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Image: Wikipedia

Issue no. 35, 2011 Published: Oct 14, 2011
Falling atoms measure the Earth's rotation
DNA webs could be replicators for all things tiny
Scientists crack Black Death's genetic code
Understanding the minds of coma victims
Tablet app puts Braille keyboard at your fingertips
'Fight Back' phone app to protect women in India
Biofuel breakthrough could replace diesel

Falling atoms measure the Earth's rotation
Physicists at Stanford University have developed a new type of gyroscope, which can determine the latitude where the instrument is located, measure true north and the Earth's rate of rotation. The team hope to scale it up so that it can test Einstein's general theory of relativity. They also want to miniaturise the technology so it can be used in portable navigation systems. The gyroscope works by firing a cloud of atoms upwards at a slight angle to the vertical so that the atoms follow a parabolic trajectory as gravity pulls them down. A series of laser pulses is then fired at the cloud while in flight, which separates the atoms into a number of different bunches that follow different trajectories. The pulses are carefully selected so that two of these trajectories cross paths at a detector. Given that the atoms are governed by quantum mechanics, they behave like waves with a relative shift in phase between the atoms taking different paths. The resulting interference at the detector is dictated in part by the relative orientations of the laser pulses, gravity and the rotation of the Earth. The device is set up so that the laser pulses are fired horizontally - that is perpendicular to gravity - and was tested by rotating the orientation of the laser pulses about the gravitational axis. The resulting interference pattern is a near-perfect sinusoid with an amplitude that depends on the Earth's rate of rotation and the latitude of the location where the measurement is made. Because we know how fast the Earth is spinning, the latitude can therefore be easily determined. The direction of true north and south are given by the direction of the laser pulses when the amplitude of the sinusoid is zero.
PhysicsWorld / Physical Review Letters Oct 07, 2011	back to top

DNA webs could be replicators for all things tiny
It's DNA replication - but not as we know it. Elaborate webs of DNA have been made that can copy themselves outside cells. Unlike DNA in nature, which replicates inside cells, these webs exist freely and suggest how self-replication might one day be an alternative to conventional fabrication for very tiny structures. A self-copying DNA double-helix would not be news. Living cells have been doing this for billions of years, and researchers have done it in test tubes for decades. But in a new twist, a team at New York University has created elaborate webs of DNA never seen in nature and persuaded these structures to make exact copies of themselves. Each piece of the DNA web is a 'tile' made by joining 10 double helices together. The team made two slightly different versions of these tiles, A and B, and joined them together to make a batch of identical strings of seven tiles. These 'parent' strings then produced daughter strings made of tiles called A' and B', whose base pairs were exactly complementary to those on the A and B tiles. The team used the daughters as a further template to produce an exact copy of their parents. Although these particular strings were designed as a proof of principle, without any practical application in mind, the technique could allow more useful structures to be rapidly and easily grown, according to the researchers. Other molecules, with useful or novel properties, could be attached to the DNA tiles. The DNA itself would act as a scaffold, arranging the other molecules into the desired structure, and then later creating more and more copies.
New Scientist / Nature Oct 12, 2011	back to top

Scientists crack Black Death's genetic code
Scientists have mapped out the entire genetic map of the Black Death, a 14th century bubonic plague that killed 50 million Europeans in one of the most devastating epidemics in history. The work, which involved extracting and purifying DNA from the remains of Black death victims buried in London's 'plague pits', is the first time scientists have been able to draft a reconstructed genome of any ancient pathogen. The result - a full draft of the entire Black Death genome - should allow researchers to track changes in the disease's evolution and virulence, and lead to better understanding of modern-day infectious diseases. Building on previous research, which showed that a specific variant of the Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis) bacterium was responsible for the plague that ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351, a team of German, Canadian and American scientists went on to 'capture' and sequence the entire genome of the disease. By focusing on promising specimens from the dental pulp of five bodies, which had already been pre-screened for the presence of Y. pestis, the team were able to extract, purify and enrich the disease's DNA and at the same time reduce the amount of background non-plague DNA which might interfere. Linking the 1349 to 1350 dates of the skeletal remains to the genetic data allowed the researchers to calculate the age of the ancestor of Y. pestis that caused the mediaeval plague.
Reuters Oct 12, 2011	back to top

