Discovery News: Material World

Reunited and It Feels So Good...

It's a winter sight as familiar as runny noses and salted sidewalks: one lone glove pathetically half-buried in curbside slush.

Now a Web site could help reunite a lone glove with its mate. Last month, Jennifer Gooch, a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, launched One Cold Hand, a lost-and-found website for missing mittens and forgotten gloves. Read the New York Times article here.

 

So if you live in Pittsburgh and find a stranded glove or mitten, you can mail it to One Cold Hand, #1007, 5032 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15289. Or you can drop it in a box at one of a dozen or so participating businesses. Once it finds its way back to Gooch, she'll photograph it and post the image to her site, accompanied by descriptive tags (leather, right, left, fingerless, chenille, bling) that aid the search. 

Gooch is planning to start up similar sites in Milan and Philadelphia. And she's hoping to showcase photos of the gloves in an upcoming art show and book.

Car Drives Underwater

In the 1977 film, "The Spy Who Loved Me" James Bond evades the bad guys by driving his Lotus Esprit underwater.

Now a two-seater car called the sQuba can do the same. Developed by the Swiss company Rinspeed, the vehicle can drive on land and then, with the push of a button, dive to depths of 33 feet.

On land, an electric motor drives the car forward. Underwater, two propellers in the stern and two jet drives in the bow propels it. In both environments: zero emissions. A self-contained oxygen system supply occupants with fresh air for breathing.

The car will be on display at the Geneva Motor Show in March, 2008. But don't hold your breath. Mass-production of the car is not being planned.

Bio-Batteries: Power From the People

This week, I wrote about a pacemaker powered by heartbeats. But biobatteries don’t stop there. Simon Levinson, a biophysicist at the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver, proposes that charged particles, called ions, naturally present in cells could be harnessed to make miniature batteries that power insulin pumps or pacemakers. A short description of the invention is here, and his patent can be read here.

Nanotechnology: Do You Know What It Is? Do You Care?

No. Nanotechnology is not what makes iPod's Nano possible. If only it were that simple. But it really begs the question, Do you know what nanotech is? And for those of you who have a pretty good guess, Do you care?

The reason I ask is that lately I've been noticing a flutter of announcements, commentaries, and news pieces about whether nanotechnology is safe or not. For example, at the end of October, Andrew Maynard, chief scientist at Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, testified before the U.S. Congress’s House Science Committee, saying that the government is not doing enough to ensure the safety of these materials.

Then in the December issue of Nature Nanotechnology, Dietram Scheufele of the University of Wisconsin-Madison published a study revealing that the unknown human health and environmental impacts of nanotechnology are a bigger worry for scientists than for the public. (See article here.)

I think it's because, for the most part, people don't really know what nanotechnology is or what nanomaterials are.

Ok, here's what nanotechnology is: manipulating molecules to make a whole range of things, from bulletproof vests, to remote-controlled drugs, to a robot made from DNA, to motors and solar cells smaller than a human hair.

Nanomaterials are the engineered molecules that serve as the building blocks for these things. For example, scientists are working frequently with carbon nanotubes, which are hollow tubes made of carbon atoms. These tubes can be used to make flat-screen televisions, clear coatings, and fuel cells, among other things.

The benefits of nanotechnology are far-reaching: better drugs, safer materials, faster computers, energy-harvesting sufaces, to name a few.

But there are risks, too. These particles are so small that they could interfere with biological or ecological processes in unknown ways.

This week, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology published a series of scenarios depicting what our future may look like with nanotechnology and what the implications could be.

After reading this, are you concerned about health risks of nanotechnology? Why or why not?

This Is Your Skin on Cryo-Electron Tomography

For the first time, scientists have produced 3D images of human skin cells at a molecular resolution. This sounds really sciency and it is, but the images are gorgeous and you should have a look. Because this is what you're made of.

Until now, it's been difficult to image cellular components like proteins because other imaging techniques require that living tissue be treated with chemicals or coated in metal, which can alter the sample. This research, conducted by Achilleas     Frangakis, group leader at European Molecular Biology Lab uses a technique called cryo-electron tomography. Basically, they instantly freeze the tissue and then take pictures of it from different directions and then use a computer to compile those images into a 3D rendering.

The image above shows a human skin cell. Different colors represent different cellular organelles: cell-cell contact [sandy brown], nucleus and nuclear envelope [blue] with pores [red], microtubules [green], mitochondria [purple], and endoplasmic reticulum [steel blue].

This image shows cadherin molecules, proteins that ensure that cells within tissues are bound together.

You can read more about the research here, or get the academic paper here.

VR Could Accelerate Nanotech Reality

Today on Discovery Channel's News site, I have a piece about a specially designed nanoparticle that could offer targeted drug delivery. 

The potential medical applications for these kinds of molecular machines are far reaching. But a lot of work still needs to be done before nanorobots are zipping through our blood stream like Bay Watch patrols.

A group of researchers are working to accelerate that mission by using virtual reality simulations, which are helping to advance the understanding how to interact with and control nanorobots inside the body. They published their results in a recent issue of Nanotechnology.

In one real-time simulation, nanorobots equipped with chemical, temperature and other sensors are charged with finding specific proteins inside vessels with varying diameters and bringing the proteins back to an organ for drug deliver. Some robots are tasked with the same job but have no sensors.

