Posts by AltonParrish:
Innovative New Nanotechnology Stops Bed Bugs in Their Tracks – Literally
June 3rd, 2013
By Alton Parrish.
Credit: Stony Brook
“Our nanotechnology produces entanglements that are millions of times more dense than woven products such as fabrics or carpets,” said lead researcher Miriam Rafailovich, Distinguished Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Co-Director in the Program of Chemical and Molecular Engineering at Stony Brook University. “The microfibers trap them by attaching to microstructures on their legs taking away their ability to move, which stops them from feeding and reproducing.”
Successful tests were performed using live bed bugs and termites in Professor Rafailovich’s lab with the assistance of Ying Liu, a scientist with Stony Brook University’s Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center and Stony Brook graduate students Shan He and Linxi Zhang.
Kevin McAllister, Fibertrap’s co-founder added, “We are very excited to move this advancement from the lab to the consumer. Our goal has always been to make a difference for people living in areas where bed bugs are pervasive and difficult to eradicate.”
The microfibers are safe for humans and pets and unlike chemical treatments the insects cannot develop a resistance to it.
About Bed Bugs
Bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) are small, flat, parasitic insects that feed solely on the blood of people and animals while they sleep. Bed bugs are reddish-brown in color, wingless, range from one millimeter (mm) to seven mm (roughly the size of Lincoln’s head on a penny), and can live several months without a blood meal.
Infestation
Bed bug infestations usually occur around or near the areas where people sleep. These areas include apartments, shelters, rooming houses, hotels, cruise ships, buses, trains and dorm rooms. They hide during the day in places such as seams of mattresses, box springs, bed frames, headboards, dresser tables, inside cracks or crevices, behind wallpaper or any other clutter or objects around a bed. Bed bugs have been shown to be able to travel over 100 feet in a night but tend to live within eight feet of where people sleep. A bed bug bite affects each person differently. Bite responses can range from an absence of any physical signs of the bite, to a small bite mark, to a serious allergic reaction. Bed bugs are not considered to be dangerous; however, an allergic reaction to several bites may need medical attention. (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) For more information please check out the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Bed Bug FAQs.
Statistics
New York City consistently ranks in the top 10 or 15 cities with the worst bed bug problem across the nation. An annual list released by Orkin Pest Control based upon bed bug business in U.S. cities, lists Chicago as having the worst bed bug problem for 2012; New York City comes in at #10.
Nasa Radar Reveals Asteroid Has Its Own Moon
June 1st, 2013
By Alton Parrish.
The radar imagery revealed that 1998 QE2 is a binary asteroid. In the near-Earth population, about 16 percent of asteroids that are about 655 feet (200 meters) or larger are binary or triple systems. Radar images suggest that the main body, or primary, is approximately 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers) in diameter and has a rotation period of less than four hours. Also revealed in the radar imagery of 1998 QE2 are several dark surface features that suggest large concavities. The preliminary estimate for the size of the asteroid’s satellite, or moon, is approximately 2,000 feet (600 meters) wide. The radar collage covers a little bit more than two hours.
First radar images of asteroid 1998 QE2 were obtained when the asteroid was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth. The small white dot at lower right is the moon, or satellite, orbiting asteroid 1998 QE2.
The closest approach of the asteroid occurs on May 31 at 1:59 p.m. Pacific (4:59 p.m. Eastern / 20:59 UTC), when the asteroid will get no closer than about 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers), or about 15 times the distance between Earth and the moon. This is the closest approach the asteroid will make to Earth for at least the next two centuries. Asteroid 1998 QE2 was discovered on Aug. 19, 1998, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) program near Socorro, N.M.
The resolution of these initial images of 1998 QE2 is approximately 250 feet (75 meters) per pixel. Resolution is expected to increase in the coming days as more data become available. Between May 30 and June 9, radar astronomers using NASA’s 230-foot-wide (70 meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, will perform an extensive campaign of observations on asteroid 1998 QE2. The two telescopes have complementary imaging capabilities that will enable astronomers to learn as much as possible about the asteroid during its brief visit near Earth.
Radar is a powerful technique for studying an asteroid’s size, shape, rotation state, surface features and surface roughness, and for improving the calculation of asteroid orbits. Radar measurements of asteroid distances and velocities often enable computation of asteroid orbits much further into the future than if radar observations weren’t available.
NASA places a high priority on tracking asteroids and protecting our home planet from them. In fact, the United States has the most robust and productive survey and detection program for discovering near-Earth objects. To date, U.S. assets have discovered more than 98 percent of the known Near-Earth Objects.
In 2012, the Near-Earth Object budget was increased from $6 million to $20 million. Literally dozens of people are involved with some aspect of near-Earth object research across NASA and its centers. Moreover, there are many more people involved in researching and understanding the nature of asteroids and comets, including those objects that come close to Earth, plus those who are trying to find and track them in the first place.
In addition to the resources NASA puts into understanding asteroids, it also partners with other U.S. government agencies, university-based astronomers, and space science institutes across the country that are working to track and better understand these objects, often with grants, interagency transfers and other contracts from NASA.
NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington, manages and funds the search, study, and monitoring of asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them close to Earth. JPL manages the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
In 2016, NASA will launch a robotic probe to one of the most potentially hazardous of the known Near-Earth Objects. The OSIRIS-REx mission to asteroid (101955) Bennu will be a pathfinder for future spacecraft designed to perform reconnaissance on any newly-discovered threatening objects. Aside from monitoring potential threats, the study of asteroids and comets enables a valuable opportunity to learn more about the origins of our solar system, the source of water on Earth, and even the origin of organic molecules that lead to the development of life.
NASA recently announced development of a first-ever mission to identify, capture and relocate an asteroid for human exploration. Using game-changing technologies this mission would mark an unprecedented technological achievement that raises the bar of what humans can do in space. Capturing and redirecting an asteroid will integrate the best of NASA’s science, technology and human exploration capabilities and draw on the innovation of America’s brightest scientists and engineers.
More information about asteroids and near-Earth objects is available at: http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/,http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/asteroidwatch and via Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/asteroidwatch .
More information about asteroid radar research is at: http://echo.jpl.nasa.gov/
More information about the Deep Space Network is at: http://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsn .
People Can ‘Beat’ Guilt Detection Tests By Suppressing Incriminating Memories
May 30th, 2013
By Alton Parrish.
Credit: Wikipedia
However, research by psychologists at the universities of Kent, Magdeburg and Cambridge, and the Medical Research Council, has shown that, contrary to this core assumption, some people can intentionally and voluntarily suppress unwanted memories – in other words, control their brain activity, thereby abolishing brain activity related to remembering. This was demonstrated through experiments in which people who conducted a mock crime were later tested on their crime recognition while having their electrical brain activity measured. Critically, when asked to suppress their crime memories, a significant proportion of people managed to reduce their brain’s recognition response and appear innocent.
This finding has major implications for brain activity guilt detection tests, among the most important being that those using memory detection tests should not assume that brain activity is outside voluntary control, and any conclusions drawn on the basis of these tests need to acknowledge that it might be possible for suspects to intentionally suppress their memories of a crime and evade detection.
Dr Zara Bergstrom, Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Kent and principal investigator on the research, said: ‘Brain activity guilt detection tests are promoted as accurate and reliable measures for establishing criminal culpability. Our research has shown that this assumption is not always justified. Using these types of tests to say that someone is innocent of a crime is not valid because it could just be the case that the suspect has managed to hide their crime memories.’
Dr Michael Anderson, Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, commented: ‘Interestingly, not everyone was able to suppress their memories of the crime well enough to beat the system. Clearly, more research is needed to identify why some people were much more effective than others.’
Dr Anderson’s group is presently trying to understand such individual differences with brain imaging.
Dr Jon Simons, of the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, added: ‘Our findings would suggest that the use of most brain activity guilt detection tests in legal settings could be of limited value. Of course, there could be situations where it is impossible to beat a memory detection test, and we are not saying that all tests are flawed, just that the tests are not necessarily as good as some people claim. More research is also needed to understand whether the results of this research work in real life crime detection.’
‘Intentional retrieval suppression can conceal guilty knowledge in ERP memory detection tests’ (Zara M. Bergström, Michael C. Anderson, Marie Buda, Jon S. Simons and Alan Richardson-Klavehn) will be published byBiological Psychology in September 2013 (Volume 94 issue 1).
It is currently online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2013.04.012
Research Effort Deep Underground Could Sort Out Cosmic-Scale Mysteries
May 28th, 2013
By Alton Parrish.
“It might explain why we’re here at all,” said David Radford, who oversees specific ORNL activities in the Majorana Demonstrator research effort. “It could help explain why the matter that we are made of exists.”
The Majorana Demonstrator is being assembled and stored 4,850 feet beneath the earth’s surface in enriched copper to limit the amount of background interference from cosmic rays and radioactive isotopes.
Radford, a researcher in ORNL’s Physics Division and an expert in germanium detectors, has been delivering germanium-76 to Sanford Underground Research Laboratory (SURF) in Lead, S.D., for the project. After navigating a Valentine’s Day blizzard on the first two-day drive from Oak Ridge, Radford made a second delivery in March.
ORNL serves as the lead laboratory for the Majorana Demonstrator research effort, a collaboration of research institutions representing the United States, Russia, Japan and Canada. The project is managed by the University of North Carolina’s Prof. John Wilkerson, who also has a joint faculty appointment with ORNL.
Research at SURF is being conducted 4,850 feet beneath the earth’s surface with the intention of building a 40-kilogram germanium detector, capable of detecting the theorized neutrinoless double beta decay. Detection might help to explain the matter-antimatter imbalance.
Before the detection of the unobserved decay can begin, however, the germanium must first be processed, refined and enriched. Radford coordinated the multistep process, which includes an essential pit stop in Oak Ridge.
The 42.5 kilograms of 86-percent enriched white germanium oxide powder required for the project is valued at $4 million and was transported from a Russian enrichment facility to a secure underground ORNL facility in a specially designed container. The container’s special shielding and underground storage limited exposure of the germanium to cosmic rays.
