In Japan, it's called "detergent suicide." People take their own lives by inhaling a deadly mixture of chemicals, typically including hydrogen sulfide, in small, enclosed spaces such as cars or closets. At high enough concentrations, one breath can be lethal.

A few years ago, these chemical suicides were extremely rare. But they started occurring more frequently in Japan and began to make headlines there after a 14-year-old girl contaminated 90 of her neighbors when she took her life this way in 2008. Today, by some counts, more than 2,000 people have committed suicide in this fashion, … Read more

Optical tweezers have been used by biophysicists since their invention at Bell Labs in the 1980s, and are typically used to study cellular components. But they have a few drawbacks, not least of which are overheating and inefficiency.

So engineers at Harvard have been working on a next-gen model they call plasmonic nanotweezers to solve those and other issues with traditional optical tweezers so that tiny particles such as viruses can be isolated, observed, and manipulated.

Back at Bell Labs, scientists had shined a laser through a microscope lens to focus it tightly. They found that light, made of electromagnetic waves, creates a gradient force at the point of focus that is capable of attracting a tiny particle and holding it in that beam of light until random motion or some other force knocks it out.

The basic limitation of this approach is that a lens cannot focus that beam beyond half the wavelength of light, so if the particle the researchers hope to trap is smaller than the focal spot, they might have trouble trapping it.

Meanwhile, that focal size limit also places an upper limit on the gradient force generated, and yet a stronger force is required to trap nanoscale particles. So for a conventional optical tweezer to capture nanoscale particles, a high-powered laser is required.… Read more

I don't know what kinds of things you see inside your head, but I do worry about it.

As for the things I see inside my head, well, if only I could show you. Actually, there are scientists at UC Berkeley who believe that they can show you.

I haven't let them into the house yet. But I can show you video of their work. I am grateful to the inner brains at Gizmodo, who first revealed this footage to me.

You will, naturally, be wondering whether the scientists created this footage, well, naturally.

In a way. They … Read more

European physicists have measured tiny particles called neutrinos moving just faster than the speed of light--only a smidgen faster, but enough to raise a serious possibility that Einstein's physics need a major overhaul.

The scientists sent a beam of neutrinos from CERN, on the Swiss-French border near Geneva, to the INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) Gran Sasso Laboratory in central Italy, 730 kilometers (454 miles) away, in a research project called OPERA. The physicists had planned to study a rare event, the transformation of the muon variety of neutrinos into the tau variety. Instead, they found the extraordinary … Read more

Researchers at UC Santa Barbara are introducing a novel technique using a form of laser spectroscopy and biotags that help discriminate between cancerous and healthy cells.

While the tech is likely years away from clinical trials, the team hopes it will eventually lead to a microdevice that can predict when prostate cancer will metastasize--which is key, given it is the metastasis throughout the body, not the primary tumor, that kills prostate cancer patients.

"The delay is not well understood," says Gary Braun, biologist and second author of the paper that appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. &… Read more

In 2008, University of Washington scientists released the game Foldit, hoping a sort of critical mass of gamers would mess around with proteins and, in the process, uncover some of their intrigue. (We have more than 100,000 types of proteins in our bodies alone.)

Last year, we checked in on the project's progress, and principal investigator Zoran Popovic said that some 60,000 people worldwide had taken on the challenge. Popovic hoped the initial results his team reported on last year would convince those on the sidelines that scientific discovery games could actually lead to important breakthroughs.

Well, … Read more

If you think that engineering functional human body parts using a printer and laser is a sign of the end of time, you might want to proceed with caution. If you think such a development portends the saving of lives, read on.

Because researchers from an interdisciplinary group of five Fraunhofer institutes in Germany are announcing their successful creation of completely functional blood vessels using 3D printing and intense laser impulses.

First, advances in 3D printing have enabled researchers to print organs inexpensively and quickly using a modified inkjet printer. As in, very modified.

Using special inks, the researchers were … Read more

Researchers at the Imperial College London and the University of Oxford are reporting in the journal PLoS Biology that they can see the inner workings of white blood cells at the highest resolution ever documented.

To do this, the team immobilized a white blood cell using a pair of optical laser tweezers and watched with a super-res microscope as the so-called Natural Killer cell's actin filaments parted, creating a tiny portal through which enzyme-filled granules passed to kill targeted diseased tissue.

If you think the resulting image (at right) doesn't look super-res, consider the zoom. The place where … Read more

No one wants to stumble upon the radiation warning sign. But its presence at least indicates that hazardous materials have been detected, and that there might be some form of control of those materials.

In high-risk scenarios without up-to-date signage (war zones, abandoned testing sites, and now airport security lines), it could prove quite handy to have a handheld device that can detect hard radiation--including nuclear weapons.

Chemists at Northwestern University report in the journal Advanced Materials that they are one step closer to developing such a device.

"We have designed promising semiconductor materials that, once optimized, could be … Read more