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Issue no. 10, 2008 Published: Apr 04, 2008
'Artificial cell' can make its own genes
Physicists find new material for storing hydrogen
IBM develops natural disaster 'magic potion'
Researchers enlist laptops in quake research
Matrix-style virtual worlds 'a few years away'
Researchers compress music files 1000 times smaller than MP3s
Europe-wide radio net in aliens search

'Artificial cell' can make its own genes
An 'artificial cell' capable of synthesising genes and making them into proteins has been developed by researchers at MIT in the US. The artificial cell resembles a computer chip. It is made from layers of rubber, forming a solid chip shot through with a network of tiny passages and chambers. After building separate gene synthesis and protein expressions chips, the researchers have now successfully integrated the two into a single system. The first part of the device synthesises the genes using enzymes to join together DNA strands from a pool of short templates. The finished genes are then copied to produce many versions of the final product. Cycles of heating and cooling control the enzymes carrying out the reactions. Once the genes have been made, a series of tiny pumps mixes them with the enzymes and cell extracts needed to make proteins. First, a set of enzymes must convert the DNA of the genes into RNA. This RNA is then mixed with extracts from bacterial cells containing amino acids from which proteins are made, and ribosomes, the cell structures that 'read' RNA and assemble the amino acids into finished protein. In test runs, the artificial cell was used to make a fluorescent protein from jellyfish. Other proteins can also be designed with a fluorescent portion.
New Scientist Apr 01, 2008	back to top

Physicists find new material for storing hydrogen
Physicists in the US may have found a promising new class of material that can absorb and store large amounts of hydrogen. A low-cost, high-capacity hydrogen-storage medium is essential for the commercialization of hydrogen fuel-cell technologies in the future. Researcher at the University of Virginia report on transition metal-ethylene complexes with promising hydrogen-storage properties. They measured around 12% by weight of hydrogen uptake in the metal-based composites. This is significantly higher than the target of 5.4wt% set by the US Department of Energy to support the development of hydrogen-powered vehicles The researchers now plan to scale up the nanogram quantities of materials that they have studied.
PhysicsWorld / Phys. Rev. Lett. Mar 31, 2008	back to top

IBM develops natural disaster 'magic potion'
IBM scientists say they have come up with algorithms that will help model and manage natural disasters, including wildfires, floods and diseases. Experts from IBM's Global Business Services have worked with scientists in India and the US to provide government bodies, relief agencies and companies with tools to mitigate and manage natural disasters. IBM said that its mathematicians have created the equivalent of a 'magic potion' that helps speed up and simplify complex tasks, assisting with the effective allocation of resources. Tasks include the ability to determine the fastest means of delivering relief, detecting fraud in health insurance claims, the automation of complex risk decisions for international financial institutions, and detecting patterns in medical data for new insights and breakthroughs. IBM said that the same algorithms can be used to manage floods and famines in India, helping the country to tackle disaster risk reduction and disaster management.
VNUnet UK Apr 02, 2008	back to top

Researchers enlist laptops in quake research
Researchers at the University of California Riverside are asking PC users to help with earthquake research. The university's Earth Sciences department has launched a network computing project which enlists consumer notebooks to detect seismic activity. The Quake Catcher Network will link the laptops to a central server by way of the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing service. Each laptop will use its internal accelerometer to monitor motion and report possible quakes. The aim of the project is to create a large grid of laptops that can report earthquakes in areas without dedicated large-scale seismographs. With a dense grid of detectors in place, an early warning can be sent through the internet to neighbouring cities should an earthquake strike, which will give people 10-20 seconds to prepare themselves before the seismic waves reach them, according to the researchers.
VNUnet UK Apr 03, 2008	back to top

Matrix-style virtual worlds 'a few years away'
Are supercomputers on the verge of creating Matrix-style simulated realities? Undergoing the Graphics Turing Test, a human judge viewing and interacting with an artificially generated world should be unable to reliably distinguish it from reality. The key to passing the Graphics Turing Test, says Michael McGuigan at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, is to marry that photorealism with software that can render images in real-time – defined as a refresh rate of 30 frames per second. McGuigan tested the ability of the Blue Gene/L supercomputer – to generate such an artificial world. He studied the supercomputer's ability to mimic the interplay of light with objects – an important component of any virtual world with ambitions to mimic reality. He found that conventional ray-tracing software could run 822 times faster on the Blue Gene/L than on a standard computer, even though the software was not optimised for the parallel processors of a supercomputer. This allowed it to convincingly mimic natural lighting in real time. However, the speed with which Blue Gene/L renders the images still falls short. But supercomputers capable of passing the Graphics Turing Test may be just years away, according to McGuigan.
New Scientist Apr 03, 2008	back to top

Researchers compress music files 1000 times smaller than MP3s
University of Rochester researchers on Tuesday said they have come up with a way to reproduce music into a computer file that's 1,000 times smaller than a comparable high-quality MP3 file. The researchers demonstrated their methods by encoding a 20-second clarinet solo in less than a single kilobyte. The technique involved re-creates the clarinet solo in the same way that a player piano re-creates a piano piece from a roll of punched paper. But in addition to re-creating the notes, it also re-creates the way in which the player played the notes. The researchers programmed a computer to model clarinet fingering, breath pressure, and lip pressure and to use that information to affect the sound described by their model of a virtual clarinet. By using its programmed knowledge of clarinets and clarinet players, the approach avoids having to sample music thousands of times a second, which generates a lot of data and makes music files large. The researchers think the technology could lead to more expressive electronic and computer-generated music that it could be extended to generate vocals and voices more naturally.
InformationWeek Apr 01, 2008	back to top

Europe-wide radio net in aliens search
Scientists are finalising plans to link radio wave detectors in five countries and create a device sensitive enough to pick up signals from worlds the other side of the galaxy. By connecting banks of detectors in fields across Britain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany, astronomers aim to create a radio telescope that will have the accuracy of a machine the size of Europe. They believe it could solve some of the universe's most important secrets - including the discovery of radio broadcasts from intelligent extraterrestrials. This system works by collecting radio waves over a range of frequencies. These can then be analysed using arrays of computers which can identify patterns from the data streaming from our detectors. The project - known as Lofar (low frequency array) - was launched in the Netherlands several years ago, but has attracted the attention of other European astronomers. All have agreed to build their own banks of detectors, which can then be linked to those in the Netherlands.
EJC MediaNews / Guardian Mar 31, 2008	back to top