Testing Relativity, Black Holes And Strange Attractors In The Laboratory

Through the optical-mechanical analogy, metamaterials and other advanced optical materials can be used to study such celestial phenomena as black holes, strange attractors and gravitational lenses. Here an air-GaInAsP metamaterial mimics a photon-sphere, one of the key black hole phenomena in its interactions with light. (Credit: Xiang Zhang)

Even Albert Einstein might have been impressed. His theory of general relativity, which describes how the gravity of a massive object, such as a star, can curve space and time, has been successfully used to predict such astronomical observations as the bending of starlight by the sun, small shifts in the orbit of the planet Mercury and the phenomenon known as gravitational lensing. Now, however, it may soon be possible to study the effects of general relativity in bench-top laboratory experiments.

Xiang Zhang, a faculty scientist with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and professor at the University of California Berkeley, lead a study in which it was determined that the interactions of light and matter with spacetime, as predicted by general relativity, can be studied using the new breed of artificial optical materials that feature extraordinary abilities to bend light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation.

“We propose a link between the newly emerged field of artificial optical materials to that of celestial mechanics, thus opening a new possibility to investigate astronomical phenomena in a table-top laboratory setting,” says Zhang. “We have introduced a new class of specially designed optical media that can mimic the periodic, quasi-periodic and chaotic motions observed in celestial objects that have been subjected to complex gravitational fields.”

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720134239.htm

Ytterbium’s Broken Symmetry: Largest Parity Violations Ever Observed In An Atom

Yacov Zel’dovich proposed that the weak force induces electrical currents in the nucleus, which flow like currents in a tokamak. This anapole moment has been detected in nuclear valence protons but not yet in valence neutrons. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

The elemernt Ytterbium was discovered in 1878, but until it recently became useful in atomic clocks, the soft metal rarely made the news. Now ytterbium has a new claim to scientific fame. Measurements with ytterbium-174, an isotope with 70 protons and 104 neutrons, have shown the largest effects of parity violation in an atom ever observed – a hundred times larger than the most precise measurements made so far, with the element cesium.

“Parity” assumes that, on the atomic scale, nature behaves identically when left and right are reversed: interactions that are otherwise the same but whose spatial configurations are switched, as if seen in a mirror, ought to be indistinguishable. Sounds like common sense but, remarkably, this isn’t always the case.

“It’s the weak force that allows parity violation,” says Dmitry Budker, who led the research team. Budker is a member of the Nuclear Science Division at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Of the four forces of nature – strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational – the extremely short-range weak force was the last to be discovered. Neutrinos, having no electric charge, are immune to electromagnetism and only interact through the weak force. The weak force also has the startling ability to change the flavor of quarks, and to change protons into neutrons and vice versa.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090722123755.htm

Living, Breeding Mice Grown From Skin Cells

Cells from flakes of skin have grown into living, breeding mice, through a bit of biotechnological wizardry.

This feat helps confirm that reprogrammed adult cells, considered a potentially convenient source of stem cell therapies, share the shape-changing powers of embryonic stem cells.

The goal was to create an animal made entirely from reprogrammed cells, and to confirm that reprogrammed cells “are as good as embryonic stem cells,” said Beijing National Stem Cell Bank director Qi Zhou, co-author of the study published Thursday in Nature.

Much more research is needed to meet the second of Zhou’s criteria, but fulfilling the first is remarkable enough. Just three years ago, it would have been inconceivable.

That’s when Japanese stem cell biologists Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi described how four development-regulating genes (carried by viruses into the adult cells of mice) transformed those cells into something very much like an embryonic stem cell.

Embryonic stem cells are able to become any tissue type in the body. Scientists and doctors hope they’ll someday be used to regrow lost limbs and rejuvenate diseased organs. For now, those miracle cures are years, if not decades, away. But even if the cures materialize, embryonic stem cells are difficult to produce. They could end up being rare and expensive.

So when the mouse cell-reprogramming trick was replicated with cells taken from humans, turning skin flakes into brain and bone and muscle cells, scientists rejoiced. A flood of research followed. Hardly a week now goes by without news of improvements to the methods, which tended to result in cancer-prone tissues, or of reprogrammed cells being coaxed into yet another type of tissue.

But at this early date, despite all the progress, many questions still remain. The reprogrammed adult cells, known as induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells, are still far more experimental than embryonic stem cells. Their ultimate medical viability is uncertain. It’s not even absolutely clear whether iPS cells can truly become any cell type, or just many of them.

