitoring, neural macrosensing (nanorobots eavesdropping on the body’s sensory traffic, including auditory and optic nerve taps), modification of natural cellular message traffic by nanorobots stationed nearby (including signal… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Nanotech/Materials Science

Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge?

November 14, 2005

The scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength, according to a National Academy of Sciences report, “Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.”

The report recommends enhanced math and science education in grade school and high school, a more hospitable environment for scientific research and training at the… read more

Topics: Social Networking/Web

World’s Fastest Computer Gets Even Faster

November 14, 2005

The IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, which operates at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, has doubled its performance to 280.6 trillion calculations a second (teraflops), up from 136.8 teraflops from the list released in June.

The system is used to study the United States nuclear stockpile and perform other research.

Topics: Singularity/Futures

Neuroscientists break code for visual recognition

November 13, 2005

Neuroscientists in the McGovern Institute at MIT have been able to decipher a part of the code involved in recognizing visual objects.

In a fraction of a second, visual input about an object runs from the retina through increasingly higher levels of the visual stream, continuously reformatting the information until it reaches the highest purely visual level, the inferotemporal (IT) cortex. The IT cortex identifies and categorizes the object… read more

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience

In Study, Hormone Reduced Appetite in Mice

November 11, 2005

Stanford University researchers have found a hormone that sharply reduces the desire to eat.

The new substance, obestatin (OHB-statin), is made in the stomach and small intestine, and it seems to prompt the brain to send out a signal that says “eat less.”

Topics: Biomed/Longevity

Interview with Robert Freitas

November 11, 2005

Robert A. Freitas, Jr., author of Nanomedicine and other works, and Ralph Merkle are writing a book-length discussion of diamond mechanosynthesis, entitled Diamond Surfaces and Diamond Mechanosynthesis (DSDM), to be published in 2006 or 2007.

Freitas is also involved in research collaborations to develop computational chemistry simulations of plausible mechanosynthetic tooltips and reaction sequences. He also filed the first-ever U.S. patent on diamond mechanosynthesis that describes a specific process… read more

Topics: Nanotech/Materials Science

Science to ride gravitational waves

November 10, 2005

Scientists hope to finally detect the most elusive of astrophysical phenomena — gravitational waves — in experiments using ultrasensitive laser interferometers, starting in November.

The aim is to gather data continuously for 18 months. In that time, they would expect to see perhaps two events, maybe more, that can be put down to a passing gravitational wave.

‘Gravity tractor’ to deflect Earth-bound asteroids

November 10, 2005

NASA scientists have come up with a surprisingly simple yet effective way to deflect an Earth-bound asteroid: park a large spacecraft close by and let gravity do the work, creating an invisible towline to tug the rock off its deadly course.

The strategy crucially relies on our ability to detect an asteroid threat about 20 years in advance. For larger asteroids this is realistic. But Erik Asphaug, a planetary… read more

Topics: Survival/Defense

High-speed robots

November 10, 2005

MIT researchers have proposed a method of making robotic muscles 1,000 times faster than human muscles, with virtually no extra energy demands and the added bonus of a simpler design.

The artificial muscles would be achieved by actuating conjugated polymers on command by sending charges to specific locations in the polymer chain in the form of solitons (charge density waves) that are activated by shining a light of a… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics

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