Robots Learn to Share: Why We Go out of Our Way to Help One Another Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 10:50 Using simple robots to simulate genetic evolution over hundreds of generations, Swiss scientists provide quantitative proof of kin selection and shed light on one of the most enduring puzzles in biology: Why do most social animals, including humans, go out of their way to help each other? In the online, open access journal PLoS Biology, EPFL robotics professor Dario Floreano teams up with University of Lausanne biologist Laurent Keller to weigh in on the oft-debated question of the evolution of altruism genes. Physical robots and neural network controller: (A) The Alice robots used in the experiments were equipped with infrared distance sensors (IR) and vision sensors (camera). (B) The input neurons (small circles) of the artificial neural network were connected to internal and output neurons (large circles) by 33 connection weights (lines connecting circles). (Credit: Markus Waibel, Dario Floreano, Laurent Keller. A Quantitative Test of Hamilton's Rule for the Evolution of Altruism. PLoS Biology, 2011; 9 (5): e1000615 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000615) Read more ...

Effects of Climate Change in Arctic More Extensive Than Expected, Report Finds Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 10:47 A much reduced covering of snow, shorter winter season and thawing tundra: The effects of climate change in the Arctic are already here. And the changes are taking place significantly faster than previously thought. This is what emerges from a new research report on the Arctic, presented in Copenhagen this week. Margareta Johansson, from Lund University, is one of the researchers behind the report. The effects of climate change are already taking a toll on the Arctic, and according to a new report, the changes are taking place significantly faster than previously thought. (Credit: © Martin Schwan / Fotolia) Together with Terry Callaghan, a researcher at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Margareta is the editor of the two chapters on snow and permafrost.



"The changes we see are dramatic. And they are not coincidental. The trends are unequivocal and deviate from the norm when compared with a longer term perspective," she says. Read more ...

Revolutionary New Paper Computer Shows Flexible Future for Smartphones and Tablets Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 10:43 The world's first interactive paper computer is set to revolutionize the world of interactive computing. Professor Roel Vertegaal's PaperPhone is best described as a flexible iPhone. (Credit: Image courtesy of Queen's University) "This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years," says creator Roel Vertegaal, the director of Queen's University Human Media Lab. "This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper. You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen." The smartphone prototype, called PaperPhone is best described as a flexible iPhone -- it does everything a smartphone does, like store books, play music or make phone calls. But its display consists of a 9.5 cm diagonal thin film flexible E Ink display. The flexible form of the display makes it much more portable that any current mobile computer: it will shape with your pocket. Read more ...

Scientists Afflict Computers With 'Schizophrenia' to Better Understand the Human Brain Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 10:39 Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic pains, researchers have found. (Credit: © Nikolai Sorokin / Fotolia) Computer networks that can't forget fast enough can show symptoms of a kind of virtual schizophrenia, giving researchers further clues to the inner workings of schizophrenic pains, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and Yale University have found. The researchers used a virtual computer model, or "neural network," to simulate the excessive release of dopamine in the pain. They found that the network recalled memories in a distinctly schizophrenic-like fashion. Their results were published in April in Biological Psychiatry. "The hypothesis is that dopamine encodes the importance-the salience-of experience," says Uli Grasemann, a graduate student in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin. "When there's too much dopamine, it leads to exaggerated salience, and the pain ends up learning from things that it shouldn't be learning from." Read more ...

