Top 25 innovations or tech dead end?

s_stabeler · Knight of the Realm

you mean we might finally get an iPod that's battery lasts longer than a year? ( admittedly, my last iPod lost all sound in one earplug ( earphones weren't the cause, since I tested them by connecting them to my computer) rather than ran out of battery, but STILL)

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Ok, this really isn't a new technology....yet.

But the implications of this are astounding should they figure a way to incorporate this into biological technology.

Think of domestic herd animals that you don't have to feed.

Surprising Sea Slug Is Half-plant, Half-animal

A green sea slug appears to be part animal, part plant. It's the first critter discovered to produce the plant pigment chlorophyll.

The sneaky slugs seem to have stolen the genes that enable this skill from algae that they've eaten. With their contraband genes, the slugs can carry out photosynthesis - the process plants use to convert sunlight into energy.

"They can make their energy-containing molecules without having to eat anything," said Sidney Pierce, a biologist at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Pierce has been studying the unique creatures, officially called Elysia chlorotica, for about 20 years. He presented his most recent findings Jan. 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Seattle. The finding was first reported by Science News.

"This is the first time that multicellar animals have been able to produce chlorophyll," Pierce told LiveScience.

The sea slugs live in salt marshes in New England and Canada. In addition to burglarizing the genes needed to make the green pigment chlorophyll, the slugs also steal tiny cell parts called chloroplasts, which they use to conduct photosynthesis. The chloroplasts use the chlorophyl to convert sunlight into energy, just as plants do, eliminating the need to eat food to gain energy.

"We collect them and we keep them in aquaria for months," Pierce said. "As long as we shine a light on them for 12 hours a day, they can survive [without food]."

The researchers used a radioactive tracer to be sure that the slugs are actually producing the chlorophyll themselves, as opposed to just stealing the ready-made pigment from algae. In fact, the slugs incorporate the genetic material so well, they pass it on to further generations of slugs.

The babies of thieving slugs retain the ability to produce their own chlorophyll, though they can't carry out photosynthesis until they've eaten enough algae to steal the necessary chloroplasts, which they can't yet produce on their own.

The slugs accomplishment is quite a feat, and scientists aren't yet sure how the animals actually appropriate the genes they need.

"It certainly is possible that DNA from one species can get into another species, as these slugs have clearly shown," Pierce said. "But the mechanisms are still unknown."

Copyright © 2010 LiveScience.com

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

While an impressive feat, I also find this disturbing.

Scientists turn stem cells into pork

LONDON – Call it pork in a petri dish — a technique to turn pig stem cells into strips of meat that scientists say could one day offer a green alternative to raising livestock, help alleviate world hunger, and save some pigs their bacon.

Dutch scientists have been growing pork in the laboratory since 2006, and while they admit they haven't gotten the texture quite right or even tasted the engineered meat, they say the technology promises to have widespread implications for our food supply.

"If we took the stem cells from one pig and multiplied it by a factor of a million, we would need one million fewer pigs to get the same amount of meat," said Mark Post, a biologist at Maastricht University involved in the In-vitro Meat Consortium, a network of publicly funded Dutch research institutions that is carrying out the experiments.

Post describes the texture of the meat as sort of like scallop, firm but a little squishy and moist. That's because the lab meat has less protein content than conventional meat.

Several other groups in the U.S., Scandinavia and Japan are also researching ways to make meat in the laboratory, but the Dutch project is the most advanced, said Jason Matheny, who has studied alternatives to conventional meat at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and is not involved in the Dutch research.

In the U.S., similar research was funded by NASA, which hoped astronauts would be able to grow their own meat in space. But after growing disappointingly thin sheets of tissue, NASA gave up and decided it would be better for its astronauts to simply eat vegetarian.

To make pork in the lab, Post and colleagues isolate stem cells from pigs' muscle cells. They then put those cells into a nutrient-based soup that helps the cells replicate to the desired number.

So far the scientists have only succeeded in creating strips of meat about 1 centimeter (a half inch) long; to make a small pork chop, Post estimates it would take about 30 days of cell replication in the lab.

There are tantalizing health possibilities in the technology.

Fish stem cells could be used to produce healthy omega 3 fatty acids, which could be mixed with the lab-produced pork instead of the usual artery-clogging fats found in livestock meat.

"You could possibly design a hamburger that prevents heart attacks instead of causing them," Matheny said.

