#How do bone cells grow in space? Alvetex Scaffold technology, produced by Durham University spin out company Reinnervate,
allows cells to be grown in three dimensions (3d), overcoming problems with two-dimensional (2d) culture methods
and offering a more lifelike model of how cells grow in tissues. A team from Massachusetts General Hospital investigating bone loss during bed rest,
in microgravity or through diseases such as osteoporosis, will use the Alvetex Scaffold in experiments 150 miles above the surface of the Earth after the equipment is delivered by the Spacex Dragon capsule.
The experiment seeks to understand how the effects how physical forces such as gravity affect the biochemistry of bone cells
and could lead to better treatments for diseases such as for osteoporosis. BBSRC-funded research by Professor Stefan Przyborski
and his team at Durham University was crucial to the development of the technology. Prof Przyborski, the CSO and founder of Reinnervate, said:"
"I am delighted personally to see the application of a technology I invented and commercialised.""It is amazing to think that what we developed in Durham with the help of BBSRC funding has been acquired by leading researchers in MIT
and Harvard to be sent then into space to help address their interests in bone formation."
"Our technology is now also being adopted widely by many other scientists for a multitude of different applications in many different areas of cells biology in both academic and industrial research.
This is reflected in a range of different scientific papers now being published where Alvetex has contributed to the research effort.""
""This is reflected in a range of scientific papers now being published by independent investigators where Alvetex has contributed to the research effort."
"Being able to grow cells in a 3d culture prevents the cells from flattening and altering their structure and function,
which is common when they are grown in traditional 2d Petri dishes. It allows for cells to grow in a more natural way,
What the EU says Google is doing wrong The European union slapped Google Inc. with antitrust charges Wednesday,
saying it is abusing its dominance in Web search to promote its own products Here are the major allegations:
The EU says Google is unfairly favoring its own comparison-shopping service in general search results.
a coffee mug would find Google Shopping results for mugs displayed at the top of the search page,
even if a competing price-comparison site had more or better information. The EU says part of the reason for competing sites'low rankings is applied that Google different parameters to comparison-shopping services,
which can lead to those services having a lower rank in general search pages. The EU pointed out that a previous Google shopping site called Froogle did not use a favorable system
and performed poorly. The current Google Shopping product which allegedly uses the favorable system, is experiencing higher growth.
Also under investigation is Google's smartphone operating system, Android. The EU is looking in whether the company is giving smartphone makers unfair incentives for preinstalling Google's applications,
such as the Chrome Web browser and Youtube. The EU is also continuing a formal investigation into concerns that Google copies rivals Web content and places undue restrictions on advertisers a
#Using composite material samples, NRL scientists predict aspects of F/A-18 performance The U s. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has built a robot to pull, bend,
and twist samples of the composite materials used to build F/A-18s and other aircraft.
Dr. John Michopoulos leads the project. With a machine that can, as he says,"Measure so much more than anybody else,
"and some very advanced math, he can"create a theory that is consistent with all these experiments that we made,
and works for all scales.""He predicts how the materials will perform when made into large structures
and used over many years. Sitting in his lab, Michopoulos picks something the size of a luggage tag off his desk."
"It's a sample of advanced composite, made of resin reinforced by carbon epoxy fiber."
"So that little thing that's so light,"he says, "is actually stronger than steel.""The F/A-18 Hornet became the U s. Navy and Marine corps'first strike fighter in 1978;
the median age of today's active aircraft is 22-23 years old. As F/A-18s continue to age beyond their design life cycle,
showing structural stress corrosion cracking and wing panel composite skin abnormalities, engineers have had to do extensive analysis to develop repairs."
"So the need for certifying a new material comes in, "says Michopoulos, "and says,'How are we going to compare a new material and,
if we start using it, have confidence it's going to behave the same or better than the old material?'"
as set out in the Composite materials Handbook-MIL 17. The approach starts with testing fibers and matrix materials;
then the tests get, as the handbook states,"increasingly more complicated,"until reaching the level of structural subcomponent (or higher).
"As private companies and the military continue to look to advanced composites for new aerospace and other applications,
NRL's robot could help get aircraft from factory to fleet faster. NRL66. 3 robot applies,
he would have to"capture the behavior of the composites in any possible combination of loading;"
A custom-developed machine vision system, with four cameras, captures digital images of what's happening in real-time.
the scientists use custom-developed full field measurement algorithms Michopoulos'group has patented now to"take those digital images
what might happen to an advanced composite in the real world. Advanced composites age in a very particular way."