Without such preventative measures, Radford says, “Cosmic rays transmute germanium atoms into long-lived radioactive atoms, at the rate of about two atoms per day per kilogram of germanium. Even those two atoms a day will add to the background in our experiment. So we use underground storage to reduce the exposure to cosmic rays by a factor of 100.”
The germanium must further undergo a reduction and purification process at two Oak Ridge companies, Electrochemical Systems, Inc. (ESI) and Advanced Measurement Technology (AMETEK), before being moved to its final destination in South Dakota. ESI works to reduce the powdered germanium oxide to metal germanium bars. ORTEC, a division of AMETEK, further purifies the bars, using the material to grow large single crystals of germanium, and turning those into one-kilogram cylindrical germanium detectors that will be used in the Demonstrator. Once they leave AMETEK, Radford and his team transport the detectors to SURF.
The enrichment process is lengthy. The Majorana Demonstrator project began the partnership with ESI four years ago. To date, ORNL has delivered — via Radford’s two trips — nine of the enriched detectors, which are valued at about $2 million including the original cost of the enriched germanium oxide powder.
Requiring a total of 30 enriched detectors, the Majorana Demonstrator is not expected to be fully complete and operational until 2015.
Those involved in the Majorana research effort believe its completion and anticipated results will help pave the way for a next-generation detector using germanium-76 with unprecedented sensitivity. The future one-ton detector will help to determine the ratio and masses of conserved and annihilated lepton particles that are theorized to cause the initial imbalance of matter and antimatter from the Big Bang.
“The research effort is the first major step towards building a one-ton detector — a potentially Nobel-Prize-worthy project,” Radford says.
ORNL’s partner institutions in the Majorana Demonstration Project are Black Hills State University, Duke University, Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (Russia), Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Russia), Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, North Carolina State University, Osaka (Japan) University, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Triangle Universities Nuclear Laboratory, Centre for Particle Physics (Canada), University of Chicago, University of North Carolina, University of South Carolina, University of South Dakota, University of Tennessee and the Center for Experimental Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics.
The Majorana Demonstrator research project is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Physics.
Even Farm Animal Diversity Is Declining As Accelerating Species Loss Threatens Humanity
May 28th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
Credit: IPBES
Dr. Zakri, a national of Malaysia who co-chaired 2005’s landmark Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and serves also as science advisor to his country’s prime minister, cited fast-growing evidence that “we are hurtling towards irreversible environmental tipping points that, once passed, would reduce the ability of ecosystems to provide essential goods and services to humankind.”
The incremental loss of Amazon rainforest, for example, “may seem small with shortsighted perspective” but will eventually “accumulate to cause a larger, more important change,” he said. Experts warn that ongoing climate change, combined with land use change and fires, “could cause much of the Amazon forest to transform abruptly to more open, dry-adapted ecosystems, threatening the region’s enormous biodiversity and priceless services,” he added.
“It has been clear for some time that a credible, permanent IPCC-like science policy platform for biodiversity and ecosystem services is an important but missing element in the international response to the biodiversity crisis,” Dr. Zakri told the 7th Trondheim Conference on Biodiversity.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment “demonstrated that such an intergovernmental platform can create a clear, valuable policy-relevant consensus from a wide range of information sources about the state, trends and outlooks of human-environment interactions, with focus on the impacts of ecosystem change on human well-being. It showed that such a platform can support decision-makers in the translation of knowledge into policy.
“The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment provides our baseline,” he said. “The IPBES will tell us how much we have achieved, where we are on track, where we are not, why, and options for moving forward. It will help to build public support and identify priorities.”
The structure of IPBES mimics that of the IPCC but its aims go further to include capacity building to help bridge different knowledge systems.
“IPBES will reduce the gulf between the wealth of scientific knowledge on declining natural world conditions, and knowledge about effective action to reverse these damaging trends,” he said.
Even barnyard diversity is in decline
Some scientists have termed this the “sixth great extinction episode” in Earth’s history, according to Dr. Zakri, noting that the loss of biodiversity is happening faster and everywhere, even among farm animals.
He underlined findings by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization that genetic diversity among livestock is declining.
“The good news is the rate of decline is dropping but the latest data classify 22% of domesticated breeds at risk of extinction,” Dr. Zakri said.
Breeds become rare because their characteristics either don’t suit contemporary demand or because differences in their qualities have not been recognised. When a breed population falls to about 1,000 animals, it is considered rare and endangered.
Causes of genetic erosion in domestic animals are the lack of appreciation of the value of indigenous breeds and their importance in niche adaptation, incentives to introduce exotic and more uniform breeds from industrialised countries, and product-focused selection.
Among crops, meanwhile, about 75 per cent of genetic diversity was lost in the last century as farmers worldwide switched to genetically uniform, high-yielding varieties and abandoned multiple local varieties. There are 30,000 edible plant species but only 30 crops account for 95% of human food energy, the bulk of which (60%) comes down to rice, wheat, maize, millet and sorghum.
“The decline in the diversity of crops and animals is occurring in tandem with the need to sharply increase world food production and as a changing environment makes it more important than ever to have a large genetic pool to enable organisms to withstand and adapt to new conditions,” he said.
Biodiversity and the Sustainable Development Goals
According to Dr. Zakri, the most important outcome of last year’s Rio+20 international environmental summit of nations was agreement to set new multi-year global objectives to succeed the Millennium Development Goals (2000 – 2015).
Biodiversity is expected to feature prominently in the new “Sustainable Development Goals.”
For specifics, Dr. Zakri commended the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, already established through the Convention on Biological Diversity, which contain five strategic priorities and 20 specific targets internationally agreed for achievement by 2020, beginning with public awareness of the value of biodiversity and the steps people can take to conserve and use it sustainably.
“The Aichi Targets are an important contribution to the SDG process and it is up to us to ensure that they are fully considered,” he said.
“I would argue, though, that advancing towards equity and sustainable development requires us to go beyond. We need to meet the fundamental challenge of decoupling economic growth from natural resource consumption, which is forecast to triple by 2050 unless humanity can find effective ways to ‘do more and better with less.’ There are no simple blueprints for addressing a challenge as vast and complex as this but it’s imperative we commit to that idea.
“We also need measures of societal progress that go beyond Gross Domestic Product. We need the kind of vision embodied in the Inclusive Wealth Index being pioneered by Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University, Anantha Duraiappah at IHDP, and Pushpam Kumar at UNEP. As they have convincingly argued, enlightened measures of wealth that include natural capital, not just output like GDP, offers a real portrait of sustainable development,” he added.
“The idea that natural capital should be measured like this makes many nervous. And I agree that many of the services the environment provides, like clean water and air, are irreplaceable necessities.
“In theory, however, the undoubted value of these natural treasures should be reflected in their price, which should rise steeply as they become scarcer. In practice, natural assets are often hard to price well, if at all. Although this work is still in its infancy, it is worth recalling that GDP has only been measured for the last 70 years. And that originally it was a far cruder metric than today. The reality over many decades and the recent experience with the MDGs demonstrate all too clearly the limited success that even legal biodiversity-related commitments have in the absence of some sort of metric that speaks to other sectors and interests involved in the development process. We need to urge more economists to do the hard but valuable work of pricing the seemingly priceless. Ensuring these ideas are properly reflected in the SDGs could provide the type of support and encouragement needed.”
Contacts and sources:
Terry Collins
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)
About IPBES
Member nations (110): http://www.ipbes.net/about-ipbes/members-of-the-platform.html
Leadership: http://www.ipbes.net/about-ipbes/current-bureau-members.html
Profile of Prof. Zakri: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zakri_Abdul_Hamid
Biodiversity from terrestrial, marine, coastal, and inland water ecosystems provides the basis for ecosystems and the services they provide that underpin human well-being. However, biodiversity and ecosystem services are declining at an unprecedented rate, and in order to address this challenge, adequate local, national and international policies need to be adopted and implemented. To achieve this, decision makers need scientifically credible and independent information that takes into account the complex relationships between biodiversity, ecosystem services, and people. They also need effective methods to interpret this scientific information in order to make informed decisions. The scientific community also needs to understand the needs of decision makers better in order to provide them with the relevant information. In essence, the dialogue between the scientific community, governments, and other stakeholders on biodiversity and ecosystem services needs to be strengthened.
To this end, a new platform has been established by the international community – the ‘Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES). IPBES was established in April 2012, as an independent intergovernmental body open to all member countries of the United Nations. The members are committed to building IPBES as the leading intergovernmental body for assessing the state of the planet’s biodiversity, its ecosystems and the essential services they provide to society.
IPBES provides a mechanism recognized by both the scientific and policy communities to synthesize, review, assess and critically evaluate relevant information and knowledge generated worldwide by governments, academia, scientific organizations, non-governmental organizations and indigenous communities. This involves a credible group of experts in conducting assessments of such information and knowledge in a transparent way. IPBES is unique in that it will aim to strengthen capacity for the effective use of science in decision-making at all levels. IPBES will also aim to address the needs of Multilateral Environmental Agreements that are related to biodiversity and ecosystem services, and build on existing processes ensuring synergy and complementarities in each other’s work.
History
Specific discussions on IPBES started following the final meeting of the multi-stakeholder international steering committee for the consultative process on an International Mechanism of Scientific Expertise on Biodiversity (IMoSEB) in November 2007. The consultation towards IMoSEB decided to invite the Executive Director of UNEP – in collaboration with governments and other partners – to convene an intergovernmental and multi-stakeholder meeting to consider the establishment of an intergovernmental mechanism for biodiversity and ecosystem services. There was also consensus among the stakeholders involved in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) follow-up initiative that the follow up to the IMoSEB process and the MA follow-up process should merge. It was the coming together of the MA follow up process with the follow up to the IMoSEB consultations that led to the present process on IPBES.
Three intergovernmental and multistakeholders meetings (Malaysia 2008, Kenya 2009, Republic of Korea 2010) were held to discuss ways to strengthen the science-policy interface on biodiversity and ecosystem services. At the first two meetings, the gaps and needs for strengthening the science policy interface were identified, and at the meeting in June 2010, in Busan, Republic of Korea, governments decided that an IPBES should be established, what the focus of its work programme should be, and agreed on many of the principles of its operation as part of the Busan Outcome.