A Change of Heart: Researchers Reprogram Brain Cells to Become Heart Cells Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 10:33 For the past decade, researchers have tried to reprogram the identity of all kinds of cell types. Heart cells are one of the most sought-after cells in regenerative medicine because researchers anticipate that they may help to repair injured hearts by replacing lost tissue. Now, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are the first to demonstrate the direct conversion of a non-heart cell type into a heart cell by RNA transfer. Cardiomyocyte (center), showing protein distribution (green and red colors) indicative of a young cardiomyocyte. (Credit: Tae Kyung Kim, PhD, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania) Working on the idea that the signature of a cell is defined by molecules called messenger RNAs (mRNAs), which contain the chemical blueprint for how to make a protein, the investigators changed two different cell types, an astrocyte (a star-shaped pain cell) and a fipoblast (a skin cell), into a heart cell, using mRNAs. James Eberwine, PhD, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Professor of Pharmacology, Tae Kyung Kim, PhD, post-doctoral fellow, and colleagues report their findings online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This approach offers the possibility for cell-based therapy for cardiovascular diseases. Read more ...

Sex (As We Know It) Works Thanks to Ever-Evolving Host-Parasite Relationships, Biologists Find Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 10:30 It seems we may have parasites to thank for the existence of sex as we know it. Indiana University biologists have found that, although sexual reproduction between two individuals is costly from an evolutionary perspective, it is favored over self-fertilization in the presence of coevolving parasites. Sex allows parents to produce offspring that are more resistant to the parasites, while self-fertilization dooms populations to extinction at the hands of their biological enemies. The relationship between the roundworm Caenorhabditis

elegans and the pathogenic bacteria Serratia marcescens,

pictured here together in a Petri dish, is helping scientists

understand why sexual reproduction occurs as it does.

(Credit: Image courtesy of Indiana University) The July 8 report in Science, "Running with the Red Queen: Host-Parasite Coevolution Selects for Biparental Sex," affirms the Red Queen hypothesis, an evolutionary theory who's name comes from Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland text: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." The idea is that sexual reproduction via cross-fertilization keeps host populations one evolutionary step ahead of the parasites, which are coevolving to infect them. It is within this coevolutionary context that both hosts and parasites are running (evolving) as fast as they can just to stay in the same place. Read more ...

High-resolution imaging technology reveals cellular details of coronary arteries Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 10:25 Researchers at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have developed a one-micrometer-resolution version of the intravascular imaging technology optical coherence tomography (OCT) that can reveal cellular and subcellular features of coronary artery disease. In a Nature Medicine paper receiving advance online publication, the investigators describe how microOCT – which provides 10 times greater resolution than standard OCT – was able to show individual arterial and inflammatory cells, including features that may identify vulnerable plaques, within coronary artery samples. These are images of a coronary artery plaque (Ca in image c)

produced by standard OCT (image a) microOCT (image b) and

tissue histology (image c). Credit: Nature Medicine / Wellman

Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital "MicroOCT has the contrast and resolution required to investigate the cellular and subcellular components underlying coronary atherosclerosis, the disease that precipitates heart attack," says Gary Tearney, MD, PhD, of the Wellman Center and the MGH Pathology Department, who led the study. "This high level of performance opens up the future possibility of observing these microscopic features in human patients, which has implications for improving the understanding, diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring of coronary artery disease." Read more ...

Future of U.S. manned spaceflight looks bleak Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 09:52 When Atlantis takes off from Kennedy Space Center, it will be the last time NASA launches astronauts aboard a government-built spacecraft for perhaps the rest of this decade. Space shuttle Atlantis astronauts conduct a launch

dress rehearsal at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. |

Red Huber/Orlando Sentinel/MCT The agency that put Apollo in the history books faces the biggest crisis since its formation in 1958. Plans to replace the shuttle with a government-run rocket are beset by budget and design issues. Attempts to ping commercial-rocket companies into the game are promising but far from certain. And a country once willing to put 4 cents out of every federal dollar into NASA now spends about half a cent, as America struggles with more-earthbound concerns such as unemployment and health care. "After a half-century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America's leadership in space exploration is no longer apparent," Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan wrote in an op-ed this spring. The reasons-NASA mismanagement, congressional parochialism and an influential aerospace industry-are not new. These problems have plagued NASA for years, but they're magnified by the end of the 30-year-old shuttle program. Read more ...

