Revolutionary Antibiotics that Will Save the World?

An international team of including the Lomonosov Moscow State University researchers discovered which enzyme enables Escherichia coli bacterium (E. coli) to breathe. The study is published in the Scientific Reports.

Scientists discovered how the E. coli bacterium can survive in the human gut - earlier the question how they breathe was a mystery to experts. Vitaliy Borisov, Senior Researcher, Doctor of Biological Sciences, Professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, A.N. Belozersky Research Institute physical and chemical biology employee, the Lomonosov Moscow State University and one of the authors, explains that breathing E. coli uses special enzymes, which are absent in the human body. This means that the discovery of the scientists can contribute to the creation of new drugs, which will be detrimental to the bacteria without harming a human.

The energy for the vital activity of any organism comes from food, and is generated by the means of redox processes in the body. The food is converted into energy not directly but through intermediaries. First, the complex molecules are decomposed into simpler: proteins are decomposed into amino acids, fats - to fatty acids, carbohydrates - to monosaccharides. Oxidation of simpler molecules releases energy, which all is contained in the electrons.

Electrons always find a (quantum) way

Scientists from the Univ. of Basel in Switzerland have demonstrated for the first time how electrons are transported from a superconductor through a quantum dot into a metal with normal conductivity. This transport process through a quantum dot had already been calculated theoretically in the nineties, but scientists at the Univ. of Basel have now succeeded in proving the theory with measurements. They report on their findings in the scientific journal Physical Review Letters.

Transport properties such as electrical conductivity play an important role in technical applications of new materials and electronic components. Completely new phenomena occur, for example, when you combine a superconductor and nanometer-sized structures, known as quantum dots, in a component.

Researchers at the Univ. of Basel working under Professor Christian Schönenberger have now constructed such a quantum dot between a superconductor and a metal with normal conductivity to study electron transport between the two components.

It should in fact be impossible to transport electrons from the superconductor through a quantum dot at low energies. Firstly, electrons never occur on an individual basis in a superconductor but rather always in two's or in so-called Cooper pairs, which can only be separated by relatively large amounts of energy. Secondly, the quantum dot is so small that only one particle is transported at a time due to the repulsive force between electrons.

In the past, however, scientists have repeatedly observed that a current nonetheless runs between the superconductor and the metal - in other words, electron transport does occur through the quantum dot.

First evidence of the transport mechanism through a quantum dot

On the basis of quantum mechanics, theories were developed in the nineties which indicated that the transport of Cooper pairs through a quantum dot is entirely possible under certain conditions. The prerequisite is that the second electron follows the first very quickly, namely within the time roughly stipulated by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

The scientists at the Univ. of Basel have now been able to accurately measure this phenomenon. In their experiments the scientists found the exact same discrete resonances that had been calculated theoretically. In addition, the team including doctoral student Jörg Gramich and his supervisor Dr. Andreas Baumgartner was able to provide evidence that the process also works when energy is emitted into the environment or absorbed from it.

"Our results contribute to a better understanding of the transport properties of superconducting electronic nanostructures, which are of great interest for quantum technology applications", says Dr. Andreas Baumgartner.

Airbus Displays Counter-UAV System at CES 2016

In light of the proliferation of drones, companies are devoting resources to technologies capable of countering unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).  Boeing’s introduced lasers capable of setting fires to drones, and a consortium of British technology companies have designed systems that detect, track, and disrupt drone flight via radio frequency inhibition. 

Now, Airbus Defense & Space, Inc. has entered the playing field. The company is displaying their Counter-UAV System through Jan. 9 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

“All over the world, incidents with universally available small drones have revealed a security gap with regards to critical installations such as factories, airports, or nuclear plants,” said Thomas Müller, who is the head of Airbus Defense & Space’s Electronics and Border Security. “As a specialist in defense electronics, we have all the technologies in our portfolio and the integration knowledge which are needed to set up a quick-response protection system with extremely low false alarm rates.”

Human-machine superintelligence can solve the world's most dire problems

The combination of human and computer intelligence might be just what we need to solve the "wicked" problems of the world, such as climate change and geopolitical conflict, say researchers from the Human Computation Institute (HCI) and Cornell University.

In an article published in the journal Science, the authors present a new vision of human computation (the science of crowd-powered systems), which pushes beyond traditional limits, and takes on hard problems that until recently have remained out of reach.

Humans surpass machines at many things, ranging from simple pattern recognition to creative abstraction. With the help of computers, these cognitive abilities can be effectively combined into multidimensional collaborative networks that achieve what traditional problem-solving cannot.

