or when the glare from the truck behind keeps you from looking in the rearview mirror a solution might be just around the corner.
Researchers from Carnegie mellon and Intel developed the prototype headlight which scans the road ahead using an infrared camera
or even reduce the glare during a snowfall by distributing light between snowflakes. Improving the ability to drive in the dark
. Although adaptive headlights already have been introduced in recent years by car manufacturers such as BMW, Audi, Mercedes and Volvo,
The Carnegie mellon-Intel prototype includes a camera a computer and a digital projector. Information from the infrared camera is processed by a computer that tries to identify relevant objects on the road such as cars, pedestrians or road signs.
The projector uses a light source that is 4700 lumens (much brighter than a halogen headlight) with an array of almost 800000 micromirrors that can be controlled individually by the computer.
The ability to control the light with so many micromirrors provides a high-resolution, highly tunable system that can also turn on
and off every pixel in just under one millisecond (the flap of a fly wing takes almost three times as long).
John Leonard, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT who was involved not in the research, says the Carnegie mellon programmable headlight could improve automotive machine vision.
This is a great example of taking ideas from computer vision and applying them to a challenging real-world problem,
he says. This is a known stumbling block for self-driving vehicles and one can envision how the extension of these concepts might lead to better sensors for advanced active safety and driverless car systems.
The Carnegie mellon team which recently presented its findings at the European Conference on Computer Vision in Zurich Switzerland is still modifying the prototype
which should be finished within the next six months. Over the next two years the team plans to miniaturize the components
and make the system faster. Robert Tamburo, lead engineer for the project says: We are currently exploring all options to bring our headlight design to market t
Researchers have completed the second of three major steps needed to turbocharge photosynthesis in crops such as wheat
Because it s more efficient the new photosynthesis method could also cut the amount of fertilizer
Researchers at Cornell University and Rothamsted Research in the United kingdom successfully transplanted genes from a type of bacteria-called cyanobacteria-into tobacco plants
But 75 percent of the world's crops (known as C3 plants) use a slower and less efficient form of photosynthesis. Researchers have been attempting for a long time to change some C3 plants-including wheat rice and potatoes-into C4 plants.
The approach has been given a boost lately by novel high-precision gene-editing technologies that are being applied to the C4 Rice Project (see Why We Will need Genetically modified foods.
If you can have a simpler mechanism that doesn't require anatomical changes that's pretty darn good says Daniel Voytas director of the Center for Genome Engineering at the University of Minnesota.
Maureen Hansen a professor of molecular biology and genetics at Cornell says the advances won't be seen in commercially grown food crops for at least five or 10 years.
and making sure the genes are stable says Dean Price a professor of medicine biology and environment at Australian National University.
Price was involved not in the current research. Only then can extensive field testing begin along with the regulatory process for genetically modified crops.
The approach will likely be limited at first to a few plants that researchers are particularly good at genetically modifying such as potatoes tomatoes eggplant and peppers.
However Price says there are genetic workarounds that could quickly make it possible in a wider range of crops s
#Radical New DNA Sequencer Finally Gets into Researchers Hands One day in 1989 biophysicist David Deamer pulled his car off California's Interstate 5 to hurriedly scribble down an idea.
In a mental flash he had pictured a strand of DNA threading its way through a microscopic pore.
Twenty-five years later the idea is now being commercialized as a gene sequencing machine that's no larger than a smartphone and
Early versions of the instrument called the Minion have been reaching scientific labs over the past few months after long delays (see 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2012:
Nanopore Sequencing). ) It's built by a U k. company Oxford Nanopore that has raised $292 million and spent 10 years developing Deamer's idea into a DNA sequencer unlike any other now available.
It is four inches long and gets its power from a USB port on a computer.
Unlike other commercial sequencing machines which can be the size of a refrigerator and require jugs of pricey chemicals this one measures DNA directly as the molecule is drawn through a tiny pore suspended in a membrane.