The Busan Outcome was welcomed by the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya in October 2010, and was subsequently considered at the 65th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). UNGA passed a resolution requesting UNEP to convene a plenary meeting to fully operationalize IPBES at the earliest opportunity. This resolution was then taken on board by UNEP in a decision at the 26th session of the UNEP Governing Council meeting, held in February 2011.
The plenary meeting was held in two sessions. The first session was held from 3 to 7 October 2011 in Nairobi. The second session of the plenary was hosted by UNEP, in collaboration with UNESCO, FAO and UNDP, in Panama City from 16 to 21 April 2012. There, many of the modalities and institutional arrangements for the Platform were finalised and 94 Governments adopted a resolution establishing the Platform as an independent intergovernmental body.
The first meeting of the Platform’s Plenary (IPBES-1) was held in Bonn, Germany from 21 to 26 January 2013, hosted by the Government of Germany. The final outcome document of this session is available as IPBES/1/12, which includes decisions on the next steps for the development of an initial work programme, the status of contributions and initial budget for the Platform for 2012, the IPBES administrative and institutional arrangements, and the procedure for receiving and prioritizing requests put to the Platform. In addition the report includes the updated rules of procedure for the plenary of the Platform.
The intersessionnal process towards the second session of the Platform’s plenary (IPBES-2), anticipated in December 2013, is contained in decision IPBES/1/2. More on the intersessional process here:http://www.ipbes.net/intersessional-process.html
The Better to See You With: Scientists Build Record-Setting Metamaterial Flat Lens
May 26th, 2013
By Alton Parrish.
Credit: Lezec/NIST
“Conventional lenses only capture two dimensions of a three-dimensional object,” says one of the paper’s co-authors, NIST’s Ting Xu. “Our flat lens is able to project three-dimensional images of three-dimensional objects that correspond one-to-one with the imaged object.” An article published in the journal Nature* explains that the new lens is formed from a flat slab of metamaterial with special characteristics that cause light to flow backward—a counterintuitive situation in which waves and energy travel in opposite directions, creating a negative refractive index.
Naturally occurring materials such as air or water have a positive refractive index. You can see this when you put a straw into a glass of water and look at it from the side. The straw appears bent and broken, as a result of the change in index of refraction between air, which has an index of 1, and water, which has an index of about 1.33. Because the refractive indices are both positive, the portion of the straw immersed in the water appears bent forward with respect to the portion in air. The negative refractive index of metamaterials causes light entering or exiting the material to bend in a direction opposite what would occur in almost all other materials.
For instance, if we looked at our straw placed in a glass filled with a negative-index material, the immersed portion would appear to bend backward, completely unlike the way we’re used to light behaving. In 1967, Russian physicist Victor Veselago described how a material with both negative electric permittivity and negative magnetic permeability would have a negative index of refraction.
(Permittivity is a measure of a material’s response to an applied electric field, while permeability is a measure of the material’s response to an applied magnetic field.) Veselago reasoned that a material with a refractive index of -1 could be used to make a lens that is flat, as opposed to traditional refractive lenses, which are curved. A flat lens with a refractive index of -1 could be used to directly image three-dimensional objects, projecting a three-dimensional replica into free space.
A negative-index flat lens like this has also been predicted to enable the transfer of image details substantially smaller than the wavelength of light and create higher-resolution images than are possible with lenses made of positive-index materials such as glass. It took over 30 years from Veselago’s prediction for scientists to create a negative-index material in the form of metamaterials, which are engineered on a subwavelength scale. For the past decade, scientists have made metamaterials that work at microwave, infrared and visible wavelengths by fabricating repeating metallic patterns on flat substrates. However, the smaller the wavelength of light scientists want to manipulate, the smaller these features need to be, which makes fabricating the structures an increasingly difficult task.
Until now, making metamaterials that work in the UV has been impossible because it required making structures with features as small as 10 nanometers, or 10 billionths of a meter. Moreover, because of limitations inherent in their design, metamaterials of this type designed for infrared and visible wavelengths have, so far, been shown to impart a negative index of refraction to light that is traveling only in a certain direction, making them hard to use for imaging and other applications that rely on refracted light.
To overcome these problems, researchers working at NIST took inspiration from a theoretical metamaterial design recently proposed by a group at the FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics in Holland. They adapted the design to work in the UV—a frequency range of particular technological interest. According to co-authors Xu, Amit Agrawal and Henri Lezec, aside from achieving record-short wavelengths, their metamaterial lens is inherently easy to fabricate. It doesn’t rely on nanoscale patterns, but instead is a simple sandwich of alternating nanometer-thick layers of silver and titanium dioxide, the construction of which is routine.
And because its unique design consists of a stack of strongly coupled waveguides sustaining backward waves, the metamaterial exhibits a negative index of refraction to incoming light regardless of its angle of travel. This realization of a Veselago flat lens operating in the UV is the first such demonstration of a flat lens at any frequency beyond the microwave. By using other combinations of materials, it may be possible to make similarly layered metamaterials for use in other parts of the spectrum, including the visible and the infrared.
The metamaterial flat lens achieves its refractive action over a distance of about two wavelengths of UV light, about half a millionth of a meter—a focal length challenging to achieve with conventional refractive optics such as glass lenses. Furthermore, transmission through the metamaterial can be turned on and off using higher frequency light as a switch, allowing the flat lens to also act as a shutter with no moving parts. “Our lens will offer other researchers greater flexibility for manipulating UV light at small length scales,” says Lezec.
“With its high photon energies, UV light has a myriad of applications, including photochemistry, fluorescence microscopy and semiconductor manufacturing. That, and the fact that our lens is so easy to make, should encourage other researchers to explore its possibilities.” The new work was performed in collaboration with researchers from the Maryland NanoCenter at the University of Maryland, College Park; Syracuse University; and the University of British Columbia, Kelowna, Canada.
Contacts and sources:
Charles Boutin
Water Apocalypse Looming
May 26th, 2013
By Alton Parrish.
Bonn Declaration issued by 500 scientists at ‘Water in the Anthropocene’ conference
A conference of 500 leading water scientists from around the world today issued a stark warning that, without major reforms, “in the short span of one or two generations, the majority of the 9 billion people on Earth will be living under the handicap of severe pressure on fresh water, an absolutely essential natural resource for which there is no substitute. This handicap will be self-inflicted and is, we believe, entirely avoidable.”
This is an image of North America from the data visualization video “Water in the Anthropocene,” to debut May 21 at gwsp.org and www.anthropocene.info.
“The list of human activities and their impact on the water systems of Planet Earth is long and important,” Anik Bhaduri, Executive Officer of the Global Water System Project (GWSP).
“We have altered the Earth’s climatology and chemistry, its snow cover, permafrost, sea and glacial ice extent and ocean volume—all fundamental elements of the hydrological cycle. We have accelerated major processes like erosion, applied massive quantities of nitrogen that leaks from soil to ground and surface waters and, sometimes, literally siphoned all water from rivers, emptying them for human uses before they reach the ocean. We have diverted vast amounts of freshwater to harness fossil energy, dammed major waterways, and destroyed aquatic ecosystems.”
“The idea of the Anthropocene underscores the point that human activities and their impacts have global significance for the future of all living species — ours included. Humans are changing the character of the world water system in significant ways with inadequate knowledge of the system and the consequences of changes being imposed. From a research position, human-water interactions must be viewed as a continuum and a coupled system, requiring interdisciplinary inquiry like that which has characterized the GWSP since its inception.”
Among many examples of humanity’s oversized imprint on the world, cited in a paper by James Syvitski, Chair of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and three fellow experts (in full:http://bit.ly/Yx4COp), and in a new “Water in the Anthropocene” video to debut in Bonn May 21 (available at gwsp.org and http://www.anthropocene.info):
Credit: gwsp.org/ www.anthropocene.infoHumanity uses an area the size of South America to grow its crops and an area the size of Africa for raising livestockDue to groundwater and hydrocarbon pumping in low lying coastal areas, two-thirds of major river deltas are sinking, some of them at a rate four times faster on average than global sea level is risingMore rock and sediment is now moved by human activities such as shoreline in-filling, damming and mining than by the natural erosive forces of ice, wind and water combinedMany river floods today have links to human activities, including the Indus flood of 2010 (which killed 2,000 people), and the Bangkok flood of 2011 (815 deaths)
On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years. Tens of thousands of large dams now distort natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over millennia
Drainage of wetlands destroys their capacity to ease floods—a free service of nature expensive to replace
Evaporation from poorly-managed irrigation renders many of the world’s rivers dry — no water, no life. And so, little by little, tens of thousands of species edge closer to extinction every day.
Needed: Better water system monitoring and governance
The water community stresses that concern now extends far beyond ‘classic’ drinking water and sanitation issues and includes water quality and quantity for ecosystems at all scales.
Says GWSP co-chair Claudia Pahl-Wostl: “The fact is, as world water problems worsen, we lack adequate efforts to monitor the availability, condition and use of water — a situation presenting extreme long term cost and danger.”
“Human water security is often achieved in the short term at the expense of the environment with harmful long-term implications. The problems are largely caused by governance failure and a lack of systemic thinking in both developed and developing countries. Economic development without concomitant institutional development will lead to greater water insecurity in the long-term. Global leadership is required to deal with the water challenges of the 21st century.”
Credit: gwsp.org/ www.anthropocene.info
It will recommended priorities for decision makers in the areas of earth system science and water resources governance and management.
And it will constitute a scientific prelude to October’s Budapest Water Summit, a major objective of which is to elevate the importance of water issues within the UN General Assembly negotiations on the Sustainable Development Goals — a set of globally-agreed future objectives to succeed the UN Millennium Development Goals in 2015.
Observers expect adoption of “water security” as a Sustainable Development Goal
Water expert Janos Bogardi, Senior Advisor to GWSP, says the absence of defined global water quantity and quality standards for personal use, agriculture and healthy ecosystems are critical gaps as the world community develops its next set of shared medium-term objectives.
“These definitions constitute a cardinal challenge today for scientists and politicians alike. It is important to reach consensus in order to make progress on the increasingly important notion of ‘water security’,” says Dr. Bogardi, stressing that changing terminology will not in itself solve problems. “Replacing the word ‘sustainability’ with ‘security’ is not a panacea.”
