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Issue no. 1, 2012 Published: Jan 13, 2012
Cut-and-splice time cloak makes events disappear
Rolling microcapsules repair damaged surfaces
Introducing the 'nano-ear'
Company announces low-cost DNA decoding machine
New material bests silicon at gadget cooling
Should computers have their own websites?
GM silk worms make Spider-Man web closer to reality

Cut-and-splice time cloak makes events disappear
Want to steal money from a safe and get away with it? Your best bet is a time cloak, a device that can hide an event in time, making it appear as if it never happened. The possibility of such a device was suggested in 2010 by a team at Imperial College London. Now the notion has been put into practice, with the first demonstration of a time cloak by a team led at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Before any bank robbers out there get too excited, it's important to note that the event in question was the passage of a beam of light, and that the researchers only cloaked a section of it for 5 trillionths of a second. Nonetheless, it's an intriguing idea that may have more prosaic applications, such as hiding traffic passing through fibre optic cables to help prevent eavesdropping. So how do time cloaks work? It may help to cast your mind back to invisibility cloaks, which hide objects in space. These work via a metamaterial that bends light around an object, making the object appear as if it isn't there. If you were filming a movie of a scene including a cloaked object, the object would be invisible in every frame. A time cloak on the other hand, is like cutting some frames out of a movie and then splicing it back together again. An entire scene could now be missing from the movie, rather than just a specific object. To demonstrate this, the team passed a beam of light through lenses that can compress or stretch out a light signal in time. A clever arrangement allowed them to do the equivalent of cutting frames from a movie and splicing it back together. They created a time gap in the light beam a few trillionths of a second long, then seamlessly stitched the rest of the beam back together so that anyone recording it would not notice it had been tampered with.
New Scientist Jan 05, 2012	back to top

Rolling microcapsules repair damaged surfaces
Researchers at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Pittsburgh have unveiled a new technique to repair nanometre-sized defects using oil-based microcapsules filled with a nanoparticle solution. The microcapsules roll or glide over a surface and stop to repair any cracks or imperfections that they encounter by releasing their nanoparticle cargo into them. They then move on to the next defect. Such a 'repair-and-go' approach is inspired by naturally occurring biological mechanisms in the body. Leukocytes, for example, probe, identify and heal wounded or diseased tissue. It has also found use in medicine - cancer drugs are routinely encapsulated to ensure that they preferentially permeate into 'leaky' cancer tissue rather than healthy surrounding tissue, according to the researchers. The technique could have numerous practical applications in industry and research because it avoids the need to coat an entire surface when only a small fraction of it has been damaged. It might also be used as a precise way to detect damaged substrates by depositing sensor material into the regions of concern.
PhysicsWorld / Nature Nanotechnology Jan 09, 2012	back to top

Introducing the 'nano-ear'
Physicists have developed the first-ever 'nano-ear' capable of detecting sound on microscopic length scales with an estimated sensitivity that is six orders of magnitude below the threshold of human hearing. The device is based on an optically trapped gold nanoparticle, and its inventors claim that it could be used to 'listen' to biological micro-organisms as well as investigate the motion and vibrations in tiny machines. Particles can be trapped in 'optical tweezers', which are formed when laser light is focused at a point in space. An electric dipole moment is induced in the particle and it is drawn to the most intense part of the laser's electric field. The technique was discovered in the 1980s and is used routinely in research labs around the world. It is particularly useful for manipulating biological objects, since the optical field used to make the trap is non-destructive. Now, a team at the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich has shown that a particle inside an optical trap can also be used as an extremely sensitive and minuscule sound detector. They have found that the trapped particle can be made to move from its equilibrium position by vibrations from nearby sound waves. The frequency of the sound can then be calculated by analysing how much the particle has been displaced. According to the team, the device could be used to analyse the sounds made by live micro-organisms, such as bacteria and viruses. It might also be used to investigate artificial micro-objects that produce acoustic vibrations but that cannot be directly visualized in an optical microscope because of strong light absorption or scattering.
PhysicsWorld / Physical Review Letters Jan 10, 2012	back to top