The mice grown by Zhou’s team, described in a study published Thursday in Nature, don’t answer all these questions, but they’re a powerful demonstration of the cells’ flexibility.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/07/ipsmice/

Can We Slow the Aging Clock? -One of World’s Leading Expert Says “Yes”

Just Say NO To Old Age: Professor X isn’t the only one with incredible mental powers: recent research says that you might be even better at brain-boosting, helping heal yourself with the power of a positive attitude – while he can’t even summon up the mental energy to stand.  

The power of positive thinking might make us sound infinity percent more likely to wear hemp and say “man” an inappropriate number of times for science reporters (i.e. ever), but it’s real research at Harvard.  Professor Ellen Langer has conducted several studies into “mindfulness theory”, researching just how much your attitude affects your actual body.  The answer: quite a bit.

 

One of Benjamin Button’s many stories-within-stories in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, involves the tale of a clock built for the New Orleans train station that is designed to run backwards, in the hope that it will resurrect the First World War dead.

With a similar result in mind, in one experiment Langer shut several septuagenarians in a hotel that had been redecorated in mid-eighties style, eliminating all evidence of the last two decades.  Subjects were instructed to act as if they’d really gone all Doctor Who, and after only seven days they were faster, stronger, better than before.  Stronger for seventy-year olds, anyway, and certainly stronger than a control group who didn’t get this amateur time-travel and were basically left to think about how damn old they were.

This raises a number of interesting questions, and if you don’t think so then we hate to bear bad news but aging applies to you too.  How can we best apply this technique to our own lives?  And if you can feel younger but have to listen to 80s music to do so, is that too high a price to pay?

Dr Langer’s theory is that all the external reminders that “you are old and broken” can convince the brain and body that it must be so.  It’s quite possible – anyone who talks about brain and body as if they were separate items isn’t using either properly, so all kinds of unconscious instructions could affect your health.  There’s no “be healthy!” switch, and this can’t prevent aging (that’s a job for the gene-workers) – but it can slow the clock down.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/can-we-slow-the-aging-clock-a-leading-expert-says-yes.html

Baryonyx to build largest offshore wind farms in the US, power massive data centers

Mr. Pickens — looks like you’ve got some competition down in Texas. With the aforesaid energy baron scraping plans to plant 687 massive wind turbines in Texas’ panhandle, Baryonyx has stepped in to do the honors via a slightly different project. Just this past week, Baryonyx won a bid to create a pair of sizable offshore wind farms that Jerry Patterson — Commissioner of the Texas General Land Office — says “could be the biggest offshore wind farms in the nation.” Additionally, another lease was granted for a prospective wind energy development in the panhandle, and now the company is eager to get going on the green energy gigs. The best part of this whole plan involves that actual purpose of the turbines; aside from providing juice for grids, they’ll also be used to energize forthcoming Tier 4 server farms, with a minimum of 750 megawatts of power being pumped to two coastal areas all the while. Ma Earth would be proud.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/07/23/baryonyx-to-build-largest-offshore-wind-farm-in-the-us-power-ma/

A Superlens That Assembles Itself

Self-assembly line: The spherical nanolenses shown in this electron microscope image have separated from the crystalline nanotubes underneath them. The structures spontaneously form when a solution of cup-shaped organic molecules is allowed to evaporate.
Credit: Nature

Korean researchers have created nanoscale lenses with superhigh resolution using a novel self-assembly method. So far, they’ve demonstrated that the tiny lenses can be used for ultraviolet lithography, for imaging objects too tiny for conventional lenses, and for capturing individual photons from a light-emitting nanostructure called a quantum dot.

The limits on the resolution of both light microscopes and the photolithographic instruments used by the semiconductor industry are a consequence of light’s fundamental properties. Because of the way light scatters, or diffracts, even a perfect lens cannot distinguish two objects that are closer together than half the wavelength of the light used to image them.

Other researchers are making devices that overcome the diffraction limit using so-called metamaterials, which bend light in unnatural ways, or nanoscale metal gratings, which capture light through surface interactions. The new lenses, developed by researchers at the Pohang University of Science and Technology in Korea, overcome the diffraction limit because of their size. The lenses are flat on one side and spherical on the other and range in diameter from about 50 nanometers to three micrometers.

The size of each lens is on the same length scale as the wavelength of light that it interacts with, meaning that “the usual optics don’t hold,” says Chee Wei Wong, head of the Optical Nanostructures Laboratory at Columbia University in New York, who helped evaluate the lenses’ performance. And it is the first time the properties of a spherical lens this small have been tested, says Kwang Kim, head of the Center for Superfunctional Materials at Pohang University, who led the research. “No ideal nanoscale lens was available in the past,” says Kim.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23040/

Olive extract may have obesity, diabetes benefits

An extract from extra-virgin olive oil may stimulate the function of mitochondria in cells, and prevent diseases associated with dysfunction like diabetes and obesity, says a new study.