With respect to quantity, less than 20 liters daily for sanitary needs and drinking is deemed “water misery” while 40 to 80 liters is considered “comfortable.” (Current US per capita average daily consumption is over 300 liters; daily usage in urban Germany is about 120 liters per capita and in urban Hungary, where water is relatively expensive, the figure is 80 liters.)
Missing also are authoritative scientific determinations of how much water can be drawn without crossing a “tipping point” threshold into ecosystem collapse. While there is no general rule, GWSP scientists say withdrawals of 30% to 40% of a renewable freshwater resource constitutes “extreme” water stress, but underline scope to continue satisfying needs if water is returned and recycled in good quality. Mining fossil groundwater resources is by definition non-sustainable.
The GWSP is developing water quality guidelines for people, agriculture and ecosystems in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals.
“The urgency of formulating the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals and a tracking system for their success means that quite soon the SDG negotiators must offer-up water targets,” says Dr. Vörösmarty. “Whether they focus predominantly on continuing the Millennium Development Goals (narrowly on drinking water and sanitation for human health) or formulate a more comprehensive agenda that simultaneously optimizes water security for humans as well as for nature remains an open question. The water sciences community stands ready to take on this challenge. Are the the decision makers?”
Definitions of water security
In 2007, World Bank expert David Grey and Claudia Sadoff of IUCN, defined water security as “The availability of an acceptable quantity and quality of water for health, livelihoods, ecosystems and production, coupled with an acceptable level of water-related risks to people, environments and economies.”
Their use of the term “acceptable” acknowledges that water security has relative, negotiable meanings.
In March, another formulation was set out by UN-Water, the United Nations’ inter-agency coordination mechanism for all water-related issues.
It defined water security as: “The capacity of a population to safeguard sustainable access to adequate quantities of and acceptable quality water for sustaining livelihoods, human well-being, and socio-economic development, for ensuring protection against water-borne pollution and water-related disasters, and for preserving ecosystems in a climate of peace and political stability.” (seehttp://bit.ly/1864vMG)
The full text of The Bonn Declaration:
In the short span of one or two generations, the majority of the 9 billion people on Earth will be living under the handicap of severe pressure on fresh water, an absolutely essential natural resource for which there is no substitute. This handicap will be self-inflicted and is, we believe, entirely avoidable.
After years of observations and a decade of integrative research convened under the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) and other initiatives, water scientists are more than ever convinced that fresh water systems across the planet are in a precarious state.
Mismanagement, overuse and climate change pose long-term threats to human well-being, and evaluating and responding to those threats constitutes a major challenge to water researchers and managers alike. Countless millions of individual local human actions add up and reverberate into larger regional, continental and global changes that have drastically changed water flows and storage, impaired water quality, and damaged aquatic ecosystems.
Human activity thus plays a central role in the behavior of the global water system.
Since 2004, the Global Water System Project (GWSP) has spearheaded a broad research agenda and new ways of thinking about water as a complex global system, emphasizing the links that bind its natural and human components. Research carried out by GWSP and its partners has produced several important results that inform a better global understanding of fresh water today.
Humans are a key feature of the global water system, influencing prodigious quantities of water: stored in reservoirs, taken from rivers and groundwater and lost in various ways. Additional deterioration through pollution, now detectable on a global scale, further limits an already-stressed resource base, and negatively affects the health of aquatic life forms and human beings.
At a time of impending water challenges, it remains a struggle to secure the basic environmental and social observations needed to obtain an accurate picture of the state of the resource. We need to know about the availability, condition and use of water as part of a global system through sustained environmental surveillance. History teaches us that failure to obtain this basic information will be costly and dangerous.
Humans typically achieve water security through short-term and often costly engineering solutions, which can create long-lived impacts on social-ecological systems. Faced with a choice of water for short-term economic gain or for the more general health of aquatic ecosystems, society overwhelmingly chooses development, often with deleterious consequences on the very water systems that provide the resource.
Traditional approaches to development are counterproductive, destroying the services that healthy water systems provide, such as flood protection, habitat for fisheries and pollution control. Loss of these services will adversely affect current and future generations.
Sustainable development requires both technological and institutional innovation. At present, the formulation of effective institutions for the management of water lags behind engineering technologies in many regions.
Research from the GWSP and elsewhere confirms that current increases in the use of water and impairment of the water system are on an unsustainable trajectory. However, current scientific knowledge cannot predict exactly how or precisely when a planetary-scale boundary will be breached. Such a tipping point could trigger irreversible change with potentially catastrophic consequences.
The existing focus on water supply, sanitation and hygiene has delivered undoubted benefits to people around the world, but equally, we need to consider wider Sustainable Development Goals in the context of the global water system. Ecosystem-based sustainable water management, a pressing need that was reaffirmed at the Rio+20 Earth Summit, requires that solving water problems must be a joint obligation of environmental scientists, social scientists, engineers, policy-makers, and a wide range of stakeholders.
These realities motivate the water community assembled in Bonn for the Global Water System Project Conference “Water in the Anthropocene” to make a set of core recommendations to institutions and individuals focused on science, governance, management and decision-making relevant to water resources on earth. Given the development imperatives associated with all natural resources at the dawn of the 21st century, we urge a united front to form a strategic partnership of scientists, public stakeholders, decision-makers and the private sector. This partnership should develop a broad, community-consensus blueprint for a reality-based, multi-perspective, and multi-scale knowledge-to-action water agenda, based on these recommendations:
1) Make a renewed commitment to adopt a multi-scale and interdisciplinary approach to water science in order to understand the complex and interlinked nature of the global water system and how it may change now and in future.
2) Execute state-of-the-art synthesis studies of knowledge about fresh water that can inform risk assessments and be used to develop strategies to better promote the protection of water systems.
3) Train the next generation of water scientists and practitioners in global change research and management, making use of cross-scale analysis and integrated system design.
4) Expand monitoring, through traditional land-based environmental observation networks and state-of-the-art earth-observation satellite systems, to provide detailed observations of water system state.
5) Consider ecosystem-based alternatives to costly structural solutions for climate proofing, such that the design of the built environment in future includes both traditional and green infrastructure.
6) Stimulate innovation in water institutions, with a balance of technical- and governance-based solutions and taking heed of value systems and equity. A failure to adopt a more inclusive approach will make it impossible to design effective green growth strategies or policies.
Many river floods today have links to human activities, including the Indus flood of 2010 (which killed 2,000 people), and the Bangkok flood of 2011 (815 deaths)
On average, humanity has built one large dam every day for the last 130 years. Tens of thousands of large dams now distort natural river flows to which ecosystems and aquatic life adapted over millennia
Drainage of wetlands destroys their capacity to ease floods-a free service of nature expensive to replace
Evaporation from poorly-managed irrigation renders many of the world’s rivers dry — no water, no life. And so, little by little, tens of thousands of species edge closer to extinction every day.
Terry Collins
Global Water System Project
Top Ten New Animals Discovered
May 24th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
Scientists Announce Top 10 New Species
The announcement, now in its sixth year, coincides with the anniversary of the birth of Carolus Linnaeus — the 18th century Swedish botanist responsible for the modern system of scientific names and classifications.
Credit: Composite: Jacob Sahertian
“We have identified only about two million of an estimated 10 to 12 million living species and that does not count most of the microbial world,” said Quentin Wheeler, founding director of the International Institute for Species Exploration at ASU and author of “What on Earth? 100 of our Planet’s Most Amazing New Species” (NY, Plume, 2013).
“For decades, we have averaged 18,000 species discoveries per year which seemed reasonable before the biodiversity crisis. Now, knowing that millions of species may not survive the 21st century, it is time to pick up the pace,” Wheeler added.
“We are calling for a NASA-like mission to discover 10 million species in the next 50 years. This would lead to discovering countless options for a more sustainable future while securing evidence of the origins of the biosphere,” Wheeler said.
Taxon experts pick top 10
Members of the international committee made their top 10 selection from more than 140 nominated species. To be considered, species must have been described in compliance with the appropriate code of nomenclature, whether botanical, zoological or microbiological, and have been officially named during 2012.
“Selecting the final list of new species from a wide representation of life forms such as bacteria, fungi, plants and animals, is difficult. It requires finding an equilibrium between certain criteria and the special insights revealed by selection committee members,” said Antonio Valdecasas, a biologist and research zoologist with Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain. Valdecasas is the international selection committee chairman for the top 10 new species.
“We look for organisms with unexpected features or size and those found in rare or difficult to reach habitats. We also look for organisms that are especially significant to humans — those that play a certain role in human habitat or that are considered a close relative,” Valdecasas added.
This year’s top 10 come from Peru; NE Pacific Ocean, USA: California; Democratic Republic of the Congo; Panama; France; New Guinea; Madagascar; Ecuador; Malaysia; and China.
Top 10 New Species, 2013
“I don’t know whether to be more astounded by the species discovered each year, or the depths of our ignorance about biodiversity of which we are a part,” shared Wheeler.
“At the same time we search the heavens for other earthlike planets, we should make it a high priority to explore the biodiversity on the most earthlike planet of them all: Earth,” he added. “With more than eight out of every 10 living species awaiting discovery, I am shocked by our ignorance of our very own planet and in awe at the diversity, beauty and complexity of the biosphere and its inhabitants.”
Describing the discoveries
Lilliputian Violet
Viola lilliputana
Country: Peru
Tiny violet: Not only is the Lilliputian violet among the smallest violets in the world, it is also one of the most diminutive terrestrial dicots. Known only from a single locality in an Intermontane Plateau of the high Andes of Peru, Viola lilliputana lives in the dry puna grassland eco-region. Specimens were first collected in the 1960s, but the species was not described as a new until 2012. The entire above ground portion of the plant is barely 1 centimeter tall. Named, obviously, for the race of little people on the island of Lilliput in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Lyre Sponge
Chondrocladia lyra
Country: NE Pacific Ocean; USA: California
Carnivorous sponge: A spectacular, large, harp- or lyre-shaped carnivorous sponge discovered in deep water (averaging 3,399 meters) from the northeast Pacific Ocean off the coast of California. The harp-shaped structures or vanes number from two to six and each has more than 20 parallel vertical branches, often capped by an expanded, balloon-like, terminal ball. This unusual form maximizes the surface area of the sponge for contact and capture of planktonic prey.
