Popular Science

Molecularly engineered potato chips, an appreciation for cheese on the microbiological level, using gold to destroy acne, and 3-D C-notes? Clearly, we've been spoiled by this week's abundance of novelty.

Welcome to the future.

Here are some of our favorite stories this week:

• Gold Nano-Bombs Deliver Bacteria-Killing Therapy Directly to Acne
• Lay's Changing Basic Shape of Salt Crystals for Healthier Potato Chips
• U.S. Treasury Jumps on 3-D Bandwagon, Unveils Redesigned Benjamins
• Have Modern Scientists Made any Advancements in Alchemy?
• Wisconsin Becomes First State to Name Official Microbe, Honoring Cheese-Producing Bacterium

As always, leave a comment to win this drawing on a shirt. We'll announce our randomly chosen winner next week. If you can't wait, buy the shirt here. Have a good weekend everyone!

On the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, we take a look back at where it all began

The year 1970 was a pivotal one for the modern environmental movement: on April 22, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson founded Earth Day, which quickly grew from a grassroots demonstration into the week-long celebration that we partake in to this day. And on December 2, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to respond to the growing demand for green legislation and environmental oversight.

We shouldn't be surprised, then, at the influx of environment and pollution-related articles recorded in our archives during the early 1970s.

Prior to that decade, keyword searches for typical green terms turn up only a smattering of results. In 1932, we briefly mentioned that fumes from factory chimneys in Germany may be damaging farmers' crops. Dangerous chemicals were described simply as "foreign vapors in the atmosphere." In June 1955, we featured an article on anti-traffic exhaust technology, while referring to stories about smog as "scare headlines."

Oh, how times change.

Click to launch the photo gallery

Those types of "scares" of course became all too real, as studies about the thinning ozone layer and acid raid began entering the public dialogue. We are pleased to report that following the landmark publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 and the consequent banning of DDTs, we published dozens of articles that not only examined the crisis, but that recommended ways people could contribute to a greener, healthier future for Earth.

Click through our gallery to read about 10 ways people becan to confront pollution after 1970.

If only Mozart had this

Spanish telecommunications engineers have devised a new method to generate sheet music based on the sounds of individual notes, which it can identify regardless of musician, instrument, and venue.

The research team, from the University of Jaen in Jaen, Spain, describes an automated system that determines the spectral pattern of an instrument's musical notes. The pattern is used to create a harmonic dictionary, which is paired with a pattern algorithm. The system then determines which note is which, and converts the information into a readable format. Given a WAV file of a recording, the software can produce a MIDI transcription.

Automatic music transcription could help musicologists analyze sound samples, recover musical content and separate varying audio sources, according to Julio José Carabias, co-author of the paper and a researcher from the Department of Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Jaen.

The method's details were published in IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. The system is adaptable, meaning it can interpret any instrument, from dulcimers to didgeridoos. As of now, it only works for one instrument at a time, but the researchers think the method can be scaled to include many instruments playing at once. Other musical transcription devices use databases and are trained to recognize specific notes -- much like a spectrometer is trained to recognize the spectra of certain chemical compounds. But the Spanish device learns on its own, by creating its own dictionary.

A sound spectrum is a representation of a sound in terms of the amount of vibration at each individual frequency. The distribution of a note's harmonic energy defines its spectral pattern. Using that information, the system creates a dictionary of sound. It identifies the notes even when the type of instrument, musician, type of music or recording studio conditions vary.

"Another advantage of this method is that it does not require prior training with a musical database," Carabias said.

The patch uses 100 times less vaccine than an injection to provide the same resistance

In a successful test of a prototype nanotech vaccine patch, Australian researchers at the University of Queensland used a patch smaller than a postage stamp to deliver vaccine through the skin without needles, and with 100 times less vaccine required to evoke a similar protective immune response, according to Pharmacy News.

We noted previously that the nanopatch efficiency could help limited stocks of vaccine go a longer way during epidemics. Its ability to be self-administered also means that ordinary people in the developing world could more easily get vaccinated without the presence of physicians or nurses.

The nanopatch has thousands of densely packed projections to administer the vaccine through the skin over a period of just two minutes. Australian scientists used the nanopatch to specifically target a narrow layer just beneath the skin which holds a high density of antigen-presenting cells (APCs). Such cells are essential to creating a protective immune response.

