#This can make the organs in your body transparent California Institute of technology rightoriginal Studyposted by Jessica Stoller-Conrad-Caltech on August 6 2014scientists have developed a way to see through tissues organs and even an entire body.
The technique allows them to peer through the tissue#in 3d#using standard optical methods such as confocal microscopy. arge volumes of tissue are not optically transparent#you can t see through themsays Viviana Gradinaru (BS 05) an assistant professor of biology
at the California Institute of technology (Caltech) and the principal investigator whose team has developed the new techniques which are explained in a paper appearing in the journal Cell.
if we need to see individual cells within a large volume of tissue#within a mouse kidney for example
or a human tumor biopsy#e have to slice the tissue very thin separately image each slice with a microscope
and put all of the images back together with a computer. t s a very time-consuming process and it is error prone especially
or sparse cell populations such as stem cells or tumor cellsshe says. The new approach builds off a technique known as CLARITY that was developed previously by Gradinaru
and hydrogel#a water-based polymer gel that provides structural support #thus learingthe tissue but leaving its three-dimensional architecture intact for study.
and postdoctoral scholar Jennifer Treweek coauthors on the paper#can quickly deliver the lipid-dissolving hydrogel and chemical solution throughout the body.
When whole-body clearing is not necessary the method works just as well on individual organs by using a technique called PACT short for passive clarity technique.
and RNA#Gradinaru and her team collaborated with Long Cai an assistant professor of chemistry at Caltech
The Cell paper focuses on the use of PACT and PARS as research tools for studying disease and development in research organisms.
Using the techniques on a biopsy from a human skin tumor the researchers were able to view the distribution of individual tumor cells within a tissue mass.
In the future Gradinaru says the methods could be used in the clinic for the rapid detection of cancer cells in biopsy samples.
Gradinaru also leads Caltech s Beckman Institute BIONIC center for optogenetics and tissue clearing and plans to offer training sessions to researchers interested in learning how to use PACT
and PARS in their own labs. think these new techniques are very practical for many fields in biologyshe says. hen you can just look through an organism for the exact cells
#Wi-fi backscatter could make Internet of things real A new method uses radio frequency signals as a power source
and reuses existing Wi-fi infrastructure to provide internet connectivity to battery-free devices. Called Wi-fi backscatter this technology is the first that can connect battery-free devices to Wi-fi infrastructure.
Imagine a world in which your wristwatch or other wearable device communicates directly with your online profiles storing information about your daily activities where you can best access it all without requiring batteries.
Or battery-free sensors embedded around your home could track minute-by-minute temperature changes and send that information to your thermostat to help conserve energy.
This not-so-distant nternet of Thingsreality would extend connectivity to perhaps billions of devices.
Sensors could be embedded in everyday objects to help monitor and track everything from the structural safety of bridges to the health of your heart.
But needing a way to cheaply power and connect these devices to the internet has kept this from taking off. f Internet of things devices are going to take off we must provide connectivity to the potentially billions of battery-free devices that will be embedded in everyday objectssays Shyam Gollakota an assistant professor of computer science
and engineering at the University of Washington. e now have the ability to enable Wi-fi connectivity for devices
while consuming orders of magnitude less power than what Wi-fi typically requires. he researchers will publish their results at the Association for Computing Machinery s Special interest Group on Data communication s annual conference this month in Chicago.
The team also plans to start a company based on the technology. This work builds upon previous research that showed how low-powered devices such as temperature sensors
or wearable technology could run without batteries or cords by harnessing energy from existing radio TV
and wireless signals in the air. This work takes that a step further by connecting each individual device to the internet
which previously wasn t possible. The challenge in providing Wi-fi connectivity to these devices is that conventional low-power Wi-fi consumes three to four orders of magnitude more power than can be harvested in these wireless signals.
The researchers instead developed an ultra-low power tag prototype with an antenna and circuitry that can talk to Wi-fi-enabled laptops or smartphones while consuming negligible power.
These tags work by essentially ookingfor Wi-fi signals moving between the router and a laptop or smartphone.
They encode data by either reflecting or not reflecting the Wi-fi router s signals slightly changing the wireless signal.
Wi-fi-enabled devices like laptops and smartphones would detect these minute changes and receive data from the tag.
In this way your smart watch could download emails or offload your workout data onto a Google spreadsheet. ou might think how could this possibly work
when you have a low-power device making such a tiny change in the wireless signal?