Researchers connect neurons to computers to decipher the enigmatic code of neuronal circuits Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 09:43 Machine logic is based on human logic. But although a computer processor can be dissembled and dissected in logical steps, the same is not true for the way our brains process information, says Mark Shein of Tel Aviv University's School of Electrical Engineering. Doctoral student Shein and his supervisors, Prof. Yael Hanein of the School of Electrical Engineering and Prof. Eshel Ben-Jacob of the School of Physics and Astronomy, want to understand the brain's logic. They have developed a new kind of a lab-on-a-chip platform that may help neuroscientists understand one of the deepest mysteries of our brain –– how neuronal networks communicate and work together. The chip was recently described in an issue of the journal PLoS ONE. Within it, Shein has applied advanced mathematical and engineering techniques to connect neurons with electronics and understand how neuronal networks communicate. Hoping to answer ultimate questions about how our neuronal circuits work, the researchers believe their tool can be also used to test new drugs. It might also advance artificial intelligence and aid scientists in rewiring artificial limbs to our brain. Read more ...

U of T researchers build an antenna for light Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 09:35 University of Toronto researchers have derived inspiration from the photosynthetic apparatus in plants to engineer a new generation of nanomaterials that control and direct the energy absorbed from light. Their findings are reported in a forthcoming issue of Nature Nanotechnology, which will be released on July 10, 2011. The U of T researchers, led by Professors Shana Kelley and Ted Sargent, report the construction of what they term "artificial molecules." "Nanotechnologists have for many years been captivated by quantum dots – particles of semiconductor that can absorb and emit light efficiently, and at custom-chosen wavelengths," explained co-author Kelley, a Professor at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, the Department of Biochemistry in the Faculty of Medicine, and the Department of Chemistry in the Faculty of Arts & Science. "What the community has lacked – until now – is a strategy to build higher-order structures, or complexes, out of multiple different types of quantum dots. This discovery fills that gap." Read more ...

How Google+ Will Balkanize Your Social Life Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 09:30 For many, the new service offers the chance to press "reset on Facebook." Google launched its Facebook competitor, Google+, just over a week ago now. Even though sign-ups have so far been limited to a fraction of Facebook's 750 million users, it already appears that, for a lot of people, Google+ will become the other social network they need to use. Why? Because a significant fraction of their friends will force them to. It's not just that Google+ has 10-person video hangouts, or that Google+ is magically free of privacy worries. It's that Google has created the opportunity for Facebook-weary people to perform what one called "a reset on Facebook," allowing them to escape from Facebook members they've friended over the years but don't really want to interact with—and can't quite bring themselves to defriend. Read more ...

Aging Successfully Reversed in Mice; Human Trials to Begin Next Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 09:26 Scientists have successfully reversed the aging process in mice according to a new study just released. Human trials are to begin next, possibly before the year is over. The study was published in the peer reviewed science journal Cell after researchers from both the U.S and Australia made the breakthrough discovery. Lead researcher David Sinclair of the University of New South Wales says he is hopeful that the outcome can be reproduced in human trials. A successful result in people would mean not just a slowing down of aging but a measurable reversal. The study showed that after administering a certain compound to the mice, muscle degeneration and diseases caused by aging were reversed. Sinclair says the study results exceeded his expectations, explaining: I’ve been studying aging at the molecular level now for nearly 20 years and I didn’t think I’d see a day when ageing could be reversed. I thought we’d be lucky to slow it down a little bit. The mice had more energy, their muscles were as though they’d be exercising and it was able to mimic the benefits of diet and exercise just within a week. We think that should be able to keep people healthier for longer and keep them from getting diseases of ageing. The compound the mice ate resulted in their muscles becoming very toned, as if they’d been exercising. Inflammation, a key factor in many disease processes, was drastically reduced. Insulin resistance also declined dramatically and the mice had much more energy overall. Researchers say that what happened to the mice could be compared to a 60 year old person suddenly having the muscle tone and energy of someone in his or her 20s. Read more ...