Only dry vaccine was needed, as opposed to refrigerated vaccine -- removing yet another limiting factor for many vaccination programs. And it almost goes without saying that people afraid of needles can also find some relief from this approach.

If the nanopatch performs just as well in human clinical trials, it could hit the market within five years. Just sit tight on that needle phobia until then.

[via Pharmacy News]

1,000 of the maps could fit on a grain of salt

IBM scientists working across three countries have created the smallest-ever 3D map of the world -- so tiny that 1,000 maps could fit on a grain of salt.

The map, measuring 22 by 11 micrometers, is scratched out on a polymer surface. Every 8 nanometers corresponds to 1,000 meters of altitude -- so Mount Everest would be about 64 nanometers high. The map is composed of 500,000 pixels, each measuring 20 nanometers square. The patterning process could conceivably be used for nano-scale electronics and medical devices.

The breakthrough was in how the scientists decided to build the map. IBM scientist Urs Duerig says in a company video that his "a-ha" moment was in realizing he could make 3-D shapes by removing material rather than adding to it.

A tiny silicon tip attached to a cantilever is heated as it approaches a polymer substrate. Force and heat chip away at the polymer, yielding the desired shapes. It took two minutes and 23 seconds to build the 3-D map of Earth.

"It's like the ancient Egyptians chiseled their stuff into stone plates. Here we have the analogue, but on the nano-scale," he said.

The team also created a scale model of the Matterhorn, well known to Europeans and Disney World visitors. The famous mountain is recreated in molecular glass, reaching 25 nanometers high -- a scale of 1 to 5 billion.

The findings were reported in the journals Advanced Materials and Science.

We're one step closer to the stuff of sci-fi and boy wizards. Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have engineered a metamaterial with a refined 3-D structure that gives light a negative refraction index upon entering the material. Put another way, it bends light the opposite way one might expect, irrespective of the angle or polarization of incoming light waves. Put yet another way: We're getting closer to that invisibility cloak we've been looking for.

Metamaterials, of course, are artificial materials engineered to exhibit properties that don't come easily in nature. Such materials could have a range of applications, from superlenses to solar cells to active camouflage. And while this isn't the first light-bending metamaterial we've ever seen, it is the first one that operates on visible light, doing all of its negative-index refracting in the blue part of the spectrum.

Not only that, but this new metamaterial is simpler than previous attempts at negative-index metatamaterials. It requires only a single functional layer, yet is seriously versatile, handling light at any polarization and functioning at a wide range of incident angles. That could potentially enable superlenses that image past the diffraction limit, solar cells that are able to scoop up a lot more sunlight, and even invisibility cloaking.

Related ArticlesAcoustic Metamaterials Could Make Ultra-Thin, Ultra-Effective Noise-Cancelling PanelsCustom-Made Metamaterials Could Show Scientists a Tabletop Big Bang New Metamaterials Could Produce Sonar Cloaking DeviceTagsScience, Clay Dillow, experimental materials, invisibility, invisibility cloaks, materials scientist, metamaterials, physicsPrevious metamaterials required several layers of resonant elements to create this negative-index response, but the Caltech method requires only a single layer of silver with plasmonic waveguide elements distributed throughout that route the light waves through the material. Involving only a single layer in the process means this new material is easier to manufacture and easier to tune to different wavelengths of light.

While it's more fun to think about a Harry Potter-like invisibility cloak, the real breakthrough here could be in solar gathering technology. The fact that this metamaterial is tunable means engineers could potentially tweak it to better sync with the solar spectrum, manufacturing solar cells with a far higher efficiency that could in turn make solar a more feasible alternative to fossil fuels. Which is almost -- but not quite -- as exciting as an invisibility cloak.

[PhysOrg]

What if you could go to sleep with a vision problem and wake up with a crystal-clear view of the world? A Spanish optometrist not only says this is possible, but he actually wants you to sleep in your contacts. His patented contact lenses, designed to achieve the same effect of corneal reshaping surgery, can correct vision defects like myopia (nearsightedness) and stigmatism - and now hyperopia (farsightedness) - without taking sharp instruments or lasers to your eyes.

Reshaping the cornea is a tricky business, of course, and generally requires a surgical procedure to permanently fix the problem. But Jaume Paune's corrective lenses don't aim to permanently reshape the corneas at all, but rather to temporarily reshape them each night while you sleep.

