Blogs / Discoblog

A retired physics professor is trying to bring clear vision to a billion of the world’s poor.  His strategy: eyeglasses with easily adjustable, fluid-filled lenses that cost just $1 a pair.  His goal: distributing one billion pairs by 2020.  The glasses would help schoolchildren learn how to read, fishermen to mend their nets, and women to weave clothing, he says.

According to the WHO, there are about one billion people in the world who would benefit from vision correction, most of them living in developing countries.  However, in places like sub-Saharan Africa, where people make less than $1 a day and there is roughly one optometrist per one million people, glasses are an impossible luxury.

Josh Silver came up with the idea of fluid-filled lenses over 20 years ago while he was still a professor of physics at Oxford University.  The glasses contain a clear sac in each lens that can be filled with silicone oil.  Adjusting the power of each lens is as simple as changing the amount of silicone oil in the sacs, which can be done with a syringe through the arm of the spectacles (a process reminiscent of adjustable breast implants).  Adjustments can be made by the wearers themselves and the power can range from -6.00 to +6.00 dioptre. The shape-changing lenses actually operate similarly to the natural lens of the eye, although in the eye, the shape of the lenses is controlled by muscles.

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The latest in DIY involves playing around with DNA.  Toying with circuit boards and Python algorithms in basements and garages is so passé. The new crop of amateur tinkerers—self-pronounced “biohackers”—are cooking up genetics experiments and trying to reprogram life itself.  Could the biotech equivalent of Apple or Google, both of which were born in garages, emerge from someone’s home-made lab?

Meredith L. Patterson of San Francisco, who is a computer programmer by day, has set up a make-shift bio lab in her dining room.  She’s trying to create a genetically modified yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal melamine contamination. She constructed a gel electrophoresis chamber for $25 and purchased some green fluorescent jellyfish protein from a bio supply company for less than $100. Step-by-step instructions for genetic transformation experiments were only a Google search away.  With the relative simplicity and low-cost of basic DNA experiments, it may not be long before kids start asking for electrophoresis kits instead of microscopes.

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A group of Japanese researchers are claiming that their “mind-reading” machine can read people’s dreams. While it sounds like a novel idea, this is certainly not the first claim from scientists that they can depict what a person sees based on their brain activity—nor the last.

Brain imaging has been around for ages. Typically, when fMRI machines are used to read people’s brain activity, the different states are classified into categories and then used to predict a person’s “perceptual state.” So what these ATR Computational Neuroscience researchers are saying they can do is actually reconstruct what a person is seeing. But can they really?

In the study, published in Neuron, the researchers flashed 400 images in front of subjects for 12 seconds each. An fMRI machine was used to collect brain activity data, which was then analyzed on a computer to determine patterns linked to how the brain reacted when it saw the images.

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Soon, every single American will have a digital avatar—and we’re not talking about Second Life characters. Researchers at Virginia Tech are building a nationwide computer simulation that will include 300 million synthetic individuals with true-to-life characteristics taken from U.S. Census data. The researchers say there are many uses for the simulation, from predicting the spread of infectious diseases to tracking fads and modeling traffic flow.

The program, known as EpiSimdemics, already has 100 million simulated residents. Each resident is endowed with as many as 163 variables, including age, education, occupation, family size, and general health. Although each synthetic resident isn’t meant to represent a specific real-life person, the information is taken from publicly available demographics data. The residents are mapped to real houses and real neighborhoods and assigned local schools, grocery stores, and shopping centers. The researchers hope to add more variables, including air travel using real-life flight data.

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• Ever wanted to scratch-n-sniff Michael Phelps? The current issue of People features a special “Sexy Scents” section with “scratch-n-sniff” photos of hunky men and their preferred odors. (Is it chlorine?)

• One of the two orb weaver spiders on the International Space Station escaped, briefly. Now it’s back and weaving webs of confusion in zero-gravity.

• Amateur astronomers are keeping an eye on the tool bag that was lost during a recent space walk. They say it’s about as bright as the planet Neptune.

