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Issue no. 42, 2009 Published: Dec 18, 2009
Plastic plane takes to the skies
Microsoft donates weapon to fight child porn
NASA launches sky surveyor
'Rock-breathing' bacteria make electricity and clean up oil spills
Flexible solar cell implant could restore vision
Sliding ink could boost speed of printed electronics
Organic flash memory developed

Plastic plane takes to the skies
After many years and many setbacks as its scientists and engineers struggled to build the world's first plastic aircraft, Boeing of Seattle has finally coaxed its 787 airliner into the air this week. Boeing says the successful three-hour test flight heralds the start of a programme in which six 787 aircraft will soon begin flying round the clock test flights. The plane brings new thinking to many aspects of airplane design. First, the twin-engined, wide-bodied, circa 300-passenger jet has a lightweight fuel-saving airframe. Its fuselage is made from carbon-fibre reinforced plastic rather than aluminium like most planes in the air. Second, it uses packet-based computer networking - like that used for the internet - to route control, navigation and communications data around the plane. Until now, planes have used standard wiring to transmit data in more old-fashioned ways. Third, it has ultra-high-density lithium batteries for backup electrical power: for the cockpit controls, underfloor lighting and flight recorders, for instance. Much heavier nickel cadmium batteries are the norm today.
New Scientist Dec 16, 2009	back to top

Microsoft donates weapon to fight child porn
Microsoft has crafted a new weapon that internet service providers will be able to wield to battle the growing problem of child pornography. The company is giving the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) software that uses unique 'signatures' of pornography to find images of minors being sexually abused. Microsoft researchers created PhotoDNA software that pinpoints identifying characteristics in digital images that computers can scan for online. Unlike current digital image-identification software, PhotoDNA reliably identifies pictures even if size, colouring or other characteristics have been altered, as is common on the internet. The NCMEC will begin by using PhotoDNA to amass signatures of the worst child pornography images they have catalogued in their work with abuse victims and law enforcement agencies. The NCMEC is experimenting with PhotoDNA and plans to release the software to internet service providers worldwide in coming months. Microsoft is hoping that internet service providers along with the people that use them will do more to combat child pornography.
Sydney Morning Herald / AFP Dec 17, 2009	back to top

NASA launches sky surveyor
An infrared space telescope that will map the sky in the finest detail yet has successfully launched from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a Delta II rocket. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) will probe the coolest stars in the universe and the structure of galaxies at four wavelengths between 3 and 25 µm. WISE will circle the Earth's poles at an altitude of 525 km, scanning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months. The mission, which is expected to be 1000 times more sensitive than current infrared space probes, will take over 1.5 million images in total, covering almost 99% of the sky. As WISE is designed to detect infrared radiation from cool objects, the telescope and detectors will be chilled to 12 K with liquid helium. As well as studying stars that are cooler and dimmer than the Sun, WISE will also measure the diameters of more than 100,000 asteroids. WISE eyes NASA's craft will join two existing infrared missions in space: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the European Space Agency's Herschel telescope. Researchers will now spend the next month calibrating the instrument.
Physics World Dec 14, 2009	back to top

'Rock-breathing' bacteria make electricity and clean up oil spills
A discovery by scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA) could contribute to the development of systems that use domestic or agricultural waste to generate clean electricity. The researchers have demonstrated for the first time the mechanism by which some bacteria survive by 'breathing rocks'. The findings could be applied to help in the development of new microbe-based technologies such as fuel cells, or 'bio-batteries', powered by animal or human waste, and agents to clean up areas polluted by oil or uranium. The vast proportion of the world's habitable environments is populated by micro-organisms which, unlike humans, can survive without oxygen. Some of these micro-organisms are bacteria living deep in the Earth's subsurface and surviving by 'breathing rocks' - especially minerals of iron. Iron respiration is one of the most common respiratory processes in oxygen-free habitats and therefore has wide environmental significance. The researchers discovered that the bacteria can construct tiny biological wires that extend through the cell walls and allow the organism to directly contact, and conduct electrons to, a mineral. This means that the bacteria can release electrical charge from inside the cell into the mineral, much like the earth wire on a household plug.
Science Daily / Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Dec 15, 2009	back to top

Flexible solar cell implant could restore vision
The first flexible retinal implant could restore some vision to people with certain forms of visual impairment. Conditions such as age-related macular degeneration occur when some of the photoreceptors in the eye stop functioning properly. But as other parts of the eye still work, it should be possible to restore vision using an implant that mimics the photoreceptor layer. To achieve this, an implant needs to convert a light signal into an electrical pulse - in other words, perform like a solar cell. However, the implant should preferably be flexible to approximate the curve of the retina. While several companies are developing rigid implants, researchers at Stanford University in California have designed a flexible silicon implant. They did so by carving deep grooves into the silicon between adjacent solar cell pixels that are each just 115 micrometres across. The implant would be inserted over the most damaged part of the retina. A glasses-mounted camera would capture video, convert it to near-infrared signals and project it directly onto the implant. When hit by the light, the solar cells inject current patterns corresponding to the projected images into neural tissue, which ultimately arrive at the visual cortex via the optic nerve. Near-infrared signals are used as they do not interfere with the surrounding intact photoreceptor cells, which send signals to the brain as normal.
New Scientist Dec 14, 2009	back to top

Sliding ink could boost speed of printed electronics
Ink drops sliding down a microscopic ridge, like water running off a roof, can boost the speed of printed transistors for flexible electronics Printing electronic circuits rather than carving them from silicon saves money and unlocks the door to flexible electronic gadgets. Despite the allure of simply printing electronics, traditional methods are still needed to tidy up printed electronics and bring them up to scratch. Without this final tuning transistors tend to perform poorly, say researchers at the University have developed a more accurate way of printing transistors, without resorting to extra processing. Their method is the first to abandon traditional etching altogether, they say. Their new technique cut the overlap in the final transistor to just 0.78 micrometres, a 10-fold improvement on the previous all-printed techniques and comparable to the figures obtained by using photolithography to clean up after printing.
New Scientist Dec 16, 2009	back to top

Organic flash memory developed
Researchers at the University of Tokyo have developed a non-volatile memory that has the same basic structure as a flash memory but is made from cheap, flexible, organic materials. The organic flash memory uses an array of 26 x 26 memory cells on a plastic polyethylene naphthalate (PEN) resin sheet substrate that is flexible enough to be curved to a radius of only 6 mm without causing electrical or mechanical problems. The device is called an organic flash memory device because it has the same kind of floating-gate transistors as those used for silicon-based flash memories. A floating gate is a component of the transistor that is fully enclosed by a thin insulating material called a gate dielectric, which isolates it electrically and allows it to retain its charge for years. If a large voltage is applied an electronic charge can be brought on to the floating gate and it remains there until the charge is erased when a voltage of opposite polarity is applied. The organic flash memory's disadvantage is its short memory retention time of just 24 hours, but the researchers are hopeful to improve this.
PhysOrg.com / Science Dec 17, 2009	back to top