Hybrid Nanoparticles Image and Treat Tumors

PhysOrg.com - September 26, 2008

By combining a magnetic nanoparticle, a fluorescent quantum dot, and an anticancer drug within a lipid-based nanoparticle, a multi-institutional research team headed by members of the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Alliance for Nanotechnology in Cancer has created a single agent that can image and treat tumors. In addition, this new nanoparticle is able to avoid detection by the immune system, enabling the particle to remain in the body for extended periods of time.

"The idea involves encapsulating imaging agents and drugs into a protective ‘mothership’ that evades the natural processes that normally would remove these payloads if they were unprotected,” said Michael Sailor, Ph.D., an Alliance member at the University of California, San Diego, who led this research effort. Other Alliance members who participated in this study include Sangeeta Bhatia, M.D., Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Erkki Ruoslahti, M.D., Ph.D., Burnham Institute for Medical Research at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The researchers published the results of their work in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

“Many drugs look promising in the laboratory but fail in humans because they do not reach the diseased tissue in time or at concentrations high enough to be effective,” added Dr. Bhatia. “These drugs don’t have the capability to avoid the body’s natural defenses or to discriminate their intended targets from healthy tissues. In addition, we lack the tools to detect diseases such as cancer at the earliest stages of development, when therapies can be most effective.”

The researchers designed the hull of their motherships to evade detection by constructing them of lipids modified with poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG). The researchers also designed the material of the hull to be strong enough to prevent accidental release of the mothership’s cargo while circulating through the bloodstream. Tethered to the surface of the hull is a protein called F3, a molecule that sticks to cancer cells. Prepared in Dr. Ruoslahti’s laboratory, F3 was engineered to specifically home in on tumor cell surfaces and then transport itself into their nuclei.

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World's first Cyborg will get a brain implant next

CIOL News - September 23, 2008, by Pratima Harigunani

PUNE, INDIA: World's first ever Cyborg, Professor Kevin Warwick, Department of Cybernetics, University of Reading, is just six to eight years away from another implant, this time a brain implant.

This experiment would be in the area of bi-directional communication. Currently the investigation process is on for brain-computer links, in particular an implant into the brain, which acts bi-directionally.

As Warwick tells, "This probably will mean retraining neurons within the brain to alter their basic functioning. The main reason here would be for bi-directional communication. Clearly this is different to space projects. I believe it is far more important as it really changes what it means to be human."

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Visa develops software for Google phone

msnbc - September 25, 2008

SAN FRANCISCO - Visa Inc. said Thursday it's developing mobile payment software for the new wireless phone powered by Google Inc.'s Android system.

San Francisco-based Visa said Android users will be able to receive near real-time alerts about purchases via their mobile devices. Users also will be able to use location-based mapping technology to find ATM machines and nearby stores where they can redeem special Visa offers.

The software will be broadly available to U.S. consumers by the end of the year, starting with holders of Chase Visa cards. Visa's announcement came two days after T-Mobile USA showed off the G1, the first phone harnessing Google's ambition to make the Internet easy to use on the go. The T-Mobile device is schedule to hit U.S. stores Oct. 22.

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HP Labs aims at exascale computing

EETimes - September 19, 2008 by R. Colin Johnson

PORTLAND, Ore. — Exascale data centers would harness farms of petaflop-caliber computers to achieve 1,000-fold increases over the world's fastest computers.

Hewlett-Packard Laboratories wants to lay the groundwork for exascale computing (an exaflop is equal to 1,000 petaflops) through a three-year grant to Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta) to develop Xen-based virtualization management software.

"Our work is designed to virtualize heterogeneous multi-core platforms that include general purpose cores, special purpose nodes like graphics accelerators and the management of tasks," said Karsten Schwan, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and director of its Experimental Research in Computer Systems. "We are extending the open source virtualization software, called Xen, for exascale computing."

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A robot in every home?

Physorg.com - September 23, 2008

Observers like Bill Gates believe that by 2025 we could have robots in every home. In labs across Europe, researchers are creating designs that could become the robo-butler of the future.

