#Researchers engineered a protein factory inside a living cell for the first time For the first time, scientists have discovered what makes the cell tiny protein-making machines run
and have built their own molecular gadget. They created a ribosome, the factory for proteins within the cell, inside a living cell,
where it worked just like its natural counterpart, according to a report in the journal Nature.
This finding means it may soon be possible to harness these little machines to produce more complex proteins, perhaps one day for use in medicine.
But the scientists did something even more remarkable: they changed the structure of the protein factories themselves.
In nature, ribosomes are split in halves, which float around separately inside the cell until it time to produce a protein.
To keep the lab-made ribosome from linking up with the naturally occurring ones which would kill the cell the scientists tethered the two halves together.
Keys to the protein-making factory This change in ribosome structure may have accounted for the attempt success scientists have tried to produce them in the past.
Theye crucial structures in the cell; if DNA is a blueprint, the ribosomes are the carpenters.
Making one from scratch might give researchers the ability to make any number of proteins easily, and in large quantities.
synthetic biologist at Northwestern University and a co-author of the study. These ribosomes could be tailored to only make a certain type of molecule,
Farren Isaacs, a cellular biologist at Yale university, agrees. The study is"a key advance,"that"sets the stage for the production of entirely new classes of exotic molecules."
a molecular biologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a co-author of the study."
"But the point of engineering a protein factory isn to improve the naturally occurring version, anyway.
but can still be repurposed to make a specific therapeutic protein, "we would be very happy,
#Obama wants to build an exascale supercomputer by 2025 The White house is getting serious about supercomputers.
Today, President Obama issued an executive order establishing the National Strategic Computing Intiative essentially a federal strategy for making sure America leads the field in supercomputers.
The order points to implementations in medicine, climate science, and aerospace as just some of the early benefits of supercomputing power.
within the next ten years, the government pledges to build an exascale computer, capable of 10 18 operations per second.
but supercomputer experts had predicted already the US could break the so-called exaflop barrier as early as 2023.
and likely to throw some money behind that promise. The most powerful supercomputers currently in development in the US are the twin Summit
and Sierra supercomputers, built by IBM for the Department of energy and expected to handle 100 petaflops each
when completed in 2017. But breaking the exaflop barrier is complicated more than simply strapping ten Summits together.
Without architectural breakthroughs a computer that powerful would require an entire power plant's worth of energy to keep going,
making it impractical for publicly funded science. The hope for data-crunching scientists is that in the years to come,
new architectures will be developed alongside software formats that can make use of all that raw power w
#Ebola vaccine is 100 percent effective in Guinea trial, WHO reports A vaccine is"highly effective"against Ebola, according to the World health organization.
Early results from a trial in Guinea show that the drug protected 100 percent of the people who received it against Ebola.
If the trial's results continue to show this level of promise, the vaccine could help end the outbreak in West Africa."
"The initial results are exciting and very promising, "said Margaret Chan, director-general of the World health organization, in a press conference earlier today."
There no cure for the virus right now, but infection can be avoided through routine hand-washing
and by using gloves or other barriers that prevent contact with bodily fluids. Ebola doesn spread through the air,
and the hunt for a vaccine continues. Now, it seems that scientists have a real contender on their hands.
4, 000 people with close ties to Ebola patients either received the vaccine immediately or three weeks after the identification of an Ebola patient in their social circle.
no cases of Ebola were reported, starting 10 days after the initial vaccination, which is needed the time period to develop immunity.
There were 16 cases of Ebola in the group that were given the vaccine three weeks later, however."
"The results of this interim analysis indicate that rvsv-ZEBOV might be highly efficacious and safe in preventing Ebola virus disease,
"the researchers write in the study. The trial will now be aged open to teenagers 13 to 17an independent body of international experts reviewed the study's results
and decided that the trial should continue. Starting July 26th, all of the study's participants were given the vaccine immediately,
instead of putting half in a delayed group. In addition, the trial will now be aged open to teenagers 13 to 17;
These results don't mean that the world now has an Ebola vaccine. The vaccine needs to undergo further safety and efficacy testing.
The vaccine is also being tested on frontline health workers, Bertrand Draguez, medical director at Doctors Without Borders, said in a statement."
"These people have worked tirelessly and put their lives at risk every day to take care of sick people,
"he said.""If the vaccine is effective, then we are already protecting them from the virus. i
#Engineers create world's first white laser beam Researchers at Arizona State university have created the world's first white laser beam,
More work needs to be done to perfect this technology, but white lasers could serve as a potential alternative light source both in people's homes and in the screens of their electronics.
