The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Univ. of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI) are co-sponsoring the "Accelerating Innovation in 21st Century Biosciences:
Identifying the Measurement Standards and Technological Challenges" conference, symposium and workshop to be held Oct. 19-22, 2008, at NIST headquarters in Gaithersburg, Md. The conference's goal is identifying and prioritizing measurement, standards and technology needs currently creating barriers to innovation—and impeding the realization of the societal and economic benefits of new discoveries in the biosciences.
Now open to registrants, the conference will have the following areas of focus:
• Agriculture—increasing yield, quality and safety in the world's food supply;
• Energy—obtaining sustainable energy from biological sources;
• Environment—understanding our planet through linking molecules to ecosystems;
• Manufacturing—obtaining higher quality products through better bioprocess measurements; and
• Medicine—improving health through measurement of complex biological signatures.
Conference participants will help create a detailed "road map" list of measurement, standards and technology needs that will inform and guide researchers at NIST, as well as others in the measurement and standards communities worldwide.
The conference will open with a session in which policy makers and National Metrology Institute directors from around the globe will discuss priority setting and budgeting for bioscience measurement and standards activities in their respective regions/countries. This will be followed by a series of plenary lectures from visionary bioscience leaders discussing future trends and measurement, standards and technology needs.
Other sessions will focus on stem cell therapy, personalized medicine, antibiotic resistance, synthetic biology, biothreats, rising new infectious diseases, environmental and bioremediation, marine versus terrestrial energy sources, agricultural viability, and manufacturing.
For more information, to view a complete list of speakers and for the online register page, click here.
SOURCE: National Institute of Standards and Technology
West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP)—Satellites are helping scientists expand a virtual network to watch for increases in ocean temperatures that can damage or kill the fragile ecosystems of coral reefs worldwide.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday its Coral Reef Watch network has been expanded from 24 to 190 locations, including sites in the Florida Keys, the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, the Indian and Pacific oceans, Indonesia, Australia and Hawaii.
The agency uses onsite water instruments to monitor ocean temperatures at about a dozen reefs. The expanded system uses satellites to remotely monitor water temperature and other factors without the high cost of deploying devices.
A mere 2-degree rise in typical summertime water temperature can stress corals, causing the tiny marine creatures that form reefs to expel algae living in their tissues.
The so-called bleaching upsets the symbiotic nature of the ecosystem by exposing their white skeletons. Many corals can recover from a mild, short-lived bleaching event.
But if it occurs over a longer period, entire colonies die. The Caribbean region has lost at least 50 percent of its corals, largely because of warmer seas.
The bolstered network will allow NOAA to better track, understand and mitigate the impacts of warming waters that contribute to coral bleaching damage.
U.S. researchers said the technology used to heat and cool car seats has the potential to improve gas mileage.
Northwestern University researchers said thermoelectrics can convert waste heat into electricity to help power a car. The team created a thermoelectric metal that is more efficient than existing materials, the university said Wednesday in a release.
The findings are published online in the journal Angewandte Chemie.
A thermoelectric device could be attached to a car's tailpipe to generate electricity that would be returned to the car's engine for additional torque, the report said. Senior author Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, a chemistry professor at Northwestern, said automakers are working on thermoelectrics in an effort to improve gas mileage by 5% to 10%.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger presided over the dedication ceremony of a 2-MW solar power system at Applied Materials, one of the largest corporate installations of its kind in the country.
The array features some 7, 500 sun-tracking panels manufactured by the SunPower Corp. The system serves as a parking lot canopy at the Sunnyale campus and shields the employees' cars from the rays while capturing the power to generate electricity.
The dedication on Oct. 9 of Applied Materials' system is the latest of four developments involving large-scale corporate solar power projects in California in less than a week.
The system is expected to prevent more than 2,700 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year. That's the equivalent of the annual carbon emissions of approximately 450 passenger cars, according to Applied Materials. If sequestered, it would take 667 acres of pine forest to do the job.
The installation is also expected to generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of about 350 homes for a year. The system installation is expected to be productive for more than 20 years and pay for itself in 7 to 10 years, the company said.
Little Rock, Ark. (AP)—Famed scientist Richard Leakey warned that the worldwide credit crisis will be "just devastating" to scientific research in coming years, as endowment interest income drops and companies cut donations.
Leakey, who once served on a government economic team in his native Kenya, said much of the support for science comes from wealthy philanthropists, foundations and companies. All those groups likely will be affected by lowered interest rates and the squeeze of credit not being available to fund their operations, he said.
