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Environmental monitoring is often expensive, cumbersome, and time-intensive. Equipment that can run quick and easy tests for pollutants like pesticides in our food are almost nonexistent. However, researchers in Canada are working on a new biomonitoring technique using treated paper on a stick that can quickly identify trace amounts of pesticides in your chicken soup, or your first early morning cup of joe [Technology Review]. Could these dipsticks lead to DIY pollution monitoring one day? That may still be far off, but this technology could give researchers a reliable and cheap way to get a better picture of what pollutants—even at trace amounts—are in the environment, and how they interact with our bodies.

In the study, published in the journal Analytical Chemistry, the researchers describe a new paper-based test strip that changes color shades depending on the amount of pesticide present. In laboratory studies using food and beverage samples intentionally contaminated with common pesticides, the test strips accurately identified minute amounts of pesticides. The test strips, which produced results in less than 5 minutes, could be particularly useful in developing countries or remote areas that may lack access to expensive testing equipment and electricity, they note [R&D Magazine]. If the dipsticks pan out, restaurant customers may one day have more to complain about than a stray hair in their soup.

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Image: ACS

When 3-year-old Mark Blinder developed pain in his right arm, doctors diagnosed him with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone tumor. Chemotherapy wasn’t working and radiation would have destroyed the growth plates in his bones. So instead of amputating the arm, doctors tried an experimental approach–implanting an artificial, expandable bone made of titanium and cobalt chrome, designed specifically for Mark. The bone, produced by the company Biomet Inc., is small enough to fit inside the 3-year-old’s arm, but should be sturdy enough to last his entire life.  Most artificial bones are used to replace only part of a bone, so they are glued securely to remaining bone. In Mark’s case, the entire humerus was being removed, so the prosthetic had to be attached to soft tissue [Los Angeles Times].

To install the bone, doctors first had to remove the tumor by carving out the fat around it, a process one of the doctor’s likened to carving out a peach pit without ever touching the pit. The surgery was a success but Mark, who is now 4 years old, underwent chemotherapy as a precaution. Mark is gradually relearning how to use his arm. He’s moving his wrist and fingers, can pick up small objects, and is receiving physiotherapy to rebuild strength and flexibility in the elbow and shoulder. He won’t ever regain full function in those joints, but he is using the arm more each day, his mother said [Los Angeles Times]. He will have to undergo three or four minor surgeries over the years so doctors can extend the prosthetic bone as he grows–but since the only other option open to Mark was amputating his arm completely, he probably won’t complain.

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Image: iStockphoto

A laser-powered robot took a climb up a cable in the Mohave Desert in Wednesday, and pushed ahead the sci-fi inspired notion of a space elevator capable of lifting astronauts, cargo, and even tourists up into orbit. The robot, built by LaserMotive of Seattle, whizzed up 2,953 feet (nearly 1 kilometer) in about four minutes, which qualifies the team for at least $900,000 of the $2 million in prizes offered in the NASA-backed Space Elevator Games.

Theorized in the 1960s and then popularized by Arthur C. Clarke’s 1979 novel “The Fountains of Paradise,” space elevators are envisioned as a way to gain access to space without the risk and expense of rockets. Instead, electrically powered vehicles would run up and down a cable anchored to a ground structure and extending thousands of miles up to a mass in geosynchronous orbit — the kind of orbit communications satellites are placed in to stay over a fixed spot on the Earth [AP].

The LaserMotive vehicle that climbed up the cable (held by a hovering helicopter) was powered by a system that resembles an upside-down solar power mechanism. Laser beams on the ground were fired up at the ascending craft and hit its photovoltaic cells–like those used in solar panels–in a process known as “power beaming.” LaserMotive will have a chance to improve its vehicle’s speed at another trial today, and other teams will also be vying for prizes.

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Image: Space Elevator Games. The LaserMotive vehicle gets weighed in.

