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Issue no. 14, 2007 Published: Apr 20, 2007
Creepy-crawly robot to mend a broken heart
Scientists create ultra-hard material
Mobile phones 'killing bees'
How to find Earth's alien twin
'Smart dust' to explore planets
Nanolamp lights up
Ultrasound portraits

Creepy-crawly robot to mend a broken heart
A robot developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University may soon be set loose inside the chests of heart patients. Resembling a robotic caterpillar, it will crawl across the surface of their beating heart, delivering treatment without the need for major surgery. The device, called HeartLander, can be inserted using minimally invasive keyhole surgery. Once in place, it will attach itself to the heart and begin inching its way across the outside of the organ, injecting drugs or attaching medical devices. In tests on live pigs, the HeartLander has fitted pacemaker leads and injected dye into the heart. The 20-millimetre-long robot has two suckers for feet, each pierced with 20 holes connected to a vacuum line, which hold it onto the outside of the heart. By moving its two body segments back and forth relative to one another it can crawl across the heart at up to 18 centimetres per minute. This back-and-forth movement is generated by pushing and pulling wires that run back to motors outside the patient's body. Surgeons keep track of the device using X-ray video or a magnetic tracker, and control its movements via a joystick.
New Scientist magazine Apr 18, 2007	back to top

Scientists create ultra-hard material
A super-hard material that is tough enough to scratch diamond could be made cheaply and easily, according to researchers at the University of California. The material is made from the metal rhenium and the element boron and resembles both a metal and a crystal in structure. Covalent bonds — strong bonds formed when atoms share their electrons — increase a material's hardness. The researchers introduced boron atoms between the atoms of rhenium to form short stiff covalent bonds. The resulting material, rhenium diboride, had been made for other reasons before, but no one realised quite how hard it was. The material has a hardness of about 48 gigapascals (GPa). That sounds low compared with the 70-100 GPa strength of diamond, but it is comparable to the strength of the current second-place holder, boron nitride. And the new material is made quite easily in the lab, under ambient pressure. There are hints that it could be even harder than their measurements suggest: the team found that in some circumstances it could actually scratch diamond. That is probably because the material seems to show a different hardness when tested from different angles.
Nature / Science / New Scientist Apr 19, 2007	back to top

Mobile phones 'killing bees'
Researchers at Langer University in Koblenz, Germany, say that mobile phones and other radio-emitting devices could be killing bees. The study suggests that the radio waves scramble bees' internal navigation systems, leaving them unable to find their hives. The study looked at Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a syndrome first noticed in the US, in which colonies of bees suddenly disappear. Bee numbers in the US have fallen by two thirds and CCD has now been seen in Europe. But there are other reasons for the decline in bee numbers. Increased use of organophosphate pesticides seriously damaged European bee stocks a decade ago, and predators and fungal infections have also been cited as reasons for declining numbers. Bees are vital to humans, since they pollinate over 80 per cent of the world's crops. In many cases bees have also been domesticated to the point where they can no longer live without human support.
VNUnet UK Apr 17, 2007	back to top

How to find Earth's alien twin
For the first time, researchers have successfully demonstrated in the laboratory that a space telescope rigged with special masks and mirrors could snap a photo of an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star. The accomplishment marks a step forward for missions like the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder, designed to hunt for an Earth twin that might harbour alien life. Trying to see an exoplanet - a planet orbiting a star other than the sun - is a daunting task, because its relatively dim glow is easily overpowered by the intense glare of its much bigger, brighter parent star. Now, NASA researchers have shown that a fairly basic coronagraph - an instrument used to 'mask' a star's glare - paired with an adjustable mirror, could enable a space telescope to image a distant planet 10 billion times fainter than its central star. The study describes the system, called the High Contrast Imaging Testbed, and how the technique could be used with a telescope in space to see alien planets. The lab experiment used a laser as a simulated star, with fainter copies of the star serving as 'planets'.
Daily Telegraph Apr 12, 2007	back to top

'Smart dust' to explore planets
Tiny 'smart' devices that can be borne on the wind like dust particles could be carried in space probes to explore other planets, according to engineers at the University of Glasgow. Smart dust could be packed into the nose cones of planetary probes and then released into the atmospheres of planets, where they would be carried on the wind. For a planet like Mars, smart dust particles would each have to be the size of a grain of sand. By applying a voltage to alter the shape of the polymer sheath surrounding the chip, dust particle could be steered towards a target, even in high winds. The polymer sheath surrounding the computer chip could be made to wrinkle or flatten out. Wrinkling the plastic sheath would increase the drag on the particle, lifting it higher on the wind. Flattening out the sheath would cause the particle to plummet. Wireless networking would allow these particles to form swarms. Mathematical simulations have shown that a swarm of 50 dust particles can organise themselves into a star formation, even in turbulent wind. The ability to fly in formation would allow the processing of data to be spread, or 'distributed' between all the chips, and a collective signal to be beamed back to a 'mothership'.
BBC News Apr 18, 2007	back to top

Nanolamp lights up
An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Cornell University in the US has built one of the smallest organic light-emitting devices to date. The microscopic 'nanolamp' is made of synthetic nanofibres just 200nm wide and could find applications in flexible electronics, which are increasingly being made smaller, and sensors. The fibres are made of a compound based on the metal ruthenium and are smaller than the wavelength of light they emit. Such a localised light source could be useful in applications ranging from sensing and microscopy to flat-panel displays and lab-on-a-chip devices. Using a technique called electrospinning, the researchers spun the fibres from a mixture of the metal complex, ruthenium tris-bipyridine, and the polymer, polyethylene oxide. The fibres emitted orange light when excited by low voltage of about 3–4V applied through micropatterned electrodes, rather like a tiny light bulb. The new work shows that these light-emission devices can be made using relatively simple fabrication methods. Compared with conventional high-resolution lithography techniques, in which devices are attached onto pieces of silicon, electrospinning is much simpler.
Nanotechweb / Nano Letters Apr 12, 2007	back to top

Ultrasound portraits
The first image most parents have of their baby is a grainy ultrasound splodge that requires a remarkable stretch of the imagination to pass for their progeny. Newer machines can produce 3D images of babies by computing how light reflects off their features and generating the appropriate highlights and shadows to give an impression of a 3D face. The only trouble with these images is that they still look frighteningly clinical and far from cute. Siemens hopes to change all this by making 3D pictures look much better. An ultrasound scan still takes place in the normal way but, once the 3D shape of the baby's face has been calculated, Siemens plans to manipulate the image to make it look more like an artist's illustration than a photograph. The technique works by analysing the pixels in an image and then manipulating it in a predetermined way, like adding effects in graphics software packages such as Photoshop, to change the overall appearance. In this way, every parent's first image of their baby will be more aesthetically pleasing.
New Scientist Apr 16, 2007	back to top