Results of a cell study indicate that hydroxytyrosol may influence gene expression, which would influence mitochondrial function. The mitochondria are the ‘power plants’ of the cell, generating chemical energy by producing adenosince triphosphate (ATP), the body’s ‘energy currency’.

“We collaborated with DSM Nutritional Products in Switzerland and investigated effects of hydroxytyrosolthat stimulate mitochondrial biogenesis and promote mitochondrial function in [fat cells],” Dr Jiankang Liu, corresponding author of the study, told NutraIngredients.

“Because mitochondrial loss and dysfunction are closely related with obesity and diabetes, these results suggest that supplement with olive oil and/or hydroxytyrosol may have beneficial effect on preventing obesity and diabetes,” he added.

The results are published in the Journal of Nutritional Biochemistry.

Med diet benefits

“As is known very well, the Mediterranean diet has been associated with a lower incidence of certain cancers and of cardiovascular disease, which is the most common and serious complication of diabetes,” Dr Liu, from the University of Kentucky and the University School of Life Science in Xi’an, told this website.

“Olive oil is the principal source of fats in the Mediterranean diet, and hydroxytyrosol is considered to be one of the most potent determinants of its efficacy.

“We hypothesised that the Mediterranean diet or supplementation with HT could stimulate mitochondrial function and prevent diabetes and obesity-related mitochondrial dysfunction, thus reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease,” he added.

Study details

Using mouse-derived fat cells (adipocytes), the researchers tested the effects of different concentrations of hydroxytyrosol (DSM Nutritional Products), ranging from 0.1 to 10 micromoles per litre, on the expression of proteins linked to mitochondrial function.

“In the present study, we showed that hydroxytyrosol over the concentration range of 0.1-10 micromoles per litre stimulated the protein expression of [peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR) coactivator 1 alpha (PPARGC1-alpha)] – the central factor for mitochondrial biogenesis,” wrote the researchers.

“We showed that hydroxytyrosol is a nutrient that effectively stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis and function,” they added.

“This mitochondrial targeting property may provide a possible mechanism for the efficacy of the Mediterranean diet for lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease and also suggests that hydroxytyrosol may be used as a therapeutic intervention for preventing […] type-2 diabetes and obesity,” they concluded.

The study was funded by a UC Davis Center for Human and Nutrition Pilot Award and by DSM Nutritional Products.

http://www.nutraingredients-usa.com/Research/Olive-extract-may-have-obesity-diabetes-benefits

Hot dogs should carry a warning label, lawsuit says

Americans paid $3.4 billion for 730 million packages of hot dogs and sausages in supermarkets last year, according to the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council. The industry is against requiring cancer warning labels.

The suit, by a group that promotes a meat-free diet, seeks to require cancer-risk labels on processed meats. Nutrition experts say foods that go along with the hot dog may be more dangerous.

“Warning: Consuming hot dogs and other processed meats increases the risk of cancer.”

That’s the label that a vegan advocacy group wants a New Jersey court to order Oscar Mayer, Hebrew National and other food companies to slap on hot dog packages.

The nonprofit Cancer Project filed a lawsuit Wednesday on behalf of three New Jersey plaintiffs asking the Essex County Superior Court to compel the companies to place cancer-risk warning labels on hot dog packages sold in New Jersey.

“Just as tobacco causes lung cancer, processed meats are linked to colon cancer,” said Neal Barnard, president of the Cancer Project and an adjunct professor at the George Washington University medical school in Washington, D.C. “Companies that sell hot dogs are well aware of the danger, and their customers deserve the same information.”

The defendants in the lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, include Nathan’s Famous Inc., Oscar Mayer owner Kraft Foods Inc., Sara Lee Corp., Marathon Enterprises Inc. and ConAgra Foods Inc., which owns Hebrew National.

Efforts to put warning labels on hot dog packages are “crazy,” said Josh Urdang, 27, as he stood in line to buy two franks at Pink’s hot dog stand in Hollywood on Tuesday.

“It wouldn’t change how many hot dogs I eat. Not at all,” said Urdang, an information technology consultant from Hollywood.

His friend Joe Di Lauro, 31, called such a move “overpolicing. . . . At what point do you stop breaking things down? Unless we’re going to put a warning label on every single food and say what’s bad in it.”

Other consumers were skeptical of the Cancer Project’s agenda.

“Vegans complaining about hot dogs is like the Amish complaining about gas prices,” said Susan Thatcher of Irvine.

Americans spent $3.4 billion buying 730 million packages of hot dogs and sausages in U.S. supermarkets last year, according to the National Hot Dog & Sausage Council.