The quest to find a second Earth–a potentially habitable planet that’s about the size of our home, but that lies in a distant solar system–has hit a snag. The Kepler space telescope was expected to be well on its way to detecting Earth-sized exoplanets by now, but an electronic glitch is slowing it down. The delays are caused by noisy amplifiers in the telescope’s electronics. The team is racing to fix the issue by changing the way data from the telescope is processed, but the delay could mean that ground-based observers now have the upper hand in the race to be the first to spot an Earth twin [Nature News].

Kepler, which was launched in March, uses the transit method to detect exoplanets; it’s watching a patch of 100,000 stars in hopes of detecting the brief dimming of a star’s light, which indicates that a planet has passed in front of the star. Kepler focuses light onto 42 light-detecting chips, called CCDs, each of which monitors stars in a different part of the telescope’s field of view. Each CCD is split into two for the purposes of sending data back to Earth, for a total of 84 data channels. Three of these channels are plagued by electronic noise that makes stars in their field of view appear to flicker – “like it’s changing its brightness at a rapid rate”, says Kepler chief scientist William Borucki [New Scientist]. That’s awkward, since the artificial flickers could obscure the real dimming that occurs during a planet’s transit.

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If you’ve caught an episode of COPS lately, then you’ve probably noticed that so-called less-lethal weapons have caught on with police departments across the country as a way to force unruly suspects into compliance. Tasers, which delivers an electrical current to the suspect via two dart-like electrodes, are often the weapon of choice. Now, the Pentagon wants to use beefed up Taser technology on the battlefield.

The puny little electrodes that the police weapons use just won’t do for the military. That’s why the U.S. Department of Defense has been developing a long-range electric shock device that fires from a 40-millimeter grenade launcher and can subdue an enemy from just under 200 feet away. The new Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) projectile is being developed for the Pentagon by Taser International under a $2.5 million contract and should be ready for prototype testing some time after the new year [Popular Science]. HEMI’s range is three times longer than Taser International’s XREP shotgun-style projectile, which has generated controversy because of concerns that the projectile could be deadly in untrained hands.

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Cancer treatment in the future could have dramatically reduced side effects if new nanotechnology research proves useful. Heat-sensitive nanoparticles might be able to deliver drugs to a targeted location in the body—to a tumor, say—and release them on cue, a sought-after goal of biomedical research.

One research team has developed nanoparticle cages that can be stuffed with tiny amounts of drugs that are only released on demand. These “nanocages” are cubes of gold, with sides about 50-billionths of a meter long and holes at each corner. They are easily made, using silver particles as a mold, and then coated with strands of a smart polymer. The polymer strands are normally extended and bushy and cover the holes in the cube. But when heated the strands collapse, leaving the holes open and allowing the drug inside to escape [The New York Times]. The researchers say they can engineer the nanocages to stick to tumors.

Doctors could release the packaged drugs whenever they want, just by zapping the cages inside the patient’s body with near-infrared light. Near-infrared wavelengths are not greatly absorbed by body tissues, so light from a near-infrared laser could penetrate a couple of inches inside the body, but they are absorbed by gold [The New York Times]. Researchers could design the cages to fall apart at just a few degrees above normal body temperature, so they only spill their contents where the heat is applied; they could also alter the drug’s rate of release by adjusting the laser’s intensity. The technology, described in the journal Nature Materials, could help cut down on the side effects of today’s treatments which are often caused by toxic drugs coursing through the body.

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Image: Younan Xia, Washington University in St. Louis

NASA’s Ares I-X experimental rocket completed its first test flight—but the successful endeavor ended on a sour note. The rocket’s first booster stage, which splashed down in the ocean as planned six minutes after launch, was found to be significantly dented when divers reached the mammoth cylinder to prep it for retrieval [Scientific American]. A malfunctioning parachute system caused the hard splashdown, according to mission manager Bob Ess. However Ess argued that it’s not a real cause for concern, since test flights are intended to reveal and work out the technology’s glitches.