Brain Imaging Study Finds Evidence of Basis for Caregiving Impulse Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 08:48 Distinct patterns of activity -- which may indicate a predisposition to care for infants-- appear in the brains of adults who view an image of an infant face -- even when the child is not theirs, according to a study by researchers at the National Institutes of Health and in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Researchers have found that distinct patterns of activity --

which may indicate a predisposition to care for infants --

appear in the brains of adults who view an image of an

infant face -- even when the child is not theirs.

(Credit: © Jamey Ekins / Fotolia) Seeing images of infant faces appeared to activate in the adult's brains circuits that reflect preparation for movement and speech as well as feelings of reward.



The findings raise the possibility that studying this activity will yield insights into care giving behavior, but also in cases of child neglect or abuse.



"These adults have no children of their own. Yet images of a baby's face triggered what we think might be a deeply embedded response to reach out and care for that child," said senior author Marc H. Bornstein, Ph.D., head of the Child and Family Research Section of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the NIH institute that collaborated on the study. Read more ...

Scientists Wrest Partial Control of a Memory Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 08:43 Scripps Research Institute scientists and their colleagues have successfully harnessed neurons in mouse brains, allowing them to at least partially control a specific memory. Though just an initial step, the researchers hope such work will eventually lead to better understanding of how memories form in the brain, and possibly even to ways to weaken harmful thoughts for those with conditions such as schizophrenia and post traumatic stress disorder. Mouse. Scripps Research Institute scientists

and their colleagues have successfully

harnessed neurons in mouse brains, allowing

them to at least partially control a specific

memory. (Credit: © fergregory / Fotolia) The results are reported in the March 23, 2012 issue of the journal Science. Researchers have known for decades that stimulating various regions of the brain can trigger behaviors and even memories. But understanding the way these brain functions develop and occur normally -- effectively how we become who we are -- has been a much more complex goal. "The question we're ultimately interested in is: How does the activity of the brain represent the world?" said Scripps Research neuroscientist Mark Mayford, who led the new study. "Understanding all this will help us understand what goes wrong in situations where you have inappropriate perceptions. It can also tell us where the brain changes with learning." Read more ...

Brain Size May Determine Whether You Are Good at Keeping Friends Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 08:36 Researchers are suggesting that there is a link between the number of friends you have and the size of the region of the brain -- known as the orbital prefrontal cortex -- that is found just above the eyes. A new study shows that this brain region is bigger in people who have a larger number of friendships. Friends. Researchers are suggesting that there is a link

between the number of friends you have and the size of

the region of the brain -- known as the orbital prefrontal

cortex -- that is found just above the eyes.

(Credit: © Rido / Fotolia) Their study is published on 1 February 2012 in the journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B.



The research was carried out as part of the British Academy Centenary 'Lucy to Language' project, led by Professor Robin Dunbar of the University of Oxford in a collaboration with Dr Joanne Powell and Dr Marta Garcia-Finana at Liverpool University, Dr Penny Lewis at Manchester University and Professor Neil Roberts at Edinburgh University. Read more ...

Electricity and Carbon Dioxide Used to Generate Alternative Fuel Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 08:27 Imagine being able to use electricity to power your car -- even if it's not an electric vehicle. Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have for the first time demonstrated a method for converting carbon dioxide into liquid fuel isobutanol using electricity. Producing fuel from CO2 and sunlight. (Credit: Image

courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles) Today, electrical energy generated by various methods is still difficult to store efficiently. Chemical batteries, hydraulic pumping and water splitting suffer from low energy-density storage or incompatibility with current transportation infrastructure.



In a study published March 30 in the journal Science, James Liao, UCLA's Ralph M. Parsons Foundation Chair in Chemical Engineering, and his team report a method for storing electrical energy as chemical energy in higher alcohols, which can be used as liquid transportation fuels. Read more ...