"With the investment portfolios being hit as hard as they've been hit in the last few weeks, particularly the last few days, I would have thought there would be a very dramatic reduction in available funds for research in all sorts of countries," Leakey told reporters Wednesday. "Unless they bring it under control, I think it's going to spread. I think it's extremely worrying for science."
Leakey became famous after making a number of fossil discoveries in East Africa. His team unearthed the bones of the most complete skeleton of a prehistoric human ever found in the desolate, far northern reaches of Kenya in 1984.
The effect of the credit crisis on science likely will begin to be felt as organizations begin planning their budgets for 2009, Leakey said. The paleontologist said donations will be "hugely hit," affecting what research and exploration can be done next year and into the future.
"This has spread right across the world and there's quite a lot of science to be supported," Leakey said. "I think it is just devastating.
"It's more worryful for people who are losing their homes, it's more worryful for people who are losing investments for their children's futures, but we're also very worried as scientists," he said.
Leakey was in Little Rock to speak at the Univ. of Arkansas at Little Rock.
In a new book, Leakey offers a stark warning for the planet, saying global warming could wipe out endangered species living in national parks and refuges throughout the world. He said the extinction of a few species could destroy food chains supporting many other animals—including humans.
"I think the end of the Ice Age was a quite a massive change and I think this will be ... almost as big of a change in the way we live," Leakey said.
Two Penn State scientists have received a U.S. patent for a statistical program that might someday make it easier to search the Internet for photographs. R&D Magazine reported on the technology when it was first published last year.
Associate Professors Jia Li and James Wang, said their program—Automatic Linguistic Indexing of Pictures, or ALIPR—teaches computers to recognize the contents of photographs, rather than by searching for keywords in the surrounding text, which is how most current image-retrieval systems work.
"Our basic approach is to take a large number of photos—we started with 60,000 photos—and to manually tag them with a variety of keywords that describe their contents," said Li. She said a statistical model is then built to teach the computer to recognize patterns in color and texture and to assign keywords to new photos that seem to contain similar scenes.
"Eventually, we hope to reverse the process so that a person can use the keywords to search the Web for relevant images," she added.
Wang and Li said the public can participate in improving ALIPR's accuracy by visiting the Web site—http://www.alipr.com—and uploading photographs, then evaluating whether the keywords ALIPR uses to describe the photographs are appropriate.
San Francisco (AP)—A Silicon Valley gene-testing startup is responding to criticism that the tests could spur bad health-care choices by teaming up for a broad study of how the results affect behavior.
Navigenics Inc. charges customers $2,500 to analyze their DNA to assess their risk of developing more than 20 diseases. Several public health officials have said the science on which the tests by Navigenics and other companies are based is too new to be used for making serious medical decisions.
Critics fear that some consumers will use positive results to seek treatments they might not need or suffer unnecessary emotional distress. Negative results, critics say, could inspire others to be less cautious than they should be about lifestyle choices or preventative care.
On Thursday, the Redwood Shores-based company announced it was joining with the Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego in hopes of showing those fears are unfounded.
"We have so much knowledge now that we didn't have just a couple of years ago that it's about time we started finding out what kind of impact this knowledge has," said the institute's director, Dr. Eric Topol, who is leading the study.
Researchers plan to gauge whether personal genetic testing encourages people to improve their diets, exercise, quit smoking and work with their doctors to prevent future health problems.
Navigenics will offer to analyze the DNA of up to 10,000 Scripps Health hospital chain employees, family members and friends. The study will track changes in their behaviors over the next 20 years. Over the course of the study, participants will be surveyed on the lifestyle changes and health decisions they make after receiving the test results.
Scripps hopes to report its first findings in April or May, about three months after participants receive their DNA test results, Topol said.
Coushatta, La. (AP)—If predictions hold true, a Colorado company's plan to build an activated carbon facility in Red River Parish will mean 180 construction jobs plus 50 production line jobs in northwestern Louisiana.
ADA Environmental Solutions is planning the plant. The activated carbon—which is derived from coal—is to be used to help coal-fired power plants reduce mercury emissions.
A groundbreaking ceremony is set for 11 a.m. on October 21 at a site near Red River Mining where ADA-ES will build its first production line—the largest of its kind in the U.S. The land will accommodate a second production line, if needed. The plant should be online in 2010.
The U.S. space agency said Melissa Rey, 14, of Parkway Central Middle School in Chesterfield, Mo., has won the "America's Top Young Scientist" competition.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said Edward Evans of Mount View School in Welch, W.VA., was named "America's Top Science Teacher" during the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
Goddard scientists, engineers and resident astronaut Paul Richards assisted in challenging each participant on their knowledge of space related themes. Challenges included jet propulsion, repair of the Hubble Space Telescope, Martian topography and how to simulate lunar gravity on Earth.