The results show that nanorobots have a better chance of finding a target when they use sensors, and have more success in smaller vessels, where there are fewer obstacles floating around. 

It may seem obvious, but until the test is done, who knows. That's where VR comes in. It can also help researchers come up with a wish list of necessary technologies before they even exist. 

For more information, see NanoRobotDesign.

Electric Bike-Share Program Coming to the US

Despite the fact that Asia and Europe seem gung-ho over the notion of citywide bike-sharing programs, the U.S. still lags behind. We are a car-loving country with people who guard their autonomy and worship the vehicles that give it to us.

This week on Discovery's News site, I wrote a piece about a foldable electric scooter being developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The idea is to make these scooters available to commuters at conveniently located, one-way rental racks. While researching the piece, I was pleased to find out that there is one bike-share project being implemented next fall at the University of Washington, Seattle. Forty bikes from Intrago will be distributed among four station located at the edge of campus and made available to students, faculty and staff.

Bike-sharing is not a technology, but a transportation solution that could impact technology. For example, a lot of research is going into developing more fuel-efficient cars, but fuel-efficiency doesn't  solve congestion problems in urban areas. Electric bikes or scooters made available as part of city's mass transit plan could go a long way to preserving our autonomy while reducing pollution and traffic.

For more bike-sharing news and to see a world map of bike-sharing locations, see Paul DeMaio's blogspot.

Where Oh Where Art Thou, Digital Image?

I’m one of those. I immediately upload my digital images to a photo-sharing website and send the link to all of my friends and family. To date, I have 53 albums and probably thousands of images going back to 2004.

The sharing part is great. But the archiving and then finding part is a royal pain in the arse. It’s difficult to search the stack and locate the exact image, unless you rename each individual image. And frankly I, and lots of other people out there, don’t have time for that. Wouldn’t it be great if your camera and computer would work together to automatically handle some of that tedious archiving?

Sure thing, said Jiebo Luo, a senior principal scientist with the Kodak Research Laboratories in Rochester, NY.

“I have the same frustration,” he said. “I try to organize photos by folders. Some people name each picture, but that’s too much work.”

Luo and his team at Kodak are just one group of researchers (there are others at Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft doing the same) trying to solve this problem.

I called Luo to ask him why annotating, archiving, and searching of digital images is still largely a manual task akin to placing prints in a photo albums.

The problem, said Luo, is semantics. We can do two important things: recognize objects like sky, water, and sand, and then infer that those objects combined equal a beach. It’s just plain difficult to translate semantic concepts into computer language, which is based on numbers.

Researchers are working on a solution though and most of them are trying to combine contextual information that can be gathered automatically by the camera with more advanced computer algorithms that can squeeze hints out of numbers.

For example, lots of GPS-enabled mobile phones have cameras these days. A group at Yahoo! Research Berkeley has developed Zone Tag, which uses GPS location data to automatically tag, or suggests tags, for images being uploaded to Flickr. Anyone can download the program and try it out.

Conventional digital cameras also have setting information such as exposure, shutter speed, subject distance, and scene mode (portrait, landscape, night, sports) that could be saved in the digital code for each image. Combined with GPS and time information, a computer could narrow in on the fact that a certain group of images were taken at Lambeau Field in Green Bay under the “sports” setting and, that with all of the green and gold pixels, that this is most likely a Packers game.

If you took your pictures with a digital camera, you can try Penn State’s program, Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures, which automatically tags images as they are uploaded. I wrote a piece about ALIPR on Discovery last year. But since then, the system has been improved with technology called Tagging Over Time, a software system that improves the tags by learning from user interactions.

Although Zone Tag and ALIPR are still research projects, some of the technological advances that will make auto-tagging easier are making their way to the commercial market, say Luo. Take face recognition. Nikon and Cannon both have face recognition software that finds the face of your subject and uses it for auto focus. The next step, said Luo, would be to find the face and then recognize that it’s Aunt Bea and label the image accordingly.

I guess the message is: Hang in there. Help is on the way.

Human Organs and a Side of Chips

In order develop therapies or drugs to help people, medical researchers usually conduct their tests on live cells or in lab mice. These methods are not perfect. Live cells don't often live that long outside a human body and lab mice aren't human. But now scientists are finding ways to assemble cells onto glass or plastic chips that provide the control of a Petri dish but offer physical conditions that more closely resemble those in a living human body.

This week on the Discovery New site, I report on an Artificial Liver designed by a group at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology to test drugs. Along those lines, there is also an artificial lung in development at the University of Michigan.

The plastic wafer is about the size of a quarter and contains two tiny fluid channels that mimic airway branches in the lungs. The scientists flooded both chambers with a nourishing liquid that promoted the growth of lung cells. Then, they emptied the top chamber to simulate an airway. The lung cells continued to multiply and divide, eventually forming tighter tissue bonds and secreting airway proteins as if they were part of a real lung.

In lab test, the biomedical engineers used the device to show that the respiratory crackles stethoscopes pick up in patients with diseases including asthma, cystic fibrosis, pneumonia and congestive heart failure aren't just symptoms, but may actually cause lung damage.