"The resin that's between the fibers starts developing little micro-cracks,"says Michopoulos, which can cause the resin to separate from the fibers or the fibers to break."
"A continuous accumulation of micro-cracking (that leads to a softening of the material) can be used as a metric for material degradation assessment."
"The group has, over the past 20 years, used various robots to test over 150 different material systems, with potential applications for ballistic missiles to rocketry to automobile manufacturing."
"So we do have a very rich database, "says Michopoulos. Computations from robot data predict how materials behave in aircraft A snapped composite specimen is one thing;
a theory of how that material will behave when formed into a jet wing is another.
But that's what Michopoulos'group has done.""It's highly computationally driven, "says Michopoulos.""You cannot write on a small piece of paper a single equation that encapsulates how composites behave."
"From 2008-2012, the Cooperative Research Centre Advanced Composite Structures (CRC-ACS) of Australia provided specimens to NRL to test
and characterize, while they did their own tests using more traditional methods. Universities in Australia and the Massachusetts institute of technology MIT also participated in the project, with support from the Office of Naval Research ONR.
Says Michopoulos, "We tested 1, 152 specimens in 12 days; that has happened never really anywhere anytime before."
"Additionally, as Michopoulos explains, ONR said, "CRC-ACS also is going to create specimens that you're not going to test,
they were still getting the same results as CRC-ACS because of all the data they'd captured with NRL66. 3."For me,
"NRL collected 12 terabytes of data during the testing period.""Just to tell you how much richness there is in these data,
"he says, out of the 72 loading paths we applied, an MIT student"based one dissertation out of one of these paths."
"Michopoulos wants to offer design engineers a simulation environment based on actual data.""Instead of asking the question,
'Is this good or bad in a general sense?''hich again, is never really what they meansking,
being efficient to thrive Using Composite material Samples, NRL Scientists Predict Aspects of F/A-18 Performance The U s. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) robot,
The lab has tested over 150 different material systems, with potential applications for ballistic missiles to rocketry to automobile manufacturing.
U s. Naval Research Laboratory/Jamie Hartman While Michopoulos is interested in continuing to run experiments on composites,
"Characterization of composite materials,"he says, "is a domain that I'm fortunate to be able to expresss an industrialization process, an application."
A robot that has a process to optimize its own performance based on how well it collects data for material characterization."
we can have the machine decide where it wants to go to get the best possible data for characterizing the material in real time."
"Using Composite material Samples, NRL Scientists Predict Aspects of F/A-18 Performance Dr. John Michopoulos with the robot he
A robot that has a ore But then, he says, there's first-best time, "Which is really developing your mind."
"I do have a genuine desire to see my group grow in a way that creates value for the military and society in general,
"Michopoulos has a Phd in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and Applied mathematics from the National Technical University of Athens,
and pursued postdoctoral research in multiphysics, fracture mechanics, and applied mathematics at Lehigh University. When he tells how he came to be at NRL in 1986,
he describes what his future mentor, Dr. Phillip Mast, asked in the interview:"'"'If you imagine there is a line connecting Socrates with Bertrand Russell,
'Instead of asking me an engineering and mathematics question, he is asking me this question. So then I knew I had to stay. e
#New synthetic technology for medicines and fine chemicals A University of Tokyo research group has succeeded in synthesizing (R)- and (S)- rolipram, the active component of a medicine,
in high yield with high selectivity by an innovative catalyzed flow fine synthesis instead of the traditional batch method used in the production of 99%of medicines.
Professor Shu Kobayashi's group at the Graduate school of Science has developed highly active immobilized catalysts (heterogeneous catalysts)
and demonstrated simple and highly efficient synthesis of (R)- and (S)- rolipram by an eight-step continuous flow reaction using multiple column reactors containing the immobilized catalysts.
the active components of medicines as well as other fine chemicals are synthesized by a repeated batch reaction method, in
In this method excess energy and operational steps are needed and a significant amount of waste is generated.
Professor Kobayashi's application of flow chemistry techniques to the production of fine chemicals using heterogeneous catalysts has resulted in simple method to synthesize (R)
-and (S)- rolipram without requiring the isolation or purification of intermediates, without excess amount of energy,
and without purification of products from catalysts. Professor Kobayashi says"This new technology can be applied to not only other gamma aminobutyric-acids acids and medicines but also various chemicals such as flavors, agricultural chemicals,
and functional materials. In the future, if this innovative catalyzed flow fine synthesis is established as an original Japanese technology,
we can hope for significant development of the chemical, pharmaceutical and related industries and recovery of high skill manufacturing in Japan
#Oil spill leaves half million Mexicans without water The city of Villahermosa in Tabasco state closed schools on Wednesday to protect the health of students following the incident.