"The Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge targets middle school students in the years when research indicates their interest in science begins to fade and encourages them to explore scientific concepts and creatively communicate their findings," NASA said.
This event provided 10 middle school students and five teachers an opportunity to demonstrate their science prowess in a series of interactive challenges focused on the theme "The Science of Space."
Runners up were Shyamai Buch, 12, of Folsom Middle School in Folsom, Calif., and Peter Ku, 13, from Grover Middle School in Princeton Junction, N.J.
Los Angeles (AP)—Will NASA's flagship mission to Mars fly next year?
The space agency could decide as early as Friday whether to cancel, delay or proceed with plans to launch a nuclear-powered, SUV-size rover to the red planet.
NASA has already sunk $1.5 billion into the Mars Science Laboratory, which is pricier than expected. The mega-rover will roam the surface and drill into rocks for clues to whether the planet ever possessed an environment capable of supporting primitive life.
Doug McCuistion, who heads the Mars exploration program at NASA headquarters, told scientists in recent public meetings that he expects the mission's total cost to run over by more than 30%. If it goes over that threshold, Congress would have the right to intervene and use its power to end the project on its own.
Managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, the project has been plagued by development problems and ballooning costs that caught headquarters' attention. McCuistion told a gathering of Mars scientists last month that NASA was keeping a close eye on the project's progress and costs and participating in weekly reviews with JPL.
From the outset, the Mars Science Lab proved to be an engineering challenge due to its size and capability. The 9-foot-long robot geologist is bigger and can drive farther than its twin predecessors, Spirit and Opportunity, which are still alive after four years. It also carries some of the most sophisticated instruments, including a laser that can zap rocks from afar.
The mission's financial woes took many in the science community by surprise who fear that other projects will suffer to pay for the mega-rover.
"The magnitude of the increases has been mind-boggling," said geologist John Mustard of Brown Univ. "It has sent a shock wave to the Mars program and beyond to the planetary community."
If NASA pushes to launch in 2009 as planned, it will have to find the money to get the rover ready. Any delay until 2010 or 2011 will add at least $300 million to the mission's price tag.
Alex Dery Snider, a spokeswoman for the House Science Committee, said members were concerned about the extra cost and want to know how NASA will solve the problem.
Some scientists outside the Mars research community said canceling the project does not make sense since so much money has already been invested.
"We've got to continue our exploration of Mars, but in a way that's rational and sensible," said Frances Bagenal of the Univ. of Colorado, Boulder.
Stockholm, Sweden (AP)—Two Americans and one Japanese won the Nobel Prize in chemistry on Wednesday for the discovery and development of a brightly glowing protein first seen in jellyfish, work that has helped scientists study how cancer cells spread.
Japan's Osamu Shimomura and Americans Martin Chalfie and Roger Tsien shared the prize for their research on green fluorescent protein, or GFP, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said. Shimomura, born in 1928, works at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and the Boston Univ. Medical School.
Chalfie, born in 1947, is a professor at Columbia Univ. in New York, while Tsien, born in 1952, is a professor at the Univ. of California, San Diego.
The protein is a widely used laboratory tool to illuminate processes in living organisms, such as development of brain cells or the spread of cancer cells. Shimomura first isolated GFP from a jellyfish found off the west coast of North America in 1962 and discovered that it glowed bright green under ultraviolet light.
In the 1990s, Chalfie showed GFP's value "as a luminous genetic tag," while Tsien contributed "to our general understanding of how GFP fluoresces," the academy said in its citation.
Their work has allowed researchers to able to use GFP to track nerve cell damage from Alzheimer's disease or see how insulin-producing beta-cells are created in the pancreas of a growing embryo.
Trenton, N.J. (AP)—Pfizer Inc., continuing its drive to create more focused business units, told employees worldwide Tuesday it is replacing its current geographic divisions with new ones focused on primary care, specialty care and operations in emerging markets. The shift is aimed at enabling the company to respond better to the needs of doctors, patients and government and other payers, while increasing innovation and holding the independent business units accountable for meeting targets, a Pfizer spokesman said.
The new units, which will begin operating at the beginning of next year, will have complete responsibility for functions including strategic planning, sales and marketing, and even drug development process—testing experimental compounds in people and tinkering with them to come up with the best dose.
Research operations, including identifying potential compounds and testing in the laboratory and in animals, will remain independent.