But the point is if you re looking for specific patterns you can find it among all the other Wi-fi reflections in an environmentsays coauthor Joshua Smith an associate professor of computer science and engineering and of electrical engineering.
The Wi-fi backscatter tag has communicated with a Wi-fi device at rates of 1 kilobit per second with about 2 meters between the devices.
They plan to extend the range to about 20 meters and have filed patents on the technology.
The University of Washington Commercialization Gap Fund the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship Washington Research Foundation the National Science Foundation and the University of Washington supported the work.
Source: University of Washington You are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license
#Algorithm edits boring bits out of Gopro videos Carnegie mellon University Posted by Byron Spice-Carnegie mellon on August 5 2014.
It's easy to capture video with smartphones Gopro cameras and Google glass but viewing it can get boring.
A new video highlighting technique can automatically pick out the interesting parts. Called Livelight this method constantly evaluates action in the video looking for visual novelty
and ignoring repetitive or eventless sequences to create a summary that lets a viewer get the gist of
what happened. It basically produces a miniature video trailer. Although not yet comparable to a professionally edited video it can help people quickly review a long video of an event a security camera feed or video from a police cruiser's windshield camera.
One potential application would be using Livelight to automatically digest videos from Gopro or Google glass for example and quickly upload thumbnail trailers to social media.
The summarization process avoids generating costly internet data charges and tedious manual editing on long videos.
This application along with the surveillance camera auto-summarization is now being developed for the retail market by Panoptus Inc. a startup founded by the inventors of Livelight.
The Livelight video summary occurs in uasi-real-timewith just a single pass through the video.
It's not instantaneous but it doesn't take long Livelight might take 1 to 2 hours to process one hour of raw video
and can do so on a conventional laptop. With a more powerful backend computing facility production time can be shortened to mere minutes according to the researchers.
Eric P. Xing professor of machine learning and Bin Zhao a Phd student in the machine learning department presented their work on June 26 at the Computer Vision
and Pattern Recognition Conference in Columbus Ohio. he algorithm never looks backsays Zhao whose research specialty is computer vision.
Rather as the algorithm processes the video it compiles a dictionary of its content. The algorithm then uses the learned dictionary to decide in a very efficient way
if a newly seen segment is similar to previously observed events such as routine traffic on a highway.
Segments thus identified as trivial recurrences or eventless are excluded from the summary. Novel sequences not appearing in the learned dictionary such as an erratic car
or a traffic accident would be included in the summary. Though Livelight can produce these summaries automatically users can also participating in compiling the summary.
In that instance Zhao says Livelight provides a ranked list of novel sequences for a human editor to consider for the final video.
In addition to selecting the sequences a human editor might choose to restore some of the footage deemed worthless to provide context
or visual transitions before and after the sequences of interest. e see this as potentially the ultimate unmanned tool for unlocking video dataxing says.
Video has never been easier for the average person to shoot but reviewing and tagging the raw video remains so tedious that ever larger volumes of video are going unwatched or discarded.
The ability to detect unusual behaviors amidst long stretches of tedious video could also be a boon to security firms that monitor and review surveillance camera video.
Google, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research and the Air force Office of Scientific research supported the work r
#obbit skull points To down syndrome, not new species New analysis of a 15000-year-old skull and thigh bone shows the original descriptions of the remains may have been skewed.
Instead of the abnormalities marking a new species the bones more likely indicate Down syndrome researchers say.
Now detailed reanalysis by an international team of researchers including Robert B. Eckhardt professor of developmental genetics
and according to the researchers contains important features most consistent with a diagnosis of Down syndrome. he skeletal sample from Liang Bua cave contains fragmentary remains of several individualseckhardt says.
and the revised figure falls in the range predicted for a modern human with Down syndrome from the same geographic regioneckhardt says.
But humans with Down syndrome also have diagnostically short thighbones Eckhardt says. Though these and other features are acknowledged unusual he nusual does not equal unique.
The originally reported traits are not so rare as to have required the invention of a new hominin species. nstead the researchers build the case for an alternative diagnosis:
Down syndrome one of the most commonly occurring developmental disorders in modern humans. hen we first saw these bones several of us immediately spotted a developmental disturbancesays Eckhardt ut we did not assign a specific diagnosis
Over the years several lines of evidence have converged on Down syndrome. he first indicator is craniofacial asymmetry a left-right mismatch of the skull that is characteristic of this and other disorders.
A previously unpublished measurement of LB1 s occipital-frontal circumference the circumference of the skull taken roughly above the tops of the ears allowed the researchers to compare LB1 to clinical data routinely collected on patients with developmental disorders.