Changes in electrical current are used to read off the chain of genetic letters A g C
and T. Scientists with early access to prototypes of the first commercial nanopore sequencer say it's glitchy
After testing it Mick Watson a bioinformatics researcher at the Roslin Institute in Scotland says nanopore sequencing is a disruptive technology that could potentially dominate the sequencing market for years to come.
A sequencer this small might one day let police read off a genome from a spot of blood at a crime scene or permit doctors to pinpoint viruses in the midst of an epidemic.
One scientist this month tweeted a picture of the sequencer on his dining room table decoding DNA.
The Minion is the result of some very high-stakes R&d by Oxford a 200-person company that s long has had its eye on the expanding market for high-speed DNA sequencers.
About 90 percent of DNA data is produced on sequencing machines from a single company Illumina of San diego (see 50 Smartest Companies:
But now some big companies are betting that nanopores could be the technology to break Illumina's lucrative monopoly.
Roche which made a failed attempt to acquire Illumina in 2012 this year spent $125 million to buy Genia Technologies a small nanopore company based in California
Hitachi is also working on nanopore technology as are startups like Electronic Biosciences. Deamer says the idea of nanopore sequencing occurred to him in 1989 just three years after the first automated DNA sequencers were introduced.
He had been trying to build artificial cells spherical blobs of fat that could pump molecules in
His flash of insight was that a molecule passing through one of these pores especially a long molecule like DNA would continuously change the blob's electrical properties.
It took another 25 years before the Minion was developed. That's because the technical problems were so daunting.
Each DNA letter is only about half a nanometer from the next and some differ by just an atom
And how could you pull the string of DNA letters through the pore suspended in a layer one-100000th as thick as a hair much less at a rate of 30 letters a second as the Minion does?
There were a lot of smart people saying this is physically not possible to do says Jeffery Schloss head of the division of genome sciences at the National Human genome Research Institute in Bethesda Maryland.
When it first announced the Minion in 2012 expectations soared off the charts (see Why a Portable DNA Device Could Yield Better Data.
if the sequencer was vaporware. By this spring Oxford had worked the bugs out enough at any rate to start mailing out beta versions of the nanopore sequencer to 500 hand-picked labs it is collaborating with.
Another early creator of the technology Mark Akeson who works alongside Deamer in the bioengineering department at the University of California Santa cruz says
since June he s received two updated versions a sign of how quickly Oxford is scrambling to improve the device.
To the technology s original inventors the arrival of any commercial nanopore sequencer is a milestone.
The idea they can Fedex a 100-gram machine that actually works is pretty amazing says Akeson.
While both he and Deamer have extensive financial ties to Oxford they say it s obvious to everyone that the Minion is just the start.
Yet nanopore sequencing is so different that even a machine that s error-prone might be a boon to science.
Those bits then have to be puzzled back together to create a genome. Even with a supercomputer the puzzle often can't be solved there can be repeated too many sequences
or parts that go missing. Nanopore sequencing may help because it produces what scientists call long reads.
For instance Akeson says this summer his lab read across a continuous strand of human DNA that was 79000 letters long.
Like having the edges of a puzzle long reads make it much easier to reassemble a genome especially of a species never studied before.
Nick Loman a researcher at the University of Birmingham said his lab has paid about $1000 each to get hold of the machines though disposable cells containing the matrix of pores (about 2000 of them) would cost extra.
He said he hoped the price would stay very cheap in the future. Last week Oxford's chief technology officer Clive Brown said further instruments would be announced soon.
which was introduced early this year (see Does Illumina Have the First $1000 Genome?)to labs interested in sequencing hundreds of thousands of human genomes for medical research h
#Motorized Pants to Help Soldiers and Stroke Victims A soft exoskeleton being developed by researchers at Harvard could let soldiers carry heavy backpacks over long distances or help stroke victims walk more steadily.
The device which helps propel the wearer s legs forward is extremely lightweight and efficient
but the big challenge is the amount of energy the devices use. The Harvard prototype is much sleeker than most exoskeletons.
Sensors monitor the wearer s motion and battery-powered motors move cables to pull up on the heel
or on part of the leg near the hip##adding a propelling tug at just the right moment as the wearer steps forward.
