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An infrared laser beam focused on the arm of an atomic-force microscope launches plasmons on the surface of graphene.

Image: Basov Lab / UCSD

Issue no. 18, 2012 Published: Jun 22, 2012
Plasmonic graphene controls rippling electrons
'Magnetic emulsions' could clean up oil spills
Mysterious electrical bursts warn of material collapse
Baby robot learns first words from human teacher
UK government report backs open access science publishing
Trouble brewing for GM crops
Bacteria turn CO2 into soil improver
Engineers build smallest, fastest digital gigapixel camera
South African innovator takes water out of showering
The descent of music

Plasmonic graphene controls rippling electrons
As if diamond-beating strength and high conductivity aren't enough, graphene has a new trick: turning electron waves on and off. That could make this wonder material a useful component in novel types of circuits, exotic materials and ultra-sharp microscopes. When light hits some materials in just the right way, ripples of electrons called plasmons appear on the surface. These rippling surfaces can focus light through openings smaller than light's wavelength, so might allow microscopes with unprecedented resolution. For decades, researchers have focused on metals as the best material for carrying plasmons. They have the advantage of being abundant in free electrons, but their plasmons were hard to control without building delicate nanostructures. Now, two teams have shown that plasmons can be produced in graphene too. Both groups coated a thin silicon wafer with a layer of graphene, and excited the surface with a laser. They used a nanoscale microscope to image the resulting electron ripples. Unlike similar work in metals, both teams were able to control their graphene plasmons, using a voltage to make the ripples grow and shrink. As well as microscopes, the ability to switch plasmons could be useful when building circuits and also metamaterials, which can bend light around objects by controlling its path. Metamaterials are the technology behind preliminary invisibility cloaks but must be intricately engineered. Plasmonic graphene might be capable of the same feat but would be easier to manufacture.
New Scientist / Nature Jun 20, 2012	back to top

'Magnetic emulsions' could clean up oil spills
Researchers of the University of Bristol have unveiled a molecule that can make 'magnetic emulsions', which has the potential to revolutionise the chemical industry. Emulsions are blends which normally do not mix, like oil and water. The team's custom-made molecule acts as an 'emulsifier', coating oily materials and acting to blend the liquids. But because the molecule responds to magnetic fields, it could be put to use in cleaning up oil spills. The work is an extension of the 'magnetic soap' the team reported in January and published in the journal Angewandte Chemie. At the heart of the idea are what are known as surfactants - short for surface-active agents - that are based on metal atoms, which respond to magnetic fields. These magnetic surfactants are long chains of atoms, with metal atoms at one end. One end of these surfactant molecules is 'hydrophilic', or water-loving, and the other 'hydrophobic', or water-fearing. In a mixture including water and oily substances, the molecules surround bubbles of oils, aligning themselves with their hydrophilic tails pointing outward into the water. To achieve this effect, the team changed their original formula. The result is that the magnetic molecules create emulsions even when added in small amounts to currently available surfactants - so they could be easily implemented into industrial or clean-up applications. The researchers also says that the simple preparation of the molecules could mean they join a number of other approaches to deliver medicines to specific sites in the body using magnetic fields. have unveiled a molecule that can make 'magnetic emulsions', which has the potential to revolutionise the chemical industry.
BBC News / Soft Matter Jun 21, 2012	back to top

Mysterious electrical bursts warn of material collapse
Inexplicable flashes of electricity burst out of powdery materials seconds before they form cracks and fail. If better understood, the flashes could be monitored to forewarn of earthquakes, concrete bridge collapses or failures in the ceramic components of engines, such as turbine blades. Researchers of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey discovered the flashes by studying small avalanches created in the lab by swirling powders, such as flour, in revolving cylinders. Electrical charges as large as 500 volts were detected up to 4.5 seconds before the avalanches occurred. The team found that the bursts originated from tiny flaws in the structure of the densely packed powder. These propagated towards the surface as the cylinder revolved, eventually resulting in a crack that sheared off a portion of the powder from the main body. It is well known that failing materials, and earthquakes, release electrical signals. What is new is the discovery that the discharges are triggered by structural flaws preceding the failure itself. The researchers saw the same thing in powders used to make pharmaceuticals. They have no explanation as yet but have ruled out a build-up of static electricity, chemical production of electricity and pressure effects.
New Scientist / Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jun 12, 2012	back to top