Bill Gates likens the current state of robotics research to the earliest days of personal computing history when he formed the then fledging company Microsoft. Like the 1970s personal computer market, robotics designs and breakthroughs are following one another rapidly, and consumers are beginning to take an interest, too.

In Europe, as the rest of the world, there is s surge in robotics research, reflected in part by the European Network of Robotic Research (EURON), an EU-funded network of excellence that completed its work in May 2008.

It was an important network. The dozens of research programmes united by EURON (see related articles) represent a state-of-the-art in robotics, and a tantalising glimpse of the future.

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US Army Invests in 'Thought Helmet' Technology for Voiceless Communication

Physorg.com - September 22, 2008 by Lisa Zyga

In the future, soldiers may be communicating silently with sophisticated "thought helmets." The devices would harness a person´s brain waves and transmit them as radio waves, where they would be translated into words in the headphones of other soldiers.

The US Army has recently awarded a five-year $4 million contract to researchers from the University of California at Irvine (led by UCI´s Mike D´Zmura), Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Maryland to study the concept. It will likely be a decade or two before the thought helmet becomes a reality, but the rough technology is already under investigation. Researchers have been working on other brain-computer interfaces, such as Emotiv Systems´ brain-wave headset for video games, which is expected to be available commercially next summer.

The Army's version would of course be more sophisticated and reliable than the gaming headset. To make the thought helmet a feasible piece of equipment for soldiers, scientists need to combine advances in computing power together with our understanding of the human brain.

At the moment, the thought helmet concept consists of 128 sensors buried in a soldier´s helmet. Soldiers would need to think in clear, formulaic ways, which is similar to how they are already trained to talk. The key challenge to making the system work is a software system that can read an electroencephalogram (EEG) generated by the sensor data, and pick out when a soldier is thinking words, and what those words are.

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Building a Self-Assembling Stomach-Bot

Technology Review - September 22, 2008 by Kristina Grifantini

Modules that self-assemble inside the stomach could perform more-sophisticated diagnosis and treatment.

Doctors have long sought better ways to examine the workings of the human body without having to cut their patients open. A swallowable camera, little bigger than a normal pill, can already snap pictures as it floats through the stomach and intestine, offering a less invasive way to perform diagnosis than an endoscope or surgery. Now a consortium of European researchers is testing a way to connect several swallowable devices to create a surgical "robot" that would self-assemble inside the stomach.

The Israeli company that developed the first pill cameras, Given Imaging, is currently working on a way to control the movement of its camera capsule from outside the body. Several academic research groups are also looking at ways to let swallowable capsules maneuver themselves by rolling, crawling, or sticking to tissue. With greater control, doctors should be able to better diagnose and possibly even treat illness. But the capabilities of such intestinal devices will still be limited because a capsule must remain small enough to be comfortably swallowed.

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Computers figuring out what words mean

Physorg.com - September 18, 2008

The Internet got smarter this week with the release of a semantic map that teaches computers the meanings behind words -- and gives the machines a vocabulary far larger than that of a typical US college graduate.

"We have taught the computer virtually all the meanings of words and phrases in the English language," Cognition chief executive Scott Jarus told AFP.

"This is clearly a building block for Web 3.0, or what is known as the Semantic Web. It has taken 30 years; it is a labor of love," Jarus said.

The semantic map is reportedly the world's largest, and gives computers a vocabulary more than 10 times as extensive as that of a typical US college graduate.

The coming third generation of life online is predicted to feature intuitive artificial intelligence applications that work swiftly across broadband Internet connections.

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3D Virtual Reality Environment Developed at UC San Diego Helps Scientists Innovate

Physorg.com - September 18, 2008 by Doug Ramsey

Its name sounds like something out of science fiction, but the StarCAVE at the University of California, San Diego is now a science fact. The virtual-reality environment allows groups of scientists to venture into worlds as small as nanoparticles and as big as the cosmos – permitting new insights that could fuel discoveries in many fields. Early users of the StarCAVE include UC San Diego researchers in biomedicine, neuroscience, structural engineering, archaeology, earth science, genomics, art history and other disciplines.