It s quite lightweight flexible and conformal says Conor Walsh a professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering at Harvard.
and novel soft sensors made of silicone rubber are integrated into the suit. The sensors developed at another lab at Harvard include embedded channels filled with a conductive liquid that changes in resistivity as the silicone is stretched.
To make the device even more efficient Walsh is studying human biomechanics and testing people s energy consumption as they use it.
He is also hoping for advances in batteries to help lighten the load further. Whereas a person can walk 3. 5 miles using the energy in a single cookie an electric bike requires a battery weighing 10 times as much to travel the same distance.
Energy storage is still a challenge he says
#Gene-Silencing Drugs Finally Show Promise The disease starts with a feeling of increased clumsiness.
Spilling a cup of coffee. Stumbling on the stairs. Having accidents that are easy to dismiss everyone trips now and then.
But it inevitably gets worse. Known as familial amyloid polyneuropathy or FAP it can go misdiagnosed for years as patients lose the ability to walk
or perform delicate tasks with their hands. Most patients die within 10 to 15 years of the first symptoms.
There is no cure. The disease is caused by malformed proteins produced in the liver so one treatment is a liver transplant.
But few patients can get one and it only slows the disease down. Now after years of false starts and disappointment it looks like an audacious idea for helping these patients finally could work.
In 1998 researchers at the Carnegie Institution and the University of Massachusetts made a surprising discovery about how cells regulate
which proteins they produce. They found that certain kinds of RNA which is what DNA makes to create proteins can turn off specific genes.
The finding called RNA interference (RNAI) was exciting because it suggested a way to shut down the production of any protein in the body including those connected with diseases that couldn't be touched with ordinary drugs.
It was so promising that its discoverers won the Nobel prize just eight years later. Inspired by the discovery another group of researchers including the former thesis supervisor of one of the Nobel laureates founded Alnylam in Cambridge Massachusetts in 2002.
Their goal: fight diseases like FAP by using RNAI to eliminate bad proteins (see The Prize of RNAI and Prescription RNA.
Never mind that no one knew how to make a drug that could trigger RNAI. In fact that challenge would bedevil the researchers for the better part of a decade.
Along the way the company lost the support of major drug companies that had signed on in a first wave of enthusiasm.
At one point the idea of RNAI therapy was on the verge of being discredited. But now Alnylam is testing a drug to treat FAP in advanced human trials.
It s the last hurdle before the company will seek regulatory approval to put the drug on the market.
Alnylam has more than 11 drugs including ones for hemophilia Hepatitis b and even high cholesterol in its development pipeline and has three in human trials progress that led the pharmaceutical company Sanofi to make a $700 million investment in the company last winter.
Last month the pharmaceutical giant Roche an early Alnylam supporter that had given up on RNAI reversed its opinion of the technology as well announcing a $450 million deal to acquire the RNAI startup Santaris.
The world went from believing RNAI would change everything to thinking it wouldn t work to now thinking it will says Robert Langer a professor at MIT and one of Alnylam s advisors.
Its founders among them the Nobel laureate and MIT biologist Philip Sharp had solved one of the biggest challenges facing the idea of RNAI therapies.
One was encasing RNA in bubbles of fat-like nanoparticles of lipids. They are made with the same materials that make up cell membranes the thought was that the cell would respond well to the familiar substance.
The early mechanisms were too toxic at the doses required to be used as drugs. As a result delivering RNA through the bloodstream like a conventional drug seemed a far-off prospect.
The company tried a shortcut of injecting chemically modified RNA directly into diseased tissue for example into the retina to treat eye diseases.
By 2010 some of the major drug companies that were working with and investing in Alnylam lost patience.
Alnylam laid off about a quarter of its workers and by mid-2011 its stock price had plunged by 80 percent from its peak.
But Alnylam and partner companies notably the Canadian startup Tekmira were making steady progress in the lab. Researchers identified one part of the lipid nanoparticles that was keeping them from delivering its cargo of RNA to the right part of a cell.