Company announces low-cost DNA decoding machine
A biotechnology company announced it has developed a machine to decode an individual's DNA in a day for USD 1,000, a long-sought price goal for making the genome useful for medical care. Life Technologies said it was taking orders for the technology, which it expects to deliver in about a year. A second company, Illumina of San Diego, also introduced a new technology Tuesday that it said will decode an entire genome in about 24 hours. Its statement did not estimate the cost per genome. The machines, called sequencers, allow scientists to identify the arrangement of the 3bn chemical building blocks that make up someone's DNA. Since the first sequencing of the basic human genome was announced at the White House in 2000, the costs of sequencing DNA have steadily tumbled. The USD 1,000 target has long been cited as a key step toward making the technique practical for doctors to use to help their patients, such as for revealing vulnerabilities to certain diseases or tailoring medical treatment. Sequencing whole genomes is now done primarily for research. It is different from the service some companies offer to consumers that cover just part of the genome or particular spots in it, such as for information on ancestry or disease susceptibility.
Yahoo / AP Jan 10, 2012	back to top

New material bests silicon at gadget cooling
Overheating could easily damage all those expensive laptops and smartphones were it not for cooling fans or heat-transferring materials. Now, a new graphene material capable of conducting heat 20 times faster than silicon could make the next generation of electronic devices quieter and longer-lasting. The experimental graphene made by researchers at the University of Texas has also proven 60% more effective at transferring heat than typical graphene - a carbon sheet just one atom thick. Such a material could eventually become a part of computer chips alongside silicon as well as whisk heat away from solar panels, radar, security systems and imaging gadgets. Efficient heat removal would also allow for smaller and more-powerful electronic devices that not only put computing power in everyone's hands, but also allow for smarter gadgets connected to sensors and the Internet. The secret to graphene's success comes from its makeup. Natural carbon is found in concentrations of about 99% 'carbon 12' and 1% 'carbon 13', based on differences in its atomic mass. Researchers removed just 1% of carbon 13 to make it an 'isotopically pure' carbon - about 99.99% carbon 12.
MSNBC / Nature Materials Jan 11, 2012	back to top

Should computers have their own websites?
Websites designed to be read by computers rather than humans could make it easier to share and use data says Stephen Wolfram, creator of 'computational knowledge engine' Wolfram Alpha. Writing in a blog post, he suggests that '.data' should become a new top-level domain (TLD) for organisations to share data in a standard from, creating a 'data web' that would run in parallel with the ordinary web. Under Wolfram's scheme, a website like wolfram.com would be accompanied by wolfram.data. A human visitor to wolfram.data would just see a list of publicly available databases, but a computer would be able to access and interact with the data itself. Of course, this kind of data sharing is already possible thanks to application programming interfaces (APIs), the software instructions published by many web services that allow programmers to combine data in creative ways, such as plotting Twitter updates on a Google map. Each organisation's API is different though, which can make them hard to use. Wolfram's proposal would put data in a standard location and format, making it easier to access. For example, the various software behind price comparison websites currently use a variety of methods to get pricing data, whether that be a direct data feed from a particular merchant or simply visiting their website and scraping the necessary information, meaning that even a simple website redesign can break price comparisons. A .data TLD would mean price comparison software could simply visit amazon.data, ebay.data and other similar sites in order to find you the best deals.
New Scientist Jan 11, 2012	back to top

GM silk worms make Spider-Man web closer to reality
Researchers from the University of Wyoming have created silkworms that are genetically modified to spin much stronger silk. Their eventual aim is to produce silk from worms that has the toughness of spider silk. In weight-for-weight terms, spider silk is stronger than steel. Researchers have been trying to reproduce such silk for decades. But it is unfeasible to 'farm' spiders for the commercial production of their silk because the arachnids don't produce enough of it - coupled with their proclivity for eating each other. Silk worms, however, are easy to farm and produce vast amounts of silk - but the material is fragile. Researchers have tried for years to get the best of both worlds - super-strong silk in industrial quantities - by transplanting genes from spiders into worms. But the resulting genetically modified worms have not produced enough spider silk until now. GM worms produced by the Wyoming team seem to be producing a composite of worm and spider silk in large amounts - which is just as tough as spider silk. The main applications could be in the medical sector creating stronger sutures, implants and ligaments. But the GM spider silk could also be used as a greener substitute for toughened plastics, which require a lot of energy to produce.
BBC News / PNAS Jan 04, 2012	back to top