Some employees may see slight shifts in their duties, but job cuts are not part of the plan, he said. Under a major restructuring announced in January 2007, the company already has eliminated more than 13,500 jobs, closed numerous plants and reduced annual costs, compared with 2006 levels, by $1.2 billion out of its goal of cutting $2 billion in spending.
A part of the U.S. House of Representatives approval of a giant bailout of the U.S. mortgage industry was to extend the research and development tax credit to U.S. businesses for two years. These breaks will benefit, in particular, R&D companies, energy ventures, and “green” commercial construction.
The House on Friday voted 263-171 to pass an amended Emergency Economic Stabilization Act on Friday after rejecting the bill earlier last week. President George Bush also signed the US$700 billion bailout plan Friday. Several tech companies, including Microsoft and Texas Instruments, had called on Congress to extend the tax credit, saying it helps U.S. businesses invest in R&D and keeps R&D workers in the country.
The R&D Tax Coalition, representing the tech, manufacturing, chemical, pharmaceutical and other industries, praised Congress for extending the tax credit. The U.S. Senate had passed the R&D extension in late September as part of a different bill, but the tax credit was added to the bailout bill in recent days.
The tax credit can cover up to 20% of qualified R&D spending. It has expired 13 times since 1981 despite calls by tech, pharmaceutical and manufacturing groups to make the tax credit permanent.
Lawmakers have resisted making the tax break permanent largely because of its price tag of about $7 billion a year. Some critics have called the tax credit a government subsidy for large businesses.
Rome (AP)—A U.N. agency on Tuesday called for an urgent review of agriculture and biofuel subsidies and trade barriers, saying their removal would increase opportunities for developing countries to take advantage of rising biofuel demand.
The Food and Agriculture Organization said in a newly released report that keeping the trade barriers may prolong and deepen the food crisis. Current policy, it says, tend to favor producers in some developed countries over producers in most developing countries.
Growing demand for biofuels, which are made from crops such as sugar cane and corn, will contribute to food price increases, but can also promote rural development in poor countries—provided that small farmers gain access to markets and receive support to boost their production.
The Rome-based agency also says in its yearly report that biofuels, although environmentally friendly, will not necessarily contribute as much as previously thought to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Their impact depends on how and where biofuels are produced and brought to the market, it says.
The U.N. has called on the international community to issue guidelines to ensure biofuel crops do not compete with food crops and do not encourage deforestation.
Biofuel production based on agricultural commodities, which more than tripled from 2000 to 2007, covers nearly 2% of the world's consumption of transport fuels, the agency said. While the growth is projected to continue, the contribution of liquid biofuels—mostly ethanol and biodiesel—to transport energy will remain limited, it says.
Three researchers in so-called broken symmetry, which helps to explain the intricate workings of the smallest constituents of the universe, were awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics today. Half the prize went to Yoichiro Nambu of the Univ. of Chicago, with the other half shared by Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto Univ.
All three men were rewarded for work done decades ago: Nambu for his description of “spontaneous broken symmetry” in the 1960s and Kobayashi and Maskawa for their work on symmetries and elementary particles known as quarks in the 1970s.
In 1960 Nambu described spontaneous broken symmetry, which “conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface,” according to the Nobel committee. (The committee illustrated this principle by holding up an orange—while it’s useful to describe the fruit as a sphere, it actually deviates from sphericity in subtle ways when examined up close.) Nambu’s work helps to inform the Standard Model of Particle Physics, which describes the behavior of elementary particles and three of the four fundamental forces that govern nature. (Gravity, the fourth force, has not yet found a place in the Standard Model—physicists hope that the Large Hadron Collider will help to resolve this problem once it begins operating next year.)
Specifically, Nambu’s work describes how these fundamental forces can be so different, and how elementary particles, including the particles that mediate those forces, can have such disparate masses—according to the Nobel committee, the top quark is more than 300,000 times heavier than the electron, while the photon has no mass at all.
Kobayashi and Maskawa, in their work, predicted the existence of three families of quarks—only two were known at the time—a prediction that was borne out in later particle-accelerator experiments. This work helps to explain why all particles are not always symmetrical, including making a differentiation between particles and their antiparticles. This differentiation is critical to the universe’s existence—matter and antimatter annihilate when they come in contact, so somewhere along the line, matter must have had an edge over its counterpart to form the cosmos we inhabit today. (Both were created in equal amounts in the big bang, some 14 billion years ago.)
A U.S. scientist says DNA tests could help predict and prevent harmful algae blooms around the globe, thereby reducing such blooms' economic impacts.
Associate Professor Senjie Lin of the Univ. of Connecticut said such an approach might also help decrease the outbreaks of food poisoning due to contamination of seafood by the toxins some algae produce.
