Blogs / 80beats

Feel like teaching a lesson to that pinhead-sized worm that’s been bothering you? According to a study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, a  material called dithienylethene plus a blast of UV light can stop a worm in the midst of its worming, rendering it temporarily paralyzed.

The researchers fed a light-sensitive material — a “photoswitch” known as dithienylethene — to the transparent worms. When exposed to ultraviolet rays, the molecule turned blue and the worms became paralyzed. Using visible light instead made the chemical turn colorless and the paralysis ended [LiveScience]. Scientists aren’t sure why the transparent nematodes became paralyzed, but they know dithienylethene changes shapes and suspect it interferes with the worm’s energy-producing metabolic pathways. Repeated cycles of UV-induced paralysis actually killed some of the worms.

Unsurprisingly, news of this worm stun-gun led to longing for Star Trek-style phasers, and the scientists, though skeptical, were good sports about it. As lead researcher Neil Branda said tactfully: “I’m not convinced there’s a legitimate use of turning organisms on and off in terms of paralysis, but until somebody tells me otherwise, I’m not going to say that there isn’t an application” [BBC News].

But while phasers remain a fantasy, light-activated materials certainly have a future in medical research. Light-activated drugs could be used to activate tumour-killing drugs once they reach a particular location in the body. Similar chemicals have been used before, but have required a steady supply of light – often harmful UV bandwidths – to stay active. The new compounds, known as diarylethenes, could be more useful because they can be switched on and off with a single light pulse, Branda says [New Scientist].

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Image: Wiki Commons / Yonatanh

An artificial brain as powerful as a human’s remains a distant goal, but scientists are inching closer. This week IBM announced that by using a brain-simulating algorithm called BlueMatter, researchers created an artificial brain simulation that packs more brainpower than a cat.

Researchers used an IBM supercomputer at the Lawrence Livermore Lab to model the movement of data through a structure with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses, which allowed them to see how information “percolates” through a system that’s comparable to a feline cerebral cortex [San Jose Mercury News]. The team’s previous effort two years ago, modeled after a rat brain, simulated only about 55 million neurons.

The staggering surge in computing power has engineers like IBM’s Dharmendra Modha drooling over the possibilities for more brain-like computers. By reverse engineering [the] cortical structure, Modha says, researchers could give machines the ability to interpret biological senses such as sight, hearing and touch. And artificial machine brains could process, intelligently, senses that don’t currently exist in the natural world, such as radar and laser range-finding [Popular Mechanics].

It should come as no surprise that the design suggests such military applications, as DARPA provided much of the funding. But like the Internet and other technologies originally developed for the military, BlueMatter’s abilities could lead in a multitude of directions. “As our digital and physical worlds collide, there is a tsunami of information,” Modha said. “There is a need for a new kind of intelligence that can sort through, prioritize and extract the most important information, much like how the brain deals with sight, sounds, tastes, touch and smell” [San Jose Mercury News].

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Image: IBM Almaden research lab, Stanford University

With NASA’s manned space flight program in tumult, it’s an open question when/if human boots will tramp on Martian soil. But the space agency has provided a virtual way for humans to explore the red planet, with its new “Be a Martian” program.

The online project, a collaboration between NASA and Microsoft, enlists the power of crowdsourcing. Users are invited to sort through the hundreds of thousands of photos of Mars that have been sent back by rovers and orbiters. To convince people to spend hours pouring over pictures of dusty Martian landscapes, two tasks have been set up as games where participants can win points and badges. One game asks people to count craters in photos of Mars; the other asks people to match small, high-res photos of the Martian surface with their corresponding locations on a low-res photo taken from a higher altitude [Seattle Post-Intelligencer]. (You’ll need to have Microsoft’s Silverlight application for the games and videos on the site to work.)

By enlisting citizen scientists, NASA hopes to both interest students in space careers and to make real progress in Martian research. “We really need the next generation of explorers,” says Michelle Viotti, from the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions. “And we’re also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There’s so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important” [BBC News].

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Image: JPL / Microsoft

Air travelers around the country saw their flights delayed this morning, thanks to a computer glitch. The problem, which occured [sic] in the Atlanta-based computer system that provides data about flight plans, has forced air controllers to input the information manually, said Arlene Salac, FAA spokeswoman in New York [Reuters].