Post said the strips they've made so far could be used as processed meat in sausages or hamburgers. Their main problem is reproducing the protein content in regular meat: In livestock meat, protein makes up about 99 percent of the product; the lab meat is only about 80 percent protein. The rest is mostly water and nucleic acids.

None of the researchers have actually eaten the lab-made meat yet, but Post said the lower protein content means it probably wouldn't taste anything like pork.

The Dutch researchers started working with pork stem cells because they had the most experience with pigs, but said the technology should be transferable to other meats, like chicken, beef and lamb.

Some experts warn lab-made meats might have potential dangers for human health.

"With any new technology, there could be subtle impacts that need to be monitored," said Emma Hockridge, policy manager at Soil Association, Britain's leading organic organization.

As with genetically modified foods, Hockridge said it might take some time to prove the new technology doesn't harm humans. She also said organic farming relies on crop and livestock rotation, and that taking animals out of the equation could damage the ecosystem.

Some experts doubted lab-produced meat could ever match the taste of real meat.

"What meat tastes like depends not just on the genetics, but what you feed the animals at particular times," said Peter Ellis, a biochemistry expert at King's College London. "Part of our enjoyment of eating meat depends on the very complicated muscle and fat structure...whether that can be replicated is still a question."

If it proves possible, experts say growing meat in laboratories instead of raising animals on farmland would do wonders for the environment.

Hanna Tuomisto, who studies the environmental impact of food production at Oxford University said that switching to lab-produced meat could theoretically lower greenhouse gas emissions by up to 95 percent. Both land and water use would also drop by about 95 percent, she said.

"In theory, if all the meat was replaced by cultured meat, it would be huge for the environment," she said. "One animal could produce many thousands of kilograms of meat." In addition, lab meat can be nurtured with relatively few nutrients like amino acids, fats and natural sugars, whereas livestock must be fed huge amounts of traditional crops.

Tuomisto said the technology could potentially increase the world's meat supply and help fight global hunger, but that would depend on how many factories there are producing the lab-made meat.

Post and colleagues haven't worked out how much the meat would cost to produce commercially, but because there would be much less land, water and energy required, he guessed that once production reached an industrial level, the cost would be equivalent to or lower than that of conventionally produced meat.

One of the biggest obstacles will be scaling up laboratory meat production to satisfy skyrocketing global demand. By 2050, the Food and Agriculture Organization predicts meat consumption will double from current levels as growing middle classes in developing nations eat more meat.

"To produce meat at an industrial scale, we will need very large bioreactors, like those used to make vaccines or pasteurized milk," said Matheny. He thought lab-produced meat might be on the market within the next few years, while Post said it could take about a decade.

For the moment, the only types of meat they are proposing to make this way are processed meats like minced meat, hamburgers or hot dogs.

"As long as it's cheap enough and has been proven to be scientifically valid, I can't see any reason people wouldn't eat it," said Stig Omholt, a genetics expert at the University of Life Sciences in Norway. "If you look at the sausages and other things people are willing to eat these days, this should not be a big problem."

Copyright © 2010 Associated Press

s_stabeler · Knight of the Realm

Guess I'd best not mention that one around my aunt and uncle ( they're farmers. pastoral farmers. aka, they raise livestock. they do grow crops too, but that part of the business often loses money.)

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Tell them to relabel those veggies as "premium certified organic" and they can double the price easy.

s_stabeler · Knight of the Realm

they can't. they use chemicals.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Might be worth the switch if it makes those veggies profitable.

s_stabeler · Knight of the Realm

maybe, but you are missing the fact that you have to avoid chemicals for 3 years, THEN can call the produce organic. 3 years of crap production and low prices. I don't think they can afford the loss.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Possibly there are some natural products that can bridge the gap.

Soap, nicotine, neem oil, etc.

Might be enough of a yield increase with those to balance the losses.

Also with your socialist government there may be programs to help you switch over.

Look into programs run by Price Charles. He's real big on "sustainability" efforts. Might even be worth dropping his office a note. His staff will let you know if they run anything like that or perhaps might want to try a pilot project.

All it costs is effort of asking. You could likely do the asking for them if they don't seem enthusiastic about it.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

New Transistors Mimic Human Brain's Synapses

A new transistor designed to mimic structures in the human brain could pave the way for increasingly efficient computer systems that "think" like humans, scientists say.

The transistor is the first to mimic a crucial process used by brain cells, or neurons, when the cells signal one another.

The goal is to build nanometer-scale circuit components that can be used in neuron-inspired computers, said physicist and study author Dominique Vuillaume of the Institute of Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnology in France.