Lasers are more energy efficient than LEDS, and the ASU researchers claim that their white lasers can cover 70 percent more colors than current standard displays.
The researchers also suggest the technology could be used beyond consumer electronics. They suggest white lasers could be used in Li-Fi
a developing technology that uses multiple colors of light to enable high-speed wireless internet access. Currently, LEDS are being used to develop Li-Fi technology,
which could be 10 times faster than current radio-based Wi-fi. Ning and his colleagues argue that Li-Fi using white lasers could be 10 to 100 times faster than LED-based Li-Fi.
White lasers could serve as a potential alternative light sourcefor the past 50 years, lasers have been able to emit every single wavelength of light except for white.
The problem is that typical lasers only beam one specific wavelength of light at a time. To create white
the ASU researchers manufactured three thin semiconductor lasers each as thick as one-thousandth of a human hair
and lined them up parallel to one another. Each semiconductor emits one of the three primary colors
and are combined then together to form white. The entire device can also be tuned to create any color in the visible spectrum.
White lasers won't be showing up in our electronics any time soon, however. For this study, the researchers had to pump electrons into the semiconductors with an additional laser light.
The engineers will have to design white lasers to run on battery power before they can be used for commercial applications.
This image shows mixed emission color from the semiconductor lasers in the colors of red green, blue, yellow, cyan, magenta, and white.
ASU/Nature Nanotechnology o
#Google, Samsung, and 16 others receive post-password certification This morning, the plot to kill the password got a little stronger. 18 different companies received an official FIDO certification for 31 different products,
ranging from physical devices to login services. They're the first products to be certified officially under the specification,
opening the door for interoperating services down the road. The services aren't comprehensive enough to do away with passwords entirely,
a fingerprint reader can authenticate a user without sharing the fingerprint itself, using a zero-knowledge proof to protect sensitive biometric data.
More importantly, a system that's compatible with FIDO can accept a login from any FIDO-certified device,
whether it's a fingerprint reader, a voiceprint detector, or even a more exotic system that hasn't been invented yet.
receiving a certification as a universal two-factor server. Yubico also received a certification for two different USB security keys
which are designed for use as a physical second factor. Google announced support for Yubico keys in October, allowing users to opt for the physical keys rather than the standard four-digit authentication code.
But two-factor authentication is just the first step of the process, and a number of FIDO services have moved already into more ambitious territory.
letting users authenticate through a combination fingerprint reader and biometric wristband. Samsung's secure identification framework was certified also,
as well as a system that would use Samsung's fingerprint reader to log into online stores. Today's certification also included a number of software development tools
and there's also reason to believe more services are on the way. Alibaba, Visa and Bank of america are all on the FIDO board,
but none of the companies have released any FIDO compatible login systems as of yet. One name missing from the list was Microsoft,
which plans to integrate Windows 10 and FIDO once the next version of the specification is released.
Microsoft has taken an active role in managing the spec this year, with Microsoft executive Dustin Ingalls taking on duties as President of the FIDO alliance in January n
#Facebook is testing a new tool to lock down user logins As services go mobile,
logins have gotten a lot stickier and a lot harder to track. Once you've logged in on a phone or tablet,
that login will usually stick around until you actively turn it off, a particular problem if that phone ends up lost, stolen,
or just re-sold. There are tools to protect against that, but you may not have checked them out in a while.
Login alerts will send you an email any time there's a new login, while device management can show you every device that's accessed your account.
You can find versions of those tools from Google Facebook, Paypal, or half a dozen other services,
but most users skip past them, if they even know they're there. Today, Facebook is releasing a new feature that will give those tools a higher profile.
It's called Security Checkup, and should be popping up into select users'News Feeds starting today.
The Checkup will pop-up over top of the site, prompting users to explore"a couple options you have to increase your security."
"From there, Facebook will walk users through password security options and show the computers logged into different Facebook services.
If anything's fishy, it should be obvious from there. Those tools were already available to Facebook users,
but thanks to Security Checkup, they'll be a lot harder to miss. It's a minor update,
but an interesting one. For years, the conventional wisdom has been that security should be invisible,
interfering as little as possible with user experience. Security Checkup is the opposite, forcing itself into view
and encouraging users to grapple with options they probably didn't know existed. Beyond Facebook
it's a sign that after a year full of bad security news, a more conspicuous approach to security may be coming back into style e
#Intel's new storage chip is 1, 000 times faster than flash memory Intel and Micron have a new way to store data that they say is denser, tougher,
and faster than the competition, and it's already starting production. In a live keynote today, the companies announced 3d Xpoint, a new category of nonvolatile memory that claims to be 1,
000 times faster than the NAND architecture underlying most flash memory cards and solid state drives. The new architecture does without transistors entirely,
relying on a bulk material property change to switch bits from a low-resistance to a high-resistance state.