Every cornea deformation is a bit different, so there's no one-size-fits-all approach to fixing the problem - hence the usual need for surgery if a patient doesn't want to be stuck with glasses or contacts. But Paune's system involves custom designing a pair of rigid, gas-permeable contact lenses for each patient based on his or her particular deformities, a process known as orthokeratology or ortho-k.

During the night the lenses gently reshape the cornea by pressuring the film that coats the outside of the cornea, changing its shape by about half the width of a human hair. The next morning, the lenses come out and the patient has perfect vision - at least for the duration of the day. The changes are not permanent so the patient must repeat the process each night, which could prove a tedious chore. But the farsightedness is gone, allowing the patient to get through the day without constantly squinting or groping about for his or her glasses.

The cost of the system might sway patients back toward surgery though - $1,350 up front to custom-design the lenses, plus another $550 or so each year thereafter to replace them. Then again, no one needs to put a laser to your iris either, so there's certainly a give-and-take.

[Science Daily]

The gelatinous capsule has passed its first human trials

It's no secret that obesity is a growing problem for Americans. Our kids are growing larger, our rates of diabetes and heart disease show no signs of retreating, and our military is worried that the next generation of warfighters will be too big and sluggish to get the job done. But Boston-based Gelesis has engineered a complex obesity solution that works by a simple mechanism: take a pill, become full, eat less.

The idea of shrinking stomach size to reduce the amount of processed foodstuffs a person can consume in one sitting isn't a new idea, but conventional methods of doing so - stomach stapling or gastric bypass surgery - carry with them a bevy of inherent risks (not to mention they're invasive). Gelesis has engineered a similar plan of attack called Attiva, but rather than shrinking the stomach, it aims to reduce gastrointestinal real estate from the inside.

Gelesis engineered a super-absorbent polymer - is it ironic that it's derived from an unspecified food source? - that can be reduced to small beads about the size of a grain of sugar. These tiny polymer beads swell up more than 100 times over when introduced to water, kind of like those little sponges you used to play with in the bath. So when you down a pill with a glass of water, the capsule dissolves in your stomach and the hydrogel beads begin to grow. In a few minutes you're feeling pretty full, and that second Double Down from KFC is decidedly less attractive.

Of course, now you have a belly full of hydrogel, and this is where the engineers at Gelesis had to be clever. The food is now mixed in with the gel, but you still need to digest that food (the object here is weight loss, not starvation). The hydrogel keeps food in the stomach longer, giving stomach acid more time to break down both the food and the hydrogel, which begins to release its water. Everything then moves to the small intestine where the gel can re-expand to some extent, slowing the absorption of fatty materials and sugars. Finally everything ends up in the lower bowels, and the rest is history.

The clever part of the engineering, of course, was creating a polymer that can stand up to changing pH levels so that it never fully breaks down; the company claims its product never touches the bloodstream, making it more of a medical device than a medication. How will the FDA treat it? Who knows, but it did just pass its first human trial without any problems beyond the occasional stomach ache. And let's be honest, that second Double Down probably would have given you a stomach ache anyhow.

[xconomy]

To celebrate Earth Day, we've compiled the best images of our planet as seen from NASA's satellites.

It's the 40th anniversary of Earth Day today. To honor our beloved planet, it's nice sometimes to stop and envy the view enjoyed by such a tiny slice of humanity: the astronauts. Here we've compiled some of our favorite views of Earth from space.

Click to launch the photo gallery

In addition to more conventional images taken from spacecraft and satellites, we've also included more data-rich visualizations of the sort that continue to help us understand our great planet.

Launch the gallery above for images of earthquakes, fires, sunsets, ice shelves and more. Happy Earth Day!

Finding in fruit flies could lead to odor-blocking drugs that might prevent disease or boost lifespan

Dieters know the powerful temptations of just seeing or smelling food. Certain odors might have such a strong effect as to actually change the body's metabolism and lead to an early grave. At least, that's the case for fruit flies on a diet, according to Science Now.

Scientists have known that low-calorie diets can lengthen the lives of yeast, fruit flies and monkeys. One past study also showed that blocking the sense of smell in roundworms extended their lives. Another conducted by the University of Michigan and Baylor College showed that wafting the tasty smell of live yeast in front of dieting fruit flies shortened their lives.

The new study is a follow-up to the fruit fly experiment, but focused on a brain cell receptor which allows fruit flies to smell carbon dioxide -- the olfactory trigger that alerts flies to the presence of yeast.

