At http://www.livescience.com/20299-viruses-harnessed-create-energy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Livesciencecom+%28LiveScience.com+Science+Headline+Feed%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Viruses May Someday Power Your Cellphone

Jeanna Bryner, LiveScience Managing Editor

Date: 14 May 2012 Time: 04:00 PM ET

The virus-based generator works by tapping a finger on a postage stamp-sized electrode coated with specially engineered viruses. The viruses convert the force of the tap into an electric charge.
CREDIT: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

View image

Scientists have just put pesky viruses to work, for us, using the teensy particles to generate electricity.

So far, they have produced enough energy with these harmless viruses to power a small liquid-crystal display.

The researchers think their findings could lead to a "personal power generator in the near future," study researcher Seung-Wuk Lee of the University of California, Berkeley, told LiveScience. "Therefore, by walking around, we can charge our cellular phone." The device could also replace batteries as a self-sustaining power source for environmental sensors.

And being that the device would be biocompatiable, Lee foresees its use in biomedical devices, powering pacemakers and hearing aids, for instance.

Lee, also a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and colleagues focused their research on a virus called M13 bacteriaphage that attacks bacteria but is benign to people. Particularly they were looking for a strong piezoelectric material, or one that generates electricity due to mechanical stress.

To see if the virus was piezoelectric, the researchers applied an electric field to a film of M13 viruses. They found that proteins coating the viruses began to twist and turn, a telltale sign of the piezoelectric effect at work, they noted.

But how much voltage could these viruses produce? The researchers genetically tweaked the viruses to boost the negative charge of one end of the proteins coating the viruses; this increased the charge difference between the positive and negative ends of the proteins. The resulting viruses had higher voltage.

Next, they stacked films of the virus 20 layers high, a design that proved optimal for a strong piezoelectric effect, meaning more electrical output.

In their test, the researchers created conditions under which the viruses would organize on their own into a multilayered film measuring about 0.16 inches (1 square centimeter). They sandwiched this tiny, paper-thin device between two electrodes that were connected to... ( more at http://www.livescience.com/20299-viruses-harnessed-create-energy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Livesciencecom+%28LiveScience.com+Science+Headline+Feed%29&utm_content=Google+Reader )

At http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/roger-highfield/9019760/Life-is-like-Lego-only-better.html

Life is like Lego - only better

The natural world is constructed of blocks, and, like the building kit, relies on a small variety of pieces to make complex objects. Roger Highfield explains.

Coming together: traditional Lego has become more elaborate yet stacks up badly compared with nature

By Roger Highfield

8:52AM GMT 17 Jan 2012

I'm a big Lego fan. I've visited the original theme park in Denmark. There's even a Lego Star Wars Stormtrooper key-ring lurking in my coat pocket. Appropriately enough, it's missing a leg. Leg-go.

But there's something that has troubled me over the years: why has Lego moved away from the idea of a universal construction set based on simple plastic bricks? Purists like me hark back to the old days when a Lego set consisted of basic units, from cuboids to sheets. And it seems we may have a point: with Lego, less is not necessarily more, but more is also not necessarily better.

Today, the company makes hundreds of sets – kits, really – on a variety of themes, from city to space to robots. And it makes hundreds of elaborate bricks in all shapes and sizes. Yet with enough imagination, even the simplest building blocks can be used to make structures of amazing complexity. And what is true of Lego is also true of the natural world.

Our world is a gigantic construction set – which, like old-fashioned Lego, relies on a surprisingly small variety of building blocks out of which the most amazingly complex structures can be made. In the past few days I have seen one scientist talk about proteins with a Lego-like, modular quality that are ideal for gene therapy, and another about polymer rings created with molecular Lego blocks.

So does the more complex modern Lego mean that you can build even more complex models? It turns out that the answer is: "A bit, but not as much as you'd think."

In a paper with the arcane title: Scaling of Differentiation in Networks: Nervous Systems, Organisms, Ant Colonies, Ecosystems, Businesses, Universities, Cities, Electronic Circuits, and Legos, Mark Changizi and colleagues at Duke University, North Carolina, looked at networks under economic or natural selective pressure, such as electronic circuits (networks of electronic components), Lego ("networks" of pieces), businesses (networks of employees), universities (networks of academics), organisms (networks of cells), ant colonies (networks of ants), and nervous systems (networks of neurons).