From there memory cells are layered in an intricate three-dimensional checkerboard pattern that Intel researchers say is 10 times denser than conventional memory."
"For decades, the industry has searched for ways to reduce the lag time between the processor
and data to allow much faster analysis, "said Intel VP Rob Crooke in a statement."
"This new class of nonvolatile memory achieves this goal and brings game-changing performance to memory and storage solutions."
"The limitations of the new memory class are still unclear, but its earliest applications are likely to be in real-time data analysis,
where fast access to large datasets is at a premium. Intel singled out fraud detection
and disease tracking as likely early applications, but said the chip could also be used to power more immersive gaming experiences
if brought to the PC. Because the memory is durable and nonvolatile, it's likely to be used primarily for long-term storage,
but executives at the keynote said fast access to that long-term data could enable entirely new applications for everyday services s
#Nvidia recalls all Shield Tablets due to battery fire hazard Nvidia promised spectacular, unprecedented gaming performance from its 8-inch Shield Tablet last year,
but its pursuit of extreme performance seems to have gone a tiny bit too far. The company is now recalling its first Android tablet device due to a potential fire hazard posed by the battery,
which can overheat. No details are provided about the circumstances in which the problem might arise,
though Nvidia is being extra cautious and"asking consumers to stop using the recalled tablet,
except as needed to participate in the recall and back up data.""When it launched the Shield Tablet,
Nvidia made a big deal out of the extra thermal dissipation of its design, claiming it was double
what you'd get from a typical tablet. So the Shield Tablet was designed deliberately to handle greater loads and heat than usual,
but apparently its battery hasn't lived up to the same high standards. Nvidia has set up a replacement program
and a dedicated website to help owners of Shield Tablets purchased between July of last year
and today swap their faulty devices i
#New prosthetic limbs can be controlled by the mind NEW YORK Engineers at Johns hopkins university Applied Physics lab have developed a next-generation prosthetic:
A robotic arm that has 26 joints and can be controlled by a person mind, just like a regular arm.
Researchers think the arm may help people such as Mr Les Baugh, who lost his arms at the shoulder after an accident as a teenager.
Now 59, Mr Baugh recently underwent surgery at Johns Hopkins to remap the remaining nerves from his missing arms,
allowing brain signals to be sent to the prosthetic. Mr Baugh custom socket can pick up brain signals to control the arms, known as Modular Prosthetic Limbs (MPL), just by thinking about the movements.
The lab chief engineer of research and exploratory development Mike Mcloughlin said that as the remapped nerves grow deeper
it is possible that Mr Baugh would feel sensation in his prostheses. Each arm has more than 100 sensors,
and amputees who have undergone the same surgery reported being able to feel texture through MPL.
Patients of varying disabilities have tested the arm at the lab and helped push the design forward.
The limb is modular, which means it can be broken off or built up to accommodate people with different needs from a hand amputee to someone missing an entire arm.
Mr Mcloughlin also said the cost of the arm needs to be about a tenth of its current price to be viable in the marketplace.
e have designed a Maserati, but what most people will want is a good Toyota, Mr Mcloughlin said. he MPL was designed to be sophisticated as as we could make it,
so you could really push the state of the art. But ultimately, for commercialising it, it needs to be a lower-cost design. he lab has been awarded US$120 million by a programme run by the Pentagon Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to help wounded warriors,
and has worked with technology developer HDT Global to make a prosthetic that mimics the human arm in dexterity
and strength. he long-term goal for all of this work is to have noninvasive no extra surgeries
or implants ways to control a dexterous robotic device, said Mr Robert Armiger, project manager for amputee research at the lab. Researchers envision a kind of cap that an amputee can wear that would feed information about brain activity to the robotic arm.
The lab is starting to work with industry partners and they hope the MPL, or a version of it, will be available to consumers in a few years s
if a person driving a car is drunk in fact. The program though started as early as 2008,
A video posted on Youtube last Thursday displayed the technology via a test vehicle equipped with mock-up DADSS,
The technology functions in a way that it causes the cars to shut down if it finds that the drivers exceed the permissible blood alcohol levels.
is detected by the twin sensors. The DADSS works with two devices-Breath-based sensors and touch-based sensors.