Lesula Monkey
Cercopithecus lomamiensis
Country: Democratic Republic of the Congo
Old World monkey: Discovered in the Lomami Basin of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the lesula is an Old World monkey well known to locals but newly known to science. This is only the second species of monkey discovered in Africa in the past 28 years. Scientists first saw the monkey as a captive juvenile in 2007. Researchers describe the shy lesula as having human-like eyes. More easily heard than seen, the monkeys perform a booming dawn chorus. Adult males have a large, bare patch of skin on the buttocks, testicles and perineum that is colored a brilliant blue. Although the forests where the monkeys live are remote, the species is hunted for bush meat and its status is vulnerable.
No to the Mine! Snake
Sibon noalamina
Country: Panama
Snail-eating snake: A beautiful new species of snail-eating snake has been discovered in the highland rainforests of western Panama. The snake is nocturnal and hunts soft-bodied prey including earthworms and amphibian eggs, in addition to snails and slugs. This harmless snake defends itself by mimicking the alternating dark and light rings of venomous coral snakes. The species is found in the Serranía de Tabasará mountain range where ore mining is degrading and diminishing its habitat. The species name is derived from the Spanish phrase “No a la mina” or “No to the mine.”
A Smudge on Paleolithic Art
Ochroconis anomala
Country: France
Fungus: In 2001, black stains began to appear on the walls of Lascaux Cave in France. By 2007, the stains were so prevalent they became a major concern for the conservation of precious rock art at the site that dates back to the Upper Paleolithic. An outbreak of a white fungus, Fusarium solani, had been successfully treated when just a few months later, black staining fungi appeared. The genus primarily includes fungi that occur in the soil and are associated with the decomposition of plant matter. As far as scientists know, this fungus, one of two new species of the genus from Lascaux, is harmless. However, at least one species of the group, O. gallopava, causes disease in humans who have compromised immune systems.
World’s Smallest Vertebrate
Paedophryne amanuensis
Country: New Guinea
Tiny frog: Living vertebrates — animals that have a backbone or spinal column — range in size from this tiny new species of frog, as small as 7 millimeters, to the blue whale, measuring 25.8 meters. The new frog was discovered near Amau village in Papua, New Guinea. It captures the title of ‘smallest living vertebrate’ from a tiny Southeast Asian cyprinid fish that claimed the record in 2006. The adult frog size, determined by averaging the lengths of both males and females, is only 7.7 millimeters. With few exceptions, this and other ultra-small frogs are associated with moist leaf litter in tropical wet forests — suggesting a unique ecological guild that could not exist under drier circumstances.
Endangered Forest
Eugenia petrikensis
Country: Madagascar
Endangered shrub: Eugenia is a large, worldwide genus of woody evergreen trees and shrubs of the myrtle family that is particularly diverse in South America, New Caledonia and Madagascar. The new species E. petrikensis is a shrub growing to two meters with emerald green, slightly glossy foliage and beautiful, dense clusters of small magenta flowers. It is one of seven new species described from the littoral forest of eastern Madagascar and is considered to be an endangered species. It is the latest evidence of the unique and numerous species found in this specialized, humid forest that grows on sandy substrate within kilometers of the shoreline. Once forming a continuous band 1,600 kilometers long, the littoral forest has been reduced to isolated, vestigial fragments under pressure from human populations.
Lightning Roaches?
Lucihormetica luckae
Country: Ecuador
Glow-in-the-dark cockroach: Luminescence among terrestrial animals is rather rare and best known among several groups of beetles — fireflies and certain click beetles in particular — as well as cave-inhabiting fungus gnats. Since the first discovery of a luminescent cockroach in 1999, more than a dozen species have (pardon the pun) “come to light.” All are rare, and interestingly, so far found only in remote areas far from light pollution. The latest addition to this growing list is L. luckae that may be endangered or possibly already extinct. This cockroach is known from a single specimen collected 70 years ago from an area heavily impacted by the eruption of the Tungurahua volcano. The species may be most remarkable because the size and placement of its lamps suggest that it is using light to mimic toxic luminescent click beetles.
No Social Butterfly
Semachrysa jade
Country: Malaysia
Social media lacewing: In a trend-setting collision of science and social media, Hock Ping Guek photographed a beautiful green lacewing with dark markings at the base of its wings in a park near Kuala Lumpur and shared his photo on Flickr. Shaun Winterton, an entomologist with the California Department of Food and Agriculture, serendipitously saw the image and recognized the insect as unusual. When Guek was able to collect a specimen, it was sent to Stephen Brooks at London’s Natural History Museum who confirmed its new species status. The three joined forces and prepared a description using Google Docs. In this triumph for citizen science, talents from around the globe collaborated by using new media in making the discovery. The lacewing is not named for its color — rather for Winterton’s daughter, Jade.
Hanging Around in the Jurassic
Juracimbrophlebia ginkgofolia
Country: China
Hangingfly fossil: Living species of hangingflies can be found, as the name suggests, hanging beneath foliage where they capture other insects as food. They are a lineage of scorpionflies characterized by their skinny bodies, two pairs of narrow wings, and long threadlike legs. A new fossil species, Juracimbrophlebia ginkgofolia, has been found along with preserved leaves of a gingko-like tree, Yimaia capituliformis, in Middle Jurassic deposits in the Jiulongshan Formation in China’s Inner Mongolia. The two look so similar that they are easily confused in the field and represent a rare example of an insect mimicking a gymnosperm 165 million years ago, before an explosive radiation of flowering plants.
Why create a top 10 new species list?
Arizona State University’s International Institute for Species Exploration announces the top 10 new species list each year as part of its public awareness campaign to bring attention to biodiversity and the field of taxonomy.
“Sustainable biodiversity means assuring the survival of as many and as diverse species as possible so that ecosystems are resilient to whatever stresses they face in the future. Scientists will need access to as much evidence of evolutionary history as possible,” said the institute’s Wheeler, who is also a professor in ASU’s School of Life Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and in the School of Sustainability, as well as a senior sustainability scientist with the Global Institute of Sustainability.
“All of our hopes and dreams for conservation hinge upon saving millions of species that we cannot recognize and know nothing about,” Wheeler added. “No investment makes more sense than completing a simple inventory to the establish baseline data that tells us what kinds of plants and animals exist and where. Until we know what species already exist, it is folly to expect we will make the right decisions to assure the best possible outcome for the pending biodiversity crisis.”
Additionally, the announcement is made on or near May 23 to honor Linnaeus. Since he initiated the modern system for naming plants and animals, nearly two million species have been named, described and classified. Excluding unknown millions of microbes, scientists estimate there are between 10 and 12 million living species.
IISE International Selection Committee: Antonio G. Valdecasas, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, CSIC, Spain, Committee Chair; Andrew Polaszek, Natural History Museum, England; Ellinor Michel, Natural History Museum, England; Marcelo Rodrigues de Carvalho, Universidade de São Paulo; Aharon Oren, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Mary Liz Jameson, Wichita State University, USA; Alan Paton, Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, England; James A. Macklin, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, Canada; John S. Noyes, Natural History Museum, England; Zhi-Qiang Zhang, Landcare Research, New Zealand; and Gideon Smith, South African National Biodiversity Institute, South Africa.
Most Elite Athletes Believe Doping Substances Are Effective In Improving Performance
May 22nd, 2013By Alton Parrish.
These are some of the conclusions of a study conducted by researchers from the Department of Physical and Sports Education at the University of Granada. Their research has also shown a widespread belief among elite athletes that the fight against doping is inefficient and biased, and that the sanctions imposed “are not severe enough”.
In an article in the journal “Sports Medicine”, the most important publication in the field of Sport Sciences, researchers Mikel Zabala and Jaime Morente-Sánchez have analysed the attitudes, beliefs and knowledge about doping of elite athletes from all over the world. To this end, they conducted a literature review of 33 studies on the subject published between 2000 and 2011, in order to analyse the current situation and, as a result of this, to act by developing specific, efficient anti-doping strategies.
Fewer controls in team-based sports
The results of the University of Granada study reveal that athletes participating in team-based sports appear to be less susceptible to using doping substances. However, the authors stress that in team sports anti-doping controls are clearly both quantitatively and qualitatively less exhaustive.
The study indicates that coaches seem to be the principle influence and source of information for athletes when it comes to starting or not starting to take banned substances, while doctors and other specialists are less involved. Athletes are becoming increasingly familiar with anti-doping rules, but there is still a lack of knowledge about the problems entailed in using banned substances and methods, which the researchers believe should be remedied through appropriate educational programmes.
Moreover, they also conclude that a substantial lack of information exists among elite athletes about dietary supplements and the secondary effects of performance-enhancing substances.
In the light of their results, the University of Granada researchers consider it necessary to plan and conduct information and prevention campaigns to influence athletes’ attitudes towards doping and the culture surrounding this banned practice. “We should not just dedicate money almost exclusively to performing anti-doping tests, as we currently do. To improve the situation, it would be enough to designate at least a small part of this budget to educational and prevention programmes that encourage athletes to reject the use of banned substances and methods”, Mikel Zabala and Jaime Morente-Sánchez conclude. In this context, one pioneering example in their opinion is the Spanish Cycling Federation’s “Preventing to win” project.
Citation: Doping in Sport: A Review of Elite Athletes’ Attitudes, Beliefs, and Knowledge.
Morente-Sánchez J, Zabala M. Sports Medicine. 2013 Mar 27.
Contacts and sources:
Jaime Morente-Sánchez
University of Granada
New Discovery Of Ancient Diet Shatters Conventional Ideas Of How Agriculture Emerged
May 21st, 2013
By Alton Parrish.
Archaeologists have made a discovery in southern subtropical China which could revolutionise thinking about how ancient humans lived in the region.
They have uncovered evidence for the first time that people living in Xincun 5,000 years ago may have practised agriculture –before the arrival of domesticated rice in the region.