Algae include cyanobacteria, dinoflagellates, diatoms, raphidophytes, haptophytes, and various other species, many of which produce potent toxins. It is estimated annual economic losses due to U.S. algae blooms total tens of millions of dollars.
"To minimize economic and environmental impacts, an early warning detection system is needed," says Lin. His research provides information on the technical aspects of using biological markers—DNA or RNA—to detect algae quickly and easily without the need for highly sophisticated methods or equipment.
A paper outlining his research appears in the International Journal of Environment and Pollution.
Drug researcher and blogger Derek Lowe has some interesting thoughts on the future of drug discovery. With the easiest types of research projects headed overseas, U.S. researchers will be left to deal with the toughest jobs. And those jobs are increasingly being handled by smaller, risk-taking discovery companies. Big Pharma, meanwhile, is laying off more and more researchers as it continues to play it safe. And life won't get any easier for research scientists as the field undergoes a fundamental shift.
"Those of us trying to make a living through science and drug discovery are going to have to scramble for it," writes Lowe in "Hard Times: A Manifesto." "We're going to have to prove our worth to those who are in a position to pay for us, and we're going to have to try to make as many of our own opportunities as we can."
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has picked 10 U.S. teams to study the origins, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
Each interdisciplinary team receives a five-year grant averaging $7 million and becomes a member of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, located at NASA's Ames Research Center.
Selected are teams from the Univ. of Hawaii, Arizona State Univ., the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pennsylvania State Univ., the Georgia Institute of Technology and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Teams from Ames, the Goddard Space Flight Center and two teams from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., also were selected.
"The research of these new teams reflects the increasing maturity of astrobiology," says NASA Astrobiology Institute Director Carl Pilcher. "They are focused on fundamental questions of life in the universe but their work has implications for all of science. The research of these teams, together with that of the four continuing institute teams, will bridge the basic science of astrobiology to NASA's current and planned space exploration missions."
The new members join four continuing teams from Montana State Univ., the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Univ. of Washington in Seattle and the Univ. of Wisconsin.
According to an Associated Press report, nuclear engineering programs at universities nationwide are brimming with students eager to break into what they see as a growth industry.
This rebirth of learning comes after a decades-long slump that prompted many schools to scale back nuclear engineering programs and some to close altogether, a trend that has some experts worrying whether enough new workers can be trained in time to support the potential growth. There are now 65 nuclear power plants operating in the country, most built during a flurry of construction in the 1960s and '70s. There have been no new plants built since 1996.
But the recent rise in the cost of fossil fuels and concerns about the level of greenhouse gases from coal and natural-gas fired power plants has the nation again looking at nuclear as a source of electric power. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission expects to rule on 23 nuclear-plant construction permits over the next six years.
Among those with applications pending before the NRC are NuStart Energy—a consortium of 10 power companies—Duke Energy, Exelon and Progress Energy. A complex regulatory environment, the vagaries of world energy markets and continued resistance by environmental interests make it impossible to predict how many new plants—if any—will be built.
Complete Genomics Inc., a third-generation human genome sequencing company, today announced its formal launch as the world's first provider of large-scale human genome sequencing services.
The company, which was established in March 2006, has been operating in "stealth mode" from a 32,000-square-foot facility near San Francisco. For the past two and a half years, Complete Genomics has been reinventing the process of DNA sequencing based on pioneering technology invented by its founders and refined by a team of 100 employees with expertise in DNA engineering, molecular biology, instrumentation, semiconductors and high-performance computing. The company’s aim is to build the world's largest commercial human genome sequencing center. By offering a sequencing service instead of following the traditional instrument sales model, Complete Genomics intends to relieve its customers of operational, computational and capital purchase burdens, allowing them to focus their resources on scientific discovery.
According to the company’s chairman Dr. Clifford Reid, complete human genomes will be sequenced for less than $1,000 in material costs and just $5,000 sales cost beginning the second quarter of 2009.
A new space race is officially underway, and this one should have the sci-fi geeks salivating. The project is a "space elevator," and some experts now believe the concept is well within the bounds of possibility—maybe even within our lifetimes.
A conference discussing developments in space elevator concepts is being held in Japan in November, and hundreds of engineers and scientists from Asia, Europe and the Americas are working to design the only lift that will take you directly to the one hundred-thousandth floor.
In 1979, Arthur C. Clarke's novel "The Fountains of Paradise" first brought the idea of a space elevator to a mass audience. Charles Sheffield's "The Web Between the Worlds" also featured the building of a space elevator. But, jump out of the storybooks, fast-forward nearly three decades and Japanese scientists at the Japan Space Elevator Association (JSEA) are working seriously on the space-elevator project.
