Dye-sensitized Solar Cells To Power Air Force Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

AFOSR MC Best Energy Harvesting Sources for Future AF UAVs. Flexible dye-sensitized solar cell. (Credit: Courtesy of Nagata and Taya, University of Washington)

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) are expected to power Air Force unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the future because they are an optimum energy harvesting source that may lead to longer flight times without refueling.

The University of Washington’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) project team, with lead researcher Dr. Minoru Taya is working on airborne solar cells by using a flexible film and a thin glass coating with transparent conductive electrodes. He has found that DSSCs made from organic materials, which use (dyes) and moth-eye film, are able to catch photons and convert them into synthesized electrons that can harvest high photon energy.

A few years ago the team mounted dye-sensitized solar cells on the wings of a toy airplane. The propeller was effectively powered, but the plane was not able to become airborne because the glass based solar cells they were using were too heavy. Upon experimentation, they decided to use film battery technology, which worked and in fact, enabled the plane to fly.

“These kinds of solar cells have more specific power convergence efficiency (PCE), very clean energy and easy scalability to a larger skin area of the craft, as well as, low-temperature processing, which leads to lower costs overall,” said Taya.

The team is currently working on DSSCs with higher PCEs using bioinspired dyes, which are installed in the wings of the UAV (airborne energy harvesters).

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090714124954.htm

Transparent Aluminum Is ‘New State Of Matter’

Experimental set-up at the FLASH laser used to discover the new state of matter. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Oxford)

Oxford scientists have created a transparent form of aluminium by bombarding the metal with the world’s most powerful soft X-ray laser. ‘Transparent aluminium’ previously only existed in science fiction, featuring in the movie Star Trek IV, but the real material is an exotic new state of matter with implications for planetary science and nuclear fusion.

In the journal Nature Physics an international team, led by Oxford University scientists, report that a short pulse from the FLASH laser ‘knocked out’ a core electron from every aluminium atom in a sample without disrupting the metal’s crystalline structure. This turned the aluminium nearly invisible to extreme ultraviolet radiation.

”What we have created is a completely new state of matter nobody has seen before,’ said Professor Justin Wark of Oxford University’s Department of Physics, one of the authors of the paper. ‘Transparent aluminium is just the start. The physical properties of the matter we are creating are relevant to the conditions inside large planets, and we also hope that by studying it we can gain a greater understanding of what is going on during the creation of ‘miniature stars’ created by high-power laser implosions, which may one day allow the power of nuclear fusion to be harnessed here on Earth.’

The discovery was made possible with the development of a new source of radiation that is ten billion times brighter than any synchrotron in the world (such as the UK’s Diamond Light Source). The FLASH laser, based in Hamburg, Germany, produces extremely brief pulses of soft X-ray light, each of which is more powerful than the output of a power plant that provides electricity to a whole city.

The Oxford team, along with their international colleagues, focused all this power down into a spot with a diameter less than a twentieth of the width of a human hair. At such high intensities the aluminium turned transparent.

Whilst the invisible effect lasted for only an extremely brief period – an estimated 40 femtoseconds – it demonstrates that such an exotic state of matter can be created using very high power X-ray sources.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090727130814.htm

Students Embed Stem Cells In Sutures To Enhance Healing

Surgical thread can be embedded with a patient’s own adult stem cells to promote healing. (Credit: JHU)

Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering students have demonstrated a practical way to embed a patient’s own adult stem cells in the surgical thread that doctors use to repair serious orthopedic injuries such as ruptured tendons. The goal, the students said, is to enhance healing and reduce the likelihood of re-injury without changing the surgical procedure itself.

The project team — 10 undergraduates sponsored by Bioactive Surgical Inc., a Maryland medical technology company — won first place in the recent Design Day 2009 competition conducted by the university’s Department of Biomedical Engineering. In collaboration with orthopedic physicians, the students have begun testing the stem cell–bearing sutures in an animal model, paving the way for possible human trials within about five years.

The students believe this technology has great promise for the treatment of debilitating tendon, ligament and muscle injuries, often sports-related, that affect thousands of young and middle-aged adults annually. “Using sutures that carry stems cells to the injury site would not change the way surgeons repair the injury,” said Matt Rubashkin, the student team leader, “but we believe the stem cells will significantly speed up and improve the healing process. And because the stem cells will come from the patient, there should be no rejection problems.”