This is Dr Mingqi Li sampling one of the pebble tools for ancient starch using an ultrasonic bath, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
Credit: Dr. Huw Barton
Current archaeological thinking is that it was the advent of rice cultivation along the Lower Yangtze River that marked the beginning of agriculture in southern China. Poor organic preservation in the study region, as in many others, means that traditional archaeobotany techniques are not possible.
Now, thanks to a new method of analysis on ancient grinding stones, the archaeologists have uncovered evidence that agriculture could predate the advent of rice in the region.
The research was the result of a two-year collaboration between Dr Huw Barton, from the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester, and Dr Xiaoyan Yang, Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing.
Funded by a Royal Society UK-China NSFC International Joint Project, and other grants held by Yang in China, the research is published in PLOS ONE.
This shows the Xincun site under excavation, a) Neolithic living surface under cleaning.
Credit: Dr Jun Wei
“We have used a relatively new method known as ancient starch analysis to analyse ancient human diet. This technique can tell us things about human diet in the past that no other method can.
“From a sample of grinding stones we extracted very small quantities of adhering sediment trapped in pits and cracks on the tool surface. From this material, preserved starch granules were extracted with our Chinese colleagues in the starch laboratory in Beijing. These samples were analysed in China and also here at Leicester in the Starch and Residue Laboratory, School of Archaeology and Ancient History.
“Our research shows us that there was something much more interesting going on in the subtropical south of China 5,000 years ago than we had first thought. The survival of organic material is really dependent on the particular chemical properties of the soil, so you never know what you will get until you sample. At Xincun we really hit the jackpot. Starch was well-preserved and there was plenty of it. While some of the starch granules we found were species we might expect to find on grinding and pounding stones, ie. some seeds and tuberous plants such as freshwater chestnuts, lotus root and the fern root, the addition of starch from palms was totally unexpected and very exciting.”
This is a map of the study region in southern China (A), Xincun site indicated by red triangle (B), and details of the Xincun site including excavation areas marked by red grids, stippling shows location of coastal sand dunes (C).
Credit: Xiaoyan Yang
Dr Barton said: “The presence of at least two, possibly three species of starch producing palms, bananas, and various roots, raises the intriguing possibility that these plants may have been planted nearby the settlement.
“Today groups that rely on palms growing in the wild are highly mobile, moving from one palm stand to another as they exhaust the clump. Sedentary groups that utilise palms for their starch today, plant suckers nearby the village, thus maintaining continuous supply. If they were planted at Xincun, this implies that ‘agriculture’ did not arrive here with the arrival of domesticated rice, as archaeologists currently think, but that an indigenous system of plant cultivation may have been in place by the mid Holocene.
“The adoption of domesticated rice was slow and gradual in this region; it was not a rapid transformation as in other places. Our findings may indicate why this was the case. People may have been busy with other types of cultivation, ignoring rice, which may have been in the landscape, but as a minor plant for a long time before it too became a food staple.
“Future work will focus on grinding stones from nearby sites to see if this pattern is repeated along the coast.”
Contacts and sources:
Dr. Huw Barton
University of Leicester
Nanotechnology Could Help Fight Diabetes
May 20th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
The nanoparticles were designed to sense glucose levels in the body and respond by secreting the appropriate amount of insulin, thereby replacing the function of pancreatic islet cells, which are destroyed in patients with Type 1 diabetes. Ultimately, this type of system could ensure that blood-sugar levels remain balanced and improve patients’ quality of life, according to the researchers.
“Insulin really works, but the problem is people don’t always get the right amount of it. With this system of extended release, the amount of drug secreted is proportional to the needs of the body,” says Daniel Anderson, an associate professor of chemical engineering and member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.
Anderson is the senior author of a paper describing the new system in a recent issue of the journal ACS Nano. Lead author of the paper is Zhen Gu, a former postdoc in Anderson’s lab. The research team also includes Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, and researchers from the Department of Anesthesiology at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Mimicking the pancreas
Currently, people with Type 1 diabetes typically prick their fingers several times a day to draw blood for testing their blood-sugar levels. When levels are high, these patients inject themselves with insulin, which breaks down the excess sugar.
In recent years, many researchers have sought to develop insulin-delivery systems that could act as an “artificial pancreas,” automatically detecting glucose levels and secreting insulin. One approach uses hydrogels to measure and react to glucose levels, but those gels are slow to respond or lack mechanical strength, allowing insulin to leak out.
The MIT team set out to create a sturdy, biocompatible system that would respond more quickly to changes in glucose levels and would be easy to administer.
Their system consists of an injectable gel-like structure with a texture similar to toothpaste, says Gu, who is now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering and molecular pharmaceutics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. The gel contains a mixture of oppositely charged nanoparticles that attract each other, keeping the gel intact and preventing the particles from drifting away once inside the body.
Using a modified polysaccharide known as dextran, the researchers designed the gel to be sensitive to acidity. Each nanoparticle contains spheres of dextran loaded with an enzyme that converts glucose into gluconic acid. Glucose can diffuse freely through the gel, so when sugar levels are high, the enzyme produces large quantities of gluconic acid, making the local environment slightly more acidic.
That acidic environment causes the dextran spheres to disintegrate, releasing insulin. Insulin then performs its normal function, converting the glucose in the bloodstream into glycogen, which is absorbed into the liver for storage.
Long-term control
In tests with mice that have Type 1 diabetes, the researchers found that a single injection of the gel maintained normal blood-sugar levels for an average of 10 days. Because the particles are mostly composed of polysaccharides, they are biocompatible and eventually degrade in the body.
The researchers are now trying to modify the particles so they can respond to changes in glucose levels faster, at the speed of pancreas islet cells. “Islet cells are very smart. They can release insulin very quickly once they sense high sugar levels,” Gu says.
Before testing the particles in humans, the researchers plan to further develop the system’s delivery properties and to work on optimizing the dosage that would be needed for use in humans.
The research was funded by the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust and the Tayebati Family Foundation.
Contacts and sources:
Sarah McDonnell
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Origins Of Chinese Agriculture Date Older Than Previously Thought
May 16th, 2013
By Alton Parrish.
Origins Of Agriculture In China Began 23,000 Years Ago, 12,000 Years Earlier Than Previously Believed
Professor Li Liu and graduate student Hao Zhao take residue and use-wear samples from a grinding slab in China.
Credit: Stanford University/ Li Liu
The first evidence of agriculture appears in the archaeological record some 10,000 years ago. But the skills needed to cultivate and harvest crops weren’t learned overnight. Scientists have traced these roots back to 23,000-year-old tools used to grind seeds, found mostly in the Middle East.
Now, research lead by Li Liu, a professor of Chinese archaeology at Stanford, reveals that the same types of tools were used to process seeds and tubers in northern China, setting China’s agricultural clock back about 12,000 years and putting it on par with activity in the Middle East. Liu believes that the practices evolved independently, possibly as a global response to a changing climate.
The earliest grinding stones have been found in Upper Paleolithic archaeological sites around the world. These consisted of a pair of stones, typically a handheld stone that would be rubbed against a larger, flat stone set on the ground, to process wild seeds and tubers into flour-like powder.
Once the stones are unearthed, use-wear traces and residue of starch grains on the used surfaces can be analyzed to reveal the types of plants processed by the long-dead owners.
Liu focused on stones discovered at a roughly 23,000-year-old site in the middle of the Yellow River region in northern China. Most of the agricultural research in this area has focused on the Holocene period, roughly 10,000 years ago, when people were domesticating animals and farming.
“The roots of agriculture must be much deeper than 10,000 years ago,” Liu said. “People have to first be familiar with the wild plants before cultivating them. The use of these grinding stones to process food indicates that people exploited these plants intensively and became familiar with their characteristics, a process that eventually led to agriculture.”
Indeed, the starch analysis has shown traces of grasses, beans, wild millet seeds, a type of yam and snakegourd root – the same types of food that people in the region would domesticate thousands of years later. Domesticated millet, in particular, became the main staple crop that supported the agricultural basis of ancient Chinese civilization.
Similar patterns of activity existed around the world at the same time, but this is the first evidence that people in northern China were practicing comparable methods. In particular, the extensive use of seeds by people in China and elsewhere could help paint a picture of humans adapting to a worldwide changing climate during an ice age.
“Wild millet seeds are very, very small, and people would need to spend a lot of time to gather enough seeds to be useful,” Liu said. “This suggests either that they were under some pressure and better foods were not readily available, or that seeds had suddenly become more abundant and easier to collect.
“We know that during the Ice Age, populations were under pressure. I think that our finding suggests that there was some general evolutionary trend, and that people around the world reacted to climate change in a similar way, although independently.”
Incidentally, the presence of tubers could point to the dawn of another discipline.
“Yam and snakegourd root that we found can be used both as food and as traditional herb medicine in China,” Liu said. “Whether or not they were used as medicine, we don’t know yet, but this discovery could suggest that people understood, or were developing an understanding of, the medicinal properties of some of those roots.”
The study was published last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Terahertz Technology: Seeing More With Less
May 14th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
© 2013 A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics
“In a commercial terahertz transmitter–receiver unit, the central module alone measures typically around 190 by 80 by 65 millimeters, which is roughly 1 million cubic millimeters,” says Hu. The novel design of Hu’s team unites the essential components of a terahertz device in a smaller two-dimensional area of just a few millimeters along each side. According to Hu and his co-workers, this compact device paves the way towards the mass production of a fully integrated terahertz system.
As the next step, the team will use the IME’s cutting-edge technologies to build more complex structures composed of several two-dimensional layers, which will be based on their new designs. Although the team is not pursuing any specific applications, their devices potentially open up a wide range of possibilities. These include wireless short-range transfers of data sets — the content of a Blu-ray disc could be sent in as little as a few seconds, for example — high-resolution biosensing, risk-free screening of patients and passengers, and see-through-envelope imaging (see image).
Contacts and sources:
Super Language From The Ice Age, Some Words Still With Us Today
May 11th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
New research from the University of Reading shows that Ice Age people living in Europe 15,000 years ago might have used forms of some common words including I, you, we, man and bark, that in some cases could still be recognized today.
Credit: Manhattan Museum of Natural History
Previously linguists have relied solely on studying shared sounds among words to identify those that are likely to be derived from common ancestral words, such as the Latin pater and the English father. A difficulty with this approach is that two words might have similar sounds just by accident, such as the words team and cream.