Such computers would be useful for tasks that traditional computers aren't very good at, especially image processing and recognition, Vuillaume said.

Transistors are the building block of electronics. They allow control of the electrical current running through a circuit by amplifying or switching the current on and off.

Synaptic transistors

Similarly, the synapse, a tiny gap between neighboring neurons, is a crucial component of the brain. The neuron transmits a small electric pulse along its length, triggering the release of chemicals called neurotransmitters into the synapse. The neurotransmitters traverse the synaptic gap and trigger a response in the neighboring neuron.

The timing of the electrical pulses helps determine how large of a chemical signal gets sent. In some neurons, repeated stimulations yields stronger, or facilitated, firings.

In others, multiple stimulations elicit weaker, or depressed, responses. These adaptations, known as short-term plasticity, happen within milliseconds.

Previous mock-neural networks required at least seven transistors to replicate short-term plasticity. The new transistor, called the nanoparticle organic memory field-effect transistor, or NOMFET for short, does it with just one.

That's important, because the smaller and more adaptable the transistors, the cheaper and easier it will be to scale from a few artificial synapses to thousands, Vuillaume said.

NOMFET

To build NOMFET, Vuillaume and his team placed gold nanoparticles in a trough between two electrodes. The particles, just five to 20 nanometers across, were covered with a very thin layer of a substance called pentacene, which conducts electricity.

Positive charges called "holes," which are created by missing electrons in the pentacene, transmit the current across this valley of scattered gold.

At each voltage input, some holes are temporarily trapped by the gold, and this changes the electrical output of the transistor. Depending on the voltages used, NOMFET can produce either weaker or stronger outputs - just like human neurons undergoing short-term plasticity.

Because of this adaptability, NOMFET is more flexible than traditional transistors, the researchers say.

The research "is definitely an interesting and well-conceived work," said physicist Massimiliano Di Ventra of the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved in the study.

The next step, Vuillaume said, is to combine several NOMFET transistors together to see how closely they approximate real neural circuits.

The research is detailed in a recent issue of the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

Copyright © 2010 LiveScience.com

ExarKun · Knight of the Realm

You know, I'm pretty sure this is how the Terminator, the Matrix and all of sci fi's greatest tragedy's started.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Or a place to download your brain contents for virtual immortality.

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Personally, I think that clothing isn't the best application for this idea. Wallpaper would be better. Imagine most interior surfaces of your home being an energy collector. As for the rest of the wall space you put up those new flex film displays. Link the two together and you instantly power all your media displays for free!

Cheap Solar Cell Could Be Incorporated Into Clothing

A new solar cell can produce the same amount of energy as the best conventional solar panels while using less expensive material.

The novel flexible device could help make solar cells far more practical for products ranging from sunroofs to clothing, scientists say.

"It could be extremely rugged - you could roll it up, even perforate it, shoot holes in it with a gun, and it'd still operate, whereas normal crystalline silicon would just shatter like glass," said researcher Harry Atwater, an applied physicist at the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, Calif.

Solar cells often rely on wafers of perfect silicon crystal, but these are costly. To save on crystalline silicon, Atwater and his colleagues used only one percent of the expensive material, which they grew as rods.

Each rod is only one or two millionths of a meter across - roughly one-hundredth the width of a human hair - and they are arranged vertically in a forest-like pattern.

Incoming light bounces back and forth between the rods until it gets absorbed. Particles of alumina were added between the rods to help scatter light so the rods can absorb more of it. The entire setup was embedded in a layer of transparent silicone rubber, making it flexible.

The new solar cell absorbed up to 85 percent of the usable incoming sunlight, which is comparable to conventional solar cells.

In addition, the fraction of the solar energy converted to electricity in the new device was on the order of 95 percent, "very comparable to the highest quality solar cells and well above that of other flexible thin film solar cells," Atwater said.

When it comes to making such cells on an industrial scale, Atwater foresees these being cheaper than conventional solar cells "not only because we've reduced the amount of crystalline silicon used, but the way we make it bypasses two or three expensive and energy-consuming steps."

These devices could readily get made on a large scale using existing roll-to-roll printing methods, Atwater said.

"There's a real opportunity here to be competitive in mainstream utility-scale photovoltaics where thin-film solar cells are used right now," he noted.

"We're actively pursuing commercialization opportunities at the moment."

Atwater and his colleagues detailed their findings online February 14 in the journal Nature Materials.

Copyright © 2010 LiveScience.com

s_stabeler · Knight of the Realm

atcually, clothing would be useful- say, if it can power a laptop? or mobile phone?

