Bioengineers introduce 'Bi-Fi' -- The biological 'Internet' If you were a bacterium, the virus M13 might seem innocuous enough. It insinuates more than it invades, setting up shop like a freeloading houseguest, not a killer. Once inside it makes itself at home, eating your food, texting indiscriminately. Recently, however, bioengineers at Stanford University have given M13 a bit of a makeover. The researchers, Monica Ortiz, a doctoral candidate in bioengineering, and Drew Endy, PhD, an assistant professor of bioengineering, have parasitized the parasite and harnessed M13's key attributes -- its non-lethality and its ability to package and broadcast arbitrary DNA strands -- to create what might be termed the biological Internet, or "Bi-Fi. " Using the virus, Ortiz and Endy have created a biological mechanism to send genetic messages from cell to cell.
Medium and message M13 is a packager of genetic messages. The M13-based system is essentially a communication channel. "Effectively, we've separated the message from the channel. Rates and ranges. Your Likes in Microbiology – Page 1. Neurological Control - Neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitter Molecules Neurotransmitters can be broadly split into two groups – the ‘classical’, small molecule neurotransmitters and the relatively larger neuropeptide neurotransmitters. Within the category of small molecule neurotransmitters, the biogenic amines (dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin and histamine) are often referred to as a discrete group because of their similarity in terms of their chemical properties. Click on the links in the table above to read more about some of the important neurotransmitters.
Serotonin Although the CNS contains less than 2% of the total serotonin in the body, serotonin plays a very important role in a range of brain functions. Within the brain, serotonin is localised mainly in nerve pathways emerging from the raphe nuclei, a group of nuclei at the centre of the reticular formation in the Midbrain, pons and medulla. Noradrenaline Find out more about noradrenaline and serotonin Dopamine Acetylcholine Neurotransmitter Receptors Serotoning receptors. IBM - SyNAPSE: a cognitive computing project from IBM Research. Primates' Thinking Power Augmented by Brain Implant. What's the Latest Development? For the first time ever, scientists have improved primates' capacity for thought using an electronic brain implant, raising questions about how the human mind might be augmented in the future.
After training monkeys to do perform reasonably well on a matching game, which required them to select one of seven images that corresponded to a separate image shown on a screen, researchers gave the monkeys cocaine in order to impair the neural pathways essential to the task. The monkey's performance on the game fell immediately by a factor of 20 percent.
What's the Big Idea? Prior to the experiment, researchers had implanted a neural device in the monkeys' brains which measured blood flow, temperature, and the electrical activity of neurons. Photo credit: Shutterstock.com. 10 Best Neuroscience Websites. Cyborg surgeon: Hand and technology combine in new surgical tool that enables superhuman precision. Even the most skilled and steady surgeons experience minute, almost imperceptible hand tremors when performing delicate tasks. Normally, these tiny motions are inconsequential, but for doctors specializing in fine-scale surgery, such as operating inside the human eye or repairing microscopic nerve fibers, freehand tremors can pose a serious risk for patients. By harnessing a specialized optical fiber sensor, a new "smart" surgical tool can compensate for this unwanted movement by making hundreds of precise position corrections each second -- fast enough to keep the surgeon's hand on target.
Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md., have combined the Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT) imaging technique as a distance sensor with computer-controlled piezoelectric motors to actively stabilize the tip of a surgical tool. For their study, the tests were performed on two targets. Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience - StumbleUpon. High speed video reveals the bizarre physics of an ordinary water droplet. 'Quantum Teleportation' Beams Information Farther Than Ever Before. Physicists have "teleported" quantum information farther than ever in a new study reported Wednesday (Sept. 5).
This kind of teleportation isn't quite what Scotty was "beaming up" on television's Star Trek, but it does represent a kind of magic of its own. While Star Trek's teleporters transport people from place to place instantaneously, quantum teleportation sends information. A team of scientists from Austria, Canada and Germany have now beamed the quantum state of a particle of light from one island to another 89 miles (143 kilometers) away.
"One can actually transfer the quantum states of a particle — in our case a photon — from one location to another location without physically transferring this photon itself," explained physicist Xiaosong Ma of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. To do this, the researchers started out with three particles: one particle to be teleported, and two "entangled" particles. List of Free Books. Quantum teleportation tipped for Nobel Prize: Thomson Reuters. By Chris Wickham LONDON (Reuters) - Researchers who wrote the rulebook for quantum teleportation, described as "spooky" by an exasperated Einstein, are among the 2012 Thomson Reuters tips to win Nobel prizes for science. Nobel prediction expert David Pendlebury's annual forecasts are based on the company's "Web of Knowledge" data on how often a scientist's published papers are cited as a basis for further investigation by other researchers.
Winners of the 2012 Nobels are due to be announced in early October and although they are notoriously hard to predict, over the last decade 26 people from Pendlebury's list have won. "We're not trying to pull a rabbit out of the hat," he said. "We're trying to demonstrate that citations in the literature are a strong indicator of peer esteem, which is the basis for awarding top prizes for research, such as the Nobel. " Quantum teleportation transfers information between two points without anything physical, like a radio wave, passing through space. Glass Half Empty. What if a glass of water was, all of a sudden, literally half empty? —Vittorio Iacovella The pessimist is probably more right about how it turns out than the optimist.
When people say “glass half empty”, they usually mean something like a glass containing equal parts water and air: Traditionally, the optimist sees the glass as half full while the pessimist sees it as half empty. This has spawned a zillion joke variants—e.g., the engineer sees a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be, the surrealist sees a giraffe eating a necktie, etc. But what if the empty half of the glass were actually empty—a vacuum? The vacuum would definitely not last long. For our scenario, we’ll imagine three different half-empty glasses, and follow what happens to them microsecond by microsecond. In the middle is the traditional air/water glass.
We’ll imagine the vacuums appear at time t=0. For the first handful of microseconds, nothing happens. When the bottle is struck, it’s pushed suddenly downward. Motion Mountain - The Free Physics Textbook for Download - StumbleUpon. Magnets in a copper pipe. Your Likes in Science – Page 1. 2012 March 12 - The Scale of the Universe Interactive. Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer. 2012 March 12 The Scale of the Universe - Interactive Flash Animation Credit & Copyright: Cary & Michael Huang Explanation: What does the universe look like on small scales?
On large scales? Tomorrow's picture: dust before galaxies Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)NASA Official: Phillip Newman Specific rights apply.NASA Web Privacy Policy and Important NoticesA service of:ASD at NASA / GSFC& Michigan Tech. Ten Most Extreme Substances Known to Man.