The Ares I-X was a prototype for the controversial Ares I rocket that may carry astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond once the space shuttle is retired. The rocket’s design calls for the first booster stage to be retrieved after each flight for reuse. While NASA’s main objective on the test flight was to evaluate the rocket booster’s power, the test of the new parachute system was one of several major objectives of the Ares 1-X test flight [Spaceflight Now]. Despite the test flight’s overall success, the parachute system’s failure is a black eye for the $450 million project, since the heavy Ares I booster rocket will be difficult to ease back down to Earth. The booster is being retrieved from the Atlantic Ocean to determine what exactly went wrong with the parachute system.

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Image: NASA

When European Union officials first discussed the idea of a massive solar power plant in the Sahara to provide power to all of Europe, many people took it as a thought experiment, a plan that was far too outlandish to ever come to pass. But now a band of alternative energy companies have announced the formation of a consortium dedicated to pushing the project ahead.

The Desertec Industrial Initiative (DII) aims to provide 15% of Europe’s electricity by 2050 or earlier via power lines stretching across the desert and Mediterranean sea. The German-led consortium was brought together by Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, and consists of some of country’s biggest engineering and power companies [The Guardian].

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The Russian space agency has proposed a powerful new way to get a spacecraft to Mars or beyond: just put a big ole nuclear reactor on board.

The head of the agency, Anatoly Perminov, just proposed this new class of nuclear-powered spaceships for manned missions to explore our solar system. “The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs, including a manned mission to Mars, interplanetary travel, the creation and operation of planetary outposts” [AP], Perminov wrote in an online statement. He suggested that preliminary designs could be completed by 2012, and said it would then take about nine years and $600 million to build the spacecraft. Some experts call these numbers utterly unrealistic, but Russian President Dmitry Medvedev insists that the government is very serious about the project.

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The self-proclaimed spam king of the Internet, Sam “Spamford” Wallace, was ordered to pay Facebook $711 million in civil damages for slinging spam on the social networking site. Wallace allegedly accessed Facebook accounts without obtaining permission, and used them to make bogus wall posts and spam the account holders’ friends. Those actions run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which sets guidelines for commercial e-mails, which are enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) [PC World]. The judge also referred Wallace to the U.S. Attorney’s Office with a request that he be prosecuted for criminal contempt, which means he could actually face jail time if convicted.

If you’ve ever received an unsolicited email (and who hasn’t), chances are good that it came from Wallace’s company, Cyber Promotions, which was once the largest source of spam. So not surprisingly, this isn’t the first time Spamford has run afoul of the law. In May, 2008, MySpace won a $230 million judgment against Wallace for sending junk messages. Wallace was also fined $4 million by the Federal Trade Commission in 2006 for his excessive pop-up ads [CNN]. Officials at Facebook said they don’t expect to see much of the $711 million, seeing as how Wallace is bankrupt and may soon have to send out his spam as hand written letters from behind bars.

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Image: flickr / benstein

It seems that every day brings a new electronic gadget to the market, whether it’s a smart phone, an electronic reader, a laptop the size and weight of a magazine, or a television the size of a wall. But each advance adds to the world’s electronic waste, which is the fastest-growing component of solid waste. Much of the electronic refuse ends up in developing countries, where workers strip down the gadgets to get at the copper and other valuable metals inside, often exposing themselves to toxins in the process. Now, scientists are calling for federal regulations in the United States to stem the tide.

Although the U.S. is one the world’s largest producers of electronic waste (e-waste), it is hardly a leader in addressing this problem, given that the country has “no legally enforceable federal policies requiring comprehensive recycling of e-waste or elimination of hazardous substances from electronic products,” the researchers say [Scientific American]. Instead, e-waste policies are left to the states, not all of which have laws on the books. In the article, published in Science, the authors note that the United States has not ratified the Basel Convention, which regulates the movement of hazardous wastes across international borders and has the support of 169 of the 192 United Nations member countries [Scientific American].