The StarCAVE is a five-sided virtual reality (VR) room where scientific models and animations are projected in stereo on 360-degree screens surrounding the viewer, and onto the floor as well. It was constructed by the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). At less than $1 million, the StarCAVE immersive environment cost approximately the same as earlier VR systems, while offering much higher resolution and contrast.

“When you’re inside the StarCAVE the quality of the image is stunning,” said Thomas A. DeFanti, director of visualization at Calit2 and one of the pioneers of VR systems. “The StarCAVE supports 20/40 vision and the images are very high contrast, thanks to the room’s unique shape and special screens that allow viewers to use 3D polarizing glasses. You can fly over a strand of DNA and look in front, behind and below you, or navigate through the superstructure of a building to detect where damage from an earthquake may have occurred.”

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Google's quest for the intelligent cloud

CNET News - September 18, 2008 by Dan Farber

Google is publishing a series of brief articles by ten of its top scientists on how the Internet will evolve in the next ten years. In the first article, Alfred Spector, a vice president of engineering and research scientist Franz Och, outline how Google's search engine will evolve over the next decade.

Traditionally, systems that solve complicated problems and queries have been called "intelligent", but compared to earlier approaches in the field of 'artificial intelligence', the path that we foresee has important new elements. First of all, this system will operate on an enormous scale with an unprecedented computational power of millions of computers. It will be used by billions of people and learn from an aggregate of potentially trillions of meaningful interactions per day. It will be engineered iteratively, based on a feedback loop of quick changes, evaluation, and adjustments. And it will be built based on the needs of solving and improving concrete and useful tasks such as finding information, answering questions, performing spoken dialogue, translating text and speech, understanding images and videos, and other tasks as yet undefined. When combined with the creativity, knowledge, and drive inherent in people, this "intelligent cloud" will generate many surprising and significant benefits to mankind.

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Microsoft and Cray Team Up to Drive High Productivity Computing Into the Mainstream

Cray - September 16, 2008

Supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) and Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) today introduced the new Cray CX1 supercomputer pre-installed with Windows HPC Server 2008. With U.S. list prices starting at $25,000 to over $60,000, "ease-of-everything" features and the ability to fit into standard office environments and workflows, the new product reflects Microsoft and Cray's shared goal to drive high productivity computing farther into the mainstream in a broad array of markets including financial services, aerospace, automotive, petroleum, life sciences, government, academic and digital media.

Studies released by the Council on Competitiveness and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) found that nearly all large firms using HPC consider it indispensable for their ability to compete and survive, but smaller companies, as well as workgroups and departments in larger firms, have been hampered by the cost of HPC systems and a lack of access to in-house experts to help them use these systems.

The Cray CX1 supercomputer was designed from the ground up to address these barriers. It is the most affordable supercomputer ever offered by Cray and is designed to be easy to purchase, deploy, operate and upgrade. Purpose-built for offices, laboratories and university departments, the Cray CX1 is the world's highest-performing computer that uses standard office power.

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Space-Based Solar Power Breakthrough

National Space Society - September 12, 2008

Space solar power could be a clean, renewable solution to America's long-term energy needs. John C. Mankins, former manager of NASA's Exploration Systems Research and Technology Program, and one of the foremost experts on space solar power, will announce on Friday a milestone demonstration of the critical technology enabling SSP: long-distance, solar-powered wireless power transmission.

The project demonstrated wireless power transmission between two Hawaiian islands 148 kilometers apart, more than the distance from the surface of Earth to the boundary of space.

It will be featured in an hour-long special that evening on Discovery Channel as part of DISCOVERY PROJECT EARTH, an eight-part series on the most ambitious geo-engineering ideas to tackle global climate change and the need for new and sustainable energy sources.