The Federal Aviation Administration tried to assure travelers that the problem wasn’t a safety concern; rather it fouled up ground stops and caused delays. The problems began a little after 5 a.m. Eastern time, and hit Atlanta’s busy airport the hardest. One passenger said that a Delta Air Lines gate agent had announced that the glitch prevented pilots from accessing flight plans, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported [The New York Times].

The computer problem has been fixed, though FAA spokeswoman Kathleen Bergen said she doesn’t know how many flights have been affected [MSNBC]. And today’s glitch was the second such one in 15 months.

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Image: flickr/ eschipul

If  you read this blog last week, you might have seen us cover a study suggesting that South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius ought to be allowed to compete in the same track and field events as everyone else because his prosthetic legs confer no advantage over a sprinter with biological legs. But if you saw a study cited by the Associated Press and many other publications yesterday, you might think that Pistorius would soon be banned from competitions, because his “blades” let him swing his legs far faster than even the world’s fastest man, Usain Bolt. So what the heck is going on?

The AP’s study isn’t actually a “study,” per se. Rather, what the Journal of Applied Physiology published was a point-counterpoint (pdf), now freely available for anyone to read. In in, Peter Weyand and Matthew Bundle argue that Pistorius’ prosthetics are a huge advantage, particularly in what matters most: how fast he can move his legs. Weyand and Bundle say that the lightweight blades allow Pistorius “to reposition his limbs 15.7 percent more rapidly than five of the most recent former world-record holders in the 100-meter dash” [AP].

There is, however, a counterpoint to this argument in the journal piece that yesterday’s news reports neglected, coauthored by Alena Grabowski of the MIT Media Lab (who led the research on Pistorius’ blades that 80beats covered last week). Her team has found that the limiting factor determining an athlete’s top speed was how hard the foot or prosthesis hit the ground. Their study showed this “ground force” was around 9% lower in the prosthetic limb versus the unaffected leg [The Guardian]. Grabowski’s research focused on professional runners with only one prosthetic leg.

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Have you seen those Verizon Wireless ads on TV, showing a map of the company’s 3G network coverage next to a far less inspiring map of competitor AT&T’s coverage? Those ads have now led the nation’s two largest mobile provides to a court fight.

Verizon’s “There’s a Map for That” campaign spoofs the “There’s an App for That” campaign by Apple, whose iPhone uses AT&T. In response to the Verizon campaign, AT&T filed suit against Verizon in federal court. AT&T claims the ad is misleading because it implies that AT&T customers can’t use their phones and cannot access the mobile Internet in areas where the carrier does not offer 3G wireless coverage. The truth is that AT&T customers can use their phones and they are able to access the wireless Net using the company’s slower EDGE network [CNET].

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Cocaine combined with capsaicin, an active ingredient in pepper spray, can be deadly, if research in mice is any indication.

In the early 1990s, anecdotes of people dying after being doused with pepper spray puzzled researchers, until autopsies revealed many were on cocaine at the time. To look for a link between the two substances, a research team injected cocaine, capsaicin or both at once into the abdomens of several groups of about 30 mice. Injections allowed them to control the dose of capsaicin the mice received, which wouldn’t have been possible if the mice were simply sprayed [New Scientist]. Equal doses of cocaine plus capsaicin killed about half the mice, compared to cocaine alone, which killed just a few. And a dose of cocaine high enough to kill half the mice on its own killed up to 90 percent when combined with capsaicin.

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Americans scientists have rediscovered the remains of two advanced Japanese submarines from World War II, buried in the waters off Hawaii. But these shipwrecks, the I-14 and I-201, aren’t relics of a great Pacific Theater battle. Rather, the U.S. captured and then sank them on purpose, along with three others Japanese ships including the gargantuan I-401, which was found back in 2005.

The I-401, along with the I-14 and I-201, were captured at war’s end and sailed to Hawaii, where US naval intelligence officers could plumb the ships’ secrets…. All were scuttled to avoid having to share the information with the Pacific war’s late-comer and co-claimant to such prizes, the former Soviet Union [Christian Science Monitor].

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It’s a terrible thing to have a spirit that is trapped, bogged down, unable to reach its true potential. Just ask NASA–the space agency knows all about it. The Mars rover Spirit has been stuck in the sand since April 23rd, when it drove backwards into a pit of soft sand and came to a dead halt. Since then, NASA engineers have been testing out escape strategies with a mock-up rover and a sandbox in California, and today they announced that they’re ready to begin a careful operation that they hope will extricate the rover. The name of the project: Free Spirit.