Most of today's human computation systems rely on sending bite-sized 'micro-tasks' to many individuals and then stitching together the results. For example, 165,000 volunteers in EyeWire have analyzed thousands of images online to help build the world's most complete map of human retinal neurons.

Virtual Reality May Help Curb Isolation in Deep Space Travel

Located 817 km from the geographic North Pole, theCanadian Forces Station Alert (CFS Alert) can claim the title as the most northerly, permanently inhabited location in the world. The barren landscape is considered a desert, with average precipitation less than that of the Sahara Desert. And from Oct. 10 to March 1, the 55 full-time military, civilian, and contracted personnel at the station never see sunlight.

“It’s an isolated and confined environment with an unvarying landscape,” says Dartmouth College physician and former astronaut Jay Buckey in an interview with R&D Magazine.

And that’s the precise reason Buckey and colleagues are using the station as an analogue for space. Their mission: to test how virtual reality technology may help relieve any detrimental psychological effects stirred up by deep space travel.    

Team finds black hole affecting galactic climate

A team of researchers led by Eric Schlegel, Vaughn Family Endowed Professor in Physics at The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), has discovered a powerful galactic blast produced by a giant black hole about 26 million light years from Earth. The black hole is the nearest supermassive black hole to Earth that is currently undergoing such violent outbursts.

Schlegel's team used NASA's Earth-orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory to find the black hole blast in the famous Messier 51 system of galaxies. The system contains a large spiral galaxy, NGC 5194, colliding with a smaller companion galaxy, NGC 5195.

"Just as powerful storms here on Earth impact their environments, so too do the ones we see out in space," Schlegel said. "This black hole is blasting hot gas and particles into its surroundings that must play an important role in the evolution of the galaxy."

Schlegel and his colleagues detected two X-ray emission arcs close to the center of NGC 5195, where the supermassive black hole is located.

Could Solar Energy Be Generated with Balloons?

Over the years, solar energy has made great strides. In the U.S., utility-scale solar project developers have negotiated sales agreements to utilities at prices averaging 5 cents/kWh, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory reported in September. And installed project costs have dropped more than 50% since 2009.

But for all the technological advances made, there’s one thing that can’t be controlled by man: the whims of the weather.

Jean-François Guillemoles, the director of the French National Center for Scientific Research and the French director for NextPV, wants to change that. Not the weather, but how we collect solar energy. The answer: balloons.  

“What if, instead of waiting for sunlight to reach solar panels on the ground, balloons were used to capture solar energy up in the air, where space is not restricted, where yields would be multiplied and clouds would never interrupt production?” he muses in a post.

New Microscope Creates Near-real-time Videos of Nanoscale Processes

State-of-the-art atomic force microscopes (AFMs) are designed to capture images of structures as small as a fraction of a nanometer — a million times smaller than the width of a human hair. In recent years, AFMs have produced desktop-worthy close-ups of atom-sized structures, from single strands of DNA to individual hydrogen bonds between molecules.

But scanning these images is a meticulous, time-consuming process. AFMs therefore have been used mostly to image static samples, as they are too slow to capture active, changing environments.

Now engineers at MIT have designed an atomic force microscope that scans images 2,000 times faster than existing commercial models. With this new high-speed instrument, the team produced images of chemical processes taking place at the nanoscale, at a rate that is close to real-time video.

Solar Cells That Face Almost any Direction and Keep Themselves Clean

In recent years, a complicated discussion over which direction solar cells should face — south or west — has likely left customers uncertain about the best way to orient their panels. Now researchers are attempting to resolve this issue by developing solar cells that can harvest light from almost any angle, and the panels self-clean to boot. Their report appears in the journal ACS Nano.

Commercial solar panels work best when sunlight hits them at a certain angle. Initially, experts had suggested that solar panels face south to collect the most energy from the sun. But an influential 2013 report by Pecan Street, an energy-research organization, advised that systems tilt westward to maximize efficiency. Further analysis has found that determining the ideal angle is more complicated — in essence, it depends on where you live. And even if customers get the positioning correct, they’re still losing out on prime sunlight because most residential systems can’t move or adjust to the sun’s track across the sky. Jr-Hau He, Kun-Yu Lai and colleagues wanted to address this shortcoming.

Graphene proves a perfect fit for wearable devices

Cheap, flexible, wireless graphene communication devices such as mobile phones and healthcare monitors can be directly printed into clothing and even skin, University of Manchester academics have demonstrated.

In a breakthrough paper in Scientific Reports, the researchers show how graphene could be crucial to wearable electronic applications because it is highly-conductive and ultra-flexible.