The former have the ability to measure alcohol molecules in the driver's breath. Whereas, the latter use infrared tissue spectroscopy, wherein the sensor measures the intensity of light absorbed by alcohol, to zero in on the blood alcohol level.
Following the pilot test, the NHTSA stated that, "The agency joined with members of Congress,
"In fact, the DADSS is being seen as an answer to the battle against drunken driving deaths
#New Technology Captures Evaporation Energy by Employing Bacterial Spores In a breakthrough achievement, researchers at the Columbia University have created a new technology that powers the world's first evaporation-driven engine.
The discovery published today in the journal Nature Communications reveals the use of bacterial spores to tap evaporation energy that can be utilized for running different kinds of machines.
Peter Fratzl, biomaterial researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, stated, "This is not the first time that evaporation energy has been captured,
but it is the first time that it has been done a scale where objects could be moved. The work pushes a great idea all the way into a practical demonstration of the potential".
"The technology has been developed by a team of bioengineers led by Ozgur Sahin at Columbia University by making use of the property of bacterial spores,
which swell upon absorption of water and contract when they lose water. When billions of these spores were glued together on several plastic tapes called HYDRAS (hygroscopic-driven artificial muscles),
their movement was used to create energy that powered an engine which could run LED LIGHTS and even drive a miniature car!
Sahin informed that his system could be hundreds times cheaper to build per unit area than solar tapping,
and the engine costs less than $5 to build. Fratzl further asserted that this is a very impressive breakthrough as the engine is essentially harvesting useful amounts of energy from the infinitely small
and naturally occurring gradients near the surface of water. The best fact is that these tiny temperature gradients exist everywhere, even in some of the most remote places On earth h
#New Battery Design is hybrid between Flow batteries and Conventional Solid Ones Cambridge, Mass. -based Battery Company 24m and researchers at MIT have developed a new manufacturing approach for lithium-ion batteries.
The approach will not only prove cost effective, but will improve their performance and make it easier to recycle.
Not much change has been noticed in the manufacturing of lithium-ion batteries in the two decades.
Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics at MIT, was of the view that the existing technology is not perfect
the electrodes are suspensions of small particles carried by a liquid and pumped through different compartments of the battery.
Scientists said that the new battery design is a hybrid between flow batteries and conventional ones.
The research published in the Journal of Power Sources unveiled that the new approach has simplified manufacturing.
Also, the batteries become flexible and resistant to damage. Research paper'senior author Chiang said that after presenting the earlier research on the flow battery,
"We realized that a better way to make use of this flowable electrode technology was to reinvent the lithium ion manufacturing process".
"In the new method, the electrode material remained in a liquid state. Having the electrode in the form of tiny suspended particles reduces the path length for charged particles as they move through the material, a property known as tortuosity.
Less tortuous path simplifies production and proves cost effective. The new system leads to the production of battery that is more flexible and resilient.
Around 10,000 batteries have been made by the company on its prototype assembly lines. They will undergo testing by three industrial partners s
#Fiber Networks Ready for a Revamp, Engineers Unveil Method to Dispel Noise Effects The fiber optic data transmission will soon be enhanced significantly as electrical engineers at the UC San diego Qualcomm Institute have divulged a method to increase the capacity limit of high-bandwidth fiber optic cables.
The engineers assert to have broken the apacity limitfor fiber optic transmission which will increase the data transmission rates through the cables.
The researchers from the Qualcomm Institute claim that they were able to increase the signal power in a fiber cable by 20 fold
which enabled them to send data to a record-breaking 12, 000 kilometres with standard amplifiers and no repeaters.
Nikola Alic, researcher at the Qualcomm Institute explained that the current optic fiber cables have limited a capacity to withstand power for signals.
Upon crossing the threshold limit, the performance may get poor as noise, distortion and signal attenuation increases.
This degradation in signal quality due to increased load is called Kerr effect that necessitates the use of signal repeaters
when the data is transmitted along longer cables. Therefore, the new discovery marks a milestone in data transmission as it does not have any limitation with regards to power.