Professor Pagel, from the University of Reading’s School of Biological Sciences, said: “The way in which we use a certain set of words in everyday speech is something common to all human languages. We discovered numerals, pronouns and special adverbs are replaced far more slowly, with linguistic half-lives of once every 10,000 or even more years. As a rule of thumb, words used more than about once per thousand in everyday speech were seven to ten times more likely to show deep ancestry in the Eurasian super-family.”
Professor Pagel’s previous research on the evolution of human languages has built up a picture of how our 7,000 living human languages have evolved. Professor Pagel and his research team have documented the shared patterns in the way we use language and researched why some words succeed and others have become obsolete over time. This is done by using statistical estimates of rates of lexical replacement for a range of vocabulary items in the Indo-European languages. The variation in replacement rates makes the most common vocabulary items in these languages promising candidates for estimating the divergence between pairs of languages.
¹seven language families: Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, Dravidian, Chuckchee-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut
Women Altering Menstruation Cycles In Large Numbers, UO Study Shows
May 10th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
Most women who alter bleeding cycles do so for convenience rather than to avoid menstrual symptoms, and many learn about the option from nonmedical sources, according to research by the university’s Department of Human Physiology, Portland-based Oregon Health and Sciences University and Eastern Michigan University. The study is published in Contraception, the official journal of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals and the Society of Family Planning.
“These findings emphasize the need for health care providers to carefully interview combined hormonal contraceptive users on how they are using their method – for example, many women may be skipping pills to extend their cycles,” said researcher Christopher Minson, a human physiology professor at the University of Oregon. “With a greater understanding of the issues, health care providers may be able to more effectively engage in conversations with college-aged women and educate them about available options.”
As research indicates that reducing the occurrence of menstruation is safe and can even be beneficial, women are increasingly using hormonal contraceptives to alter bleeding cycles. But there has been a lack of information concerning why women do so and from whom they receive information regarding this option.
In a survey of undergraduate and graduate students, 17 percent reported altering their scheduled bleeding pattern by deviating from the instructions of hormonal contraceptives, which include birth-control pills, vaginal contraceptive rings and transdermal contraceptive patches.
Half of these women reported that they did so for convenience or scheduling purposes. Others cited personal preference (28.9 percent) or reducing menstrual symptoms (16.7 percent) as reasons they altered menstruation patterns.
Among the women who delayed or skipped a scheduled bleeding for convenience or personal choice, a comparatively large number – 53 percent – indicated the knowledge was obtained from nonmedical sources, such as a family member or friend, researchers said.
The survey also provides new insights on the factors that influence a woman’s decision whether to alter bleeding schedules. Asians have a 7 percent lower probability of altering hormonal cycles and women who exercise regularly have a 5 percent lower probability of doing so; another characteristic that decreased the likelihood of the practice was preference for a monthly cycle.
“We found that it is possible to identify some of the specific characteristics of women in a college population who may be more or less likely to practice scheduled bleeding manipulation,” said Dr. Paul Kaplan, of the University Health Center and Oregon Health and Sciences University. “This study provides information about the motives, beliefs and influences relating to this practice.”
In a finding that surprised researchers, women who said they would prefer no menstrual periods were less likely to alter their cycles than those who would prefer one per year. A woman who would prefer one cycle per year had a 17 percent higher probability of modifying her hormonal contraceptive regimen than one who preferred a menstrual period every three months or never.
This suggests that health care providers could improve education of the hormonal contraception regimen best-suited to a patient’s needs and desires, researchers said.
From an estimated 11,900 survey-linked emails sent to female university students, 1,719 (14.4 percent) initial responses were received and 1,374 (79.9 percent of respondents) indicated that they had used a combined hormonal contraceptive during the last six months.
The National Institutes of Health supported the research with a grant (5R01HL081671) from the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
Earth Moved Closer To The Sun To End Ice Age
May 9th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
Photo courtesy of Kelsey Winsor, UW–Madison
Climate scientists, led by a group from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used computer models to provide the strongest support yet to a case made nearly 90 years ago by mathematician Milutin Milankovitch.
“Milankovitch actually calculated the changes in insolation — the amount of heat coming into the Earth system from sunlight — in the Northern Hemisphere by astronomy,” says Feng He, a scientist at UW-Madison’sCenter for Climatic Research. “He did that before World War I, and that equation is still fairly accurate, even though he didn’t have anything like the computing resources we do.”
Credit: University of Wisconsin- Madison
Milankovitch’s work showed glacial rise and decline tied to cycles of summer sun — as opposed to winter conditions, which were intuitively expected to hold sway. A glacier that could survive summer without substantial ice loss was well set to grow even during sunny winters.
The importance of summer sun has been confirmed repeatedly by studies of physical climate records, largely ice and sediment cores taken from glaciers and the bottom of oceans around the world. But the progression of warming — from north to south, or south to north — during the last great glacial melt about 20,000 years ago is hard to follow, and has proven a bone of contention among those studying ancient climate.
Using a version of the computer model of the Earth’s climate used by theUnited Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, He and collaborators have reproduced that global warming environment as a series of falling dominoes at opposite ends of the Earth.
“That insolation in the north is the trigger,” says He, whose work will be published tomorrow (Feb. 7, 2013) in the journal Nature. “But the first consistent warming comes in the Southern Hemisphere, and that warming releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The CO2 is the feedback that accelerates the warming and gets the whole world into full deglaciation.”
The intersection of a pair of cyclical quirks in the Earth’s orbit — one that brings it closest to the sun every 21,000 years, and another that tilts its poles closest to the sun every 41,000 years — made for particularly powerful sunshine on an icy Northern hemisphere.
The researchers added Northern Hemisphere glacial melt to the IPCC computer model and ran it through the period of the last major glacial melt repeatedly on supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Model runs revealed the overturning current as key to what the researchers, whose work was funded by the National Science Foundation, called a bipolar seesaw.
Increasing sunlight alone wasn’t enough to melt the northern glaciers, but enough freshwater runoff spilled into the ocean to disrupt the progression of the overturning current, which carries warm water from the southern Atlantic Ocean and returns cooler water south. Without a way to ship heat north, the Southern Hemisphere began to warm.
“When the melt water enters the ocean, it triggers the Southern Hemisphere warming, the retreat of southern sea ice, and maybe the warming of the deep ocean and circulation changes,” He says. “All of this extracts CO2 from the southern oceans, and it’s that change that leads to a global greenhouse atmosphere and a speeding-up of the warming process around the world.”
That global temperature shift pushed even the Northern Hemisphere’s glaciers into decline, and the planet into the moderate climate it enjoys today.
“This is the first study to show this mechanism reproduced to account for early deglacial warming of the Southern Hemisphere, He says. “Before, people were using this mechanism for abrupt climate change events, but we are showing this mechanism accounts for slower, lasting warming as well.”
The research team drew together specialists in computing, oceanography, atmospheric science and glaciers — collaborators including Harvard University postdoctoral fellow Jeremy Shakun, Oregon State University geologist Peter Clark, NCAR senior scientist Bette Otto-Bliesner and UW-Madison geologist Anders Carlson, climate dynamist Zhengyu Liu and paleo-climatologist John Kutzbach.
Nanoscale Technology Used To Drive A ‘Big’ C60 Through A ‘Small’ H2O May Help Drug Delivery
May 6th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
Credit: Columbia Engineering
And, from a fundamental point of view, he hopes that the isolated, encapsulated single molecule, like the H2O one in his study, will provide an important platform for revealing and probing inherent characteristics of a single molecule, free from its outside environment.
“The important role of hydrogen bonds in the properties of water, like surface tension and viscosity, and the precise interactions between a single water molecule and hydrogen bonds, are still unclear,” Chen notes, “so our new technique to isolate a single water molecule free from any hydrogen bonds provides an opportunity for answering these questions.”
Since the discovery of C60 in the 1980s, scientists have been trying to solve the challenge of controlling a single C60. Several mechanical strategies involving AFM (atomic force microscopy) have been developed, but these are costly and time-intensive. The ability to drive a single C60 through a simple external force field, such as an electrical or magnetic field, would be a major step forward.
In the Columbia Engineering study, the researchers found that, when they encapsulated a polar molecule within a nonpolar fullerene, they could use an external electrical field to transport the molecule@fullerene structures to desired positions and adjust the transport velocity so that both delivery direction and time were controllable. Chen’s team came up with the idea a year ago, and confirmed their surprising results through extensive atomistic simulations.
Chen plans to explore more properties of the H2O@C60 molecule and other similar structures, and to continue probing the interaction and communication of the encapsulated single water molecule with its surroundings. “Studying the communication of an imprisoned single water molecule with its outside environment such as adjacent molecules,” he adds, “is like learning how a person sitting inside a room makes connections with friends outside, selectively on demand (i.e. with control) or randomly (without control) through, say, over the phone.”
This research was funded by the National Science Foundation and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency).
Holly Evarts
Columbia University
Internet Content Is Looking For You
May 6th, 2013This concept, called “contextual search,” is improving so gradually the changes often go unnoticed, and we may soon forget what the world was like without it, according to Brian Proffitt, a technology expert and adjunct instructor of management in the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.
Contextual search describes the capability for search engines to recognize a multitude of factors beyond just the search text for which a user is seeking. These additional criteria form the “context” in which the search is run. Recently, contextual search has been getting a lot of attention due to interest from Google.
Utilizing contextual search, Google Now provides information based on location, and by accessing calendar entries and travel confirmation messages in Gmail accounts. Available on Android for the last six months, Google Now was just released for the iPhone/iPad platform.
“You no longer have to search for content, content can search for you, which flips the world of search completely on its head,” says Proffitt, who is the author of 24 books on mobile technology and personal computing and serves as an editor and daily contributor for ReadWrite.com, one of the most widely read and respected tech blogs in the world.
“Basically, search engines examine your request and try to figure out what it is you really want,” Proffitt says. “The better the guess, the better the perceived value of the search engine. In the days before computing was made completely mobile by smartphones, tablets and netbooks, searches were only aided by previous searches.