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Researchers develop nano-sized 'cargo ships' to target and destroy tumors

Physorg.com - September 12, 2008

Scientists have developed nanometer-sized 'cargo ships' that can sail throughout the body via the bloodstream without immediate detection from the body's immune radar system and ferry their cargo of anti-cancer drugs and markers into tumors that might otherwise go untreated or undetected.

In a forthcoming issue of the Germany-based chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, scientists at UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and MIT report that their nano-cargo-ship system integrates therapeutic and diagnostic functions into a single device that avoids rapid removal by the body's natural immune system.

"The idea involves encapsulating imaging agents and drugs into a protective 'mother ship' that evades the natural processes that normally would remove these payloads if they were unprotected," said Michael Sailor, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSD who headed the team of chemists, biologists and engineers that turned the fanciful concept into reality. "These mother ships are only 50 nanometers in diameter, or 1,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, and are equipped with an array of molecules on their surfaces that enable them to find and penetrate tumor cells in the body."

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Biologists on the Verge of Creating New Form of Life

Wired Science - September 08, 2008 by Alexis Madrigal

A team of biologists and chemists is closing in on bringing non-living matter to life.

It's not as Frankensteinian as it sounds. Instead, a lab led by Jack Szostak, a molecular biologist at Harvard Medical School, is building simple cell models that can almost be called life.

Szostak's protocells are built from fatty molecules that can trap bits of nucleic acids that contain the source code for replication. Combined with a process that harnesses external energy from the sun or chemical reactions, they could form a self-replicating, evolving system that satisfies the conditions of life, but isn't anything like life on earth now, but might represent life as it began or could exist elsewhere in the universe.

While his latest work remains unpublished, Szostak described preliminary new success in getting protocells with genetic information inside them to replicate at the XV International Conference on the Origin of Life in Florence, Italy, last week. The replication isn't wholly autonomous, so it's not quite artificial life yet, but it is as close as anyone has ever come to turning chemicals into biological organisms.

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Fear Looms Over Scientist's Experiment to Uncover Secrets of 'Big Bang'

Fox News - September 07, 2008

A British physicist has claimed he can explain the secrets of the Big Bang Theory, but his controversial experiment has scientists believing he could bring about the end of the world, the U.K.'s Daily Mail reported.

For centuries, scientists have sought unsuccessfully to unlock the secrets of the Big Bang Theory — a model explaining the birth of the universe. But 63-year-old Dr. Lyn Evans of Aberdare, England, popularly known as "Evans the Atom," claims to know the answers, and will test his experiment on Wednesday by using a 17-mile-long doughnut-shaped tunnel that will smash sub-atomic particles together at the speed of light, the Mail reported.

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Massive $208 million petascale computer gets green light

NETWORKWORLD - September 2, 2008

The 200,000 processor core system known as Blue Waters got the green light recently as the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) said it has finalized the contract with IBM to build the world's first sustained petascale computational system.

Blue Waters is expected to deliver sustained performance of more than one petaflop on many real-world scientific and engineering applications. A petaflop equals about 1 quadrillion calculations per second. They will be coupled to more than a petabyte of memory and more than 10 petabytes of disk storage. All of that memory and storage will be globally addressable, meaning that processors will be able to share data from a single pool exceptionally quickly, researchers said.  Blue Waters, is supported by a $208 million grant from the National Science Foundation and will come online in 2011.

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Making the Visible Invisible

IEET - August 19, 2008 by James Cascio

The Metaverse Roadmap Overview, an exploration of imminent 3D technologies, posited a number of different scenarios of what a future “metaverse” could look like. The four scenarios—augmented reality, life-logging, virtual worlds, and mirror worlds—each offered a different manifestation of an immersive 3D world. Of the four, I suspect that augmented reality is most likely to be widespread soon; moreover, when it hits, it’s going to have a surprisingly big impact. Not just in terms of “making the invisible visible”—showing us flows and information that we otherwise wouldn’t recognize—but also in terms of the opposite: making the visible invisible.