The corporate sponsor, Bioactive Surgical, developed the patent-pending concept for a new way to embed stem cells in sutures during the surgical process. The company then enlisted the student team to assemble and test a prototype to demonstrate that the concept was sound. The undergraduates performed this work during the yearlong Design Team course, required by the school’s Biomedical Engineering Department.

The undergraduate team located a machine that could weave surgical thread in a way that would ensure the most effective delivery and long-term survival of the stem cells. The team conducted some aspects of the animal testing, although orthopedic physicians performed the surgical procedures. The students also prepared grant applications, seeking funding for additional testing of the technology, in collaboration with Bioactive Surgical.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720191145.htm

Image of the Day: One of the Most Massive Stellar Eruptions

The Pistol Nebula, one of the intrinsically brightest stars in our galaxy, appears as the bright white dot in the center of this image taken with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble’s Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) were needed because the star is hidden by obscuring dus tat the Milky Way’s center. NICMOS’ infrared vision penetrated the dust to reveal the star, which is glowing with the radiance of 10 million suns. 

The image also shows one of the most massive stellar eruptions ever seen in space. The radiant star is 25,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius. It has enough raw power to blow off two expanding shells (magenta) of gas equal to the mass of several of our suns. The largest shell is so big (4 light-years) it would stretch nearly all the way from our sun to the next nearest star. The outbursts seen by Hubble are estimated to be only 4,000 and 6,000 years old, respectively.

Despite such a tremendous mass loss, astronomers estimate the extraordinary star presently may be 100 times more massive than our Sun, and may have started with as much as 200 solar masses of material, but it is violently shedding much of its mass.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/image-of-the-day-one-of-the-most-massive-stellar-eruptions-ever.html

A Biofuel Process to Replace All Fossil Fuels

Solar farming: A photobioreactor houses photosynthetic microorganisms that use the energy in sunlight to make fuel and other chemicals from carbon dioxide and water.  Credit: Joule Biotechnologies

A startup based in Cambridge, MA–Joule Biotechnologies–today revealed details of a process that it says can make 20,000 gallons of biofuel per acre per year. If this yield proves realistic, it could make it practical to replace all fossil fuels used for transportation with biofuels. The company also claims that the fuel can be sold for prices competitive with fossil fuels.

Joule Biotechnologies grows genetically engineered microorganisms in specially designed photobioreactors. The microorganisms use energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water into ethanol or hydrocarbon fuels (such as diesel or components of gasoline). The organisms excrete the fuel, which can then be collected using conventional chemical-separation technologies.

If the new process, which has been demonstrated in the laboratory, works as well on a large scale as Joule Biotechnologies expects, it would be a marked change for the biofuel industry. Conventional, corn-grain-based biofuels can supply only a small fraction of the United States’ fuel because of the amount of land, water, and energy needed to grow the grain. But the new process, because of its high yields, could supply all of the country’s transportation fuel from an area the size of the Texas panhandle. “We think this is the first company that’s had a real solution to the concept of energy independence,” says Bill Sims, CEO and president of Joule Biotechnologies. “And it’s ready comparatively soon.”

The company plans to build a pilot-scale plant in the southwestern U.S. early next year, and it expects to produce ethanol on a commercial scale by the end of 2010. Large-scale demonstration of hydrocarbon-fuels production would follow in 2011.

So far, the company has raised “substantially less than $50 million,” Sims says, from Flagship Ventures and other investors, including company employees. The firm is about to start a new round of financing to scale up the technology.

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/23073/

Windows 7 will give boost to PC hardware

Windows 7 will be more than just a better interface. Under-the-hood changes will allow chips from Intel, Nvidia, and Advanced Micro Devices to ratchet up Windows 7 performance above previous Microsoft operating systems.

Microsoft on Wednesday said it has finalized the code for Windows 7, set to ship with new PCs starting October 22. Improvements will include how Windows handles multitasking, graphics acceleration, and solid-state drives

Microsoft is working closely with Intel, whose chips will power the vast majority of PCs running Windows 7. A July 22 post from Joakim Lialias, Intel Alliance Manager for Microsoft, described how Microsoft and Intel “saw unique opportunities to optimize Windows 7 for Intel processor technology” in the areas of performance, power management, and graphics.