The engineers have advocated the use of requency combsto condition signals as this will increase the capacity limit of high-bandwidth fiber optic cables
and will eliminate the need of electronic regenerators. Thus, the use of frequency combs will not only radically raise the amount of power that can be sent through a fiber optic cable
but will also significantly reduce the cost of fiber networks by doing away with the repeaters r
#Researchers make breakthrough advance towards potentially super-fast Internet A team of researchers from the University of California,
San diego, has surpassed the limits of transmitting fibre optic signals; thereby making a substantial breakthrough which can result in super-fast and cheap Internet.
Highlighting the feat achieved by the researchers, a paper published in the university's Science journal on June 26 has revealed that the researchers managed to break the barriers in the way of increasing the maximum power,
and hence the distance, for the transmission of optical signals through optical fibres. According to the details shared in the paper,
researchers were able to transmit the fibre optic signals 12,000 kilometres-that is, nearly 20 times farther than the earlier maximum limit-without any significant degrading of signals.
The breakthrough reported by the researchers implies that theoretically at least, the rate of data transmission through optical fibres can be increased without distorting the information which travels through the fibre optic cable.
The breakthrough advancement depends on wideband"frequency combs "which have been developed by researchers. Noting that the new findings effectively eliminate the requirement of electronic regenerators
which are placed occasionally along the fibre link, the researchers said that the wideband"frequency combs"ensures that signal distortions in information travelling through fibre optic cables are predictable and, hence, reversible at the receiving end of the fibre e
#Google: Youtube has overtaken cable TV in terms of popularity During Google's 2015 second-quarter earnings call last week,
Google's chief business officer Omid Kordestani revealed that the company's video-sharing service Youtube has witnessed a tremendous growth in popularity over the last one year.
Asserting that Youtube's popularity has surpassed cable TV's popularity for a whole generation of consumers,
Kordestani said that Youtube has seen a threefold increase in the number of homepage visits year-on-year.
According to the details shared by Kordestani, the Youtube video-sharing platform -which was launched by Google back in 2006-now reaches a much higher number of 18-to 49-year-olds in the US than any other cable network in the country.
Kordestani also said that the average length of homepage visits on Youtube has increased 60 percent since last year.
In addition, there has also been a 50 percent year-on-year increase in average visit times on the mobile,
which have reached now 40 minutes per session. Highlighting the fact that"once users are in Youtube,
they are spending more time per session watching videos, "Kordestani said that the increasing popularity of Youtube among the younger demographics can be described as a revolution of"the television experience for the digital age
#HPV Vaccine Is Effective Against Multiple Cancer-Causing Strains The human papillomavirus vaccine, Cervarix, not only has the potential to prevent cervical cancer,
it is also effective against other common cancer-causing stains, according to a recent study. Researchers found that Cervavix was effective aside from just the two HPV types, 16 and 18,
which are responsible for about 70 percent of all cases.""The study confirms that targeting young adolescent girls before sexual debut for prophylactic HPV vaccination has a substantial impact on the incidence of high grade cervical abnormalities,"researcher Dan Apter,
Director, said in a statement. Cervarix, not only has the potential to prevent cervical cancer, but was effective against other common cancer-causing human papillomaviruses, aside from just the two HPV types, 16 and 18,
which are responsible for about 70 percent of all cases. For the study, researchers collected and analyzed data from nearly 20,000 young women.
They found that the vaccine was extremely effective in young women who had never been infected with HPV.
It protected nearly all from HPV-16 and-18 and protected 50 to 100 percent against different grades of precancerous transformation of cervical cells caused by other strains of HPV,
including up to 100 percent of those with the immediate precursor grade to cancer. The women were followed for up to four years post-vaccination.
The vaccine was distinctly more effective among ages 15-17 than ages18-25, underscoring the value of vaccinating young adolescents,
said Apter. The study is the final report from the Papilloma Trial Against Cancer in Young Adults (PATRICIA), a multinational clinical trial encompassing 14 countries in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region
North america, and Latin america, and it confirms previous reports in this trial. The overall trial constituted the basis for approval of the Cervarix vaccine in Europe
and the United states. While the trial did not investigate the vaccine's efficacy in males, sexually transmitted HPV causes anogenital and head and neck cancers in both males and females.
HPV-related head and neck cancers now number around 8, 400 in the United states, annually."
"The more adolescents are vaccinated, the closer we will be to eradicating high risk HPV viruses, "Apter said."
"So I think boys should also be vaccinated.""Cervical cancer is the fourth most common cancer among women.
In the United states, about 12,000 new cases, and 4, 000 deaths occur annually, according to the SEER database of the National Cancer Institute.
The findings are detailed in the journal Clinical and Vaccine Immunology y
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