Electronics can contain a host of dangerous materials, from heavy metals to toxic chemicals. Toxic e-waste shows up in forms as varied as high lead levels in the blood of children in Guiya, China, where millions of tonnes of e-waste are illegally dumped, and as fire-retardant chemicals in the eggs of California’s peregrine falcons [CBC News].

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Image: Basel Action Network. E-waste in a Nigerian dump.

Yes, in early September we sent the Internet our birthday best wishes, noting that it had been 40 years since computer scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles connected two computers via a 15-foot cable, allowing for the transmission of data between them. But it wasn’t until October 29, 1969 that the first message passed between two different computer nodes, one at UCLA and the other at Stanford University. The message that researcher Leonard Kleinrock intended to send to Stanford was “login” but Kleinrock was only able to type “lo” before the system crashed. On his second attempt, the message went through successfully [ABC News]. With that, a net was born.

The system dubbed ARPANET, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, would lead directly to the Internet that we know, love, despise, and rely on utterly today. To date, over 1 billion people are online, and last year, Google announced that it had detected over 1 trillion pages [PC World].

Vinton Cerf, an Internet pioneer and the current Chief Internet Evangelist at Google says the online world will continue to evolve in ways we can barely imagine, but which serve humanity’s basic drive to communicate. “Don’t let anyone tell you that information is power…. It’s information-sharing that’s power” [LiveScience], he says.

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Image: NIH. ARPANET began with only four nodes, located at the University of California-Los Angeles, Stanford University, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

Federal experts believe that a major earthquake could trigger fires at Los Alamos National Laboratory, releasing radioactive materials and endangering lives. The rupture of a seismic fault that runs underneath the lab would shake the ground more than scientists previously thought, according to a new report (PDF). A natural disaster here would be bad news, since the lab, just west of Santa Fe, is the main plutonium factory in the United States, believed to hold thousands of pounds of plutonium for use in nuclear weapons (the actual amount is classified).

Researchers study plutonium inside glove boxes—a Hollywood movie staple, consisting of a sealed enclosure with gloves so that someone outside the box can work on dangerous materials inside. A major earthquake would shake the ground enough to topple the glove boxes, says the new study. Some glove boxes are enormous and even contain furnaces to cast and mold plutonium. If one of these were to crash, the resulting fire would be uncontrollable and would create a vaporized plutonium cloud that could drift outside of the lab, says the safety report. In a worst-case scenario, a fire could release so much airborne plutonium that a person on the boundary of the lab would get a dose of radiation—potentially many thousands of times greater than a chest X-ray—that could be fatal in weeks, according to individuals knowledgeable about the study [Los Angeles Times].

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This morning, NASA’s experimental Ares I-X rocket blasted off a Florida launch pad and roared through the atmosphere, successfully executing the first test flight of the rocket that may carry astronauts to the International Space Station and beyond once the space shuttle is retired. However, debate over the direction of NASA’s manned space flight program means that the rocket’s future is far from certain.

The prototype rocket took off through a few clouds from a former shuttle launch pad at 11:30 a.m., 3 1/2 hours late because of bad weather. Launch controllers had to retest the rocket systems after more than 150 lightning strikes were reported around the pad overnight. Then they had to wait out interfering rain clouds, the same kind that thwarted Tuesday’s try [AP].

Engineers had been concerned that if the rocket took off through rain clouds, the moisture might cause a phenomenon called triboelectrification. This occurs when the rocket encounters water or ice droplets in the clouds. As these collide with the rocket they cause a static charge to build up on its skin, creating interference with radio signals. This is a problem for the 1-X team, which needs clear signals to gather data from 700 sensors wired throughout the vehicle, which are designed to collect flight data [BBC News]. Luckily, the late morning provided a relatively cloud-free window for takeoff.

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