The research could pave the way for smart, battery-free healthcare and fitness monitoring, phones, internet-ready devices and chargers to be incorporated into clothing and ‘smart skin’ applications – printed graphene sensors integrated with other 2D materials stuck onto a patient’s skin to monitor temperature, strain and moisture levels.

Technique could set new course for extracting uranium from seawater

An ultra-high-resolution technique used for the first time to study polymer fibers that trap uranium in seawater may cause researchers to rethink the best methods to harvest this potential fuel for nuclear reactors.

The work of a team led by Carter Abney, a Wigner Fellow at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, shows that the polymeric adsorbent materials that bind uranium behave nothing like scientists had believed. The results, gained through collaboration with the University of Chicago and detailed in a paper published in Energy & Environmental Science, highlight data made possible with X-ray Absorption Fine Structure spectroscopy performed at the Advanced Photon Source. The APS is a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Argonne National Laboratory.

“Despite the low concentration of uranium and the presence of many other metals extracted from seawater, we were able to investigate the local atomic environment around uranium and better understand how it is bound by the polymer fibers,” Abney said.

Scientists blueprint tiny cellular 'nanomachine'

Scientists have drawn up molecular blueprints of a tiny cellular 'nanomachine', whose evolution is an extraordinary feat of nature, by using one of the brightest X-ray sources on Earth.

The scientists produced the structural map of this nanomachine - diacylglycerol kinase - by using a "hit and run" crystallography technique. In doing so, they have been able to understand how the tiny enzyme performs critical cellular duties - answering questions that have been on the table for over 50 years about this 'paradigmatic protein'.

Kinases are key players in metabolism, cell signalling, protein regulation, cellular transport, secretory processes, and many other cellular pathways that allow us to function healthily. They coordinate the transfer of energy from certain molecules to specific substrates, affecting their activity, reactivity, and ability to bind other molecules.

National Science Foundation and Others Award $37M in Co-Robot Funding

The development of co-robots in the U.S. has just received an injection in the arm.

This week the National Science Foundation (NSF)—in partnership with the DOD, DARPA, NASA, the NIH, and the USDA—announced a $37 million slew of awards to bolster the development of robots meant to work cooperatively with humans.

“Our engineers and scientists are creating a world where robotic systems serve as trusted co-workers, co-inhabitants, co-explorers and co-defenders,” saidPramod Khargonekar, NSF's assistant director for engineering. “The National Robotics Initiative serves the national good by encouraging collaboration among academic, industry, nonprofit and other organizations -- and by speeding the creation of the fundamental science and engineering knowledge base used by researchers, applications developers and industry.”

According to the NSF, the awards run the gamut of the development cycle, from fundamental research to prototyping and testing. Some examples of projects include improving brain-controlled prosthetic devices, designing robots for search and rescue efforts, and robots that can assist with healthcare tasks.

High-pressure Reactor

Supercritical Fluid Technologies has introduced a new, high-pressure reactor specifically designed for small batch reaction chemistry. The HPR-Micro Reactor is a suitable high-pressure reactor for early, exploratory research. It is especially well-suited for research, process development and screening applications when reagents, catalysts or other essential materials are expensive or available in very limited supply. The HPR-Micro Reactor comes standard with a 10-mL Iconel 718 reactor vessel for operation up to 10,000 psi (689 Bar/68.9 MPa), inlet and outlet valves and a pressure gauge. Optional 25- and 50-mL vessels are available. Depending upon the temperature option selected, operation from -40 C to 150 C is possible. The vessel closures are the hand tight type where no wrenches are needed. The reactor is equipped with magnetically coupled stirring for optimal mixing. All high-pressure components are ASME compliant designed and overall assembly is protected by a rupture disc assembly for safe operation. The Micro Reactor is compact and can fit into a fume hood. The Micro Reactor can be easily removed from the mounting stand and brought to a glove box for reactant and reagent loading under an inert atmosphere. Multiple inlet ports are included for addition of solvents, reagents, or gases. An optional Reagent Injection Manifold increases versatility by providing a means to add a precise amount of reagent at anytime during course of the reaction. Standard addition quantities include 2.0, 1.0 and 0.5 mL.

Google and Ford May Team up on Self-Driving Cars

Google and Ford Motor Co. are reportedly in talks to build self-driving cars together, according to Automotive Newsand Yahoo Autos, both of which cite sources familiar with the plans.

If a deal is struck, the outlets expect the partnership to be announced at the upcoming International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which is scheduled from Jan. 6-9, 2016.