Better nanoparticles improved the potency of a drug a hundredfold and its safety by about five times clearing the way for clinical trials for FAP a crucial event that kept the company alive.
The nanoparticle delivery mechanism is costly to make and requires frequent visits to the hospital for hour-long IV infusions something patients desperate to stay alive will put up with but likely not millions of people with high cholesterol.
So Alnylam turned to its second delivery approach attaching molecules to RNA to trick cells into ingesting it.
This approach allows for the drug to be administered with a simple injection that patients could give themselves at home.
The combination of low cost and ease-of-use is allowing Alnylam to go after more common diseases not just the rare ones that patients will go to great lengths to treat.
Because we ve made incredible improvements in the delivery strategy Meyers says we can now go after big diseases where we can treat millions of patients potentially.
They contain hundreds of vials each containing a unique type of nanoparticle that Dahlman synthesized painstakingly one at a time.
Dahlman doesn t work for Alnylam; he had been searching for the next great delivery mechanism one that could greatly expand the diseases that can be treated by RNAI.
Some of the materials look like clear liquids. Some are waxy some like salt crystals. He points to a gap in the rows of vials where a vial is conspicuously missing.
That s the one that worked. That s the miracle material he says. For all of their benefits the drug delivery mechanisms Alnylam uses have one flaw they re effective only for delivering drugs to liver cells.
For a number of reasons the liver is a relatively easy target that s where all kinds of nanoparticles tend to end up.
Alnylam sees the potential for billions of dollars in revenue from liver-related diseases. Yet most diseases involve other tissues in the body.
Dahlman and his colleagues at MIT are some of the leaders in the next generation of RNAI delivery targeting delivery to places throughout the body.
Last month in two separate articles they published the results of studies showing that Dahlman s new nanoparticles are a powerful way to deliver RNAI to blood vessel cells
which are associated with a wide variety of diseases. The studies showed that the method could be used to reduce tumor growth in lung cancer for example.
Treating cancer is one area where RNAI s particular advantages are expected to shine. Conventional chemotherapy affects more than just the target cancer cells it also hurts healthy tissue
which is why it makes people feel miserable. But RNAI can be extremely precise potentially shutting down only proteins found in cancer cells.
which could make cancer treatments far more effective. Lab work like this is far from fruition but if it maintains its momentum the drugs currently in clinical trials could represent just a small portion of the benefits of the discovery of RNAI i
#Intel Says Laptops and Tablets with 3-D Vision Are Coming Soon Laptops with 3-D sensors in place of conventional webcams will go on sale before the end of this year according to chip maker Intel
which is providing the sensing technology to manufacturers. And tablets with 3-D sensors will hit the market in 2015 the company said at its annual developers conference in San francisco on Wednesday.
Intel first announced its 3-D sensing technology at the Consumer electronics Show in January (see Intel s 3-D Camera Heads to Laptops and Tablets.
It has developed two different types of depth sensor. One is designed for use in place of a front-facing webcam to sense human movement such as gestures.
The other is designed for use on the back of a device to scan objects as far as four meters away.
Both sensors allow a device to capture the color and 3-D shape of a scene making it possible for a computer to recognize gestures
or find objects in a room. Intel is working with software companies to develop applications that use the technology.
In the next few weeks the chip maker will release free software that any software developer can use to build apps for the sensors.
Partners already working with Intel include Microsoft s Skype unit the movie and gaming studio Dreamworks and the 3-D design company Autodesk according to Achin Bhowmik general manager for Intel s
perceptual computing business unit. None of those partners showed off what they re working on at the event this week.
But Intel showed several demonstrations of its own. One developed with a startup called Volumental lets you snap a 3-D photo of your foot to get an accurate shoe size measurement something that could help with online shopping.
Another demonstration showed how a 3-D sensor could measure the dimensions of a sofa in a store
and how it might gauge the true size of a fisherman s catch from a photo of the fish dangling from his rod.
Bhowmik also showed how data from a tablet s 3-D sensor can be used to build very accurate augmented reality games where a virtual character viewed on a device s screen integrates into the real environment.