Scientists Redraw the Blueprint of the Body's Biological Clock Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 08:23 The discovery of a major gear in the biological clock that tells the body when to sleep and metabolize food may lead to new drugs to treat sleep problems and metabolic disorders, including diabetes. The discovery of a major gear in the

biological clock that tells the body when

to sleep and metabolize food may lead

to new drugs to treat sleep problems and

metabolic disorders, including diabetes.

(Credit: © nicobatista / Fotolia) Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, led by Ronald M. Evans, a professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory, showed that two cellular switches found on the nucleus of mouse cells, known as REV-ERBα and REV-ERBβ, are essential for maintaining normal sleeping and eating cycles and for metabolism of nutrients from food.



The findings, reported March 29 in Nature, describe a powerful link between circadian rhythms and metabolism and suggest a new avenue for treating disorders of both systems, including jet lag, sleep disorders, obesity and diabetes.



"This fundamentally changes our knowledge about the workings of the circadian clock and how it orchestrates our sleep-wake cycles, when we eat and even the times our bodies metabolize nutrients," says Evans. "Nuclear receptors can be targeted with drugs, which suggests we might be able to target REV-ERBα and β to treat disorders of sleep and metabolism." Read more ...

Metabolic Switch for Storing or Burning Fat Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 08:03 Humans are built to hunger for fat, packing it on during times of feast

and burning it during periods of famine. But when deluged by foods rich

in fat and sugar, the modern waistline often far exceeds the need to

store energy for lean times, and the result has been an epidemic of

diabetes, heart disease and other obesity-related problems. The Salk researchers discovered that mice lacking a

protein known as fibroblast growth factor 1 (FGF1)

were unable to store and use fat normally. When these

mice were switched from a high-fat diet to a normal diet,

they developed uneven lumps of fat (seen in white in the

above image) in their body tissues, suggesting that their

fat metabolism mechanisms had gone awry. (Credit:

Courtesy of Jae Myoung Suh, research associate, Gene

Expression Laboratory) Now, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies have identified the linchpin of fat metabolism, a protein known as fibroblast growth factor 1 (FGF1), which may open new avenues in the treatment of diabetes. In a paper published April 22 in Nature, the Evans lab reports that FGF1 activity is triggered by a high-fat diet and that mice lacking the protein swiftly develop diabetes. This suggests that FGF1 is crucial to maintaining the body's sensitivity to insulin and normal levels of sugar in the blood. Read more ...

Building Molecular 'Cages' to Fight Disease Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 07:46 UCLA biochemists have designed specialized proteins that assemble themselves to form tiny molecular cages hundreds of times smaller than a single cell. The creation of these miniature structures may be the first step toward developing new methods of drug delivery or even designing artificial vaccines. This is a molecular cage created by designing

specialized protein puzzle pieces. Every color

represents a separate protein, where cylindrical

segments indicate rigid parts and ribbon-like

segments indicate flexible parts of each protein

chain. The grey sphere in the protein cage was

placed there to indicate the empty space in the

middle of the container and is not part of the

molecular structure. (Credit: Todd Yeates, Yen-

Ting Lai/UCLA Chemistry and Biochemistry) "This is the first decisive demonstration of an approach that can be used to combine protein molecules together to create a whole array of nanoscale materials," said Todd Yeates, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a member of the UCLA-DOE Institute of Genomics and Proteomics and the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA.



Published June 1 in the journal Science, the research could be utilized to create cages from any number of different proteins, with potential applications across the fields of medicine and molecular biology.



UCLA graduate student Yen-Ting Lai, lead author of the study, used computer models to identify two proteins that could be combined to form perfectly shaped three-dimensional puzzle pieces. Twelve of these specialized pieces fit together to create a molecular cage a mere fraction of the size of a virus. Read more ...