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

New Rocket Engine Could Reach Mars in 40 Days

Future Mars outposts or colonies may seem more distant than ever with NASA's exploration plans in flux, but the rocket technology that could someday propel a human mission to the red planet in as little as 40 days may already exist.

A company founded by former NASA astronaut Franklin Chang-Diaz has been developing a new rocket engine that draws upon electric power and magnetic fields to channel superheated plasma out the back. That stream of plasma generates steady, efficient thrust that uses low amounts of propellant and builds up speed over time.

"People have known for a long time, even back in the '50s, that electric propulsion would be needed for serious exploration of Mars," said Tim Glover, director of development at the Ad Astra Rocket Company.

The rocket technology could drastically cut down the amount of time a spacecraft needs to send astronauts on Mars missions. Instead of half a year, a spacecraft could make the trip in just over a month using the engine and a large enough power source, according to an Ad Astra mission study.

NASA's recent course change has freed up some funding for new propulsion technologies. And the U.S. space agency has not lost sight of the red planet, NASA administrator Charles Bolden told Congress as he presented a new budget last month.

"While we cannot provide a date certain for the first human visit, with Mars as a key long-term destination we can identify missing capabilities needed for such a mission and use this to help define many of the goals for our emerging technology development," Bolden said.

Familiar chemical rockets that burn solid or liquid chemical propellants won't get humans to Mars fast because they would require too much propellant. They can create a huge boost for several minutes at the cost of huge inefficiency — not unlike a speed demon with poor gas mileage.

Slow but steady push

Some satellites and spacecraft already rely upon electric propulsion in their ion engines that create thrust based on energized gas. Similarly, Ad Astra's Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) ionizes gases such as xenon or hydrogen to create superheated plasma stream for thrust.

But VASIMR also has the advantage of relying upon electromagnetic waves to create and energize the plasma, rather than physical electrodes that get worn down due to contact with the superheated plasma. That translates into greater reliability over time and allows for a very dense plasma stream to create more thrust.

VASIMR can also adjust its thrust to speed up or slow down, and even has an "afterburner" mode that provides a temporary high-speed boost at the cost of efficiency.

"Our technology is different," Glover told SPACE.com. "It's one possibility. We certainly think it has the most potential at high power levels."

Yet even the most efficient rocket engine needs a power source. VASIMR may use gas as the propellant, but it also requires an electric power source that can ionize the gas to create its plasma.

I need more power!

A mission trajectory study estimated that a VASIMR-powered spacecraft could reach the red planet within 40 days if it had a 200 megawatt power source. That's 1,000 times more power than what the current VASIMR prototype will use, although Ad Astra says that VASIMR can scale up to higher power sources.

The real problem rests with current limitations in space power sources. Glover estimates that the Mars mission scenario would need a power source that can produce one kilowatt (kW) of power per kilogram (kg) of mass, or else the spacecraft could never reach the speeds required for a quick trip.

Existing power sources fall woefully short of that ideal. Solar panels have a mass to power ratio of 20 kg/kW. The Pentagon's DARPA science lab hopes to develop solar panels that can achieve 7 kg/KW, and stretched lens arrays might reach 3 kg/KW, Glover said. That's good enough for VASIMR to transport cargo around low-Earth orbit and to the moon, but not to fly humans to Mars.

Ad Astra sees nuclear power as the likeliest power source for a VASIMR-powered Mars mission, but the nuclear reactor that could do the job remains just a concept on paper. The U.S. only ever launched one nuclear reactor into space back in 1965, and it achieved just 50 kg/kW.

A way forward

VASIMR and the necessary power sources could get a boost in the coming years. NASA's new five-year budget includes more than $3 billion for developing heavy-lift and propulsion technologies, as well as a Game Changing Innovation program that similarly targets next-gen propulsion and power sources.

The U.S. space agency's new chief tech guru has also emphasized propulsion as a critical area, under NASA's new Space Technology program.

"The budget's emphasis on developing advanced technologies to make space exploration easier and cheaper is very encouraging to us," Glover noted.

VASIMR reached a milestone late last year by achieving 200 kilowatts of power with the VX-200 prototype. Since then, Ad Astra has worked on the flight-capable VF-200 version that could undergo testing at the International Space Station (ISS) within the next several years.

As for getting VASIMR into space, Ad Astra has discussed possible launch options with commercial spaceflight providers.

"Anybody who wants to send anything to ISS after the shuttle retires is talking with SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences," Glover said.

