TechBlog

Always on the verge of a seeming comeback, airships are back in the spotlight, touting new technologies. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency recently announced funding for an innovative, ballast-free airship technology created by Aeros Aeronautical Systems, based outside Los Angeles. The Aeroscraft ML866’s potentially revolutionary Control of Static Heaviness system compresses and decompresses helium in the 210-ft.-long envelope, changing this proposed sky yacht’s buoyancy during takeoff and landings, Aeros says.

It hopes to end the program with a test flight demonstrating the system. Other companies are planning their own first flights within the next few years. Each has a design that it promises will launch a new era of lighter-than-air transportation.

“Rarely is Wi-Fi invoked within the context of wireless sensor networking or industrial process control,” observes Sam Lucero, ABI Research senior analyst. “Wi-Fi is considered too power-intensive as many sensors, actuators, and other devices require battery operation while deployed for several years at a time – whereas Wi-Fi is optimized for limited time usage: from a few hours to less than a full day.”

But a new transition peeks over the horizon, put forth by a company called GainSpan.

A Wi-Fi chipset company, GainSpan has developed various techniques that provide the battery life needed by sensor networks for Wi-Fi.

Continue reading ‘Wi-Fi Moves Into The Sensor Networking Realm’ »

Researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have developed a new “nanobiotechnology” that enables magnetic control of events at the cellular level. They describe the technology, which could lead to finely-tuned but noninvasive treatments for disease, in the January issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Don Ingber, MD, PhD, and Robert Mannix, PhD, of Children’s program in Vascular Biology, in collaboration with Mara Prentiss, PhD, a physicist at Harvard University, devised a way to get tiny beads — 30 nanometers (billionths of a meter) in diameter — to bind to receptor molecules on the cell surface. When exposed to a magnetic field, the beads themselves become magnets, and pull together through magnetic attraction. This pull drags the cell’s receptors into large clusters, mimicking what happens when drugs or other molecules bind to them. This clustering, in turn, activates the receptors, triggering a cascade of biochemical signals that influence different cell functions.

The technology could lead to non-invasive ways of controlling drug release or physiologic processes such as heart rhythms and muscle contractions, says Ingber, the study’s senior investigator. More importantly, it represents the first time magnetism has been used to harness specific cellular signaling systems normally used by hormones or other natural molecules.

Continue reading ‘An “Attractive” Man-Machine Interface: Researchers Use Magnetic Fields, Rather Than Drugs, To Control Cellular Signaling’ »

Energy-efficient device could quickly detect hazardous chemicals

MIT research scientist Luis Velasquez-Garcia, left, and Akintunde Ibitayo Akinwande, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, are developing a tiny sensor that can detect hazardous gases, including biochemical warfare agents. Scaling down gas detectors makes them much easier to use in a real-world environment, where they could be dispersed in a building or outdoor area. Making the devices small also reduces the amount of power they consume and enhances their sensitivity to trace amounts of gases, Akinwande said.

MIT research scientist Luis Velasquez-Garcia, left, and Akintunde Ibitayo Akinwande, professor of electrical engineering and computer science, are developing a tiny sensor that can detect hazardous gases, including biochemical warfare agents.

Continue reading ‘MIT Gas Sensor Is Tiny, Quick’ »

A national team of scientists led by experts at Durham University are embarking on one of the UK’s largest ever research projects into photovoltaic (PV) solar energy.

The £6.3million PV-21 programme will focus on making thin-film light absorbing cells for solar panels from sustainable and affordable materials.

The four-year project, which begins in April (2008), is being funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under the SUPERGEN initiative.

Eight UK universities, led by Durham and including Bangor, Bath, Cranfield, Edinburgh, Imperial College London, Northumbria and Southampton, are involved in the project.

Continue reading ‘Durham University Leads UK Research Project Into Cheaper Solar Energy’ »

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has issued its first reference standards for nanoscale particles targeted for the biomedical research community—literally “gold standards” for labs studying the biological effects of nanoparticles. The three new materials, gold spheres nominally 10, 30 and 60 nanometers in diameter, were developed in cooperation with the National Cancer Institute’s Nanotechnology Characterization Laboratory (NCL).

Nanosized particles are the subject of a great deal of biological research, in part because of concerns that in addition to having unique physical properties due to their size, they also may have unique biological properties. On the negative side, nanoparticles may have special toxicity issues. On the positive side, they also are being studied as vehicles for targeted drug delivery that have the potential to revolutionize cancer treatments. Research in the field has suffered from a lack of reliable nanoscale measurement standards, both to ensure consistency of data from one lab to the next and to verify the performance of measurement instruments and analytic techniques.

False color scanning electron micrograph (250,000 times magnification) showing the gold nanoparticles created by NIST and the National Cancer Institute’s Nanotechnology Characterization Laboratory for use as reference standards in biomedical research laboratories.The new NIST reference materials are citrate-stabilized nanosized gold particles in a colloidal suspension in water. They have been extensively analyzed by NIST scientists to assess particle size and size distribution by multiple techniques for dry-deposited, aerosol and liquid-borne forms of the material. Dimensions were measured using six independent methods—including atomic force microscopy (AFM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), differential mobility analysis (DMA), dynamic light scattering (DLS), and small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS). At the nanoscale in particular, different measurement techniques can and will produce different types of values for the same particles.

Continue reading ‘NIST Reference Materials Are ‘Gold Standard’ For Bio-Nanotech Research’ »