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UKÕs $300m Menace
Targeting Chewing Gum
Scientists have created a biological brew that could help Britain clean up a £150 million-a-year environmental menace: discarded chewing gum.
The researchers, based in Manchester and Belfast, have developed a special solution of enzymes which can break up and dissolve blobs of gum hardened to streets and pavements. At present, such lumps can be removed only by using cumbersome high pressure steam hoses, expensive and noisy freezing machines or corrosive chemicals that damage the environment, the Guardian said.
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Ionic liquids are organic salts
with low melting points and have recently been employed as
alternatives to the traditional organic solvents.
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“We talked about our disgust at the habit of chewing and spitting gum,“ said biochemist Dr. Gill Stephens of Manchester University. “Then we began to think of possible solutions and realized there were new biotechnology techniques that could really make a difference.“
Britain’s chewing gum crisis has grown dramatically in recent years. Gum is now one of the nation’s most popular forms of confectionery and consumption has jumped 7 percent in the past three years. As a result, a rash of gum blobs has spread across cities and towns. A recent clean-up of Oxford Street in London resulted in 300,000 lumps being removed.
At the same time, the cost of cleaning has become extremely expensive. In 2007, a piece of gum cost 3 pence while the price tag for removing it from a street or pavement was 10 pence. But now researchers at Belfast and Manchester believe they have found a simple answer: enzymes. These are tiny molecular scissors used by living organisms to cut and break up long chemical chains. Enzymes are crucial to our digestive system, for example.
“Enzymes were just what we needed, we realized,“ said Stephens. “There was a problem, however. Chewing gum--which is essentially a form of synthetic rubber--is hydrophobic: it repels water. That meant we could not use it as the basis of an enzyme solution. We needed something else.“
Other widely used solvents, such as acetone and ether, are either poisonous or inflammable and so could not be released in public places. Then researchers at Queen’s University, Belfast, led by Professor Kenneth Seddon, came up with the idea of using substances known as ionic liquids. These are organic salts with low melting points and have recently been employed as alternatives to the traditional organic solvents. Crucially, most ionic liquids are biodegradable.
The two sets of researchers combined resources to form a joint group and raised a £1 million development fund, half from government sources and the rest from industry. For the past two years, they have been testing various ionic liquids in combination with different types of enzymes.
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Glowing Sugars Light Up Zebrafish
Using artificial sugar and some clever chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, researchers have made glow-in-the-dark fish whose internal light comes from the sugar coating on their cells.
This novel method of fluorescently tagging the sugar chains, or carbohydrates, that coat cells is a new tool for those studying development in the zebrafish, a laboratory organism popular because its transparent embryos allow easy observation of living cells as they develop over time, Physorg said.
“Most people think of carbohydrates as food, but the surface of any cell in our body is adorned with a ton of sugars as well as proteins that allow cells to communicate with other cells and invading pathogens,“ said UC Berkeley graduate student Jeremy M. Baskin. “People have had for many years the ability to image specific proteins, but not carbohydrates. We have developed for the first time methods for labeling and imaging carbohydrates inside an intact animal.“
“An understanding of how, when and where cells dust themselves with sugar may shed light on how stem cells develop into tissues, as well as turn up markers of disease, such as cancer, or strategies for battling infectious organisms,“ said Baskin .
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Microrobots Could Monitor Terrorists
A new scientific project aims to design teams of bio-inspired microrobots that could one day monitor terrorists or search for victims at disaster sites.
According to ANI, BAE and the other groups already have working microrobots and expect them to be ready for customized projects in 12 to 18 months. The microrobots will range in size from a few inches in length to the size of a hand.
“They will have a range of a few city blocks, and will be carried either by a larger robot or a human close to their target before being deployed,“ said William Devine of BAE Systems, the major partner in the project, known as the Micro Autonomous Systems and Technology (MAST) Collaborative Technology Alliance.