• Keystroke like a pro with free Gmail keyboard shortcut stickers! Just send a self-addressed stamped envelope to them via old-fashioned snailmail.

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The same technology that makes ravers at a club look like they’re gyrating in slow motion can be used to levitate water. Watch it here!

It’s a nifty illusion created by strobe lights, or a stroboscope, a device that emits quick pulses of light. In the setup shown in the video, all the water drops are actually falling and most of the time they are invisible. The drops are only visible during the millisecond pulses of the strobe light. By adjusting these pulses to the rate of the falling drops, the drops can be made to look like they are traveling at certain speeds, hovering in midair, or even levitating. Your mind automatically connects the images illuminated by the pulses, likes frames of an animated cartoon, creating the illusion of gravity-defying motion. What you perceive as a rising drop of water is actually frames of many different falling drops. The same concept is behind the wagon-wheel effect often seen in movies.

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Kudos to technology! A British surgeon volunteering in the Democratic Republic of Congo performed a complicated shoulder amputation by following text messages from a colleague in London. Dr. David Nott had never before performed a forequarter amputation, a procedure done only about ten times a year in the U.K. and requiring the removal of the shoulder blade and clavicle.

His patient was a 16-year-old boy whose left arm had been ripped off and was developing a dangerous infection. Nott knew it was a do or die situation. So he texted Professor Meirion Thomas, a colleague in London who had performed the surgery before. Thomas texted back step-by-step instructions, explaining where to make the incisions and how to divide major nerves and arteries. The text instructions ended with “Easy! Good luck.”

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This holiday season, Santa’s toy bag will again overflow with plastics. From Legos to Barbies to the Nintendo Wii, most toys today are made from non-degradable and non-renewable plastics derived from fossil fuels. Now a company is developing a bio-plastic that’s made from trees. Could ARBOFORM, or liquid wood, cure us of our plastic addiction?

Liquid wood is made mostly of lignin, one of the three major components of wood, the other two being cellulose and hemicellulose. Lignin is discarded during the paper-making process. A few years ago, researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Chemical Technology in Germany took the lignin and combined it with natural fibers like natural fibers made of wood, hemp, and flax and natural additives such as wax to produce plastic granules. The resulting material was tough, melt-able, and mold-able, and has already been used to make car parts, hunting rifles, and golf tees. But there was one major problem: It stunk from the sulfurous substances that are used to extract lignin from wood and make it non-water-soluble.

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Tired of running out of cell phone juice in the middle of a conversation? A professor at Texas A&M University may have just the answer for turning your chatter into power.

Chemical engineering professor, Tahir Cagin is using piezoelectrics, a material made of either crystals or ceramics, to generate electricity. Piezoelectrics were used in World War I in sonar devices. Today, they’re found in microphones, inkjet printers, and even cigarette lighters. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is making a shoe with piezoelectrics that can change the energy created by walking into electric power for charging soldiers’ equipment. Some European clubs even use them to transform the dance power from late night partiers into power to light up the club.

Cagin discovered that when piezoelectrics are small and thin (between 20 and 23 nanometers to be exact), twice the amount of energy is created. By finding the ideal length, he was able to convert the mechanical energy it creates into electric power.

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In yet another example of design inspired by nature, scientists at MIT have developed a heavy-duty (but tiny) anchor that burrows into the seabed, just like a clam. Dubbed the RoboClam (not to be confused with the RoboSnail, RoboTuna, or RoboLobster), the device is no bigger than a Swiss army knife but ten times stronger than traditional metal anchors. Researchers say it could be used to anchor anything from small submarines to large off-shore oil platforms.

RoboClam’s model was the razor clam (Ensis directus), an oblong mollusk about seven inches long by one inch wide that can dig to a depth of 70 centimeters at more than one centimeter per hour. Clammers call it the Ferrari of bivalves. Researchers set the razor clam digging in a plexiglass tank [video!] and observed how it used vibrations of its long muscular tongue to make a seemingly impenetrable layer of sand into liquid-like quicksand. Opening and closing its shell helps the clam propel itself downward.

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