JSEA spokesman Akira Tsuchida told CNN his organization was working with U.S.-based Spaceward Foundation and a European organization based in Luxembourg, to develop an elevator design.
The Liftport Group in the U.S. is also working on developing a design, and in total it's believed over 300 scientists and engineers are engaged in such work around the globe.
NASA is also holding a $4 million Space Elevator Challenge to encourage designs for a space elevator than can work.
Tsuchida said the technology driving the race to build the first space elevator is the quickly developing material carbon nanotube. It is lightweight and has a tensile strength 180 times stronger than steel cable. Currently, it is the only material with the potential to be strong enough to use to manufacture elevator cable, according to Tsuchida.
"At present we have a tether which is made of carbon nanotube, and has one third or one quarter of the strength required to make a space elevator. We expect that we will have strong enough cable in the 2020s or 2030s," Tsuchida said.
A cable anchored to the Earth's surface, reaching tens of thousands of kilometers into space balanced with a counterweight attached at the other end is the basic design for the elevator. It is thought that inertia—the physics theory stating that matter retains its velocity along a straight line so long as it is not acted upon by an external force—will cause the cable to stay stretched taut, allowing the elevator to sit in geostationary orbit.
The cable would extend into the sky, eventually reaching a satellite docking station orbiting in space. Engineers hope the elevator will transport people and objects into space, and there have even been suggestions that it could be used to dispose of nuclear waste. Another proposed idea is to use the elevator to place solar panels in space to provide power for homes on Earth.
CINCINNATI (AP)—Officials want to see more green roofs on building tops in Cincinnati. The City Council on Wednesday became the first in Ohio with a plan to channel grants and loans to residents and businesses to replace tar and shingles with vegetation.
Supporters of the idea want to see Cincinnati become a leader in green roofs, a European-born movement that has spread to only a few U.S. cities, including Chicago, Milwaukee and Seattle.
They say the greenery not only is pleasing aesthetically but reduces stormwater runoff, filters pollutants and cuts heating and cooling costs. In Ohio, pastoral roofs grace the tops of the Toledo public library, the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency building in Columbus and the Cleveland Environmental Center, home of the Greater Cleveland Green Building Coalition.
Chicago has scores of green roofs, including one atop City Hall. Other buildings elsewhere in the U.S. that are considered green roof pioneers include the Ford Motor Co. Rouge assembly plant in Dearborn, Mich., and the Convention Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City.
A report by the Green Roof Research Program at Michigan State Univ. estimates that 12% of all flat-roofed buildings in Germany are covered with vegetation. It noted several barriers to widespread acceptance in the United States, including lack of government incentives or tax breaks.
About $5 million a year in below-market-rate loans through the U.S. EPA Clean Water State Revolving Fund will be available starting in 2009 for green roof projects, city officials estimate, along with an undetermined amount of grant money from other EPA funds.
CERN, the world's biggest particle physics laboratory and creator of the Worldwide Web, on Friday unveiled a new computer network allowing thousands of scientists around the world to crunch data on its huge experiments.
Some 7,000 scientists in 33 countries are now linked through the computing network at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, to analyze data from its particle-smashing test probing the nature of matter that began last month.
That experiment, which could provide clues about the origins of the universe, began on September 10 and was shut down nine days later because of a helium leak in the 27 km (17 mile) tunnel of CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
When it starts up again next year, physicists involved in the experiment will have access to real-time data on their desktops, thanks to CERN's computing grid that links more than 100,000 processors at 140 institutes around the world.
The amounts of data involved in the largest scientific experiment ever conducted are hard to comprehend. At full capacity the LHC will produce 600 million proton collisions per second, producing data 40 million times per second.
These will be filtered down in the four massive subterranean detectors—the largest of which is the size of a five-storey building—to 100 collisions of interest per second.
The data flow will be about 700 megabytes per second or 15 million gigabytes a year for 10 to 15 years—enough to fill three million DVDs a year or create a tower of CDs more than twice as high as Mount Everest.
CERN has only 10% of the computing capacity needed for the LHC experiment, which will allow scientists to observe sub-atomic particles and probe the nature of gravity and matter. The grid will provide the rest.
The U.S. Dept. of Energy has detailed the methodology it uses to produce geologic resource estimates for its carbon dioxide sequestration program.