In one demo a flying robot appeared on-screen and selected a landing spot on top of a box on a cluttered table.
As the tablet showing the character was moved it stayed perched on the tabletop and even disappeared behind occluding objects.
Intel also showed how the front-facing 3-D sensors can be used to recognize gestures to play games on a laptop
or take control of some features of Windows. Those demonstrations were reminiscent of Microsoft s Kinect sensor for its Xbox gaming console
which introduced gamers to depth sensing and gesture control in 2010. Microsoft launched a version of Kinect aimed at Windows PCS in 2012
and significantly upgraded its depth-sensing technology in 2013 but Kinect devices are too large to fit inside a laptop or tablet.
Some of Intel s demos were rough around the edges suggesting that their compact sensors are less accurate than the larger ones of Microsoft.
However Bhowmik said that any such glitches would be unnoticeable in the fully polished apps that will appear on commercial devices.
Intel s two sensors work in slightly different ways. The front sensor calculates the position of objects by observing how they distort an invisible pattern of infrared light by a tiny projector in the sensor.
The rear sensor scans a scene using twin cameras that gauge depth with stereovision combined with an infrared camera to help fine-tune the results.
Intel s new sensors are roughly the same size as the camera components used in existing devices says Bhowmik.
The rear sensor in particular is compact enough to fit in very slim devices. On Monday Dell announced that the sensors will appear later this year in its Venue 8 7000 tablet which is only six millimeters thick thinner than any other tablet on the market t
#A Super-Strong and Lightweight New Material A new type of material made up of nanoscale struts crisscrossed like the struts of a tiny Eiffel Tower is one of the strongest and lightest substances ever made.
If researchers can figure out how to make the stuff in large quantities it could be used as a structural material for making planes and trucks as well as in battery electrodes.
Researchers led by Caltech materials scientist Julia Greer found that by carefully designing nanoscale struts and joints they could make ceramics metals
and other materials that can recover after being crushed like a sponge. The materials are very strong and light enough to float through the air like a feather.
The work is published today in the journal Science. In conventional materials strength weight and density are correlated.
Ceramics for example are strong but also heavy so they can t be used as structural materials where weight is critical##for example in the bodies of cars.
And when ceramics fail they tend to fail catastrophically shattering like glass. But at the nanoscale the same rules do not apply.
In this size range the structural and mechanical properties of ceramics become less tied to properties such as weight
and they can be altered more precisely. For ceramics smaller is tougher says Greer who was named one of MIT Technology Review s 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2008 for her work on nanoscale mechanics.
This means that nanoscale trusses made from ceramic materials can be both very light##unsurprising since they are mostly air##and extremely strong.
In 2011 researchers at HRL Laboratories a private engineering research company created one of the lightest materials ever made a microlattice of hollow metal tubes.
Greer worked with the company to characterize the material and later chose to take on the greater challenge of making ceramics with similar properties.
This required fine-tuning structures at the nanoscale meaning the materials are even more difficult to produce.
To make the ceramic nano-trusses Greer s lab uses a technique called two-photon interference lithography.
It s akin to a very low-yield 3-D laser printer. First they use this method to create the desired structure a lattice out of a polymer.
The polymer lattice is coated then with a ceramic such as alumina. Oxygen plasma etches out the polymer leaving behind a lattice of hollow ceramic tubes.
Greer s lab showed that by changing the thickness of the tube walls it s possible to control how the material fails.
When the walls are thick the ceramic shatters under pressure as expected. But trusses with thinner walls just 10 nanometers thick buckle
when compressed and then recover their shape. You don t expect these materials to recover##you expect them to be brittle
and to fracture says Christopher Spadaccini an engineer who specializes in materials manufacturing at the U s. Department of energy s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The new materials might be particularly interesting for use in batteries notes Nicholas Fang a mechanical engineer at MIT who is also working on nanostructured ceramics.
Nanostructures have a very high surface area and are lightweight a combination that could make for a fast-charging battery that stores a lot of energy in a convenient package.
In fact Greer says she is collaborating with German electronics company Bosch to apply her designs to lithium-air batteries i
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