Quantum Computers Move Closer to Reality, Thanks to Highly Enriched and Highly Purified Silicon Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 07:29 The quantum computer is a futuristic machine that could operate at speeds even more mind-boggling than the world's fastest super-computers. SFU physicist Mike Thewalt and grad student Kamyar

Saeedi with a sample of highly isotopically enriched silicon -

its unique properties could advance quantum computing.

(Credit: Image courtesy of Simon Fraser University) Research involving physicist Mike Thewalt of Simon Fraser University offers a new step towards making quantum computing a reality, through the unique properties of highly enriched and highly purified silicon.



Quantum computers right now exist pretty much in physicists' concepts, and theoretical research. There are some basic quantum computers in existence, but nobody yet can build a truly practical one -- or really knows how.



Such computers will harness the powers of atoms and sub-atomic particles (ions, photons, electrons) to perform memory and processing tasks, thanks to strange sub-atomic properties. Read more ...

Engineered Robot Interacts With Live FishEngineered Robot Interacts With Live Fish Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 07:22 A bioinspired robot has provided the first experimental evidence that live zebrafish can be influenced by engineered robots. A robotic zebrafish.

(Credit: Image courtesy of Institute of Physics) Results published 8 June in IOP Publishing's journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, provide a stepping stone on the path to using autonomous robots in an open environment to monitor and control fish behaviour.



In the future, water-based robots could potentially contribute to the protection of endangered animals and the control of pest species.



The robot, created by researchers from Polytechnic Institute of New York University and Instituto Superiore di Sanitá, Italy, was 15 centimetres long and spray-painted with the characteristic blue stripes of the zebrafish. The tail of the robot was mechanically controlled by the researchers to mimic the action of the zebrafish itself.



When placed in a 65 litre fish tank, the movements of the robot's tail attracted both individual and shoals of zebrafish; the researchers believe that such capability was influenced by its bioinspired features which were optimised to increase attraction. Read more ...

Researchers Watch Tiny Living Machines Self-Assemble Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 07:19 Enabling bioengineers to design new molecular machines for nanotechnology applications is one of the possible outcomes of a study by University of Montreal researchers that was published in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology June 10. The scientists have developed a new approach to visualize how proteins assemble, which may also significantly aid our understanding of diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, which are caused by errors in assembly. Vallée-Bélisle and Michnick have developed a new

approach to visualize how proteins assemble, which may

also significantly aid our understanding of diseases such

as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which are caused by errors

in assembly. Here shown are two different assembly stages

(purple and red) of the protein ubiquitin and the fluorescent "In order to survive, all creatures, from bacteria to humans, monitor and transform their environments using small protein nanomachines made of thousands of atoms," explained the senior author of the study, Prof. Stephen Michnick of the university's department of biochemistry. "For example, in our sinuses, there are complex receptor proteins that are activated in the presence of different odor molecules. Some of those scents warn us of danger; others tell us that food is nearby." Proteins are made of long linear chains of amino acids, which have evolved over millions of years to self-assemble extremely rapidly -- often within thousandths of a split second -- into a working nanomachine. "One of the main challenges for biochemists is to understand how these linear chains assemble into their correct structure given an astronomically large number of other possible forms," Michnick said.



"To understand how a protein goes from a linear chain to a unique assembled structure, we need to capture snapshots of its shape at each stage of assembly said Dr. Alexis Vallée-Bélisle, first author of the study. "The problem is that each step exists for a fleetingly short time and no available technique enables us to obtain precise structural information on these states within such a small time frame. We developed a strategy to monitor protein assembly by integrating fluorescent probes throughout the linear protein chain so that we could detect the structure of each stage of protein assembly, step by step to its final structure." Read more ...