Spirit and its partner rover have been exploring Mars for more than five years now, but this sandy area, dubbed Troy, could be the end of the road for Spirit. “If it cannot make the great escape from this sand trap, it’s likely that this lonely spot straddling the edge of this crater might be where Spirit ends its adventures on Mars,” said Doug McCuistion, who heads the Mars exploration program [AP].

On Monday, Spirit’s handlers will send the first commands to the rover. Over days, weeks, and months they’ll order it to slowly rotate its five working wheels and inch back along the path it came in on. Efforts to extract Spirit will continue until at least February. If the rover is not free by then, a review panel may decide whether it’s worth it to keep on trying, McCuistion said [AP]. But even if Spirit is stuck for all time, it may still be able to contribute to our scientific understanding of the Red Planet by studying its soil and atmosphere.

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Image: JPL / NASA

The nose knows when you’ve walked into a library or archive populated by books of a certain age: The distinctive musty smell of the old paper fills the halls and reading rooms. Now, for a study in Analytical Chemistry, a research team has analyzed the chemicals that combine to form the “old book smell,” and says that one day a book’s odor could tell scholars a lot about the tome’s history.

The international research team, led by Matija Strlic from University College London’s Centre for Sustainable Heritage, describes that smell as “a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness. This unmistakable smell is as much part of the book as its contents,” they wrote in the journal article [BBC News]. The smell is a result of volatile organic compounds that are released as the paper ages.

After watching conservators smell the paper while investigating old books, Strlic applied a “sniff test” based on gas chromotography-mass spectrometry to sort out the chemicals mingling in the odors of 72 older documents. The researchers identified 15 organic compounds that made good markers to track the condition of books [Scientific American]. The system isn’t ready for librarians or conservators yet, but Strlic says he envisions a hand-held model they could use to analyze the age of a book, or what materials constitute its pages and binding, in a noninvasive way. Currently, age-testing a book usually requires snipping off pieces for testing.

The sooner the better, because books aren’t forever. Paper produced until about 1850 was made to last for millenniums. The development of new wood-pulping techniques in the middle of the 19th century and the use of rosin sizing reduced the longevity of paper. The acidity of paper made with these techniques causes them to degrade more quickly than the older papers — or newer ones made with different methods after 1990 [Wired.com].

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Image: flickr / Guldfisken

The European Union has contracted an engineering firm to develop a public transportation system that doesn’t require users to leave their cars. The British consultancy Ricardo will work to develop a system that allows drivers to surrender control of their vehicles, and the company plans to test the system on public roads within the decade. It all sounds highly fanciful, but the firm insists it is a genuine attempt to build so-called “road trains”, whereby various cars or other vehicles travel in convoy with only the one at the front steering. Big names, such as Volvo, have also signed up [London Times]. The project has been dubbed Sartre, for Safe Road Trains for the Environment. Basically, a lead car, driven by a professional driver, will travel down the highway and other cars can fall in behind and turn the driving over to the lead car. Cars would be able to enter and exit the platoon at any time by sending a signal to the lead car.

Ricardo officials speculated that those joining a platoon or road train may one day pay for the privilege of someone else effectively driving them closer to their destination [BBC News]. The benefits of road trains extend beyond being able to sing along to the radio or eat breakfast in the privacy of your car. According to earlier research, fuel consumption could be cut by 20 percent because cars wouldn’t waste energy on abrupt braking or acceleration, and also because cars traveling close together would experience less air drag. Also, road capacity will increase at the same time that accidents from distracted or drowsy drivers decrease [Wired.com].

The Sarte development project will run for three years, and towards the end they will begin testing their convoys on private road tracks. Eventually they plan to start public road trials in Spain, which would consist of two- or three-car road trains. Click here for a schematic of how the road trains would work.