Baby robot learns first words from human teacher
At first it's just noise: a stream of incoherent sounds, burbling away. But, after a few minutes, a fully formed word suddenly emerges: 'red'. Then another: 'box'. In this way, a babbling robot learns to speak its first real words, just by chatting with a human. Between the ages of 6 and 14 months children move from babbling strings of syllables to uttering actual words. Inspired by this process, a team at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, programmed their iCub humanoid robot, called DeeChee, with almost all the syllables that exist in English - around 40,000 in total. This allowed it to babble rather like a baby, by arbitrarily stringing syllables together. The researchers enlisted 34 people to act as teachers, who were told to treat DeeChee as if it were a child. DeeChee took part in an 8-minute dialogue with each teacher. Between each session, its memory was saved, wiped and reset, so that the experiment started anew with each teacher. At the outset of each dialogue, each of the syllables in DeeChee's lexicon had an identical score. Programmed to take turns listening and then speaking, DeeChee turned the teacher's speech into syllables, totting up the number of instances of each one. It then updated the scores in its own lexicon, giving extra points to syllables the teacher had used. When it next spoke, it would be more likely to repeat the syllables the teacher had uttered because these now had higher scores. This learning by imitation was then reinforced by encouraging remarks from the teacher when DeeChee spoke a recognisable word. DeeChee was programmed to give extra points to the syllables that preceded the teacher's approval. Towards the end of the 8 minutes, real words kept popping up more often than if DeeChee were still selecting syllables at random.
New Scientist / PLoS One Jun 20, 2012	back to top

UK government report backs open access science publishing
The shift toward open access to publicly funded scientific research should be supported with an extra 50m to 60m pounds a year in public money, according to a UK government-commissioned report. The report strongly backs a move away from subscriptions by readers of scientific journals to charges levied on researchers in order to expand access to published research. Some 38m pounds of the extra money being called for is earmarked to help pay the charges associated with open access publishing, with the rest dedicated to an extension of license agreements that allow group access and investment in so-called 'repositories' that enable online searching of archived research. But the report also says the shift should be gradual and carefully managed to avoid damaging any part of the existing science publishing industry. The debate over open access is raging on both sides of the Atlantic, driven by the moral argument that science funded by governments and charities should not sit behind a pay-wall and generate huge profits for private companies. The report supports this argument, saying: 'The principle that the results of research that has been publicly funded should be freely accessible in the public domain is a compelling one, and fundamentally unanswerable.' Reed Elsevier and other subscription-driven publishers say the criticism levelled at them by some supporters of open access is unfair, and the value added by the editorial process does not come cheap. Attacking the subscription model risks damaging a successful industry, a major employer and a significant contributor to government tax revenues, they say.
Reuters Jun 18, 2012	back to top

Trouble brewing for GM crops
In an attempt to cut the use of broad-spectrum insecticides, cotton and corn have been genetically engineered to produce toxins derived from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, and have become mainstream crops over the last 15 years. However, scientists of the University of Arizona have discovered that initially-rare genetic mutations that confer resistance to Bt toxins are becoming more common as a growing number of pest populations adapt to Bt crops. The team gathered genetic evidence from pests in the field in China, enabling them to directly compare the genes involved in the resistance of wild and lab-reared populations. They found some resistance conferring mutations in the field were the same as in lab reared pests, but that others were strikingly different. One big surprise was the identification of two unrelated, dominant mutations in the field populations. By contrast, resistance mutations characterized before from lab selection are recessive. Scientists have attempted to deal with resistance in the field by planting refuges - plants that don't have a Bt toxin gene and thus allow survival of insects that are susceptible to the toxin. Refuges are planted near Bt crops with the goal of producing enough susceptible insects to dilute the population of resistant insects, by making it unlikely resistant insects will mate and produce resistant offspring. The refuge strategy worked well against the pink bollworm in Arizona, where it had plagued cotton farmers for a century, but is now scarce. But the dominant mutations discovered in China threaten this strategy because resistant offspring arise from matings between susceptible and resistant insects.
TG Daily Jun 21, 2012	back to top