It turns out that mutant flies without the CO2 receptor live up to 30 percent longer than normal flies on a typical diet. Directly causing the CO2-sensing neurons to die also extended the lives of flies. When scientists turned on the gene for the CO2 receptor again, mutant flies did not live longer than the normal breed.

The mutants also displayed strong health indicators such as storing more fat to resist stress, the researchers noted in the journal PLoS Biology. They suspect that the lack of ability to sense CO2 (and food) tricks the fly bodies into going into starvation mode with a slowed-down metabolism to conserve nutritional supplies.

Blocking the perception of CO2 may trick the animals into thinking there's no food around, which would slow down their metabolism and conserve their nutritional supplies, just as hungry animals do, the authors write. It's a long ways from helping humans, but the existence of a link between odor and physiological state has profound implications.

[via Science Now]

Your chance to spot 50 years' worth of sneakily concealed aliens

Over the past decade, those who wished to contribute to SETI's mission of locating life elsewhere in the universe could leave their computers on running a special screensaver and donate their unused computing power to the cause. Now, SETI director Jill Tarter is asking people around the globe to get more involved in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence by opening up SETI's servers to the public calling for a worldwide, open source contribution to the search.

Tarter says:

In the future, we hope that a global army of open-source code developers, students and other experts in digital signal processing, as well as citizen scientists willing to lend their intelligence to our exploration, will have access to the same technology and join our quest.

SETI's data, compiled from 25 years of scanning the skies with advanced astronomical telescopes, will be made available on a special SETI website this summer, at which point users can take whatever data sets they wish and comb through them looking for patterns or noise that SETI's algorithms may have overlooked. The site is currently configured for those with some kind of background in signal processing and the like, but SETI is working to make it more accessible to users of all backgrounds and ages.

Whether or not this shift represents frustration within SETI or simply a change in tactics befitting of the time, it vastly increases the raw brainpower that the organization has at its disposal, and that can't be bad for an organization that has a lot of universe to cover. In Tarter's words, "all of the SETI searching over the past 50 years is equivalent to examining one 8-ounce glass of water from the Earth's oceans." Maybe this change in policy will tip the scales ever so slightly in our favor.

[CNN]

Nanotechnology's bright future has finally come up with a possible treatment for the dreaded pimples of our teen years. That has arrived in the form of gold nano-bombs which deliver a lethal dose of lauric acid to skin-dwelling bacteria responsible for that unsightly acne, according to UPI.

Lauric acid can convert into a compound which essentially destroys the outer lipid walls of bacteria, and is found in coconut oil and human breast milk. Bioengineers at the University of California-San Diego packaged the lauric acid inside of artificial microscopic sacs to become bacteria-busting nano-bombs.

Gold nanoparticles studding the outside of the nano-bombs prevent the sacs from fusing together, and also help them act as smart bombs to track down bacteria based on the skin's pH level and other microenvironment factors.

The nano-bomb liposomes shed their gold nanoparticles once they reach the acidic microenvironment of the bacterial membranes, and allow the lauric acid to do their dirty work and help clear up acne.

Such nanoparticles have also helped other researchers aim their lasers at brain parasites responsible for "crazy cat lady" syndrome. But we hope that researchers are keeping an eye out for any potential safety issues with applying gold nanoparticles to human faces.

[via UPI]

A combination of the party drug and talking with therapists allowed a majority of war vets to overcome their PTSD to a great extent

War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder have found unexpected relief from the banned drug MDMA, known more commonly as ecstasy. The psychedelic drug typically associated with hard-partying clubbers appears to cure PTSD entirely in some cases, Scientific American reports.

The findings were presented at a conference held in San Jose last month, titled "Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century," and have psychiatrists excited over the unprecedented results. They came out of a study sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), which launched in 2004.

Of 21 patients, 13 took ecstasy and then talked with psychiatrists about their wartime traumas. They saw huge drops in PTSD symptoms compared to the eight-person placebo group. Seven out of the eight in the placebo group also eventually chose to receive ecstasy following the study.

After three and a half years, 13 out of 16 patients who kept in touch still appeared free of the criteria for PTSD. One psychiatrist who worked with a Veterans Affairs Medical Center told Scientific American that should definitely try ecstasy as a therapeutic tool, if it were not illegal.

This wasn't a complete victory over PTSD -- two patients suffered clear relapses, and several of the other patients remained on antidepressants or similar psychoactive medication. Still, the patients required lower amounts of the psychoactive drugs compared to before their treatment.