Nutrition experts say that the science is far more complicated and that slapping warning labels on the staple of baseball games and picnics would not have much effect on public health.

“If one were to call for a ‘black label’ on frankfurters, where should the warning label end? If we were to evaluate each food for its naturally occurring toxins and eliminate that food, then our food plate would be empty,” said Roger Clemens, a nutrition expert at USC’s pharmacy school.

The industry is dead set against such warning labels.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hot-dog23-2009jul23,1,2946755.story

PV Installation Made Simple And Straightforward

The fact is, a lot of people out there could benefit greatly from solar power.  Government incentives are at an all time high, solar panels are becoming cheaper and better, and solar installation professionals abound.  So why isn’t demand as high as it should be?

Simple: Government incentives vary a great deal from state to state, and many potential customers don’t fully understand how they work.  Some don’t know which panels are best for them.  And who knows how to find a reliable solar installer?  Some might install a great system, but others might build you a $40,000 piece of junk!

So while numerous startups are working on improving PV technology itself, companies like Global Solar Center are trying to make the purchasing process more user-friendly.

GSC (as well as competitors RoofRay and Sungevity) offers a very simple website in which you enter your address.  This takes you to a satellite image of your house (either taken straight from Google Maps, or a similar service), and after filling out some basic information about where you’d want the panels to be, how slanted your roof is, and how much you currently pay for electricity, you get a rough price quote.  

That’s nice, but not as valuable as the other services GSC offers.  There is a section which gives short, to-the-point summaries of all financial incentives available in the state you live in (I didn’t find similar information on the competitors’ sites), which is extremely important.  These incentives can cut the cost of an installation by half or more, but it’s hard to get a straight answer about them from some installers.  Many people who would not even consider a $40,000 project might see a $20,000 project as very feasible.

GSC is also working to make sure you get set up with a qualified installer.  They are doing their research by going into cities, finding out which installers are the best, and signing partnerships with those dealers.  Effectively, they are building a strong reputation for their brand which people can trust and rely upon – just like in any other industry.

http://www.ecogeek.org/component/content/article/2869

The Business of Personal Genomes

Genomic profile: Shown here is a close-up look at a genetic sequence done by Knome, a personal genomics startup in Cambridge, MA. The image shows a chromosome (top) and the letter-by-letter sequence (bottom) in a small section of that chromosome. The pink box highlights a specific genetic variation.   Credit: Knome

In some ways, Jorge Conde, cofounder of the genomics startup Knome, knows his clients more intimately than any other company president. Knome is the first company to sequence and analyze a consumer’s complete genome. And Conde and his team have spent a full day with each member of their select clientele, going through the minute details of the results in search of hidden genomic time bombs, subtle health risks, and other information.

At $100,000, Knome’s product is still out of reach for most consumers. But that could change fast. The cost of genome sequencing is dropping by an order of magnitude every one to two years, and the cost of Knome’s product will drop with it, though not quite as fast. (When the company debuted its service in late 2007, it cost $350,000.) That means that within the next few years, having your genome sequenced will cost about the same as cataract surgery, making it affordable to include your genome sequence as an integral part of your medical record.

When launching Knome in 2007, Conde wandered into largely uncharted territory–only a handful of complete human genomes had been sequenced at the time. That meant that the company had to figure out how to select and analyze the most relevant information in the genome and then deliver that information to clients in a useful and digestible way. “We have to make sure they are not overwhelmed and don’t misunderstand the information,” says Conde. “This hadn’t been done before, so we wanted to be responsible, informative, and entertaining.”

So far, scientists understand only a tiny fraction of the 3 billion letters of the human genome. Knome’s team developed software that combs both public and private genome databases for the latest in scientific research and then applies the findings to an individual’s genome. The company has also developed new ways to filter and sort that information, developing a genome browser that allows users to search their genome by disease or by chromosome, and presents disease risk based on the level of confidence that can be gleaned from the existing research on the topic. The strength of the link between a genetic variation and a disease varies widely. Some genetic variants are definitively linked to specific diseases, such as cystic fibrosis or Huntington’s disease, others are associated with a high risk of a disease, such as the BRCA mutations and breast cancer, while still others have been linked to a negligible increased risk for common diseases, including heart disease and diabetes.

Conde won’t disclose how many people the company has sequenced so far–only that Knome’s goal for 2008 was to sequence 20 people. “In comparison to the genomes that have been published, we think we’ve done more than anyone,” says Conde. Some clients buy their genome sequence to help plan how to maintain their health. “Others do it for the shear thrill of having a front-row seat of what’s going on in science,” says Conde.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/23058/