Thieves tapped an oil pipeline operated by state-run energy firm Pemex on Sunday, causing a spill that affected local rivers
The thefts have caused other environmental disasters in the past and a deadly explosion in December 2010, when an illegal tap caused a blast that killed 29 people in the central town of San martin Texmelucan.
"The core transcription machinery of RNA polymerase copies the information found in DNA genes onto MESSENGER RNA molecules that then govern the production of proteins.
developed by Albert Einstein College of Medicine biologist Robert Singer, uses fluorescent probes made of DNA
"Single-molecule FISH has made enormous contributions to our understanding of cell biology, "says Zhuang. But what if scientists could simultaneously image not just 30,
She and her team then devised special binary codes to encode individual RNAS, and labeling and imaging schemes to decode these RNA codes.
and act as easily accessed landing sites for fluorescently labeled"readout probes"that are applied to the cells in subsequent rounds.
Those fluorescent spots are translated to the first bit of the binary code: any RNAS that fluoresce at this step are assigned a 1,
Although 16 rounds of imaging could yield more than 60,000 unique binary codes, the team used only a special subset of these codes to encode their RNAS.
her team borrowed an error-correction strategy from the field of digital communications. Instead of assigning all possible codes as identifiers of specific RNAS, they use only codes that differ from all others by more than one bit."
"By applying information theory to the problem, Singer says, Zhuang has gotten around limits to how many fluorescent labels can be discriminated as discrete colors."
and we were limited by the spectral bandwidth. This is technically orders of magnitude beyond what we would have thought possible in the near future,
Zhuang credits a talented interdisciplinary team graduate student Kok Hao Chen and postdoctoral researchers Alistair Boettiger, Jeffrey Moffitt,
The ability to image hundreds to thousands of different RNA species in individual cells allows many interesting biological questions to be addressed.
The technique will also allow researchers to examine gene expression in individual cells without removing them from tissue,
#New software analyses the effect of climate change on buildings from the cloud Large Spanish construction companies have begun to use a simulation software package,
developed by two researchers at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, which analyses for the first time the entire life cycle of a building, from creation to deconstruction.
includes aspects such as energy consumption, materials and social repercussions. It also allows scenarios to be simulated, enabling the effect of global warming on constructions to be identified.
Brothers Pau and Antoni Fonseca, Inlab FIB researchers from the Centre for Innovation and Technology at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (CIT UPC) have developed the first-ever software to analyse the entire life of a building,
or group of buildings, from the cloud. The tool, named NECADA, allows the entire construction cycle to be simulated,
from creation to deconstruction, including aspects such as materials, design, orientation and energy consumption. Certain details regarding the technology have been published in the journal Advances in Engineering Software.
Even before its commercialization, Spanish construction groups such as Acciona and VIA had used already it in some of their projects.
Pau Fonseca, expert in statistics and operational research, explains to SINC:""Nowadays there are many IT solutions on the market that are capable of calculating energy consumption,
but they don't take into account key construction and design issues or deal with all the environmental and social consequences,
which are fundamental to a sustainable system"."The social aspect of construction Social aspects, omitted from other applications,
are very much present in the new tool.""You can have a very ecological building, but in making it viable materials have been used
which are not so ecological, or in whose chain of distribution and development, workers have been exploited.
It is difficult to be sure that the chain is clean. Businesses and corporations'interests often make information unclear,
"Another of the software's most original features is the ability to simulate models to show how global warming may affect construction.
and customise the primary factors that have an impact on buildings.""It is also possible to calculate how much CO2 a building will emit,"notes Fonseca.
Materials database Furthermore, NECADA has integrated an database which can be used to improve construction and design buildings that are adapted to European legislation.
The algorithms that are implemented currently in the system are some of the heuristic classics uch as hill-climbing, simulated annealing, NSGA-II,
etcwhich reduce calculation time to give a fast response to the problem posed, "adds the expert.
Pau Fonseca indicates that the software consists of a core made up of a motor referred to as SDLPS that enables simulations to be carried out from complete representations of the models using languages such as SDL
DEVS and Petri Nets.""This core can be executed in a computer or be combined in a distributed way in a cluster, speeding up the extraction of results"."