They found that for these other networks, as you might expect, there was an increase in the number of types of components - or in the case of animate systems, the division of labour - as the total number of pieces increases. And because the components are used combinatorially, as sets becomes larger, they use progressively fewer additional piece types. "But in the new Lego world, the number of piece types in a Lego-set grows nearly as fast as the size/complexity of the set, which means they're barely using their pieces combinatorially any longer," says Changizi who, now puts his Lego theory into practice with his own... ( more at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/roger-highfield/9019760/Life-is-like-Lego-only-better.html )

• Roger Highfield is director of external affairs at the National Museum of Science and Industry

At http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21760-wrinkled-doughnut-solves-geometrical-mystery.html

Wrinkled doughnut solves geometrical mystery

• Updated 12:51 02 May 2012 by Jacob Aron

This may be the weirdest doughnut you have ever seen, but it solves a long-standing geometrical puzzle that evaded mathematicians including Nobel laureate John Nash, who inspired the film A Beautiful Mind.

Topology is the branch of mathematics concerned with the geometric deformations of objects. According to its rules, a certain type of flat square - in which opposite edges have been mathematically linked - is equivalent to a holed-doughnut, or torus, because one can easily be turned into the other. First, form a cylinder by joining the top edge of the square to the bottom edge, then bend that cylinder into a circle and join its two open ends.

There is just one problem: for the two ends to meet, the torus must be stretched in a way that distorts the original shape of the square. Any horizontal lines on the original square will be stretched on the torus, while vertical lines will remain the same. (Cartographers encounter a similar problem when unwrapping a globe of the Earth to create flat maps. They are forced then to make compromises such as inflating the size of Greenland, which can appear similar in size to Africa on standard maps but is actually one-fourteenth as big.)

Molecular doughnut

But could there be an alternative torus that leaves both horizontal and vertical line lengths unchanged? In the 1950s, game theorist and economist John Nash, together with mathematician Nicolaas Kuiper, proved that such a torus could exist.

However, their methods only worked at a tiny scale, making it too difficult to actually visualise the shape. As a result, no one knew what it would look like. "It's like describing a cooking recipe at the molecular level," says Francis Lazarus at the University of Grenoble in France.

Now, Lazarus and a team of mathematicians from Grenoble and the University of Lyon have managed to visualise the shape of this torus. Starting with a shrunken version of the regular, smooth torus, they wrinkle the surface in the horizontal direction, increasing the length of just the vertical lines.

3D printout

They then apply further wrinkles in other directions until the lengths of both vertical and horizontal lines are equal to the lengths of these lines on the square. The result is the bizarre-looking torus that is... ( more at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21760-wrinkled-doughnut-solves-geometrical-mystery.html )

At http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18004050

Strokes: Drawing test 'may predict risks in older men'

A simple drawing test may help predict the risk of older men dying after a first stroke, a study in the journal BMJ Open suggests.

Taken while healthy, the test involves drawing lines between numbers in ascending order as fast as possible.

Men who scored in the bottom third were about three times as likely to die after a stroke compared with those who were in the highest third.

The study looked at 1,000 men between the ages of 67 and 75 over 14 years.

Of the 155 men who had a stroke, 22 died within a month and more than half within an average of two- and-a-half years.

The researchers think that tests are able to pick up hidden damage to brain blood vessels when there are no other obvious signs or... (more at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-18004050 )

At http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3181/bacterial_builders_on_site_for_computer_construction

Bacterial builders on site for computer construction

Published Friday 4th May 12

Forget computer viruses - magnet-making bacteria could be used to build tomorrow's computers with larger hard drives and speedier connections.

Researchers at the University of Leeds have used a type of bacterium which 'eats' iron to create a surface of magnets, similar to those found in traditional hard drives, and wiring. As the bacterium ingests the iron it creates tiny magnets within itself.

The team has also begun to understand how the proteins inside these bacteria collect, shape and position these "nanomagnets" inside their cells and can now replicate this behaviour outside the bacteria.

Led by Dr Sarah Staniland from the University's School of Physics and Astronomy, in a longstanding collaboration with the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, the team hope to develop a 'bottom-up' approach for creating cheaper, more environmentally-friendly electronics of the future.

Dr Staniland said: "We are quickly reaching the limits of traditional electronic manufacturing as computer components get smaller. The machines we've traditionally used to build them are clumsy at such small scales. Nature has provided us with the perfect tool to circumvent this problem."

The magnetic array was created by Leeds PhD student Johanna Galloway using a protein which creates perfect nanocrystals of magnetite inside the bacterium Magnetospirilllum magneticum. In a process akin to potato-printing on a much smaller scale, this protein is attached to a gold surface in a checkerboard pattern and placed in a solution containing iron.

At a temperature of 80°C, similarly-sized crystals of magnetite form on the sections of the surface covered by the protein. The team are now working to reduce the size of these islands of magnets, in order to make arrays of single nanomagnets. They also plan to vary the magnetic materials that this protein can control. These next steps would allow each of these nanomagnets to hold one bit of information allowing the construction of better hard drives.

"Using today's 'top-down' method - essentially sculpting tiny magnets out of a big magnet - it is increasingly difficult to produce the small magnets of the same size and shape which are needed to store data," said Johanna Galloway. "Using the method developed here at Leeds, the proteins do all the hard work; they gather the iron, create the most magnetic compound, and arrange it into regularly-sized cubes."

