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Photograph: Studom, Flickr.com

Issue no. 2, 2009 Published: Jan 16, 2009
Cooling the planet with crops
Morphing gel display puts images at your fingertips
Scientists weave invisibility cloak
Virtual double flexes your muscles
'Carbon cost' of Google revealed
Car exhaust fumes cause lightning strikes
Invention: Insulin chewing gum

Cooling the planet with crops
By carefully selecting which varieties of food crops to cultivate, much of Europe and North America could be cooled by up to 1 degree Celsius during the summer growing season, say researchers from the University of Bristol, UK. This is equivalent to an annual global cooling of over 0.1°C, almost 20% of the total global temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution. The growing of crops already produces a cooling of the climate because they reflect more sunlight back into space, compared with natural vegetation. Different varieties of the same crop vary significantly in their solar reflectivity or 'albedo', so selecting varieties that are more reflective will enhance this cooling effect. Since arable agriculture is a global industry, such cooling could be extensive. The researchers argue that crop varieties should be selected in order to exert a control on the climate, in the same way that specific varieties are cultivated to maximize and fine-tune food production. Unlike growing biofuels, such a plan could be achieved without disrupting food production, either in terms of yield or the types of crops grown, according to the researchers.
Eureka Alert / Current Biology Jan 15, 2009	back to top

Morphing gel display puts images at your fingertips
A tactile display made from a watery gel called hydrogel that changes shape to show objects on its surface has been developed by engineers at the Technical University of Dresden. The scientist created a square array of 4225 blobs of temperature- sensitive hydrogel, each approximately 300 microns across and separated from its neighbours by a similar amount. They sit on a black polyester backing that heats up when hit by a beam of light that is narrow enough to warm individual blobs. Below 29 °C the pixels are 0.5mm tall, but if heated to 35 °C they expel some of their water and become half as tall. They also become opaque and much harder to the touch. Rapidly scanning the light beam across the black backing makes it possible to display high-resolution, tactile images that change twice a second. Once the light beam moves away from a pixel, its temperature quickly drops and the gel swells back to its previous size, sucking up its lost water. The system could be used to make tactile displays that communicate information at a person's touch. Such displays could be for blind people, or built into the interfaces of robotic surgery equipment to let human surgeons feel what is at a robot's fingertips.
New Scientist / Advanced Materials Jan 14, 2009	back to top

Scientists weave invisibility cloak
Scientists at Duke University in Durham, US, have made a sheet that can be draped over an object to render it 'invisible' - albeit to microwave radiation rather than visible light. The new cloak works for a range of microwave frequencies. The researchers used a computer to calculate the precise shapes of the several thousand different components needed to make the cloak work. That suggests cloaking devices with different shapes or properties could be made more easily in future, perhaps including one that can hide objects from visible light. Invisibility shields are made from metamaterials: assemblies of artificial 'atoms' - in this case actually a few millimetres in size - that are individually designed to interact with electromagnetic radiation, such as light or microwaves, in unusual ways. Each 'atom' is a printed circuit board bearing a metal film cut into a prescribed pattern. For the new cloak the films have an H-shape. Microwaves excite electrical currents in this film, which then re-radiates microwaves. With the right variation in the size and shape of these films on one 'atom' to the next, a criss-crossing grid of them can effectively guide a ray along a particular path - allowing it, for example, to 'bend' round an object behind the cloak as if it wasn't there.
Nature / Science Jan 15, 2009	back to top

Virtual double flexes your muscles
A system that creates a virtual body double of a person's skeleton and muscles could help people trying to regain movement after an illness by showing them how well they are exercising. The Human Body Model, developed by Motek Medical in Amsterdam uses a virtual double to show which muscles a person is using by highlighting them in green. The force being generated is shown by the intensity of the colour. Users carry out exercises, such as running on a treadmill, while wearing a suit with 47 reflective markers placed in the positions of specific muscles. Infrared strobe lights, flashing several hundred times a second, help eight cameras to track the markers. Sensors on the floor of the treadmill can also be used to measure the force applied to the ground by the user's feet to give more information on their muscle output and the load on their joints. The final stage is to feed this information into computer models, which help create the detailed on-screen display of the user. The software used to help create the double was trained by directly measuring the force generated by people's muscles while recording their motion and the electrical activity of their muscles. This could only be done for some movements and forces, though, such as pushing against weights. The system is being tested at Sheba Hospital in Tel Aviv, Israel, where it is helping people regain movement after a stroke.
New Scientist Jan 14, 2009	back to top

'Carbon cost' of Google revealed
Two search requests on the internet website Google produce 'as much carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle', according to US physicist Alex Wissner-Gross at Harvard University. He claims that a typical Google search on a desktop computer produces about 7g CO2. However, these figures were disputed by Google, who say a typical search produced only 0.2g of carbon dioxide. A recent study by research firm Gartner suggested that IT now causes two percent of global emissions. Wissner-Gross argues that the carbon emissions he calculated stem from the electricity used by the computer terminal and by the power consumed by the large data centres operated by Google around the world. Although Google is renowned for returning fast results, Wissner-Gross says it can only do so because it uses several data banks at the same time. He said a combination of clients, networks, servers and people's home computers all added up to a lot of energy usage. Wissner-Gross said he was working on a website called co2stats.com which helps companies identify 'energy inefficient' aspects of their websites.
BBC News Jan 12, 2009	back to top

Car exhaust fumes cause lightning strikes
Commuters' car exhaust doesn't just warm the globe - it can also increase lightning strikes for miles around. During the working week, air pollution rises because of all the vehicles on the road. This effect has been shown to modify rainfall patterns both at the weekend and during the week by creating stronger updrafts of air and bigger clouds. Now it seems weekday pollution can bring lightning as well as rain. Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem counted strikes recorded across the US by the ground-based National Lightning Detection Network in June to August, from 1998 to 2008. In the south-eastern states, lightning strikes increased with pollution by as much as 25% during the working week. The moist, muggy air in this region creates low-lying clouds with plenty of space to rise and generate the charge needed for an afternoon thunderstorm. Surprisingly, the effect was not strongest within big cities with high pollution, but in the suburbs and rural areas surrounding them. The heat generated by urban areas may locally override pollution's effect on lightning, according to the researchers.
New Scientist Jan 15, 2009	back to top

Invention: Insulin chewing gum
Finding simpler ways to deliver insulin into the blood stream is one important avenue for tackling the diabetes epidemic that is sweeping the developed world. The preferred option for many patients would be an insulin pill taken orally. But studies have long shown that insulin is easily broken down by the digestive system and that any surviving hormone is not easily absorbed into the bloodstream from the gut. An insulin inhaler made it as far as the US market in 2006, but was withdrawn a year later because it wasn't cost effective. But researchers at Syracuse University in New York state have a potential solution. The body has specific mechanisms for protecting and absorbing valuable molecules that would usually be damaged by conditions in the gut. For example, vitamin B12 is protected by a salivary protein called haptocorrin that binds to it in the mouth and protects it in the stomach. Once haptocorrin reaches the intestines, another chemical pathway takes over to help vitamin B12 pass into the bloodstream. The researchers suggests binding insulin molecules to vitamin B12 so that it can hitch a ride on this protected supply chain. The insulin could ride all the way into the bloodstream, where it is released to do its work. Early tests on rats appear to work well, according to the researchers.
New Scientist Jan 14, 2009	back to top