Here too the brain size they estimate is within the range expected for an Australomelanesian human with Down syndrome.
LB1 s short thighbones not only match the height reduction seen in Down syndrome Eckhardt says but when corrected statistically for normal growth they would yield a stature of about 1. 26 meters
and not in the other Liang Bua skeletal remains further evidence of LB1 s abnormality. his work is presented not in the form of a fanciful story
Here the signs point rather clearly To down syndrome which occurs in more than one per thousand human births around the world. e
#Butterfly tree decodes evolution of 160,000 species University of Florida rightoriginal Studyposted by Stephenie Livingston-Florida on August 4 2014butterflies are more closely related to small moths than to big ones according to new
and moths and create an extensive ree of Lepidoptera. esearchers also discovered that some insects once classified as moths are actually butterflies meaning there are more butterfly species that previously thought. his project advances biodiversity research by providing an evolutionary foundation for a very diverse group of insects with nearly 160000 described
and assistant curator of Lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural history at University of Florida. ith a tree we can now understand how the majority of butterfly
Biological sciences the study builds the evolutionary framework for future ecological and genetics research of insects Kawahara says. here is a DNA revolution taking place.
This is an important time in the history of science when we can use DNA sequencing on a very large scale. he yearlong study is one of the first to utilize a massive amount of genetic data to answer questions about the history of butterflies and moths.
The analysis reveals monumental discoveries about the lineage of Lepidoptera including strongly contradicting the traditional placement of butterflies in evolutionary history.
Using next-generation sequencing a method used to rapidly process large amounts of DNA scientists developed an initial sample of 46 species that represent many of the most biodiverse groups of moths and butterflies.
They also combined 33 new transcriptomes a set of RNA molecules with 13 genomes both
of which hold genetic material for organisms. The researchers identified 2696 genes by breaking down the DNA down and piecing it back together Kawahara says.
and director of the University of Hawaii Insect Museum. his study adds to a growing body of knowledge by bringing new techniques to the table
University of Floridayou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license u
#Rice genome could answer the 9 billion-people question Researchers have sequenced the complete genome of African rice a hardy crop that could help feed the world s growing population. ice feeds
half the world making it the most important food cropsays Rod A. Wing director of the Arizona Genomic Institute at University of Arizona
and chair of the school of plant sciences with a joint appointment in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology. ice will play a key role in helping to solve what we call the 9 billion-people question. he 9 billion people question refers to predictions that the world
Now with the completely sequenced African rice genome scientists and agriculturalists can search for ways to cross Asian
and African species to develop new varieties of rice with the high-yield traits of Asian rice
and the hardiness of African rice. frican rice is once more at the forefront of cultivation strategies that aim to confront climate change
and food availability challengessays coauthor Judith Carney professor of geography at University of California Los angeles. Although it is cultivated currently in only a handful of locations around the world African rice is hardier
and more resistant to environmental stress in West african environments than Asian varieties Wing says. African rice already has been crossed with Asian rice to produce new varieties under a group known as NERICA which stands for New Rice for Africa.
The African rice genome is especially important because many of the genes code for traits that make African rice resistant to environmental stress such as long periods of drought high salinity in the soils
and flooding. ow that we have a precise knowledge of the genome we can identify these traits more easily
and move genes more rapidly through conventional breeding methods or through genetic modification techniqueswing says. he idea is to create a super-rice that will be higher yielding
but will have less of an environmental impact such as varieties that require less water fertilizer and pesticides. ardy high-yield crops will become increasingly vital for human survival as the world faces the environmental effects of climate change and an ever-growing global population.
Wing s research group specializes in developing what geneticists call physical maps a tool that enables scientists to understand the structure of the genome.
His group developed the physical maps for Asian rice and donated it to the Rice Genome Project making sequencing of that complete genome possible.
Much of the evolutionary analysis of the genome was performed by plant sciences doctoral candidate Muhua Wang and by Carlos Machado of the University of Maryland.
Yeisoo Yu a research associate professor in Wing s research group at the Arizona Genomics Institute led the sequencing effort.
In analyzing the 33000 genes that make up the African rice genome the researchers discovered that during the process of domestication Africans
and Asians independently selected for many of the same genetic traits in the two species such as higher nutrition
and traits that make harvesting the crop easier. Additionally the sequenced genome helps resolve questions about
whether African rice originally was domesticated in one region or in several locations across Africa. By comparing the genome with
what is known about the genetic structure of wild varieties Wing and his team found that it s most similar to a population of wild rice species found in one location along the Niger river in Mali. ur data supports the hypothesis that the domestication of African rice was centric in this region of Africawing says.