Officials this week released the Methodology for Development of Geologic Storage Estimates for Carbon Dioxide, which outlines the procedures used to estimate the nation's storage potential in the soon-to-be-released 2008 Carbon Sequestration Atlas of the United States and Canada. The updated version of that award-winning atlas is to be released in November.
The methodology outlines the procedures for estimating CO2 storage potential in three types of geologic formations found in the U.S. and Canada: saline formations, unmineable coal seams and oil and gas reservoirs.
"This important document represents more than a year's worth of work by researchers at the Office of Fossil Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory and members of (the department's) regional carbon sequestration partnerships to reach a consensus on the methodology," said Acting Assistant Secretary for Fossil Energy James Slutz. "We believe it will provide a sound explanation for geologic resource estimates in our upcoming carbon sequestration atlas."
The methodology document is available in PDF format here.
It will also be presented as an appendix in the forthcoming Atlas II.
Moving forward with its restructuring plan, GlaxoSmithKline announced to employees via email today that it would be laying off as many as 850 (6%) employees in its research and development units in the U.K. and in the U.S. Although the company has yet to determine exactly how many employees will be laid off, the cuts will be concentrated in its preclinical and early-stage drug development teams, and will include scientists as well as administrative staff.
At this time last year, GlaxoSmithKline announced a major overhaul that would cut $1.4 billion in costs and 5,000 jobs over four years. Much of the slimming down has been focused on the research and development teams. The British drug maker has since axed 350 jobs in R&D, 90 in a manufacturing plant in Zebulon and closed a manufacturing facility with a workforce of 900 in Puerto Rico.
According to reports from the The New York Times and The Indianapolis Star Eli Lilly and Co. is the previously unidentified company that offered $6.1 billion to purchase ImClone Systems, the manufacturer of cancer drug Erbitux, source said. Acquiring ImClone could help Lilly expand its presence in the market for biotech and cancer medicines, according to an industry analyst. A Lilly spokeswoman said the drugmaker does not comment on “rumor and speculation.”
Japan's Furukawa Battery Company, which has already begun production of the the CSIRO-invented UltraBattery, and U.S. manufacturer, East Penn, this week signed an international commercialization and distribution agreement for the technology.
CSIRO's UltraBattery combines an enhanced-power negative electrode and a lead acid battery in a single unit and has applications for low emissions transport and renewable energy storage.
The exclusive sub-license agreement will see the UltraBattery distributed by East Penn to the automotive and motive power sector throughout North America, Mexico and Canada while Furukawa Battery Company will release the technology in Japan and Thailand.
According to CSIRO, tests haven shown that the UltraBattery has a life cycle that is at least four times longer and produces 50% more power than conventional energy storage systems. They says that the technology is approximately 70% cheaper than the batteries currently used in hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs).
The technology is scheduled to be commercially available in the automotive market and for motive power applications throughout Japan, Thailand, North America, Mexico and Canada within two years.
A NASA spacecraft will whiz over Mercury's crater-scarred surface next Monday, getting a look at the third of the planet closest to the sun that has never been seen close-up before. It is a return engagement for the car-sized MESSENGER probe, which darted past Mercury on Jan. 14 during its ongoing mission to explore the small and rocky sun-baked world.
Messenger is due to fly about 124 miles above Mercury's surface at nearly 15,000 mph .The only previous times Mercury was visited by a spacecraft was in 1974 and 1975 when NASA's Mariner 10 flew past it three times and mapped about 45% of its surface. January's fly-by by Messenger covered another 20% of the surface, the U.S. space agency said.
Next week's fly-by will cover about 30% more, on the opposite side of the planet from the one seen in January.
"That represents an area bigger than the land area of South America that will be seen for the first time by our spacecraft," Sean Solomon of Carnegie Institution of Washington, the mission's lead investigator, told reporters.
The probe is due to take 1,200 images during the encounter with Mercury, which is two-thirds closer to the sun than Earth. Data from the January fly-by showed that volcanic activity played a key role in forging Mercury's surface and that the planet has been shrinking more than expected over time.
Univ. of Illinois microbiology professor William Metcalf and his collaborators have developed a way to mass-produce an antimalarial compound, potentially making the treatment of malaria less expensive.
Metcalf set out to understand how this compound, one of a group known as phosphonates, is made in nature by bacteria. He was interested in that process partly because some phosphonates have antibiotic properties. Recently, Metcalf and his lab successfully identified and sequenced the genes and identified the processes by which bacteria make this particular phosphonate compound (FR900098). His results are reported in the August 25 issue of Chemistry & Biology.
Although the compound has already been chemically synthesized, that is a costly process. By knowing how this phosphonate is biosynthesized, it can now be inexpensively mass-produced by harnessing the cellular machinery of bacteria. Efforts are already underway to engineer E. coli strains to overproduce FR900098, which can then be harvested for medicine.