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Image: flickr / Nrbelex

Many medical devices come equipped with wireless communication systems these days, allowing doctors to customize their operations or to see their patents’ information. But fitting pacemakers or implanted defibrillators with WiFi also opens the door to hackers‘ attacks. Hackers could potentially steal personal information, remotely drain batteries, or cause a dangerous malfunction, so researchers are working on ways to block them. The approach relies on using ultrasound waves to determine the exact distance between a medical device and the wireless reader attempting to communicate with it [Technology Review]. The plan is to only allow access to a medical device from wireless reading devices within 10 feet, and only then after a series of authentication steps. However, in the event of an emergency, the medical device would grant access to anyone within a few inches of the device. In other words, to anyone close enough to assist.

The research team also has to consider how much power their security measures will drain from the devices, which is a not-so-trivial point for a  battery-operated pacemaker. But Claude Castelluccia, who was involved with designing the security system, said that because the device won’t respond to requests that come from outside the predetermined distance, it would also be harder for an attacker to wear down the battery by forcing it to process one request after another [Technology Review]. To test their system, researchers recently implanted a medical device in the stomach of a cow, and they’re currently shopping their patented technology to potential developers.

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Image: flickr / library_mistress

It was a fitting tribute to Carl Sagan’s imagination, optimism, and starry-eyed wonder. On Monday, which would have been Sagan’s 75th birthday, the Planetary Society announced that it is pushing ahead with a plan for experimental spacecraft that will ride on sunbeams, powered by solar sails. The first small craft will be sent into orbit in 2010, if all goes well, and will be followed by two others, which may venture farther. Sagan was a founder of the Planetary Society and a big booster of solar sail plans.

Solar sail technology, which has not yet been tested in space, relies on the tiny impacts created by the light particles streaming from the sun as they hit a reflective surface. The force on a solar sail is gentle, if not feeble, but unlike a rocket, which fires for a few minutes at most, it is constant. Over days and years a big enough sail, say a mile on a side, could reach speeds of hundreds of thousands of miles an hour, fast enough to traverse the solar system in 5 years. Riding the beam from a powerful laser, a sail could even make the journey to another star system in 100 years, that is to say, a human lifespan [The New York Times].

The spacecraft that is scheduled for orbit in 2010, the LightSail-1, has been made possible by an anonymous donation to the Planetary Society. The recent donation reinvigorates the Society’s solar sail hopes, which were dashed in 2005 when the Russian Volna rocket carrying its first solar sail prototype, Cosmos 1, failed to reach orbit…. In addition to the Cosmos 1 disappointment, NASA’s NanoSail-D attempt was lost in the third failed flight of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket in 2008 [SPACE.com].

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Image: The Planetary Society

Contact lenses provide a number of convenience advantages over glasses, but one they come up short in one area—you can’t get contacts that automatically adjust to the sun’s UV light and darken, like the photochromic lenses many bespectacled people enjoy. But that could soon change: Researchers in Singapore led by Jackie Ying have now created a contact lens that responds to UV light.

Transition lenses for glasses are coated with a dye that is transparent when out of the sun, but responds to UV light by changing shape and darkening. Few previous attempts have been made to design transition contact lenses, largely because it’s difficult to apply dye coatings uniformly to the delicate, soft surface of a contact lens. Ying and her colleagues got around this by developing a contact lens that embeds dyes uniformly throughout the material [Technology Review].

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Refusing to cave to the “that’s far too crazy to ever work” crowd, Japan took a step forward this week in the country’s scheme to develop a giant solar power station in Earth orbit. JAXA, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, selected major Japanese firms like Mitsubishi Electric, Fujitsu, and Sharp to help develop the gargantuan project.

JAXA wants a system that can produce 1 gigawatt of electricity by 2030, and at one-sixth the cost Japan currently pays for electricity. The solar cells would capture the solar energy, which is at least five times stronger in space than on Earth, and beam it down to the ground through clusters of lasers or microwaves. These would be collected by gigantic parabolic antennae, likely to be located in restricted areas at sea or on dam reservoirs [AFP]. There the energy would be converted to electricity.

Japan isn’t alone; California utility Pacific Gas & Electric asked for regulatory approval of a similar project in April, though both schemes must confront a mountain of challenges. Sending equipment up to space is one. Operating and maintaining the system cost effectively is another. How about minimizing losses during conversion and transmission of energy [Greentech Media]?

And even if space solar power works, proponents might need to hire some talented public relations professionals: JAXA said the technology would be safe but conceded it might have to dispel fears of laser beams from above roasting birds or slicing up aircraft in mid-air [Sky News].

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Image: Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer