#Technology helps personalized medicine, enabling epigenomic analysis with a mere 100 cells A new technology that will dramatically enhance investigations of epigenomes, the machinery that turns on and off genes and a very prominent field of study in diseases such as stem cell differentiation,
inflammation and cancer, is reported on today in the research journal Nature Methods("A microfluidic device for epigenomic profiling using 100 cells").
"The examination of epigenomes requires mapping DNA interactions with a certain protein in the entire genome.
This epigenomic characterization potentially allows medical doctors to create personalized treatment of diseases, by understanding the state of a patient,
making the forecast, and tuning the treatment strategy accordingly. However, such tests require a huge number of cells.
At one point, the study of in vivo genome-wide protein-DNA interactions and chromatin modifications required approximately 10 million cells for an individual test.
Chang Lu, a professor of chemical engineering at Virginia Tech, has worked on the development of tools to effectively analyze living cells with the long-term goal of gaining a better understanding of a range of diseases.
In his lab, Lu and his students develop small microfluidic devices with micrometer features for examining molecular events inside cells.
The latest breakthrough comes from Lu's collaboration with Kai Tan at the University of Iowa, a systems biologist and associate professor of internal medicine.
along with a seed grant from Virginia Tech's Institute for Critical Technology and Applied science, funded this work."
"The use of a packed bed of beads for Chip allowed us to collect the chromatin fragments with a very high efficiency.
The entire MOWCHIP process takes about 90 minutes as opposed to many hours that conventional Chip assays took.
and progenitor cells isolated from the fetal liver of a mouse in Tan's lab. As Tan explained,"
the team plans to use this technology to study other epigenomic changes involved in inflammation and cancer in the near future e
#Researchers design first artificial ribosome Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Northwestern University have engineered a tethered ribosome that works nearly as well as the authentic cellular component,
or organelle, that produces all the proteins and enzymes within the cell. The engineered ribosome may enable the production of new drugs and next-generation biomaterials and lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes function.
The artificial ribosome, called Ribo-T, was created in the laboratories of Alexander Mankin, director of the UIC College of Pharmacy Center for Biomolecular Sciences,
and Northwestern Michael Jewett, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering. The human-made ribosome may be able to be manipulated in the laboratory to do things natural ribosomes cannot do.
When the cell makes a protein, mrna (MESSENGER RNA) is copied from DNA. The ribosomestwo subunits, one large and one small, unite on mrna to form the functional unit that assembles the protein in a process called translation.
Ribo-T may be able to be tuned to produce unique and functional polymers for exploring ribosome functions
or producing designer therapeutics and perhaps one day even non-biological polymers. No one has developed ever something of this nature. e felt like there was a small very small chance Ribo-T could work,
but we did not really know, Mankin said. Mankin, Jewett and their colleagues were frustrated in their investigations by the ribosomessubunits falling apart
Jewett. ur new protein-making factory holds promise to expand the genetic code in a unique and transformative way, providing exciting opportunities for synthetic biology and biomolecular engineering,
In optical communications, laser pulses are used to transmit information along fiber-optic cables for telephone service, the Internet and cable television.
Researchers at Purdue University have shown how an optical material made of aluminum-doped zinc oxide (AZO) is able to modulate
"said doctoral student Nathaniel Kinsey.""Otherwise, your material would heat up and melt when you start pushing it really fast.
Both the data stream and the control signals are optical pulses.""Being able to modulate the amount of light reflected is necessary for potential industrial applications such as data transmission."
"We can engineer the film to provide either a decrease or an increase in reflection,
working with a team of researchers led by Alexandra Boltasseva, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering,
and Vladimir M. Shalaev, scientific director of nanophotonics at Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center and a distinguished professor of electrical and computer engineering."
or a decrease in the reflection to encode data. It just depends on what you are trying to do.
"Findings were detailed in a research paper appearing in July in the journal Optica("Epsilon-near-zero Al-doped Zno for ultrafast switching at telecom wavelengths"),published by the Optical
and it is compatible with the complementary metalxideemiconductor (CMOS) manufacturing process used to construct integrated circuits.
"or an optical transistor. In electronics, silicon-based transistors are critical building blocks that switch power
and amplify signals. An optical transistor could perform a similar role for light instead of electricity,
bringing far faster systems than now possible. The Optica paper, featured on the cover of the journal, was authored by Kinsey, graduate students Clayton Devault and Jongbum Kim;
visiting scholar Marcello Ferrera from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland; Shalaev and Boltasseva. Exposing the material to a pulsing laser light causes electrons to move from one energy level called the valence band to a higher energy level called the conduction band.
As the electrons move to the conduction band they leave behind"holes"in the valance band,
and eventually the electrons recombine with these holes. The switching speed of transistors is limited by how fast it takes conventional semiconductors such as silicon to complete this cycle of light to be absorbed,
excite electrons, produce holes and then recombine.""So what we would like to do is speed drastically this up,
The increase in speed could translate into devices at least 10 times faster than conventional silicon-based electronics.
"meaning the refractive index is near zero, a quality found normally in metals and new"metamaterials,
"which contain features, patterns or elements that enable unprecedented control of light by harnessing clouds of electrons called surface plasmons.
Unlike natural materials, metamaterials are able to reduce the index of refraction to less than one or less than zero.
Refraction occurs as electromagnetic waves including light, bend when passing from one material into another. Each material has its own refraction index,
"If you are operating in the range where your refractive index is low then you can have enhanced an effect,
The researchers"doped"zinc oxide with aluminum, meaning the zinc oxide is impregnated with aluminum atoms to alter the material's optical properties.
Doping the zinc oxide causes it to behave like a metal at certain wavelengths and like a dielectric at other wavelengths.
because that damages underlying material on the chip or device, "Kinsey said.""An interesting thing about these materials is that by changing factors like the processing temperature you can drastically change the properties of the films.
"The AZO also makes it possible to"tune"the optical properties of metamaterials, an advance that could hasten their commercialization,
#How to look for a few good catalysts Two key physical phenomena take place at the surfaces of materials:
The discovery could make it easier to find new catalysts for particular applications, among other potential benefits.
the W. M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT and a senior author of a paper describing the findings in the Journal of Physical chemistry C("Reactivity of Perovskites with Water:
"The research focused on a class of oxides called perovskites that are of interest for applications such as gas sensing, water purification, batteries, and fuel cells.
which inhibits catalytic activity. Materials that repel water, as shown at right, where droplets form sharp,
steep boundaries, are more conducive to catalytic activity, as shown by the reactions among small orange molecules.
an associate professor of mechanical engineering, that determination can now be used to predict a materials suitability as a catalyst.
Shao-Horn is an expert on catalytic reactions. We show how wetting and catalysis, which are both surface phenomena,
explains Kelsey Stoerzinger, an MIT graduate student and the papers lead author. While most attempts to study such surface science use instruments requiring a vacuum
for applications requiring high catalytic activity, the team found, a key requirement is that the surface be hydrophobic,
Ideally, this understanding helps us design new catalysts, Stoerzinger says. If a given material has a lower affinity for water,
it has a higher affinity for catalytic activity. Shao-Horn notes that this is an initial finding,
#Light switches on a DVD There could be more to DVDS than has been assumed to date. The material comprised of germanium, antimony and tellurium in
which data media store information may also be suitable as an extremely fast light switch for optical communication or data processing.
This is what an international team working with researchers at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin
"The storage mechanism in DVDS is based on the fact that laser pulses rearrange the structure of the material,
Electrons are diffracted differently in the crystalline structure of a compound of germanium, antimony and tellurium (GST) than in the amorphous one.
While DVDS are likely to soon become a thing of the past, this may not apply to their storage material.
This is because the data media, which have become familiar mainly as media for films, are increasingly being replaced by other storage techniques.
The material owes its job to the fact that, in rewritable DVDS, laser pulses can convert it very quickly from a strongly reflective crystalline state into a much less reflective disordered version..
The two states then encode the zeros and ones of digital information. The work we have done shows that the material can also be used for applications other than data storage,
as Ralph Ernstorfer, Research Group Leader at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Berlin states.
because the team headed by Ralph Ernstorfer and Simon Wall, scientist at the ICFO-Institut de Cincies Fotniques,
They found that it changes its optical properties such as transparency, reflectivity and absorptivity instantaneously, while the structure exhibits only a delayed reaction to the excitation.
which is decisive for the optical properties such as transmission, reflectivity and absorptivity. Crystalline and transparent:
If it were possible to extract the energy of the infrared laser pulse before the crystal has melted
These electrons are confined not to a bond between two atoms. The electronic loners rather participate in multiple bonds simultaneously:
they are bonded resonantly, as physicists say. The resonantly bonded electrons dictate the optical properties of crystalline GST,
who played a crucial role in the experiments as part of his doctoral work. He and his colleagues tracked the structural change with short bursts of electrons,
which race through a crystal differently than through irregularly structured materials. Since the researchers also sent the electrons after the exciting laser pulse with a different delay
The crystal loses its regular structure in the process. Although five picoseconds sounds short, this time is sufficient to qualify the material for uses other than data storage.
Since the realignment of the atoms causes stress and eventually fractures in the material, the atomic lattice of a substance cannot be rearranged infinitely often.
But it is precisely this aspect which forms part of the specification profile for a rapid switch in the optical data stream.
If we succeed in quickly removing the energy which is required for the structural change, the crystalline structure could be maintained,
says Lutz Waldecker. The energy could be removed quickly if a GST layer were sandwiched between two thin graphite layers or even between two layers of graphene.
The sheets of cross-linked carbon atoms of which graphene is comprised fulfil the necessary requirements. The physicists in Ralph Ernstorfers group now want to experiment further with precisely these sandwiches of different materials.
We want to investigate which states the electrons arrive at as they are excited and how the energy can flow away in sandwich structures,
says Ralph Ernstorfer. In this way, he and his colleagues want to bring GST into a position where it can act as a light switch for optical data processing as well e
In the first demonstration of how the technology works, published July 30 in the journal Cell("Saturated Reconstruction of a Volume of Neocortex"),the researchers look inside the brain of an adult mouse at a scale previously unachievable, generating images
at a nanoscale resolution. The inventors'long-term goal is to make the resource available to the scientific community in the form of a national brain observatory.
Arrows point to other varicosities of this axon that are innervating dendritic spines of other neurons (data not shown.
which is a way of saying that I would prefer to generate a hypothesis from the data
"The researchers have begun the process of mining their imaging data by looking first at an area of the brain that receives sensory information from mouse whiskers,
"says study first author Narayanan"Bobby"Kasthuri, of the Boston University School of medicine.""We had this clean idea of how there's a really nice order to how neurons connect with each other,
and someone with schizophrenia would be a leap in our understanding of how our brains shape who we are (or vice versa).
The cost and data storage demands for this type of research are still high, but the researchers expect expenses to drop over time (as has been the case with genome sequencing).
To facilitate data sharing, the scientists are now partnering with Argonne National Laboratory with the hopes of creating a national brain laboratory that neuroscientists around the world can access within the next few years."
"It's bittersweet that there are many scientists who think this is a total waste of time as well as a big investment in money
and effort that could be spent better answering questions that are more proximal, "Lichtman says.""As long as data is showing you things that are unexpected,
then you're definitely doing the right thing. And we are certainly far from being out of the surprise element.
when we look at this data that we don't see something that we've never seen before. r
#Self-assembling, biomimetic membranes may aid water filtration A synthetic membrane that self assembles and is produced easily may lead to better gas separation,
This biomimetic membrane is composed of lipids--fat molecules --and protein-appended molecules that form water channels that transfer water at the rate of natural membranes,
and transport proteins are amazing machines present in biological membranes, "said Manish Kumar, assistant professor of chemical engineering, Penn State."
"They have functions that are hard to replicate in synthetic systems.""The researchers developed a second-generation synthetic water channel that improves on earlier attempts to mimic aquaporins-natural water channel proteins--by being more stable and easier to manufacture.
and aligned than carbon nanotubes, another material under investigation for membrane separation. Kumar and co-authors report their development in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science("Highly permeable artificial water channels that can self-assemble into two-dimensional arrays"."
#New insight on how crystals form may advance materials, health and basic science research Scientists have worked long to understand how crystals grow into complex shapes.
Crystals are important in materials from skeletons and shells to soils and semiconductor materials, but much is unknown about how they form.
Now, an international group of researchers has shown how nature uses a variety of pathways to grow crystals that go beyond the classical, one-atom-at-a-time route.
The findings, published today in Science("Crystallization by particle attachment in synthetic, biogenic, and geologic environments"),have implications for decades-old questions in science
and technology such as how animals and plants grow minerals into shapes that have no relation to their original crystal symmetry.
Or why some contaminants are so difficult to remove from stream sediments and groundwater.""Researchers across all disciplines have made observations of skeletons
and laboratory-grown crystals that cannot be explained by traditional theories, "said Patricia Dove, a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech and the C. P. Miles Professor of Science in the College of Science."
"We show how these crystals can be built up into complex structures by attaching particles as nanocrystals, clusters,
or droplets that become organized into complex shapes. Many scientists have contributed to identifying these particles
and pathways to becoming a crystal our challenge was to put together a framework to understand them."