From 1998 to 2005 Wing led the US effort to help sequence the genome of Asian rice which is the only other domesticated rice species. Those results were published in the journal Nature in 2005
and have enabled since the discovery of hundreds of agriculturally important genes including genes that code for faster breeding cycles
and the ability for the plant to survive for up to two weeks underwater during periods of flooding.
The group is now focusing on sequencing and analyzing the genomes of the wild relatives of African
and Asian rice. y understanding the entire genus at a genome level we have a whole new pool of genetic variation that can be used to combat pests
and plant pathogenswing says. One example would be adding disease resistance genes from all of the wild rice varieties to a species of cultivated rice creating a new super-crop that is resistant to diseases and pests.
Wing is also working with Quifa Zhang from Huazhong Agricultural University in Wuhan China to create a set of super-crop science
and technology centers around the world where focused and coordinated efforts could help solve the 9 billion-people question. e really only have about 25 years to solve this problem
and if we re always competing with each other it s not going to workhe says. fter decades of promoting high-yielding Asian varieties the emphasis now is on developing types that combine the former s higher yields with glaberrimas tolerance of environmental stresscarney
Stretching the material known as carbyne a hard-to-make one-dimensional chain of carbon atoms by just 3 percent can begin to change its properties in ways that engineers might find useful for mechanically activated nanoscale electronics and optics.
The first-principle calculations by Rice university theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and his coauthors postdoctoral researcher Vasilii Artyukhov and graduate student Mingjie Liu show that stretching carbon chains activates the transition from conductor to insulator
by widening the material s band gap. Band gaps which free electrons must overcome to complete a circuit give materials the semiconducting properties that make modern electronics possible.
In their previous work on carbyne the researchers believed they saw hints of the transition but they had to dig deeper to find that stretching would effectively turn the material into a switch.
In their relaxed state the atoms in a carbyne chain would be spaced more or less evenly with two bonds between them.
which Yakobson says keeps them from slipping into a less-stable Peierls distortion. eierls said one-dimensional metals are unstable and must become semiconductors
because there are two driving factors. ne the Peierls distortion ants to open the gap that makes it a semiconductor.
and the metal state. akobson explains that ZPV is a manifestation of quantum uncertainty which says atoms are always in motion. t s more a blur than a vibrationhe says. e can say carbyne represents the uncertainty principle in action
because when it s relaxed the bonds are confused constantly between 2-2 and 1-3 to the point where they average out
and the chain remains metallic. ut stretching the chain shifts the balance toward alternating long and short (1-3) bonds.
That progressively opens a band gap beginning at about 3 percent tension according to the computations. The team created a phase diagram to illustrate the relationship of the band gap to strain and temperature.
How carbyne is attached to electrodes also matters Artyukhov says. ifferent bond connectivity patterns can affect the metallic/dielectric state balance
and shift the transition point potentially to where it may not be accessible anymorehe says. o one has to be extremely careful about making the contacts.?
Carbyne s structure is a conundrumhe says. ntil this paper everybody was convinced it was single-triple with a long bond then a short bond caused by Peierls instability.
He says the realization that quantum vibrations may quench Peierls together with the team's earlier finding that tension can increase the band gap
and may apply equally to other one-dimensional chains subject to Peierls distortions including conducting polymers and charge/spin density-wave materials.
The Robert Welch Foundation the US Air force Office of Scientific research and the Office of Naval Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative supported the research
The researchers used the Data analysis and Visualization Cyberinfrastructure (DAVINCI) supercomputer supported by the NSF and administered by Rice s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information technology.
Source: Rice Universityyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license m
#Crows beat test that stumps little kids University of California Santa barbara right Original Studyposted by Andrea Estrada-UCSB on July 25 2014 In Aesop s fable about the crow
and the pitcher a thirsty bird finds a vessel of water but when he tries to drink from it he finds that the water level is too low.
New research conducted by University of California Santa barbara s Corina Logan and collaborators proves the birds intellectual prowess may be more fact than fiction.