A different protein has been used to create tiny electrical wires by Dr Masayoshi Tanaka, during a secondment to Leeds from Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology. These 'nanowires' are made of 'quantum dots' - particles of copper indium sulphide and zinc sulphide which glow and conduct electricity - and are encased by fat molecules, or... ( more at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3181/bacterial_builders_on_site_for_computer_construction )

At http://www.livescience.com/20172-brain-represses-negative-emotions.html

Brain Represses Bad Words for Bilingual Readers

Reading a nasty word in a second language may not pack the punch it would in your native tongue, thanks to an unconscious brain quirk that tamps down potentially disturbing emotions, a new study finds.

When reading negative words such as "failure" in their non-native language, bilingual Chinese-English speakers did not show the same brain response as seen when they read neutral words such as "aim." The finding suggests that the brain can process the meaning of words in the unconscious, while "withholding" information from our conscious minds.

"We devised this experiment to unravel the unconscious interactions between the processing of emotional content and access to the native language system. We think we've identified, for the first time, the mechanism by which emotion controls fundamental thought processes outside consciousness," study researcher Yanjing Wu, a psychologist at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "Perhaps this is a process that resembles the mental repression mechanism that people have theorized about but never previously located."

Translating negativity

Bilingual people typically respond less emotionally to words in their second language. For example, swear words in a foreign tongue don't usually feel as shocking; likewise, some research has found that people are more comfortable talking about embarrassing topics in a second language. [7 Thoughts That Are Bad For You]

To unravel the emotions of language, Wu and his colleague Guillaume Thierry, also of Bangor University, recruited 15 native English speakers, 15 native Chinese speakers, and 15 native Chinese speakers who were also fluent in English (all had first learned English around age 12). They set up an experiment in which these volunteers saw word pairs on a screen. One of the words was always neutral, while the other could be neutral, positive or negative. In addition, each word was two syllables in Chinese, with the first syllable of each word always sounding the same.

For example, the positive word "honesty" was paired with the neutral word "program." In Chinese, honesty translates to "chengshi" and program to "chengxu." Negative words included failure, war, discomfort and unfortunate.

The participants were asked to push a button if the words were linked in meaning. (In some pairs, they were.) Meanwhile, the scientists used electrodes on the scalp to measure the electrical response in the brain to reading these pairs of words.

Self-protection

The findings revealed that although they weren't aware of it, the bilingual participants' brains were translating the positive and neutral words into Chinese as they read them in English. But surprisingly, .. ( more at http://www.livescience.com/20172-brain-represses-negative-emotions.html )

At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120203182623.htm

Hearing Metaphors Activates Brain Regions Involved in Sensory Experience

ScienceDaily (Feb. 3, 2012) — When a friend tells you she had a rough day, do you feel sandpaper under your fingers? The brain may be replaying sensory experiences to help understand common metaphors, new research suggests.

Linguists and psychologists have debated how much the parts of the brain that mediate direct sensory experience are involved in understanding metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in their landmark work 'Metaphors we live by', pointed out that our daily language is full of metaphors, some of which are so familiar (like "rough day") that they may not seem especially novel or striking. They argued that metaphor comprehension is grounded in our sensory and motor experiences.

New brain imaging research reveals that a region of the brain important for sensing texture through touch, the parietal operculum, is also activated when someone listens to a sentence with a textural metaphor. The same region is not activated when a similar sentence expressing the meaning of the metaphor is heard.

The results were published online this week in the journal Brain & Language.

"We see that metaphors are engaging the areas of the cerebral cortex involved in sensory responses even though the metaphors are quite familiar," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "This result illustrates how we draw upon sensory experiences to achieve understanding of metaphorical language."

Sathian is also medical director of the Center for Systems Imaging at Emory University School of Medicine and director of the Rehabilitation R&D Center of Excellence at the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

Seven college students who volunteered for the study were asked to listen to sentences containing textural metaphors as well as sentences that were matched for meaning and structure, and to press a button as soon as they understood each sentence. Blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging. On average, response to a sentence containing a metaphor took slightly longer (0.84 vs 0.63 seconds).

In a previous study, the researchers had already mapped out, for each of these individuals, which parts of the students' brains were involved in processing actual textures by touch and sight. This allowed them to establish with confidence the link within the brain between metaphors involving texture and the sensory experience of texture itself.

"Interestingly, visual cortical regions were not activated by textural metaphors, which fits with other evidence for the primacy of touch in texture perception," says research associate Simon Lacey, PhD, the first author of the paper.

The researchers did not find metaphor-specific differences in cortical regions well known to be involved in generating and processing language, such as... (more at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120203182623.htm )