“Today, mobile computing is adding a new element to contextual searches,” he says. “By knowing where and when a search is being made, contextual search engines can infer much more about what you want and deliver more robust answers. For example, a search for nearby restaurants at breakfast time in Chicago will give you much different answers than the exact same search in Tokyo at midnight.”
Context can include more than location and time. Search engines will also account for other users’ searches made in the same place and even the known interests of the user.
“Someday soon,” Proffitt says, “you’ll watch a trailer of the latest romantic movie, and the next time you search for movie times at the local theater, that movie will be prominently displayed.”
Also on the horizon, contextual searches may be teamed up with the Internet of Things, a euphemism used to describe an inter-connected network of devices large and small, reporting data on what’s going on around them.
“Imagine a part in your car sending a malfunction signal that schedules your car for a repair appointment,” Proffitt says, “followed up by an automated function that checks your calendar online and schedules the appointment for you. Or, consider a hydro-sensor in your garden that sends you a message to let you know the plants need more water.”
This is just the tip of what the Internet of Things will do, according to Proffitt.
“Coupled with contextual searching, it could transform our online experience to something where, instead of us searching for knowledge, objects and machines around us will be delivering information to us or taking direct action,” he says. “Clothes could grow more opaque if the UV rating is too high on a given day. Pricing information for a new TV in the electronics store might display right on your phone. Nutrition information for cupcakes in your favorite bakery…”
“It will all be there at your fingertips.”
Contacts and sources:
Brian Proffitt
University of Notre Dame
Robotic Insects Make First Controlled Flight
May 4th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
Like a proud parent watching a child take its first steps, graduate student Pakpong Chirarattananon immediately captured a video of the fledgling and emailed it to his adviser and colleagues at 3 a.m. — subject line: “Flight of the RoboBee.”
“I was so excited, I couldn’t sleep,” recalls Chirarattananon, co-lead author of a paper published this week in Science.
The demonstration of the first controlled flight of an insect-sized robot is the culmination of more than a decade’s work, led by researchers at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.
“This is what I have been trying to do for literally the last 12 years,” saysRobert J. Wood, Charles River Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences at SEAS, Wyss core faculty member, and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation-supported RoboBee project. “It’s really only because of this lab’s recent breakthroughs in manufacturing, materials, and design that we have even been able to try this. And it just wonderful.”
Inspired by the biology of a fly, with submillimeter-scale anatomy and two wafer-thin wings that flap almost invisibly, 120 times per second, the tiny device not only represents the absolute cutting edge of micromanufacturing and control systems, but is an aspiration that has impelled innovation in these fields by dozens of researchers across Harvard for years.
“We had to develop solutions from scratch, for everything,” explains Wood. “We would get one component working, but when we moved onto the next, five new problems would arise. It was a moving target.”
Flight muscles, for instance, don’t come prepackaged for robots the size of a fingertip.
“Large robots can run on electromagnetic motors, but at this small scale you have to come up with an alternative, and there wasn’t one,” says co-lead author Kevin Y. Ma, a graduate student at SEAS.
The tiny robot flaps its wings with piezoelectric actuators — strips of ceramic that expand and contract when an electric field is applied. Thin hinges of plastic embedded within the carbon fiber body frame serve as joints, and a delicately balanced control system commands the rotational motions in the flapping-wing robot, with each wing controlled independently in real time.
At tiny scales, small changes in airflow can have an outsized effect on flight dynamics, and the control system has to react that much faster to remain stable.
The robotic insects also take advantage of an ingenious pop-up manufacturing technique that was developed by Wood’s team in 2011. Sheets of various laser-cut materials are layered and sandwiched together into a thin, flat plate that folds up like a child’s pop-up book into the complete electromechanical structure.
The quick, step-by-step process replaces what used to be a painstaking manual art and allows Wood’s team to use more robust materials in new combinations, while improving the overall precision of each device.
“We can now very rapidly build reliable prototypes, which allows us to be more aggressive in how we test them,” says Ma, adding that the team has gone through 20 prototypes in just the past six months.
Applications of the RoboBee project could include distributed environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue operations, or assistance with crop pollination, but the materials, fabrication techniques, and components that emerge along the way might prove to be even more significant. For example, the pop-up manufacturing process could enable a new class of complex medical devices. Harvard’s Office of Technology Development, in collaboration with Harvard SEAS and the Wyss Institute, is already in the process of commercializing some of the underlying technologies.
“Harnessing biology to solve real-world problems is what the Wyss Institute is all about,” says Wyss Founding Director Don Ingber. “This work is a beautiful example of how bringing together scientists and engineers from multiple disciplines to carry out research inspired by nature and focused on translation can lead to major technical breakthroughs.”
And the project continues.
“Now that we’ve got this unique platform, there are dozens of tests that we’re starting to do, including more aggressive control maneuvers and landing,” says Wood.
After that, the next steps will involve integrating the parallel work of many different research teams that are working on the brain, the colony coordination behavior, the power source, and so on, until the robotic insects are fully autonomous and wireless.
The prototypes are still tethered by a very thin power cable because there are no off-the-shelf solutions for energy storage that are small enough to be mounted on the robot’s body. High-energy-density fuel cells must be developed before the RoboBees will be able to fly with much independence.
Control, too, is still wired in from a separate computer, though a team led by SEAS faculty Gu-Yeon Weiand David Brooks is working on a computationally efficient brain that can be mounted on the robot’s frame.
“Flies perform some of the most amazing aerobatics in nature using only tiny brains,” notes co-authorSawyer B. Fuller, a postdoctoral researcher on Wood’s team who essentially studies how fruit flies cope with windy days. “Their capabilities exceed what we can do with our robot, so we would like to understand their biology better and apply it to our own work.”
The milestone of this first controlled flight represents a validation of the power of ambitious dreams — especially for Wood, who was in graduate school when he set this goal.
“This project provides a common motivation for scientists and engineers across the University to build smaller batteries, to design more efficient control systems, and to create stronger, more lightweight materials,” says Wood. “You might not expect all of these people to work together: vision experts, biologists, materials scientists, electrical engineers. What do they have in common? Well, they all enjoy solving really hard problems.”
“I want to create something the world has never seen before,” adds Ma. “It’s about the excitement of pushing the limits of what we think we can do, the limits of human ingenuity.”
Caroline Perry
Want To Slow Mental Decline? Play A Video Game
May 4th, 2013By Alton Parrish.
That’s according to a study from the University of Iowa, which found that people aged 50 and older who played just ten hours of a game priming their mental processing speed and skills delayed declines by as many as seven years in a range of cognitive skills.
“We know that we can stop this decline and actually restore cognitive processing speed to people,” says Fredric Wolinsky, professor in the UI College of Public Health and lead author on the paper published May 1in the journal PLOS One. “So, if we know that, shouldn’t we be helping people? It’s fairly easy, and anyone can go get the training game and play it.”
The study comes amidst a burst of research examining why, as we age, our minds gradually lose “executive function,” generally considered mission control for critical mental activities, such as memory, attention, perception, and problem solving. Studies show loss of executive function occurs as people reach middle age; other studies say our cognitive decline begins as soon as 28 years of age. Either way, our mental capacities do diminish, and medical and public health experts are keen to understand why in an effort to stem the inexorable tide as much as possible.
Wolinsky and colleagues separated 681 generally healthy medical patients in Iowa into four groups—each further separated into those 50 to 64 years of age and those over age 65. One group was given computerized crossword puzzles, while three other groups were exposed to a video game called “Road Tour,” (since renamed “Double Decision”), marketed by Posit Science Corp. Briefly, the exercise revolves around identifying a type of vehicle (displayed fleetingly on a license plate) and then reidentifying the vehicle type and matching it with a road sign displayed from a circular array of possibilities, all but one of them false icons. The player must succeed at least three out of every four tries to advance to the next level, which speeds up the vehicle identification and adds more distractions, up to 47 in all.
The goal, naturally, is to increase the user’s mental speed and agility at identifying the vehicle symbol and picking out the road sign from the constellation of distractors (which are rabbits, by the way).
“The game starts off with an assessment to determine your current speed of processing. Whatever it is, the training can help you get about 70 percent faster,” says Wolinsky, who has no financial stake in the brain-fitness game.
The groups that played the game at least 10 hours, either at home or in a lab at the university, gained, and retained, at least three years of cognitive improvement when tested after one year, according to a formula developed by the researchers. A group that got four additional hours of training with the game did even better, improving their cognitive abilities by four years, according to the study.
“We not only prevented the decline; we actually sped them up,” Wolinsky says.
Improving people’s processing speed is considered important for a host of reasons. One widely accepted benefit is widening a person’s field of view. “As we get older, our visual field collapses on us,” Wolinsky explains. “We get tunnel vision. It’s a normal functioning of aging. This helps to explain why most accidents happen at intersections because older folks are looking straight ahead and are less aware of peripherals.”
Recognizing this, the National Institutes of Health in the late 1990s commissioned the largest cognitive training study of its kind, called ACTIVE. The national, multi-site trial, in which Wolinsky was involved, showed the elderly’s memory, reasoning, and visual processing speed could be improved with interventions, thus slowing the aging of their minds. But the ACTIVE study had its limitations: Among them, the control group didn’t get any training and the primary goal was to assess the effects on seniors’ field-of-view vision.
Wolinsky’s team added an active control group—those doing the crossword puzzles. The researchers found those who played the “Road Tour” game also scored far better than the crossword puzzle group on tests involving executive function beyond field-of-view vision, such as concentration, nimbleness with shifting from one mental task to another, and the speed at which new information is processed. The improvement ranged from 1.5 years to nearly seven years in cognitive improvement, the study found.
“It’s the ‘use it or lose it’ phenomenon— with a twist,” Wolinsky says. “Age-related cognitive decline is real, it’s happening, and it starts earlier and then continues steadily. Here, the exercise designed by neuroscientists delivered significant gains that generalized to daily life.”
The NIH funded the work, out of a Research Challenge grant from the NIH director’s office as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (grant numbers 5 RC1 AG035546 02 and 1 RC1 AG035546 01).
Contributing authors include Michael Jones and Megan Dotson, from the UI College of Public Heath, and Mark Vander Weg and M. Bryant Howren, from the Iowa City VA Health Care System.