In his blog, Lialias focused on improvements to multitasking based on “SMT Parking,” which provides additional support to the Windows 7 scheduler for Intel Hyper-threading Technology. With Hyper-threading, the operating system sees a single processor core as two cores. For example, a quad-core system would be seen as having eight cores, thus potentially improving multitasking–or doing tasks (threads) simultaneously.

Hyper-threading is back in vogue at Intel after being pulled from Intel Core 2 chips (it debuted in the Pentium 4 processor). Nehalem Core “i” series processors use Hyper-threading, as do Atom chips. Intel, in fact, now includes Hyper-threading as part of a chip’s core specifications. The Core i7-975 processor, for example, is listed as “4 Cores, 8 Threads.”

Lialias also mentioned enhancements to boot and shutdown times. “Our mutual goal was to provide the most responsive compute experience possible.” (Lialias’ blog was cited in a PC World article.)

Windows 7 will also do more than previous operating systems with graphics–and here, DirectX 11 stands out as the most highly anticipated technology. A recent AMD blog describes a “beast called the tessellator…which enables games developers to create smoother, less blocky and more organic looking objects in games.” The blog discusses how DirectX has been redesigned “to ensure that it is much more efficient” at using multicore processors, such as the AMD Opteron chip.

Beyond games, Windows 7 has the potential to turn a graphics processing unit (GPU) from AMD or Nvidia into a general-purpose compute engine, used to accelerate everyday computing tasks like a CPU. Specifically, “the compute shader” can be used to speed up more common computing tasks. The buzz word used to describe this technology is a mouthful: GPGPU or general-purpose graphics processing unit.

In an April interview, Sumit Gupta, product manager for Nvidia’s Tesla products, described GPGPU in some detail. “What that essentially means to consumers is, if your laptop has an Nvidia GPU or ATI GPU, it will run the operating system faster because the operating system will essentially see two processors in the system. For the first time, the operating system is going to see the GPU both as a graphics chip and as a compute engine,” he said.

Gupta gave an example of launching an application. “For example, when you launch (Google) Picasa, that is completely run on the CPU. (But) the minute you choose an image and apply a filter, that filter should run on the GPU,” he said.

Another beneficiary of improved Windows 7 technology: solid-state drives, which are typically faster than hard-disk drives and gaining ground in niche markets such as high-end laptops, gaming PCs, and servers.

SSDs will be able to take advantage of Windows 7 technology called the Trim Command. In a recent interview, Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, explained the significance of the Windows 7 Trim Command, which clears up free area on a solid-state drive.

Even when blocks of data get deleted on a solid-state drive, the drive still looks like it’s full, according to Winslow. “Trim allows you to release those blocks for reuse and maintain the performance. Every drive will degrade somewhat over time. With Trim, you’re able to stay more in that the virgin state,” he said.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10295759-64.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Should Thursday Be the New Friday

Should Thursday Be the New Friday? The Environmental and Economic Pluses of the 4-Day Workweek

Evidence builds that working 40 hours in four days makes good sense for employee health and well-being, too

As government agencies and corporations scramble to cut expenses, one idea gaining widespread attention involves cutting something most employees wouldn’t mind losing: work on Fridays. Regular three-day weekends, without a decrease in the actual hours worked per week, could not only save money, but also ease pressures on the environment and public health, advocates say. In fact, several states, cities and companies across the country are considering, or have already implemented on a trial basis, the condensed schedule for their employees.

The economic downturn started the trend, as companies looked to avoid laying off employees, notes John Langmaid, organizer of an upcoming symposium on the issue for the Connecticut Law Review. Firms soon realized that when they closed on Fridays they could save money without having to reduce weekly hours. Indeed, Langmaid remarks, the idea of a four-day, 40-hour workweek “has been out there for quite some time as a response to environmental issues, commuting pressures, as well as work-family balance.”

Local governments in particular have had their eyes on Utah over the last year; the state redefined the workday for more than 17,000 of its employees last August. For those workplaces, there’s no longer a need to turn on the lights, elevators or computers on Fridays—nor do janitors need to clean vacant buildings. Electric bills have dropped even further during the summer, thanks to less air-conditioning: Friday’s midday hours have been replaced by cooler mornings and evenings on Monday through Thursday. As of May, the state had saved $1.8 million.