"The results emerged from discussions among 15 scientists working in the fields of geochemistry, physics, biology,
and the earth and materials sciences, including at the Department of energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. At home, these researchers conduct lab experiments, investigate animal skeletons,
or use computer simulations to visualize how particles can form and attach. The international group met for a three-day workshop in Berkeley, California,
that was sponsored by the Council on Geosciences of the Office of Basic energy Sciences of the Department of energy."
They can be small molecules, clusters, droplets, or nanocrystals. All of these particles are unstable and begin to combine with each other and with nearby crystals and other surfaces.
For example, nanocrystals prefer to become oriented along the same direction as the larger crystal before attaching,
much like adding Legos. In contrast, amorphous conglomerates can simply aggregate. These atoms later become organized by"doing the wave"through the mass to rearrange into a single crystal,
researchers said. Study authors say much work needs to be done to understand the forces that cause these particles to move and combine.
It is one of the frontiers for new research.""Particle pathways are tricky because they can form
what appear to be crystals with the traditional faceted surfaces or they can have unexpected completely shapes
and chemical compositions,"said Dove, the corresponding author of the study and a member of the National Academy of Sciences."
"Our group synthesized the evidence to show these pathways to growing a crystal become possible because of interplays between of thermodynamic and kinetic factors."
"By understanding how animals form crystals into the working structures known as shells, teeth, and bones, scientists will have a bigger toolbox for interpreting the crystals formed in nature.
The insights may also help in the design of novel materials and explain unusual mineral patterns in rocks.
Likewise, knowing how pollutants are transported or trapped in the minerals of sediments has implications for environmental management of water and soil."
"How we think about the ways to crystallization impacts how we interpret natural crystallization processes in geochemical and biological environments,
as well as how we design and control synthetic crystal growth processes, "said De Yoreo.""I was surprised at how widespread a phenomenon particle-mediated crystallization is
#From cameras to computers, new material could change how we work and play Serendipity has as much a place in science as in love.
Thats what Northeastern physicists Swastik Kar and Srinivas Sridhar found during their four-year project to modify graphene, a stronger-than-steel infinitesimally thin lattice of tightly packed carbon atoms.
Primarily funded by the Army Research Laboratory and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the researchers were charged with imbuing the decade-old material with thermal sensitivity for use in infrared imaging devices such as night-vision goggles for the military.
What they unearthed published Friday in the journal Science Advances("Atomically thin layers of BNCO with tunable composition"),was so much more:
from 20-megapixel arrays for cellphone cameras to photo detectors to atomically thin transistors that when multiplied by the billions could fuel computers.
and build everything, says Kar, an assistant professor of physics in the College of Science. We were on a journey,
The pair was controlled familiar with alloys combinations of elements that resulted in materials with properties that surpassed graphenesfor example,
the addition of boron and nitrogen to graphenes carbon to connote the conductivity necessary to produce an electrical insulator.
Indeed, Kar and Sridhar spent a lot of time trying to get rid of the oxygen seeping into their brew,
adds Sridhar, the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Physics and director of Northeasterns Electronic Materials Research Institute.
making room for the boron and nitrogen to fill the gaps. It was as if the oxygen was controlling the geometric structure,
After each trial, they analyzed the structure and the functional properties of the product electrical, opticalusing electron microscopes and spectroscopic tools,
and graduate students, contributors included researchers in government, industry, and academia from the United states, Mexico, and India.
#Nikola Labs unveils new tech to harvest electricity from EMFS; learn history behind Nikola Tesla's free electricity A revolutionary new energy harvesting technology recently unveiled by Nikola Labs,
an Ohio-based startup company inspired by the late inventor and energy genius Nikola Tesla,
promises to capture all those stray radio waves emitted back and forth between wireless phones and the towers through
which they communicate and convert them back into more energy, extending a smartphone's battery life by as much as 30%.
%Announced as part of an upcoming Kickstarter fundraising campaign, the technology, which Nikola's designers engineered into a special case made for Apple's iphone,
reportedly harvests the electromagnetic radiation transferring to and from mobile phones and converts it into direct current (DC) electrical energy,
which is recycled then back into the phone's battery.""Nikola Technology efficiently converts RF signals like Wi-fi, Bluetooth,
and LTE into DC power using its proprietary energy harvesting circuit, "explains the company on its website."
"The result is usable energy that can provide power to mobile devices wirelessly.""Though not perfect by any means, Nikola energy-capturing case holds promise For a sponsorship contribution of $99,
early supporters of the project will gain exclusive first-issue access to the case, which doesn't so much charge an iphone actively as it does extend its normal battery life.
Still, the case's novelty, and more importantly its longer-term potential, is what stands to inspire a new generation to take advantage of energy inefficiency and waste.