Physicians and scientists have long struggled with pinpointing the causes of PTSD among individual warfighters, as well as diagnosing and treating the condition. We imagine the recent successes of using ecstasy therapeutically might cause the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to rethink its prior five rejections of proposals from MAPS to work together.

The blog of American Veteran Magazine adds a helpful note that war vets should not take ecstasy on their own, given that it remains illegal -- the MAPS study was conducted under psychiatrist supervision and with FDA approval.

[via Scientific American]

More than three months after being hurled into orbit, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is snapping some breathtaking images of the Sun, the first of which NASA released this afternoon. The mission designers have to be happy with them: the pics capture huge looping prominences lashing out from the surface and the kinds of massive explosions one might expect from a giant, churning ball of cosmic gas.

Click to launch the photo gallery

SDO launched in February to help researchers on the ground gain a better understanding of how processes taking place on the sun affect life on Earth. NASA and its international partners hope that in time SDO provides a wealth of solar data that will help them predict solar weather more accurately than current means allow. SDO views the sun with a resolution ten times greater than that of an HD video camera and carries four telescopes as well as instruments for measuring magnetic motions on the surface and ultraviolet energy output.

Science aside, NASA researchers must be pretty pleased with what SDO is sending back thus far if only from an aesthetic standpoint.

[NASA]

Could build better batteries, solar cells

When we think of farming energy, we generally think of feedstocks like corn that can be processed into ethanol, or perhaps other plant life we can culture and harvest like algae. But don't underestimate the livestock; we've recently seen methane-trapping schemes that can power farms and giant cattle treadmills that turn idle dairy drones into power-producing machines. Now, a team of Stanford researchers wants to use a protein found in cow brains to make better batteries.

The concept centers on a particular protein called clathrin, which has a unique knack for assembling itself into versatile structures that foster the formation of complex molecules. Clathrin is present in every cell in the human body, but cows possess a vast wealth of it in their bovine brains that make them an ideal source for the stuff. And given the right biochemical directions, researchers think they can coax clathrin into creating better batteries and solar cells.

In cells, clathrin plays a key role in cell transport. Its tripod-like structure allows it to create a honeycomb-like lattice on the outer surface of cell walls. Atoms and molecules then attach themselves to clathrin according to the protein's will; when the right cargo is attached, the lattice collapses inward, pinching off the cell wall and delivering it's molecular payload into the cell's interior.

It's this ability to connect into structures and lure in the right molecules that makes clathrin an ideal candidate for creating battery electrodes and solar cells. Scientists can bend clathrin to their will relatively easily, coaxing it into a variety of very useful skeletal structures that they can then attach molecules to. By adding the right blend of inorganic atoms or molecules, the researchers can create electrodes, catalysts, and other battery cell building blocks.

The group has already mashed up gold and titanium dioxide into a material they call "titania" that has photocatalytic properties that allow it turn sunlight into a catalyst for water splitting. Other materials are in the works, all aimed at turning chemicals or sunlight into sweet, sweet energy. Show us an ear of corn that can do that.

[PhysOrg]

The initial fallout from a chemical or radiological attack would be devastating enough, but the cleanup of such an incident would be equally hazardous. While HAZMAT teams and other authorities have methods of scrubbing radiological and chemical waste, the porous nature of building materials like concrete gives radionuclides and dangerous chemical agents plenty of places to hide from conventional cleanup methods. So a team of chemists at Idaho National Laboratory is experimenting with a battery of laser treatments that can neutralize threats no matter how deep within our infrastructure they burrow.

In the case of a dirty bomb attack, the immediate response would be to evacuate the area and "chelate" any affected surfaces - that's the scrubbing you've seen HAZMAT types performing on contaminated surfaces. But chelation can only render inert what it can touch; radioactive particles that find their way into cracks and pores in concrete or asphalt can elude surface scrubbing only to reappear later.

So the INL researchers looked into ways to probe deeper into porous surfaces, and found a solution in an old friend: H2O. Water can get into those same cracks and pores where radionuclides hole up; cleanup crews can then blast the area with laser pulses that turn that water into steam, carrying the contaminants right back to the surface just as a steam cleaner pulls unwanted materials out of a carpet.

The team employed a similar approach to smoking chemical agents like VX nerve gas, sarin, and mustard gas out of their holes. Conventional methods of cleaning up these agents can be pretty harmful and time consuming themselves; bleach solutions work, for example, but they in turn must be cleaned up, exacerbating the environmental and economic toll of the contamination.

