Science and biotech

You might not need a whole 1.21 gigawatts to travel through time, after all.

Computer engineers at the University of California at Berkeley have found a way to reduce the minimum voltage required to store a charge in a capacitor--an electron-storing device that works somewhat like a battery--paving the way for ultra-low-power computing. This is a result of a project started in 2008 and led by Asif Khan, a UC Berkeley electrical engineering graduate student, and Sayeef Salahuddin, a UC Berkeley assistant professor of electrical engineering.

The engineers took advantage of ferroelectrics, a class of materials that can hold both positive and negative electric charges, even when there's no voltage applied. On top of that, the electrical polarization in ferroelectrics can be reversed with an external electric field.

The team was able to demonstrate that when a capacitor made of ferroelectric-based materials was paired with an electric insulator, the charge accumulated for a given voltage could be amplified in a phenomenon called "negative capacitance." This means you can create a charge that would normally require a higher voltage. And this, when applied to transistors--the on-off switch components that generate the zeros and ones that are the core of binary computing used in all personal computers--would translate into lower minimum voltage required to operate a computer processor. … Read more

Benjamin Franklin once advised a friend to take older women to bed because, figuratively speaking, "in the dark all cats are gray." Well, not these kittehs.

Researchers in the U.S. and Japan have developed green-glowing kittens with resistance to the feline version of AIDS, which may help work on AIDS research in humans.

In a study published in Nature Methods, researchers from the Mayo Clinic and Yamaguchi University took a genome approach to producing cats that are apparently resistant to feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV), a deadly condition that attacks infection-fighting T-cells as AIDS does.

The researchers including Mayo Clinic molecular biologist Eric Poeschla inserted genes into feline eggs before sperm fertilization. They added a gene for a rhesus macaque protein, known as a "restriction factor," that can prevent infection by FIV, and a jellyfish gene for tracking the cells that also makes the kitties glow a spooky green.

When cells were taken from the cats and exposed to FIV, they were found to be resistant; the animals themselves will also be exposed to the virus in the future. … Read more

Earlier this year, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, published a study identifying genetic markers found in people's stomachs that appear related to obesity and other diseases.

After that, "I got between 50 and 100 e-mails from regular people having problems with the stomach or diarrhea and wondering if we can help them," Peer Bork, a biochemist at the lab, told Nature last week. "They were long e-mails. There must be a lot of frustrated people out there."

Given the interest level, Bork and his colleagues launched MyMicrobes, which could be … Read more

IBM has inked a deal with health insurer WellPoint that will let the latter use the technology behind "Jeopardy"-playing computer Watson to suggest patient diagnoses and treatments.

The arrangement, which marks the first time the Watson technology will be used in a commercial application, will be announced Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

WellPoint hopes the technology will help improve the quality of patient care and help reduce costs. It will be introduced next year and will initially be used by nurses who review treatment requests from … Read more

Way back in the early days of 2011, the world's smallest electric motor was so...big. At 200 nanometers wide, it was a whopping 1/300th the size of a human hair.

Now, chemists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences have smashed that record, which was set in 2005, with this weekend's unveiling of their single-molecule electric motor, which at 1 nanometer wide could be the first in an entirely new class of devices with potential use in medicine and engineering.

That's right: 1 nanometer. That's been estimated to be about 1/60,… Read more

Radiation therapy requires oxygen to be effective, which makes cancers that tend to be hypoxic (meaning they are deprived of oxygen)--such as pancreatic and cervical cancers--harder to treat. (Tumors can become hypoxic for a few reasons, e.g. they grow so quickly they actually outgrow blood supply, or cells proliferate so many times that the density taxes the available oxygen.)

So researchers at Purdue have been building and testing tiny devices that can be implanted in tumors and then generate oxygen, thereby making the area far more susceptible to radiation and chemotherapy.… Read more

A good nose can be a curse. Dogs, for instance, have been shown to be able to sniff out lung cancer in humans, which means the poor creatures have to smell our breath, with a lot of smokers in the mix, one sample at a time.

Good news out of Germany, then, for man's best friend. A team of scientists at the University Hospital Jena is testing an electronic nose system that's able to distinguish between people without heart failure and people with it, and even between two types of heart failure (compensated and decompensated) with almost 90 percent accuracy--higher than what canines were able to achieve in the lung cancer study.

The system includes three thick-film metal oxide-based gas sensors with heater elements. Each is tailored to sense different odorant molecular types. As oxygen reacts to the heated sensor surface, the molecules interact with the sensors and change the free charge carrier concentrations, and thus conductivity, in the metal oxide layer.… Read more

British and U.S. scientists have confirmed that an atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) near London is the most accurate long-term timekeeper in the world, the NPL said.

The NPL-CsF2 is a cesium fountain clock that's used as a standard for International Atomic Time and Universal Coordinated Time.

The machine is apparently accurate to within two 10 million billionths of a second. Not bad, I guess.

The NPL's Krzysztof Szymaniec joined scientists from Pennsylvania State University in evaluating the clock. The team published its results in the journal Metrologia.

The analysis concludes that the clock will lose only a billionth of a second every two months, and represents an unprecedented accuracy. Cesium clocks are usually expected to lose or gain a second over tens of millions of years.

"Together with other improvements of the cesium fountain, these models and numerical calculations have improved the accuracy of the U.K.'s cesium fountain clock, NPL-CsF2, by reducing the uncertainty to 2.3 × 10-16--the lowest value for any primary national standard so far," Szymaniec was quoted as saying by the NPL.

In the U.S., the National Institute of Standards and Technology operates the NIST-F1 cesium fountain clock, which as of summer 2010 had an uncertainty of 3 x 10-16, meaning it would take more than 100 million years to lose or gain a second.

That will be billions of years before the sun dies, taking the Earth with it, so I expect an update on this from a future blogger. … Read more

Chemists at Yale University are unveiling what they call the first practical method to create the compound huperzine A, which is a naturally occurring extract of Chinese club moss.

The enzyme inhibitor has been used widely in China and now beyond to treat memory loss in disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, and some research indicates it might help fight the effects of chemical warfare agents in primates.

But the plant, whose scientific name is Huperzia serrata, is both slow-growing and overharvested, resulting in a price tag upwards of $1,000 per milligram. The Yale team's success creating a … Read more