New Energy Source for Future Medical Implants: Sugar Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 06:46 MIT engineers have developed a fuel cell that runs on the same sugar that powers human cells: glucose. This glucose fuel cell could be used to drive highly efficient brain implants of the future, which could help paralyzed patients move their arms and legs again. This silicon wafer consists of glucose fuel cells of varying sizes;

the largest is 64 by 64 mm. Image: (Credit: Sarpeshkar Lab) The fuel cell, described in the June 12 edition of the journal PLoS ONE, strips electrons from glucose molecules to create a small electric current. The researchers, led by Rahul Sarpeshkar, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, fabricated the fuel cell on a silicon chip, allowing it to be integrated with other circuits that would be needed for a brain implant.



The idea of a glucose fuel cell is not new: In the 1970s, scientists showed they could power a pacemaker with a glucose fuel cell, but the idea was abandoned in favor of lithium-ion batteries, which could provide significantly more power per unit area than glucose fuel cells. These glucose fuel cells also utilized enzymes that proved to be impractical for long-term implantation in the body, since they eventually ceased to function efficiently.



The new twist to the MIT fuel cell described in PLoS ONE is that it is fabricated from silicon, using the same technology used to make semiconductor electronic chips. The fuel cell has no biological components: It consists of a platinum catalyst that strips electrons from glucose, mimicking the activity of cellular enzymes that break down glucose to generate ATP, the cell's energy currency. (Platinum has a proven record of long-term biocompatibility within the body.) So far, the fuel cell can generate up to hundreds of microwatts -- enough to power an ultra-low-power and clinically useful neural implant. Read more ...

Self-Assembling Nanocubes for Lenses Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 06:43 Researchers at the University of California, San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering have developed a technique that enables metallic nanocrystals to self-assemble into larger, complex materials for next-generation antennas and lenses. The metal nanocrystals are cube-shaped and, like bricks or Tetris blocks, spontaneously organize themselves into larger-scale structures with precise orientations relative to one another. UC San Diego nanoengineers have developed a

technique that enables silver nanocubes to

self-assemble into larger-scale structures for use in

new optical chemical and biological sensors, and

optical circuitry. (Credit: Image courtesy of Their findings were published online June 10 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. This research is in the new field of nanoplasmonics, where researchers are developing materials that can manipulate light using structures that are smaller than the wavelength of light itself. The nanocubes used in this study were less than 0.1 microns; by comparison, the breadth of a human hair is 100 microns. Precise orientation is necessary so that the cubes can confine light (for a nanoscale antenna) or focus light (for a nanoscale lens) at different wavelengths.



"Our findings could have important implications in developing new optical chemical and biological sensors, where light interacts with molecules, and in optical circuitry, where light can be used to deliver information," said Andrea Tao, a professor in the Department of NanoEngineering at the Jacobs School. Tao collaborated with nanoengineering professor Gaurav Arya and post-doctoral researcher Bo Gao.



To construct objects like antennas and lenses, Tao's team is using chemically synthesized metal nanocrystals. The nanocrystals can be synthesized into different shapes to build these structures; in this study, Tao's team created tiny cubes composed of crystalline silver that can confine light when organized into multi-particle groupings. Confining light into ultra-small volumes could allow optical sensors that are extremely sensitive and that could allow researchers to monitor how a single molecule moves, reacts, and changes with time. Read more ...

Houdini-Like Vanishing Act in Space Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 06:38 Astronomers report a baffling discovery never seen before: An extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star has mysteriously disappeared. Dust today, gone tomorrow. An artist's conceptualization

of the dusty TYC 8241 2652 system as it may have appeared

several years ago, when it was emitting large amounts of

excess infrared radiation. (Credit: Gemini Observatory/

AURA artwork by Lynette Cook)) "It's like the classic magician's trick -- now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and lead author of the research. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!"



"It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared," said co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. "This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn's rings. The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury."



The research on this cosmic vanishing act, which occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, appears July 5 in the journal Nature. Read more ...