Perhaps as important, workers seem all too ready to replace “TGIF” with “TGIT”. “People just love it,” says Lori Wadsworth, a professor of public management at Brigham Young University in Provo. She helped survey those on the new Working 4 Utah schedule this May and found 82 percent would prefer to stick with it.

The environment seems to like it, too. “If employees are on the road 20 percent less, and office buildings are only powered four days a week,” Langmaid says, “the energy savings and congestion savings would be enormous.” Plus, the hour shift for the Monday through Thursday workers means fewer commuters during the traditional rush hours, speeding travel for all. It also means less time spent idling in traffic and therefore less spewing of greenhouse gases and other pollutants. The 9-to-5 crowd also gets the benefit of extended hours at the DMV and other state agencies that adopt the four-day schedule.

An interim report released by the Utah state government in February projected a drop of at least 6,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually from Friday building shutdowns. If reductions in greenhouse gases from commuting are included, the state would check the generation of at least 12,000 metric tons of CO2—the equivalent of taking about 2,300 cars off the road for one year.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=four-day-workweek-energy-environment-economics-utah

New Molecular Pathway For Targeting Cancer, Disease Discovered

A UCLA study has identified a way to turn off a key signaling pathway involved in physiological processes that can also stimulate the development of cancer and other diseases. The findings may lead to new treatments and targeted drugs using this approach.

In the study, which is currently available in the online edition of the journal Molecular Endocrinology, scientists found that by activating a receptor in cells called the liver X receptor (LXR), they were able to inhibit the hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathway, which is involved in the maintenance of tissue integrity and stem cell generation. When stimulated in an unregulated manner, however, the Hh pathway can also cause cancers of the brain, lung, blood, prostate, skin and other tissues.

Blocking such unregulated stimulation of the Hh pathway had previously been shown in animal studies to prevent cancers, according to the researchers. How LXR was able to inhibit tumor cell growth by impeding the Hh pathway was previously unknown.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090720134551.htm

Hey stupid! Drop the cell phone and drive

While heroic politicians all over America are mandating bicycle helmets, it’s still legal to drive 4,000 pounds of steel 60 miles an hour while your brain is turned to the moron setting.

Oh you know exactly who and what I’m talking about. You know because you are that one guy in all the world who is perfectly capable of operating your automobile and cellular device simultaneously without endangering yourself or those driving around you … all of whom are also operating their automobiles and cellular devices simultaneously, because they too are quite certain that they are that one guy … but of course they’re wrong because it’s you who is that one guy, not any of them … morons.

Seriously. Dang. Isn’t it time we, as a people, owned up to the cognitive dissonance going down whenever we tsk-tsk terrible tales of texting bus drivers, then yack away behind the wheel while driving way the hell over the speed limit or coasting through a four-way stop with a carpool full of kids? We should be shocked and appalled that a seven-year-old recommendation by National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration that drivers not use cell phones — not even hands-free — only surfaced Tuesday.

Yet as safety advocates continue to battle politics and the long reach of the cell phone industry, we, of our own free will, continue to blithely endanger the lives of others by partaking in unnecessary wireless communication empirically proven to be deadly.

The facts are these: The NHTSA’s no-cell phones-while-driving recommendations of 2002 and 2003 were made public Tuesday only because The Center for Auto Safety and Public Citizen, two public interest groups, filed a lawsuit to obtain the documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

These recommendations, along with a proposal for a long-term study of 10,000 drivers to assess the safety risk posed by cell phone use behind the wheel, were shelved, according to those quoted in The New York Times, for several “larger political considerations.”

These “larger political considerations” include, but are not limited to fear that Congress would accuse the NHTSA of overstepping its bounds from suggestion-making into lobbying, alienating stakeholders unwilling to alienate multitask-while-motoring voters and blah blah blah blah blah ….

Around the time of NHTSA 2002 report, cell phone subscribers made up more than half of the United States population, and highway safety researchers estimated driver/cell phone-related accidents to be the cause of 955 fatalities and 240,000 accidents overall. Cell phone subscribers now make up 87 percent of the U.S. population, according to the CTIA-The Wireless Association, the cell phone industry trade group.