""We are currently uploading the system to the cloud so it can be managed remotely, enabling a user who is not familiar with simulation to customise the model
and execute it in a distributed way, "he adds. Three dimensions According to Fonseca, NECADA's selling point is its versatility.
Starting with the shape and design of the building modelled in three dimensions with the open standard Building information modeling (BIM),
It also bears in mind the building's orientation and the area's climate""he stresses.
Furthermore, the software integrates"key factors such as the price of materials, and their transportation, assembly and disassembly so the construction company can calculate the total cost of the building."
"Applications With regard to its applications, the researcher believes NECADA could be useful in sectors outside of construction:"
"For example, businesses that manage a number of buildings, such as hotel chains or public bodies and local administrations,
which could use it to completely evaluate the potential renovations they need to carry out on their buildings".
Taking a building or residential area's condition as a starting point, a number of alternatives to identify the best solution can be explored,
and analysing the way it would fit in a specific building.""Other possible uses would be for carrying out energy audits
and designing scenarios to determine a building's optimal performance curve, "concludes the researcher r
#Blending realities to create a truly global workforce The globalisation of business already means many companies have scattered their workforce across the world.
This is the challenge behind a unique new project at the University of Essex. Scientists have created a first-of-its-kind virtual engineering laboratory
It allows students in Mexico and Essex to collaborate on live science and engineering work using online mixed-reality environments.
The technology, using a large screen to enhance the sense of reality and interactive avatars, synchronises the different realities so they all coordinate as one.
It means they work together in the virtual environment but manipulate the equipment in the real environment.
Working together on an intelligent home prototype, the project meant the scientists at Instituto Tecnológico de León in Mexico could immediately see the effect of their actions on the equipment at Essex.
Phd student Anasol Pena Rios, who is leading the project, said:""It was a real challenge to get the synchronisation right so we could accurately blend the real and virtual realities.
The beauty of this technology is that it opens up lots of possibilities of working together
if this is a good platform for people working together across the world in this mixed-reality environment."
"Project supervisor Professor Vic Callaghan added:""This technology has the potential to significantly change in a positive way the future of our lifestyles,
The project also involves Essex computer science alumnus Victor Zamudio whose Mexican company Fortito produced the intelligent home prototype Buzzbox used in the experiment.
which has thousands of Mexican students studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in almost 300 locations across Mexico.
The trial was also key in showing that distance was no longer a barrier to STEM laboratory work.
The five-year project funded by King Abdulaziz University in Saudi arabia, has led to over 30 research papers and three patents t
#Novel online bioinformatics tool significantly reduces time of multiple genome analysis UK research collaboration develops a new bioinformatics pipeline that enables automated primer design for multiple genome species
, significantly reducing turnaround time. With a rising global population leading to increased pressure on food resources, it is becoming ever more essential that crop breeding programmes work to enhance the security of global food sources.
A key aspect of this is utilising breakthroughs in genomics research to guide the selection of the individuals to incorporate in breeding schemes.
and identify areas of DNA responsible for desirable traits such as high yield or disease resistance. Crop breeding programmes can make use of this genetic information to ensure that the preferred trait is inherited by future crop yields,
helping to secure future food supply. However, the majority of tools for the analysis of DNA are designed for diploid organisms, such as humans, with one set of chromosomes,
and perform poorly when applied to polyploid species such as bread wheat (Triticum aestivum L) . which has multiple sets of chromosomes.
Scientists from The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) and John Innes Centre have developed a bioinformatics pipeline
Polymarker that facilitates the design of genomic specific primers for polyploid species. Once identified, these primers can be used to ascertain
whether or not an individual organism has associated the genetic variation with a given trait. As an open access tool, researchers and crop breeders can submit their own data to Polymarker
and the online tool will return suggested design primers to identify genetic variations that tag vital traits in their crop samples,
with a significantly reduced turnaround time compared to the current manual method.""The process of manually designing primers to validate in hexaploid wheat is time consuming,
with Polymarker we have reduced the design time from around a week to twenty minutes, "said lead author Ricardo Ramirez-Gonzalez, Phd student at TGAC."
"Polymarker has demonstrated already its value having been developed and applied in a research project where it identified genetic markers that signal resistance to the wheat yellow rust pathogen (Puccinia striiformis f. sp. tritici).
This disease is responsible for devastating bread wheat crops and has developed'Warrior'strains capable of infecting individuals previously believed to have tolerance."
"Mario Caccamo, senior author of the paper, said:""The development of Polymarker is a great example of the benefits of multidisciplinary research.
In one new software tool, we have applied expertise in advanced algorithm development, knowledge on genetics and principles of genome architecture."