But a series of tests currently underway has shows that ultraviolet wavelength lasers can decontaminate surfaces exposed to mustard and VX gases either by photochemically blasting apart chemical bonds or by photothermally heating particles until they degrade or simply fall apart. INL researchers are looking into using the technique on other chemical agents, many of which are susceptible to at least one of those two laser attacks. The team is also contemplating using microwaves to create heat radiation deep within porous materials to push deeply rooted chemical agents to the surface, much as they did when "steam cleaning" radioactive contaminants.

Once offending agents are at the surface, cleanup crews can simply blast them with lasers to render them inert, meaning life in affected areas can return to normal more quickly and with less chemical fuss. The technology is still in its infancy, but HAZMAT teams of the future may be trading in their bio-suits and chemical sprays for remotely controlled robotic crews packing serious laser heat.

[Idaho National Laboratory]

Every day for the past three years, 600 or so additional British citizens file into medical offices around the country. They are responding to a letter, stamped "BioBank" in blue letters, that begins: "We are writing to ask for your help in studying the prevention and treatment of cancer, heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, dementia, and many other serious diseases." The British government wants to collect peoples' blood, urine and saliva; measure their waistlines and heart rates; sequence their DNA; and ask them questions like "How hot do you drink your tea?"

Responding to the invasive-sounding request is voluntary, but turnout has been good. This summer, BioBank will enroll its target 500,000th subject in the $100-million state-sponsored effort to use citizens' genetic information to tailor medicine to individuals. The hope is that by following these people for the rest of their lives, researchers will be able to find links between gene variations, behavior and ethnic background and determine how they influence medical outcomes. The data could help doctors provide smarter, customized care.

With information gathered from the Human Genome Project, scientists have already improved the health of some people. For example, doctors now prescribe the drug Herceptin to breast-cancer patients with certain genetic factors, cutting by 50 percent the chance of tumors returning. And scientists have identified genes that might increase the risk of developing a major disease later in life. Two bad copies of the ApoE4 gene, for instance, can increase a person's chance of developing Alzheimer's disease by a factor of 10.

BioBank represents the next step in genetic investigation. Most diseases are cocktails of genetic and environmental factors, and BioBank will help identify those connections, says Rory Collins, the principal investigator. Next year, the project will make its database available to medical researchers and drug developers around the world. In effect, it's a ready-made trial. Scientists will be able to pull up the records, for example, of men ages 50 to 60 who were diagnosed with throat cancer in the past six months. They can then search patients' backgrounds for contributing factors as obvious as smoking or for unexpected links, like beverage temperature, as one recent study suggested.

This past spring, Collins presented his program to the National Institutes of Health in the U.S., which is gauging whether Americans would cooperate in a similar study. For now, the public seems wary of a government-funded and -run project here, mostly because of privacy concerns. It would involve more paperwork, too. The British effort is made possible largely by that country's electronic health records and nationalized health-care system. Every time study members visit their physicians, new medical information will be entered into their electronic records and uploaded to the BioBank.

These roadblocks make the few small projects already under way in the U.S. a limited but valuable look at genetic and environmental factors affecting our population. This winter, researchers at Vanderbilt University launched BioVU, a library of the genes and medical histories of 75,000 patients treated at its medical center. The data isn't as robust as BioBank's, but there's been great demand for access. "These efforts will convert medicine from an art to something more precise, like engineering," says BioVU's informatics director, Dan Masys.

Collins and Masys hope that their projects will have an influence similar to the Framingham Heart Study, which has followed thousands of peoples' lives since 1948. That project yielded nearly everything doctors now know about heart disease-it quantified the risks of hypertension and atherosclerosis as well as the positive effects of diet and exercise. Some of the supposed connections will turn out to be nonsense, Collins acknowledges. "But this is how you really find out what matters."

Congress will scramble to address the isotope paucity this week

A large Cold War supply of helium-3 has begun to rapidly run out, due to heavy demand from U.S. scientists who need the gas for neutron detectors and cryogenic experiments. Almost 60,000 liters of helium-3 were used in 2007 and 2008, compared to just 10,000 liters used annually about 10 years ago. A House subcommittee has been convened to search for a solution this week, New Scientist reports.