Here’s some more numbers for you: Motorists talking on a phone are four times as likely to crash as other drivers, and are as likely to cause an accident as someone with a 0.08 blood alcohol content, according to research. Do you even want to think about your loved ones cruising around with a road full of texters?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32106221/ns/technology_and_science-tech_and_gadgets/

5-Year-Old Girl Feeds Nearly 18,000 Hungry San Franciscans

Little Phoebe, from San Francisco, California has a big heart. That’s an understatement. Actually, her kindness and compassion is bigger than most grown ups I’ve crossed paths with while reporting TV news for nearly a decade.

It started off with a simple question by Phoebe, an adorable little girl with long brown locks, peach-colored cheeks and big doe eyes, like a character straight out of a Disney after-school special. After seeing a person holding a cardboard sign begging for food, Phoebe wondered, “Why does that man look so sad, and why is he holding a sign in the street?”

That question to her parents, during her daily ride to daycare, sparked an idea that has helped feed nearly 18,000 hungry San Franciscans.

A grown up conversation ensued. “What can we do to help?” asked Phoebe. Her parents told her about one possible place the hungry could go for help; The food bank.

Phoebe also asked Kathleen Albert, her teacher at “With Care Day Care,” about the hunger problem. Albert explained that some people fall on hard times and don’t have the basics like food and clothes. Phoebe replied, “I want to raise money for the San Francisco Food Bank to feed hungry people then,” she said. Her ambitious goal was to raise $1,000, in two months. Why $1,000? No one knows; Phoebe couldn’t even count denominations of money before the project.

“Phoebe focused on the smaller picture, and what she could do,” her teacher explained. She decided to collect cans as a project to complete her mission. Phoebe knew that she could raise money by recycling cans, because her dad would bring her and her sister to trade cans for cash on the weekends.

Albert, a spunky, grey-haired woman, with big Coke-bottle round, purple rimmed glasses, who resembles a jovial, energetic, Sunday strip comic book caricature, admits, “Although, I immediately supported Phoebe’s lofty goal, I thought, ‘Caaaaans?’ I didn’t think a 5-year-old could possibly raise that much money in just two months time.” And as adults sometimes are…She was wrong.

With a little bit of guidance from Albert and a whole lot of support from classmates, Phoebe wrote letters to 150 family, friends, alumni and neighbors. She received 50 responses. Word got around about the 5-year-old girl who wrote, “Dear Family and Friends… My charity project is to raise lots of money for the S.F. Food Bank. They need money. I am collecting soda cans. Would you please give me your soda cans and bring them to With Care… “Donations started pouring in… Friends, family and even anonymous donors dropped off cans, checks and cash at the colorful storybook-looking Victorian in a San Francisco neighborhood which houses Phoebe’s day care. Phoebe’s project, which had started with small donations of $5, $10, then $20 bills, grew exponentially. As, word spread, people started matching donations dollar for dollar. “I was getting cash in the mail, and I thought this is great, I’m getting money in my mailbox,” Albert recalls. Albert’s loud, one-two-three eyes-on-me classroom voice softens as she admits, “Does she understand it [the hunger problem] like you and I, no, but she understood something needed to be done. I learned something from her. And when you learn something from children, it’s great!”

Phoebe responded personally to every donation, no matter how large or small. She would skip recess, instead counting money and writing thank-you notes to all who gave. “Little Phoebe was determined and never once complained,” says Albert, “They looked at it as, ‘it doesn’t have to be big.’ We talked about it in terms of Barack Obama…and how it was the little money and the little donations. So when people came to the door with one or two cans, people we didn’t even know, she would say, oh, that’s five cents, that’s ten cents, that’s fifteen cents. She understood, that you start off small, and you can make it bigger, bigger, bigger.”

Fast forward two months.

Last June, all of the students at With Care, got dressed to the nines for a big celebration, complete with a ceiling full of colorful balloons, decorations and cake. Phoebe handed over the money and checks she collected in a handmade and hand-colored pencil box with flowers and stickers and colorful stars, to Paul Ash, the Executive Director of the San Francisco Food Bank. Phoebe’s grand total: $3,736.30. How many hungry people will that amount feed? Just ask Phoebe, she’ll tell you “Seventeen-thousand something.” The exact amount, according to Ash, 17,800 hungry people will be fed, thanks to Phoebe’s kindness, compassion and determination.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/toan-lam/5-year-old-girl-feeds-nea_b_244854.html