Monthly Archives: March 2007

Scotland Building Wave Power Farms

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Scottish engineers are taking advantage of the huge ocean coast that Scotland enjoys by building a ‘wave farm’ to harvest electricity from the ocean’s powerful waves. These big red tubes have been named the Pelamis System after a sea snake. Max Carcas, the business developer for the firm, says it is ‘a bit like a ship at anchor or a flag on a flagpole, it self orientates into the waves … Waves then travel down the length of the machine and in doing so each of the sections, each of these train carriages, moves up and down and side to side.’ These snake-like movements push hydraulic fluid through generators to produce electricity.

bbc

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Ethanol from Everything: Genome Sequencing Reveals Key to Viable Ethanol Production

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As the national push for alternative energy sources heats up, researchers at the University of Rochester have for the first time identified how genes responsible for biomass breakdown are turned on in a microorganism that produces valuable ethanol from materials like grass and cornstalks.

Waste products such as grass clippings and wood chips—once thought too difficult to turn into ethanol—may soon be fodder for hungry, gene-tweaked bacteria. The findings in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences may empower scientists to engineer ethanol-producing super-organisms that can make clean-burning fuel from the nation’s one billion unused tons of yearly biomass production.

“This is the first revelation of how a bacterium chooses from its more than 100 enzymes to break down a particular biomass,” says David H. Wu, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Rochester. “Once we know how a bacterium targets a particular type of biomass, we should be able to boost that process to draw ethanol from biomass far more efficiently that we can today.”

physorg

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Chinese Scientists Fly Pigeons by Remote Control

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Chinese scientists have succeeded in implanting electrodes in the brain of a pigeon to remotely control the bird’s flight, state media said.

Xinhua News Agency said the scientists at the Robot Engineering Technology Research Center at Shandong University of Science and Technology in eastern China used the micro electrodes to command the bird to fly right or left, and up or down.

The implants stimulated different areas of the pigeon’s brain according to electronic signals sent by the scientists via computer, mirroring natural signals generated by the brain, Xinhua quoted chief scientist Su Xuecheng as saying.

It was the first such successful experiment on a pigeon in the world, said Su, who conducted a similar successful experiment on mice in 2005.

msn

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Brain Function More Complex Than Previously Thought

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The brain appears to process information more chaotically than has long been assumed.

This is demonstrated by a new study conducted by scientists at the University of Bonn. The passing on of information from neuron to neuron does not, they show, occur exclusively at the synapses, i.e. the junctions between the nerve cell extensions. Rather, it seems that the neurons release their chemical messengers along the entire length of these extensions and, in this way, excite the neighbouring cells. The findings of the study are of huge significance since they explode fundamental notions about the way our brain works.

“We think … that on their way though the grey matter the axons probably release glutamate at other points apart from the synapses,” Dr. Dirk Dietrich at Bonn University speculates. “Nerve cells and dendrites are closely packed together here. So the axon could not only excite the actual receptor but also numerous other nerve cells.”

If this hypothesis is correct, the accepted scientific understanding of the way neurons communicate—that neurotransmitters are only releases a t synapses, which has prevailed for over a hundred years, will have to be revised.

eurekalert

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Evolving Robots and a Comparison of Individual vs Group Selection… Awesome

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Living things communicate all the time. They bark, they glow, they make a stink, they thwack the ground. How their communication evolved is the sort of big question that keeps lots of biologists busy for entire careers. One of the reasons it’s so big is that there are many different things that organisms communicate. A frog may sing to attract mates. A plant may give off a chemical to attract parasitoid wasps to attack the bugs chewing its leaves. An ant may lay down pheromone trails to guide other ants to food. Bacteria emit chemical signals to each other so that they can build biofilms that line our lungs and guts.

Communication may work all very well in these cases, but scientists also want to know how they evolved in the first place. Roughly speaking, their question goes something like this. Say you’re an organism living a solitary life. Sending a signal to another member of your species may cost you more than it might bring back in benefits. If you come across some food and suddenly declare, “My, but those are some tasty grubs,” you may find yourself besieged by other members of your species all coming to have some for themselves. You might even attract the attention of a predator and become a meal yourself. So why not just shut up?

There are many ways to attack this question. You can go out and listen to birds. You can genetically engineer bacteria to tinker with their communication system and see what happens. Or you can build an army of robots.

Laurent Keller, an expert on social evolution at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, chose the latter. Working with robotics experts at Lausanne, he constructed simple robots like the ones shown above. Each robot had a pair of wheeled tracks, a 360-degree light-sensing camera, and an infrared sensor underneath. The robots were controlled by a program with a neural network architecture. In neural networks, inputs come in through various channels and get combined in various combinations, and the combinations then produce outgoing signals. In the case of the Swiss robots, the inputs were the signals from the camera and the infrared sensor, and the output was the control of the tracks.

The scientists then put the robots in a little arena with two glowing red disks. One disk they called the food source. The other was the poison source. The only difference between them was that food source sat on top of a gray piece of paper, and the poison source sat on top of black paper. A robot could tell the difference between the two only once it was close enough to a source to use its infrared sensor to see the paper color.

Then the scientists allowed the robots to evolve. The robots—a thousand of them in each trial of the experiment—started out with neural networks that were wired at random. They were placed in groups of ten in arenas with poison and food, and they all wandered in a haze. If a robot happened to reach the food and detected the gray paper, the scientists awarded it a point. If it ended up by the poison source, it lost a point. The scientists observed each robot over the course of ten minutes and added up all their points during that time. (This part of the experiment was run on a computer simulation to save time and to be able to evolve lots of robots at once.)

the loom
the abstract
a video

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Storing Digital Data In DNA

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For people who want to ensure their words last for their progeny, Japanese scientists have found a way to literally put a message into genes.

A research team said this week it had developed a technology for storing digital data in the DNA of bacteria, which unlike most living organisms can survive for millennia in the right conditions.

Each hay bacillus bacterium can store two megabits—the equivalent of 1.6 million Roman letters. The scientists can take out the microscopic implants in a laboratory and read them so they appear as ordinary text.

The team at Keio University’s Institute for Advanced Biosciences said the technology needs to be perfected but that it was optimistic about its future uses.

“If I wanted to store my personal diary in these live bacteria and take it with me to my grave, then my story can live for thousands and thousands of years,” head researcher Yoshiaki Ohashi said with a laugh.

yahoo

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