Understanding the minds of coma victims
Scientists say they have made a breakthrough in brain imaging that may one day enable victims of coma, strokes and other neurodegenerative disease to communicate what's on their mind. As subjects watched Hollywood movie trailers, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley were able to peer into their brain activity and reconstruct what the viewers saw. The reconstructed movie trailers are not carbon copies, but resemble water colours of smeared vibrant colours and shapes similar to the original films. At the moment, researchers are only able to reconstruct movie clips that people have already seen. But they said they are closer to reproducing things such as dreams, memories and other mind movies that people have, which have never been seen by anyone else. Any practical application of this type of technology could not only lead to better understanding of what's happening in the minds of those who cannot communicate verbally, but that it may also lay the foundation for brain machine interface, according to the researchers. This could be beneficial for people with who suffer from cerebral palsy or paralysis because they would then be able to guide computers by using their minds.
IBTimes / Current Biology Sep 22, 2011	back to top

Tablet app puts Braille keyboard at your fingertips
The lack of tactile feedback makes typing on a touchscreen difficult at the best of times, but the problem is even worse for blind and visually impaired users. That's set to change thanks to Adam Duran, a student on a summer course at Stanford University who has come up with a Braille keyboard for tablets. The standard QWERTY keyboard on most tablets requires you to find small keys on a smooth, glass screen without any touchable clues to guide you. Instead, Duran's app offers a standard eight-key Braille keyboard that appears wherever you place your fingers on the screen. That means you don't have to worry about locating the keys and can just start typing Braille code, in which combinations of the keys are used to type letters, numbers, and symbols. The tablet provides feedback by reading out each letter as it is typed. Users can also choose from a variety of specialised keyboard layouts, such as one for chemical formulae.
New Scientist Oct 11, 2011	back to top

'Fight Back' phone app to protect women in India
Women in India's capital, New Delhi, will soon be able to fight off potential attackers with a push of a phone button. The phone app 'Fight Back' will be launched in November by local charity Whypoll and will function as an SOS alert device - sending out a text message with a GPS location to up to five people, including police, and as a post on Facebook and Twitter. It will also map the alerts to build an accurate database of where and what gender-related crimes occur. The app will initially be available to download from the Whypoll website (www.whypoll.org) for a nominal fee and will be supported by a range of mobile devices such as Nokia and BlackBerry. SOS alerts will cost the same as an SMS. One in every four rapes in India occurs in New Delhi, police say, with reports of women being bundled into moving cars and gang-raped before being dumped on roadsides, giving the city an unsavoury reputation as the 'rape capital' of the nation. There is one rape every 18 hours, according to police.
Reuters Oct 13, 2011	back to top

Biofuel breakthrough could replace diesel
The rising economic and political costs of oil, coupled with climate-change fears, have been driving the search for renewable, alternative transportation fuels. A chief focus of research has been on 'drop-in fuels' made from the biomass of perennial grasses and other nonfood plants or agricultural waste, which have the potential to replace gasoline, diesel and jet fuels in today's engines. Researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have identified a potential new advanced biofuel that they say could replace Number 2 (D2) diesel fuel, today's standard fuel for diesel engines. The team used bioengineered strains of the Escherichia coli bacteria and a yeast to produce a precursor to bisabolane, a chemical compound similar to those used in fragrances and flavourings. Bisabolane has properties almost identical to D2 diesel, but much lower freezing and cloud points, which, should be advantageous for its use as a fuel, according to the researchers. The team is now preparing to make larger quantities of bisabolane for tests in actual diesel engines, using the new fermentation facilities at the Berkeley Lab's Advanced Biofuels Process Demonstration Unit (ABPDU), which opened this summer.
TG Daily / Nature Communications Oct 13, 2011	back to top