-and-effect relationships by choosing options that displace more water. ogan a junior research fellow at UCSB s SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind worked with New Caledonian crows in a set of small aviaries in New caledonia run by the University of Auckland
n a previous experiment by Sarah Jelbert and colleagues at the University of Auckland the birds had preferred not the narrow tube.
or they may be using some other cognitive mechanism. ore work is neededlogan says. Logan also examined how the crows react to the U-tube task.
and colleagues at the University of Cambridge discovered in 2012. It may have taken a couple of tries to figure out how it worked Logan notes
Recently Jelbert and colleagues from the University of Auckland put the New Caledonian crows to the test using the same apparatus the children did.
and grackles are smaller-brainedshe says. ut they re really innovative So they may have a reason to pay attention to causal information like this. he next research phase will begin next month after the grackles breeding season ends
The National geographic Society/Waitt Grants Program supported the work. Source: UC Santa Barbarayou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license l
#Laser device sniffs out tiny traces of explosives University of California Berkeley rightoriginal Studyposted by Sarah Yang-Berkeley on July 24 2014mechanical engineers have found a way to dramatically increase the sensitivity of a light-based plasmon sensor.
The engineers put the sensor to the test with various explosivesâ##2. 4-dinitrotoluene (DNT) ammonium nitrate
The results published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology are much more sensitive than those for other optical sensors says Xiang Zhang professor of mechanical engineering at University of California Berkeley. ptical explosive sensors are very sensitive
and compactsays Zhang who is also director of the Materials science Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
and director at UC Berkeley of the National Science Foundation Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center. he ability to magnify such a small trace of an explosive to create a detectable signal is a major development in plasmonsensor technology
which is one of the most powerful tools we have today. he new sensor could have an advantage over current bomb-screening methods says co-lead author Ren-Min Ma an assistant professor of
physics at Peking University who did the work asâ a postdoctoral researcher in Zhang s lab. omb-sniffing dogs are expensive to train
Our technology could lead to a bomb-detecting chip for a handheld device that can detect the tiny-trace vapor in the air of the explosive s small molecules. he sensor also could be developed into an alarm for unexploded landmines that
The nanoscale plasmon sensor used in the lab experiments is much smaller than other explosive detectors on the market.
It consists of a layer of cadmium sulfide a semiconductor that is laid on top of a sheet of silver with a layer of magnesium fluoride in the middle.
This quality increases the interaction of the molecules with natural surface defects on the semiconductor.
The device works by detecting the increased intensity in the light signal that occurs as a result of this interaction. e think that higher electron deficiency of explosives leads to a stronger interaction with the semiconductor sensorsays study co-lead author Sadao
Ota a former Phd student in Zhang s lab who is now an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Tokyo.
Because of this the researchers are hopeful that their plasmon laser sensor could detect pentaerythritol tetranitrate or PETN an explosive compound considered a favorite of terrorists.
when not connected to detonators. This is the explosive that was found in Richard Reid s shoe bomb in 2001 and Umar Farouk Abdulmtallab s underwear bomb in 2009.
US Attorney general Eric holder Jr. was quoted recently in news reports as having xtreme extreme concernabout Yemeni bomb makers joining forces with Syrian militants to develop these hard-to-detect explosives which can be hidden in cell phones and mobile devices.
ETN has more nitro functional groups and is more electron deficient than the DNT we detected in our experiments so the sensitivity of our device should be even higher than with DNTMA says.
The sensor represents the latest milestone in surface plasmon sensor technology which is used now in the medical field to detect biomarkers in the early stages of disease.
The ability to increase the sensitivity of optical sensors traditionally had been restricted by the diffraction limit a limitation in fundamental physics that forces a tradeoff between how long
and in how small a space the light can be trapped. By coupling electromagnetic waves with surface plasmons the oscillating electrons found at the surface of metals researchers were able to squeeze light into nanosized spaces
but sustaining the confined energy was challenging because light tends to dissipate at a metal s surface.
The new device builds upon earlier work in plasmon lasers by Zhang s lab that compensated for this light leakage by using reflectors to bounce the surface plasmons back and forth inside the sensorâ##similar to the way sound waves
are reflected across the room in a whispering galleryâ ##and using the optical gain from the semiconductor to amplify the light energy.
The amplified sensor creates a much stronger signal than the passive plasmon sensors currently available
which work by detecting shifts in the wavelength of light Zhang says. he difference in intensity is similar to going from a light bulb for a table lamp to a laser pointer.
We create a sharper signal which makes it easier to detect even smaller changes for tiny traces of explosives in the air. he sensor could have applications beyond chemical and explosive detection such as use in biomolecular research.
The US Air force Office of Scientific research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative program helped support this work.
Source: UC Berkeleyyou are free to share this article under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivs 3. 0 Unported license o
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