One major drawback to the technology is that its relatively slow to harvest energy, and the case itself doesn't contain an actual battery of its own to store excess charge.
At the same time the case itself is small and form-fits well to the iphone, acting as an all-in-one battery extension package that's sleek, discreet and unobtrusive."
"As magical as this sounds, the iphone case won't be able to charge your phone from zero to 100,
%"explains Business Insider about the case, which captures some 90%of the stray signals that would
otherwise be lost.""And it won't charge very quickly either--the antenna and power-converting circuit can only extend the battery life of an iphone 6 by about 30,
%and it all works extremely slowly.""Tesla's visions of wireless energy threatened the military-industrial complex;
were sabotaged his ideas? The official Kickstarter campaign for the case is expected to be launched in June,
and its unveiling is sure to inspire many curious folks to take a closer look at the energy discoveries of the man behind the Nikola name, Nikola Tesla.
This Serbian-American scientist is the reason why we have modern technologies such as radios and a working power grid.
A Serbian-American inventor captured by what many in his day claimed were crazy, unrealistic visions of the future,
Tesla's pie-in-the-sky ideas admittedly led to some pretty amazing breakthroughs in energy technology.
Of particular interest was Tesla's dream of developing a way to transmit energy wirelessly using only air as a medium.
Tesla had been working on a project way back when that would have demonstrated this on a large scale--the Tesla Tower, also known as Wardenclyffe,
which reports at the time highlighted was being designed to draw millions of volts of electricity through the air from Niagara falls and feed it into cities, factories and private houses from the tops of towers, all without wires.
The project was completed never, at Tesla's own volition, with some suspecting that he put it to rest after recognizing its potential for misuse and destruction.
Others believe Tesla may have been influenced by outside forces to shut the project down as it also had the potential to put an end to war
and threaten other industries related to the control of energy and power r
#Texas and Oklahoma slammed with historic floods: 5 dead, 12 missing...hundreds of homes destroyed...
thousands impacted Less than 24 hours after I posted my Preparedness Pop quiz that encouraged people to get off their butts
and get prepared for the unexpected, an extreme, historic wave of torrential rains slammed Texas and Oklahoma.
All of us in Central Texas rode it out as the sky darkened to almost nighttime conditions,
One family's house in Austin was swept off its foundation, killing a mother and her two children while the husband and the family dog survived.
and crumbled under the weight of"a relentless wall of water"as the Governor of Texas described it.
police said. Two other people killed in the storm were described as an unidentified man found dead from the flooding in San marcos, Texas,
which said a Tulsa woman died on Saturday after her automobile hydroplaned on a highway.
many people had to abandon their vehicles and escape on foot. And it's not even over yet:
certain skills and gear helped people avoid injury or death: Owning a reliable, waterproof tactical flashlight was absolutely essential,
Having an emergency bug out bag in your vehicle was a key preparedness strategy for those who had to abandon their vehicles
Possessing emergency first aid and medical skills was also extremely important, as many people suffered injuries from being hit by debris in flood waters.
The ability to navigate on foot, possibly with a compass, was also extremely valuable. Many people had to abandon their vehicles in areas unfamiliar to them.
It's astonishingly easy to lose your sense of direction inside a thunderstorm. Those who could keep their senses
and navigate on foot were able to seek shelter more easily. In the aftermath of these natural disasters, there's always a wave of looting.
Houston, in particular, is highly vulnerable to looters seeking to profit from partially destroyed homes. In these cases, the ability to defend your life
and property becomes extremely important, and the best way to accomplish that is to own a firearm
and know how to use it. Yes, looters don't care that you've just been through a disaster.
They'll steal from anyone they can...These storms were compared mild to the social chaos that's coming As devastating as these storms
The entire nation is just one"currency event"away from the kind of financial collapse that sends people into the streets with a sense of extreme anger.
We know that central banks operate like criminal enterprises, and we know that governments will sooner or later default on every fiat currency they create.
We also know that with 109 million Americans now on government food assistance a loss of the government's ability to keep funneling free money to one-third of the nation will result in mass social chaos
when the free money musical chairs comes to a halt. We know that the U s. military is training on domestic soil for martial law operations,
and we know that DHS has purchased billions of rounds of ammunition to use domestically (DHS does not operate overseas).
There is no question that the federal government believes widespread social chaos is coming, and it simultaneously believes that large cities will explode with uncontrollable violence, looting and mayhem.
This is why you'd be wise to revisit my Preparedness Pop quiz and check your own score.
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