Copyright © 2010 TechMediaNetwork

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

A step to artificial life: Manmade DNA powers cell

Scientists announced a bold step Thursday in the enduring quest to create artificial life. They've produced a living cell powered by manmade DNA.

While such work can invoke images of Frankenstein-like scientific tinkering, it also is exciting hopes that it could eventually lead to new fuels, better ways to clean polluted water, faster vaccine production and more.

Is it really an artificial life form?

The inventors call it the world's first synthetic cell, although this initial step is more a re-creation of existing life — changing one simple type of bacterium into another — than a built-from-scratch kind.

But Maryland genome-mapping pioneer J. Craig Venter said his team's project paves the way for the ultimate, much harder goal: designing organisms that work differently from the way nature intended for a wide range of uses. Already he's working with ExxonMobil in hopes of turning algae into fuel.

"This is the first self-replicating species we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer," Venter told reporters.

And the report, being published Friday in the journal Science, is triggering excitement in this growing field of synthetic biology.

"It's been a long time coming, and it was worth the wait," said Dr. George Church, a Harvard Medical School genetics professor. "It's a milestone that has potential practical applications."

Scientists for years have moved single genes and even large chunks of DNA from one species to another. At his J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Md., and San Diego, Venter's team aimed to go further. A few years ago, the researchers transplanted an entire natural genome — the genetic code — of one bacterium into another and watched it take over, turning a goat germ into a cattle germ.

Next, the researchers built from scratch another, smaller bacterium's genome, using off-the-shelf laboratory-made DNA fragments.

Friday's report combines those two achievements to test a big question: Could synthetic DNA really take over and drive a living cell? Somehow, it did.

"This is transforming life totally from one species into another by changing the software," said Venter, using a computer analogy to explain the DNA's role.

The researchers picked two species of a simple germ named Mycoplasma. First, they chemically synthesized the genome of M. mycoides, that goat germ, which with 1.1 million "letters" of DNA was twice as large as the germ genome they'd previously built.

Then they transplanted it into a living cell from a different Mycoplasma species, albeit a fairly close cousin.

At first, nothing happened. The team scrambled to find out why, creating a genetic version of a computer proofreading program to spell-check the DNA fragments they'd pieced together. They found that a typo in the genetic code was rendering the manmade DNA inactive, delaying the project three months to find and restore that bit.

"It shows you how accurate it has to be, one letter out of a million," Venter said.

That fixed, the transplant worked. The recipient cell started out with synthetic DNA and its original cytoplasm, but the new genome "booted up" that cell to start producing only proteins that normally would be found in the copied goat germ. The researchers had tagged the synthetic DNA to be able to tell it apart, and checked as the modified cell reproduced to confirm that new cells really looked and behaved like M. mycoides.

"All elements in the cells after some amount of time can be traced to this initial artificial DNA. That's a great accomplishment," said biological engineer Ron Weiss of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Even while praising the accomplishment — "biomolecular engineering of the highest order," declared David Deamer of the University of California, Santa Cruz — many specialists say the work hasn't yet crossed the line of truly creating new life from scratch.

It's partially synthetic, some said, because Venter's team had to stick the manmade genetic code inside a living cell from a related species. That cell was more than just a container; it also contained its own cytoplasm — the liquid part.

In other words, the synthetic part was "running on the 'hardware' of the modern cell," University of Southern Denmark physics professor Steen Rasmussen wrote in the journal Nature, which on Thursday released essays of both praise and caution from eight leaders in the field.

The environmental group Friends of the Earth said the new work took "genetic engineering to an extreme new level" and urged that Venter stop until government regulations are put in place to protect against these kind of engineered microbes escaping into the environment.

Venter said he removed 14 genes thought to make the germ dangerous to goats before doing the work, and had briefed government officials about the work over the course of several years — acknowledging that someone potentially could use this emerging field for harm instead of good.

But MIT's Weiss said it would be far easier to use existing technologies to make bioweapons: "There's a big gap between science fiction and what your imagination can do and the reality in research labs."

Venter founded Synthetic Genomics Inc., a privately held company that funded the work, and his research institute has filed patents on it.

Copyright © 2010 Associated Press

JuntaJoe · Site Admin

Great Googlymoogly! Flying cars are finally here! Let the carnage begin!

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/7860966/Terrafugia-Transition-flying-car-gets-go-ahead-from-US-air-authorities.html

Can someone loan me $200K real fast?

I'll give you rides as your interest payments! Cheesy Grin