Augmented reality (AR) can be thought of as a combination of widely-accessible sensors (including cameras), lightweight computing technologies, and near-ubiquitous high-speed wireless networks—a combination that’s well-underway—along with a sophisticated form of visualization that layers information over the physical world. The common vision of AR technology includes some kind of wearable display, although that technology isn’t as far along as the other components. For that reason, at the outset, the most common interface for AR will likely be a handheld device, probably something evolved from a mobile phone. Imagine holding up an iPhone-like device, scanning what’s around you, seeing various pop-up items and data links on your screen.

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Using Biomedicine To Enhance Ourselves

UPenn Center for Bioethics

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Cell phones welcome in some classrooms

MSNBC - September 5, 2008 by Olga Kharif

Cell phones have long been anathema in the classroom, banned as a potential distraction, at best, and as a possible vehicle for cheating, at worst. But lately, educators have begun changing their tune on mobile phones.

Abilene Christian University will hand out Apple's iPhone 3G smartphone to two-thirds of this year's entering class of 950 freshmen. Students will be expected to use the devices to brainstorm ideas and get virtual handouts and podcasts during class. Instructors will use them for such tasks as monitoring attendance.

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SEEING THROUGH INVISIBILITY

MSNBC - September 03, 2008 by Alan Boyle

First, scientists developed a real-life invisibility cloak. Now Chinese researchers are working on an anti-invisibility device to see through the cloak.

This may sound like a development that would concern the Romulans in a "Star Trek" episode rather than real people. But the research, published online today on the Optics Express Web site, addresses real-world concerns about the cloaking devices that are being built in labs today.

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Goodbye to bypass ops?

Todayonline - September 3, 2008 by Tan Hui Leng

Human trials in breakthrough stem cell transplant could begin in one to two years.

MANY heart disease patients go for surgeries such as cardiac bypass operations, but these sometimes are not permanent solutions, leaving the patient with no recourse other than a heart transplant.

Now, enter a stem cell transplant method pioneered by the National Heart Centre (NHC) — which if successful, will help such patients avoid the high-risk heart transplant and even eliminate the need for bypass procedures.

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Stanford's 'autonomous' helicopters teach themselves to fly

Physorg.com - September 01, 2008

Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers. The result is an autonomous helicopter than can perform a complete airshow of complex tricks on its own.

The stunts are "by far the most difficult aerobatic maneuvers flown by any computer controlled helicopter," said Andrew Ng, the professor directing the research of graduate students Pieter Abbeel, Adam Coates, Timothy Hunter and Morgan Quigley.

The dazzling airshow is an important demonstration of "apprenticeship learning," in which robots learn by observing an expert, rather than by having software engineers peck away at their keyboards in an attempt to write instructions from scratch.

Stanford's artificial intelligence system learned how to fly by "watching" the four-foot-long helicopters flown by expert radio control pilot Garett Oku. "Garett can pick up any helicopter, even ones he's never seen, and go fly amazing aerobatics. So the question for us is always, why can't computers do things like this?" Coates said.

Video: Stanford's robotic helicopter performs stunts

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MIT engineers work toward cell-sized batteries

Microbatteries could power tomorrow's miniature devices

MIT News - August 20, 2008 by Elizabeth A. Thomson

Forget 9-volts, AAs, AAAs or D batteries: The energy for tomorrow's miniature electronic devices could come from tiny microbatteries about half the size of a human cell and built with viruses.

MIT engineers have developed a way to at once create and install such microbatteries -- which could one day power a range of miniature devices, from labs-on-a-chip to implantable medical sensors -- by stamping them onto a variety of surfaces.

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) the week of Aug. 18, the team describes assembling and successfully testing two of the three key components of a battery. A complete battery is on its way.

"To our knowledge, this is the first instance in which microcontact printing has been used to fabricate and position microbattery electrodes and the first use of virus-based assembly in such a process," wrote MIT professors Paula T. Hammond, Angela M. Belcher, Yet-Ming Chiang and colleagues.

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