Bacteria turn CO2 into soil improver
Tiny microbes and a tropical tree can be used to lock up carbon dioxide - and turn it into an agricultural soil improver. Scientists of the University of Edinburgh's School of GeoSciences have discovered that when the Iroko tree is grown in dry, acidic soil and treated with a combination of natural fungus and bacteria, it produces a mineral in the soil around its roots. It does this by combining calcium from the earth with CO2 from the atmosphere. The bacteria then create the conditions under which the resulting mineral turns into limestone. The process locks carbon into the soil, keeping it out of the atmosphere, with the mineral in the soil having the happy side effect of making it more suitable for agriculture. The team believes the discovery could lead to reforestation projects in tropical countries, and help reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the developing world. The technique has already been used successfully in West Africa, and is also being tested in Bolivia, Haiti and India. The project examined several microbiological methods for locking up CO2 as limestone, and the Iroko-bacteria pathway showed best results.
TG Daily Jun 20, 2012	back to top

Engineers build smallest, fastest digital gigapixel camera
Engineers in the United States have built a prototype gigapixel camera the size of a bedside cabinet that can capture an image in a single snapshot with 1000 times more detail than today's devices. It is not the world's first gigapixel camera, but it is the smallest and fastest and opens up prospects for improving airport security, military surveillance and even online sports coverage, its developers say. Today's cameras capture images measured in megapixels - a million pixels - normally between eight and 40 for an average consumer device. A thousand megapixels make a gigapixel, which is thus comprised of a billion pixels. Dubbed AWARE-2, the device is housed in a box of 75 x 50 x 50 cm - most of which comprises electronic processing and communication equipment. The optical system consists of a six-centimetre ball-shaped lens surrounded by an array of 98 micro-cameras each with a 14-megapixel sensor. The optical system on its own weighs about 10 kg, but with the case about 45 kg.
Sydney Morning Herald / AFP / Nature Jun 21, 2012	back to top

South African innovator takes water out of showering
With inspiration from a friend too lazy to take a shower and a few months of research on the Internet, South African student Ludwick Marishane of the University of Cape Town has won global recognition for an invention that takes the water out of bathing. Marishane invented a product called DryBath, a clear gel applied to skin that does the work of water and soap. The invention, which won Marishane the 2011 Global Student Entrepreneur of the Year Award, has wide applications in Africa and other parts of the developing world where basic hygiene is lacking and hundreds of millions of people do not have regular access to water. The product differs from the anti-bacterial hand washes by eliminating the heavy alcohol smell. It creates an odourless, biodegradable cleansing film with moisturizers. The product is now manufactured commercially with clients including major global airlines for use on long-haul flights and governments for its soldiers in the field. Marishane also sees it helping conserve water in the poorest parts of the world.
Reuters Jun 18, 2012	back to top

The descent of music
An artistic mind isn't required to create appealing music. Starting with short sound sequences more grating than Muzak, scientists of Imperial College London created pleasing tunes simply by letting them evolve through a Pandora-like process of voting thumbs up or thumbs down on each sequence. Inspired in part by long-running experiments probing the evolution of bacteria, computational biologist the researchers decided to see if pleasant music could evolve from a cacophonous mess when human listeners acted as the force of natural selection. The researchers started with a loop of simple audio wave forms and let it randomly evolve to generate a starter population with variation on which selection could act. Then more than 6,000 people listened to the audio loops and rated how much they liked the sounds on a five-point scale. The audio loops rated more favourably were allowed to mutate or combine with others to make a next-generation clip; the bad ones died off. By 500 generations, the pieces developed into pleasant little ditties with chord structure and rhythm, the team report. Now the researchers are running experiments with stricter, more realistic sources of variation. They also want to scale the project, called DarwinTunes, up to millions of users.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Jun 18, 2012	back to top