The U.S. formerly stockpiled helium-3 from the decay of tritium, the radioactive hydrogen isotope used to make nuclear weapons. That helium-3 supply stopped growing for the most part when the U.S. ceased making tritium in 1988. But in an ironic twist, the fast-growing use of neutron detectors in security systems designed to detect illegal plutonium and other nuclear materials has dramatically eaten into the helium-3 stockpile.

The shortage has slowed down the growth of quantum computing and other scientific fields which depend upon frigid conditions provided by helium-3 refrigeration. National laboratories have also been forced to develop less-sensitive neutron detectors which rely upon lithium and boron instead of helium-3.

Since the early freeze on tritium production, the U.S. did resume making bomb-grade tritium at one civilian nuclear plant in 2003. The AP notes that President Obama's 2010 budget includes funds for the Tennessee Valley Authority to expand tritium-production to a second nuclear plant, even if Obama has taken a recent stand against the development of new nuclear weapons. So fans of a quantum computing future need not give up hope just yet.

[via New Scientist]

Only 49 to go

It's good to know that Wisconsin state legislators can overcome partisan divisions and a host of pressing issues to jointly select an official state microbe -- the Lactococcus lactis bacterium responsible for helping make delicious cheddar, Colby and Monterey Jack cheese. That makes Wisconsin the first U.S. state to bestow such an honor upon a microbe, the New York Times reports.

Gary Hebl, a Democratic state representative who proposed the bill, was at first dubious of the idea. But he told the New York Times that the microbe "is really a very hard worker." Not to mention that the bacterium might rank up there as an unsung hero for the top cheese-producing state, the newspaper adds.

Apparently those arguments won over the Wisconsin Assembly, which passed the bill 56 to 41.

We can also vouch for microbes being hard workers, given their tough roles as living batteries and radioactivity cleaners. Scientists have even directed computer-controlled bacteria to build a miniature pyramid.

But on to more important scientific issues -- what microbes would you, dear readers, nominate for your states? Just keep in mind that state legislators like helpful little helpers and won't be as likely to go for cooler, meaner microbes, like the ones that cause necrotizing fasciitis.

[via New York Times]

If you've been anywhere near a television or Web enabled device in the last week (and you must have been), you know that a volcanic eruption in Iceland has grounded airline flights across Europe and even halted a few flights into the northeastern-most areas of Canada. What you probably don't know is how to pronounce the name of the volcano (Eyjafjallajökull) or why an eruption in Iceland is grounding flights in London, Madrid and Berlin.

After all, planes fly through lightning storms, heavy fog and the occasional flock of geese and come out fine on the other side with amazing consistency. But a volcanic ash cloud presents it's own unique set of problems, particularly to an aircraft engine's working parts. A group of Finnish F-16s are currently circling the area to see just how bad the air quality is for jet engines, and some airlines are conducting their own tests to see just what kind of damage this ash cloud might exact on their hardware.

Luckily for us, NASA already performed an ash cloud test on an airliner a full decade ago, albeit unintentionally. In February of 2000, a NASA DC-8 bound for Sweden flew right through an ash plume produced by Icelandic volcano Mt. Hekla. The flight crew couldn't see the plume, and in a stroke of good fortune they landed their plane at their destination without incident. In fact, no visible damage was detected upon arrival, but a closer inspection turned up some harrowing clues to just how devastating volcanic ash can be on an airplane in flight.

The fan blades where deeply gouged (see below), the critical cooling components were clogged with a sooty gunk, and the engine's innards were coated with a glassy, silicate material (see above). The in-flight data showed that the engine hit nearly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, enough to melt silicate rocks. That's lava in your jet engine, not ideal for longevity.

Interestingly - and quite fortunately for the crew on board - the relatively low dose of hot ash the DC-8 received temporarily turbocharged the engine by polishing the engine parts and letting air move more freely through the components. But make no mistake; too much more of that kind of performance enhancing would have led to engine failure, and at 30,000 feet all engine failure is a serious issue.

Of course, this is all in addition to the fact that hot ash plumes can degrade aircraft windows to the point of failure ro compromise the integrity of an aircraft's skin. But the fact that these plumes can be hard to detect from the flight deck explains why no one is leaving the ground in Europe; there's no flying under or around the ash cloud because in some cases pilots can't distinguish exactly what they're trying to avoid.

Oh, and for the record, it's "AY-uh-fyat-luh-YOE-kuutl-uh." And if you want to know how you get that pronunciation from Eyjafjallajökull, you'll have to ask elsewhere.

[NASA via Discovery News]