The first micro robots will most likely only have one mode of transportation and one sensor, such as a spider-inspired walker equipped with a camera. As the sensors and transportation methods use less power and require less space, the designers will pack more of both onto the robots.
“To do all this, scientists will work to reduce the size and energy consumption of existing sensors and transmitters by a factor of 10 to 100, while also looking at how animals perform the same tasks the microrobots will be designed for,“ said Devine.
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Closer to Sun
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is sending a
spacecraft closer to the sun than any probe has ever gone--and what it finds could revolutionize what we know about the star and the solar wind.
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Do Birds See With Quantum Eyes?
A quantum trick might be behind birds’ ability to navigate using Earth’s magnetic field lines.
Some researchers think birds might be able to ’see the magnetic field via photosensitive proteins in their retinas, NewScientist reported.
The theory is that when a photon strikes one of these proteins, it creates a pair of oppositely charged ions, which separate for a fleeting moment before recombining. Each of these ions contains electrons with a quantum property called spin. Initially, these spins point in opposite directions--but in a magnetic field, they tend to become aligned. When the ions recombine, this alignment triggers a specific biochemical reaction, which gives the bird information about the magnetic field.
The idea has a major flaw though. The ions seem to be pulled back together about 10 times faster than researchers think Earth’s magnetic field could affect the electrons’ spins.
Incubators Change Babies’ Heartbeats
The incubators used to nurture premature babies give off electromagnetic fields that change the babies’ heart rhythms, researchers in Italy have found.
Carlo Bellieni at the General Hospital of the University of Study in Siena and colleagues monitored the heart rates of 43 newborn babies being cared for in incubators. They measured the babies’ heart rate variability (HRV)--a measure of the time lapse between heart beats--when the incubators were switched on and when they were switched off, Nature said.
Human hearts don’t beat at the same rate all the time, but rather quicken and slow when breathing in and out and with changes in hormones. This variation is healthy, and it can be used as a marker of how well the nervous system works. In adults, a low HRV is thought to point to a risk of heart disease. Bellieni and his colleagues found that when the incubators were switched on, the babies were exposed to 8.9 milligauss of electromagnetic frequency (normal background levels are around 1 milligauss) and their heart rate became less variable: the HRV dropped to half that of baseline levels.
New Device Detects Latent Prints on Skin
Fingerprints that used to escape detection could soon help point to the killer. Using a field portable system being developed by ChemImage and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, investigators at crime scenes will be able to detect latent prints on human skin.
The system takes advantage of surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS)-based agents to visualize latent prints. A team led by Linda Lewis of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division is working with ChemImage to identify fingerprint components that are SERS active, which involves identifying the fingerprint components that give a Raman emission when using a SERS reagent, ScienceDaily wrote.
The ORNL team has identified a novel dielectric nanowire coated with silver as the SERS agent of choice. This material was developed at Naval Research Laboratory. The ORNL team is now assisting Naval Research Laboratory with developing a batch processing method for producing highly active silver-coated nanowires to support a robust field method of chemically imaging latent fingerprints.
Bats Emit More Decibels Than Rock Concert
Researchers studying the echolocation behavior in bats have discovered that the diminutive flying mammals emit exceptionally loud sounds--louder than any known animal in air.
According to ScienceDaily, Annemarie Surlykke from the Institute of Biology, SDU, Denmark, and her colleague, Elisabeth Kalko, from the University of Ulm, Germany, studied the echolocation behavior in 11 species of insect-eating tropical bats from Panama.
The researchers used microphone arrays and photographic methods to reconstruct flight paths of the bats in the field when these nocturnal hunters find and capture their insect prey in air using their sonar system. Surlykke and Kalko took this information as a base to estimate the emitted sound intensity and found that bats emit exceptionally loud sounds exceeding 140 dB SPL (at 10 cm from the bat’s mouth), which is the highest level reported so far for any animal in air. For comparison, the level at a loud rock concert is 115-120 dB and for humans, the threshold of pain is around 120 dB.
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