Though spokespeople from both Google and Ford did not comment on the speculation, Google confirmed it’s talking with various automakers for implementing its self-driving system in vehicles.

Already, Google has a fleet of self-driving cars out on the roads. The fleet has logged over 1.3 million autonomous miles.

Webb Telescope Reaches Halfway Point on Mirror Construction

Inside NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s clean room, a robotic arm lifted and placed nine hexagonal-shapes, each measuring just over 4.2 ft across and weighing approximately 88 lbs, on a telescope structure.

On Monday, NASA reached a halfway point in the James Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror construction by installing the ninth flight mirror of the planned 18 mirror array. Once completed, the segments will work as a single 21.3-ft mirror. Completion of the primary mirror is expected in early 2016.

“The years of planning and practicing is really paying dividends and the progress is really rewarding for everyone to see,” said Lee Feinberg, NASA’s Optical Telescope Element Manager.

With a planned launch from French Guiana in October 2018, the James Webb Space Telescope will be a premier observatory for the ensuing decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide.

Wireless sensor enables study of traumatic brain injury

A new system that uses a wireless implant has been shown to record for the first time how brain tissue deforms when subjected to the kind of shock that causes blast-induced trauma commonly seen in combat veterans.

"Blast-induced traumatic brain injury, already one of the most significant wounds throughout Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, has become increasingly prevalent," said Riyi Shi, a professor in Purdue Univ.'s Dept. of Basic Medical Sciences, College of Veterinary Medicine, and Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. "About 167,000 blast-induced traumatic brain injury cases have been documented during both deployments alone."

The consequences are dire, ranging from neurodegenerative diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy to neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression and anxiety.

"These risks pose a substantial public health burden upon military members' return to civilian life, as the conditions are generally chronic and involve lengthy and costly treatment courses both in terms of dollars and quality of life," Shi said. "To pursue targeted innovation of new preventative, diagnostic, and therapeutic measures, we must first develop a greater understanding of pathogenesis, the initiating mechanical events and the links between blast-induced damage and subsequent neuropathologies."

The new research involves the use of a biocompatible "soft magnet" wireless sensor, inserted into the brains of laboratory rats. Because the gel-like magnet has mechanical properties similar to that of brain tissue, it is able to move with the brain when exposed to blast trauma, said Babak Ziaie, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering.  

Findings are detailed in a paper appearing in Scientific Reports.

"This is the first time that anybody has been able to measure brain deformation in real time wirelessly,” Ziaie said.

Findings showed the brain does not move in a simple linear direction, but rather in a more complex motion covering a wide arc, likely resulting in greater damage than that caused by ordinary blunt-force trauma.

The paper was authored by doctoral students Seung Song, Nicholas Race, Albert Kim and Tony Zhang; Shi and Ziaie.

"There is no way to see brain deformation in blast-induced trauma events using conventional imaging technologies," Ziaie said. "Because this is a wireless device, we can track the brain's movement."

The technology has a resolution of five to 10 microns, meaning deformation can be measured in minute detail. The magnet's motion is tracked with three external sensors, creating a precise 3-D measurement.

"The system's response time is very fast—milliseconds or faster," Ziaie said. "Ordinary sensors take a signal every second, but the blast events are finished in a matter of milliseconds, so you miss everything."

The magnet is about 3 mm in diameter—about six would fit across the diameter of a U.S. penny.

"It can be inserted into any part of the brain to study, for example, the hippocampus, which is critical for memory," Shi said.

The research is an example of how interdisciplinary collaborations can help to find solutions not possible through the work of specialists from a single discipline alone, Shi said.

Source: Purdue Univ.

Computer Learns to Read Human Micro-Expressions

Not far from now:

A suspect sits in a police interrogation room. All the trimmings are there, a two-way mirror, the single bulb lighting fixture, steaming coffee on a steel table, the cops with rolled up sleeves and tired yet stern expressions, a video camera. These cops are positive their suspect is lying, but he isn’t breaking under pressure. However, the officers have another tool in their arsenal. Embedded in their video camera array is a micro-expression analysis system capable of picking up the slightest facial cues.

While the above scenario is entirely fictional, the technology mentioned is already here.

“In high-stake situations…an ME (micro-expression) fleeting across the face could give away a criminal pretending to be innocent, as the face is telling a different story than his statements,”write researchers from the Univ. of Oulu.

Since the 1960s, psychologists have studied micro-expressions and their ability to relay true meaning even when clouded by false statements. Paul Ekman, a co-discoverer of the phenomenon, developed micro-expression training tools to help people hone their micro-expression recognition abilities.