"This innovative online tool has been used to generate putative KASP probes for the 820k markers designed by the Cerealsdb project from the BBSRC funded WISP programme (a collaboration between John Innes Centre, the University of Bristol, Rothamsted Research
, NIAB and University of Nottingham. Polymarker has also been used to design probes for the 90k iselect markers set.
The paper, titled:""Polymarker: A fast polyploid primer design pipeline"is published in Bioinformatics s
#Tiny terahertz accelerator could rival huge free-electron lasers Physicists in the US, Germany and Canada have built a miniature particle accelerator that uses terahertz radiation instead of radio waves to create pulses of high-energy electrons.
A single accelerator module of the prototype is just 1. 5 cm long and 1 mm thick,
and the technology has the potential to create facilities that are much smaller than current radio-frequency (RF) accelerators.
Potential applications include free-electron lasers, whereby the electrons are used to create coherent pulses of X-rays.
However, the team cautions that much more work is needed to develop the technology so it can be used in medicine,
particle physics and material science. Terahertz radiation falls between the microwave and infrared portions of the electromagnetic spectrum (300 GHZ THZ),
and its production and detection are not without significant technical challenges. However, terahertz technologies have been improving steadily
and some physicists are keen on using the radiation in much the same way that radio waves
and microwaves are used to accelerate charged particles. In this latest work Emilio Nanni and colleagues at the Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT), the Center For free-Electron Laser Science (CFEL) at DESY in Germany and the University of Toronto have created a terahertz accelerator module with the aim
of advancing experiments that use ultrafast electron diffraction to reveal the structure and dynamics of matter.
Their prototype accelerator uses optically generated pulses centred at 450 GHZ and a bandwidth of 20000 GHZ.
The wavelength of this radiation is around 1000 times shorter than the electromagnetic radiation used by current particle accelerators the Large hadron collider uses 400 MHZ microwaves everything else on the terahertz accelerator can also be 1000 times smaller.
Steep gradients The terahertz accelerator module increased the energy of electrons fired into it by 7 kev.
it is an important first step to obtaining relativistic energy electrons with terahertz waves.""More power needed The main barrier to faster accelerating gradients is the power of terahertz pulses that can be generated."
which causes them to emit intense flashes of X-ray light. Currently, access to large-scale FELS is limited,
In particular, pulses that deliver around 20 mj of terahertz energy would be needed. In contrast, their prototype accelerator gets by on 10 J. More powerful sources are available,
and recently researchers in Switzerland and Russia have generated terahertz pulses with almost 1 mj of energy.
#Lasers burn holes in quantum security systems A new way to hack quantum-cryptography systems has been unveiled by physicists in Canada.
and this latest disruption comes as quantum-cryptography experts have modified already their systems to make them immune to other eavesdropping techniques.
when two people exchange a cryptographic key. This secret key then allows them to exchange information using conventional communications.
The sender and receiver usually called Alice and Bob respectively share a secret key made up of a series of quantum states that an eavesdropper,
receivers and other hardware used to implement it. According to Vadim Makarov of the University of Waterloo and colleagues, many scientists assume that
as long as the technical shortcomings of this equipment are characterized properly, then QKD can"provide unconditional security".
if Alice sets up a detector to measure the energy of the incoming photons, which sounds an alarm
if the energy is too great. To get around this measure, the team shone an infrared laser at Alice's photodetector for up to 30 s after disconnecting the fibre channel,
The researchers discovered that they could burn a hole in the photodiode detector and render it either partially
They repeated the experiment using six detectors, and found that in each case"the damage was sufficient to permanently open the system up to the Trojan-horse attack,"
Faking states In the case of free-space cryptography Makarov and colleagues showed that they could enable a"faked-state attack".
so that it misses the core of three of the four fibres leading to Bob's polarization detectors.
which detectors are used to measure which photons, and by doing so to steal the key unnoticed.
This attack can be prevented by placing a pinhole inside Bob's receiver an arrangement that limits the angles over
This work goes further than an experiment reported last year by Makarov and an international group of scientists,
Better detectors Norbert Lütkenhaus of the University of Waterloo, who was involved not in the current work,
says this idea of actively damaging QKD components was"not previously on the radar screen"of scientists working on quantum-communication technologies.
suggesting that an additional detector could be installed to register the light from any damaging laser beams.
But he points out that manufacturers will need to ensure that their new detectors are themselves resistant to any potential attack
the development of QKD is"always a cat and mouse game
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