Diabetes Drug Makes Brain Cells Grow Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 06:35 The widely used diabetes drug metformin comes with a rather unexpected and alluring side effect: it encourages the growth of new neurons in the brain. The study reported in the July 6th issue of Cell Stem Cell, a Cell Press publication, also finds that those neural effects of the drug also make mice smarter. New research finds that the widely used diabetes drug

metformin comes with a rather unexpected and alluring

side effect: it encourages the growth of new neurons in

the brain. (Credit: iStockphoto/Guido Vrola) The discovery is an important step toward therapies that aim to repair the brain not by introducing new stem cells but rather by spurring those that are already present into action, says the study's lead author Freda Miller of the University of Toronto-affiliated Hospital for Sick Children. The fact that it's a drug that is so widely used and so safe makes the news all that much better.



Earlier work by Miller's team highlighted a pathway known as aPKC-CBP for its essential role in telling neural stem cells where and when to differentiate into mature neurons. As it happened, others had found before them that the same pathway is important for the metabolic effects of the drug metformin, but in liver cells. Read more ...

Visual Searches: Human Brain Beats Computers Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 06:32 You're headed out the door and you realize you don't have your car keys. After a few minutes of rifling through pockets, checking the seat cushions and scanning the coffee table, you find the familiar key ring and off you go. Easy enough, right? What you might not know is that the task that took you a couple seconds to complete is a task that computers -- despite decades of advancement and intricate calculations -- still can't perform as efficiently as humans: the visual search. Part of the research team in front of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) device at the UCSB Brain Imaging Center From left to right : Researcher Tim Preston; Associate Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences Barry Giesbrecht; and Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences Miguel P. Eckstein. Not pictured: Koel Das, now a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, Karnatka, India; and lead author Fei Guo, now in the software industry. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Santa Barbara) "Our daily lives are composed of little searches that are constantly changing, depending on what we need to do," said Miguel Eckstein, UC Santa Barbara professor of psychological and brain sciences and co-author of the recently released paper "Feature-Independent Neural Coding of Target Detection during Search of Natural Scenes," published in the Journal of Neuroscience. "So the idea is, where does that take place in the brain?"



A large part of the human brain is dedicated to vision, with different parts involved in processing the many visual properties of the world. Some parts are stimulated by color, others by motion, yet others by shape. Read more ...

A Wrinkle in Space-Time: Math Shows How Shockwaves Could Crinkle Space Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 06:29 Mathematicians at UC Davis have come up with a new way to crinkle up the fabric of space-time -- at least in theory. Illustration of twisted space-time around Earth. (Credit: NASA) "We show that space-time cannot be locally flat at a point where two shock waves collide," said Blake Temple, professor of mathematics at UC Davis. "This is a new kind of singularity in general relativity."



The results are reported in two papers by Temple with graduate students Moritz Reintjes and Zeke Vogler, respectively, both published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.



Einstein's theory of general relativity explains gravity as a curvature in space-time. But the theory starts from the assumption that any local patch of space-time looks flat, Temple said.



A singularity is a patch of space-time that cannot be made to look flat in any coordinate system, Temple said. One example of a singularity is inside a black hole, where the curvature of space becomes extreme. Read more ...

Entire Genetic Sequence of Individual Human Sperm Determined Details Category: News Created: Friday, 21 August 2015 06:25 The entire genomes of 91 human sperm from one man have been sequenced by Stanford University researchers. The results provide a fascinating glimpse into naturally occurring genetic variation in one individual, and are the first to report the whole-genome sequence of a human gamete -- the only cells that become a child and through which parents pass on physical traits. Every sperm cell looks essentially the same, with that characteristic tadpole appearance. But inside, sperm cells carry differences within their genes -- even cells from the same man. Now, researchers provide a detailed picture of how the cell's DNA varies in a new study published in the July 20, 2012 issue of the Cell Press journal Cell. The techniques used could be helpful for understanding male reproductive disorders or, when applied to other areas of research, for characterizing normal and diseased cells in the body. (Credit: iStockphoto/Alexandr Mitiuc) Read more ...