The scientific community has known since the 1970s that bacteria routinely produce these types of phosphonates, in a kind of natural biological warfare. However, until now no one has done a systematic search for phosphonates in nature. Phosphonates work by disrupting biological pathways that use phosphate esters and organic acids. Each phosphonate disrupts a particular pathway. For example, FR900098 inhibits the pathway that creates isoprenoids, building blocks for important cellular components. When the parasites that cause malaria were discovered by others to have a pathway that FR900098 could disrupt, researchers saw a way to put the compound to good use. That same biosynthetic pathway does not exist in animals, which have a different way of making isoprenoids.
The Univ. of Michigan and SRI International, an independent nonprofit R&D organization, have been awarded a National Science Foundation contract to support a new program to develop CubeSats. These small satellites, typically a 10-cm cube weighing about 1 kg, will be used for science missions dedicated to space weather and atmospheric research.
The first mission under the new program is "CubeSat-based Ground-to-Space Bistatic Radar Experiment—Radio Aurora Explorer (RAX)," a collaborative space science project to be undertaken by SRI International’s Hasan Bahcivan and James Cutler of the Univ. of Michigan Ann Arbor.
The satellites were developed in partnership between Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Stanford Univ. to increase research and educational access to space. CubeSats have proven to be an excellent platform for technology development and small science missions. Because of their quick design time, they are ideal for student involvement with design, fabrication, and flight missions.
The first launch opportunity for the NSF satellite program will be with the Department of Defense Space Test Program, and is scheduled for December 2009 aboard a Minotaur-4 launch vehicle out of Kodiak, Alaska. Commissioning and launch support for the mission will be provided by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Wallops Flight Facility.
Engineers at the Univ. of California-Los Angeles claim to have created the world's fastest bar code reader.
The device, which is about one thousand times faster than other bar code readers, uses a new imaging technique that can produce one-dimensional bar codes with a frame rate on the order of 25 million frames per second, the university said Monday. The findings are published in the journal Applied Physics Letters.
UCLA said the device, dubbed the CWEETS scanner, uses "chirped wavelength electronic encoded time domain sampling." The scanner maps the one-dimensional bar code image onto the spectrum of an ultrashort laser pulse and then maps that into an amplitude-modulated waveform that is captured with a single optical-to-electrical converter.
A key component of the system is the use of dispersive Fourier transform imaging, adapted from ultrafast spectroscopy.
While traditional camera-based bar code readers require an array of pixels to capture the image, the new imager requires only a single pixel and is free of mechanically moving parts.
Applied Biosystems expects that their new SOLiD 3 System, introduced today, will enable scientists to sequence a human genome for approximately $10,000. Significant cost-reduction and productivity enhancements have been built into the latest version of this ultrahigh-throughput analysis platform, the company says.
Upgrades to the system architecture and data analysis software as well as increased streamlining in workflows and multiplexing capabilities to rapidly convert samples into mappable sequence data and reduce run times by up to 42% compared to earlier versions of the platform.
The combination of the open-slide format, bead enrichment, and software algorithms provides the infrastructure. The open-slide format uses beads containing DNA samples to input genomic information into the system. It supports the deposit of high densities of beads per slide, which results in the generation of up to 20 gigabases of mappable sequence data per run. A compute cluster, easier slide loading, optimized chemistry, and longer read lengths of more than 50 base pairs enables a sevenfold coverage increase across the entire human genome in a single run.
Early feedback on the SOLID 3 system available here.
SOURCE: Associated Press; Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News
Editor's Take
The lighter side of science
Oct. 8, 2008
With the current economic upheaval and bad news on the science and engineering front, I think it’s time to turn to the lighter side of science by looking at some of the winners of the 2008 Ig Nobel Awards. Established by the Annals of Improbable Research the Ig Nobel Awards “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative—and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.” This year’s winners do just that. Here I present my favorite winners of the 2008 competition, who were honored on Oct. 2 at the 18th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony:
The Archaeology Prize went to a team of Brazilians who measured how the contents of an archaeological dig site can be scrambled by the actions of a live armadillo. I’m not quite sure why this is important, but I do wonder if they used a dead armadillo as a control.
The Cognitive Science Prize went to an international research team that discovered that slime molds can solve puzzles. I think their next move should be to perform this experiment on the residents of New Jersey (where I live). The results might be surprising. (Or not.)
And last, but not least, the Medicine Prize was awarded to researchers who demonstrated that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine. I guess sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
