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In Michelle O’Malley’s lab, a simple approach suggests a big leap forward in addressing the challenge of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Scientists have long been aware of the dangerous overuse of antibiotics and the increasing number of antibiotic-resistant microbes that have resulted. While over-prescription of antibiotics for medicinal use has unsettling implications for human health, so too does the increasing presence of antibiotics in the natural environment. The latter may stem from the improper disposal of medicines, but also from the biotechnology field, which has depended on antibiotics as a selection device in the lab.

“In biotech, we have for a long time relied on antibiotic and chemical selections to kill cells that we don’t want to grow,” said UC Santa Barbara chemical engineer Michelle O’Malley. “If we have a genetically engineered cell and want to get only that cell to grow among a population of cells, we give it an antibiotic resistance gene. The introduction of an antibiotic will kill all the cells that are not genetically engineered and allow only the ones we want — the genetically modified organisms [GMOs] — to survive. However, many organisms have evolved the means to get around our antibiotics, and they are a growing problem in both the biotech world and in the natural environment. The issue of antibiotic resistance is a grand challenge of our time, one that is only growing in its importance.”

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Circa 2010

Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, are used in many applications to gather intelligence without risking human lives. These aircraft, however, have limited flight time because of their reconnaissance payload requirements coupled with their limited scale. A microwave-powered flight vehicle would be able to perform a reconnaissance mission continuously.

Using beamed microwave energy from a remote source on the ground, the airplane gathers energy using onboard antennas. A rectifying antenna, or rectenna, harvests power and rectifies it into a form usable by an onboard electric motor that drives the propeller, providing thrust. Using a rectenna array affixed to the underside of the aircraft, the power needed to maintain flight can be remotely transmitted.

The idea of a fuel-less flight vehicle, or an aircraft that does not carry its own fuel, has been pursued in few different forms over the past decades. There are many different approaches for how to power these vehicles; however, the common theme is that power must be transmitted from a source remote to the aircraft. Some of the possibilities for power transmission include solar power, the heating of air underneath the aircraft to cause thrust, and using antennas to convert microwave radiation into electrical power.

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O,.o circa 2014.

It’s a bird, it’s a plane… no, it’s a Microwave!?
More details and photos on this team project:
http://www.flitetest.com/articles/microwave-plane.

Thanks again to everyone who helped make this scratch built air plane a reality at 2014 eWeek!

Learn more about eWeek and Triple Tree Aerodrome here:
http://www.tripletreeaerodrome.com/eweek-fly-in.php.

More details about ROTOR DR1 here:

Continue reading “Flite Test | Microwave Plane” | >

One of the first people in the UK to have a double hand transplant has said her progress has been “phenomenal”, as she continues to pick up new skills two years on.

Cor Hutton, from Lochwinnoch in Renfrewshire, was the first patient in Scotland and the third in the UK to successfully have the procedure, having had her hands and feet amputated in 2013 after suffering acute pneumonia and sepsis which nearly killed her.

On the second anniversary of coming round from the 12-hour operation on January 9 2019, Ms Hutton paid tribute to the donor and the medical team as she said she is “very lucky”.

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When we experience a new event, our brain records a memory of not only what happened, but also the context, including the time and location of the event. A new study from MIT neuroscientists sheds light on how the timing of a memory is encoded in the hippocampus, and suggests that time and space are encoded separately.

In a study of mice, the researchers identified a hippocampal circuit that the animals used to store information about the timing of when they should turn left or right in a maze. When this circuit was blocked, the mice were unable to remember which way they were supposed to turn next. However, disrupting the circuit did not appear to impair their of where they were in space.

The findings add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that when we form new memories, different populations of neurons in the brain encode time and place information, the researchers say.

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Would you like to capture a chemical transformation inside a cell live? Or maybe revolutionize microchips’ production by printing paths in a layer that has a thickness of just 100 nanometers? These and many other goals can now be achieved with the latest femtosecond laser created by a team of scientists led by Dr. Yuriy Stepanenko.

These days, there is a multitude of laser light sources. They each have their characteristics and different applications, such as observing stars, treating illnesses, and surface micro-machining. “Our goal is to develop new ones,” says Yuriy Stepanenko, head of the team of Ultrafast Laser Techniques at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences. “We deal with sources that produce ultrashort pulses of light. Really very, very short—femtosecond pulses (that’s a part of a second with 15 zeros after the decimal point). This is the scale on which, for example, intracellular chemical reactions take place. To see them, we have to ” take a photo” in this very short time. And thanks to the new laser, we can do just that.

We can also use our source for the very precise removal of materials from various surfaces without destroying them, says the scientist. We could, for example, clean the Mona Lisa using this method without damaging the layers of paint. We would only remove dust and dirt, a layer about 10 nanometers thick, explains Dr. Stepanenko, one of the authors of a study recently published in the Journal of Lightwave Technology.

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Biotechnologists at Delft University of Technology have built an artificial chromosome in yeast. The chromosome can exist alongside natural yeast chromosomes, and serves as a platform to safely and easily add new functions to the micro-organism. Researchers can use the artificial chromosome to convert yeast cells into living factories capable of producing useful chemicals and even medicines.

Biotechnologists from all over the world are trying to engineer and other micro-organisms such that they can produce useful substances. To do this, they have to make adjustments to the existing genetic material of the cell. For example, they insert a number of genes into the genome using CRISPR-Cas9, or switch off existing genes, thereby gradually transforming yeast into ‘cell factories’ that produce useful substances.

The disadvantage of this method is that it is not possible to make all the necessary changes at once, but that several rounds of genetic manipulation are needed. This is time-consuming. Additionally, multiple sessions of DNA-tinkering using CRISPR-Cas9 can lead to mutations that disrupt (essential) functions. The result of this could be, for instance, that the metabolism of the cell is disrupted, causing problems with growth and division.

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Circa 2019 o.o

Google today announced the launch of its Osaka region, its second cloud region in Japan and seventh in Asia Pacific. With this, the company now offers its users a total of 20 regions, all of which feature at least three availability zones.

In Japan, the Osaka region joins Google’s Tokyo region and will offer lower latencies for local customers, Google notes, though Tokyo and Osaka are obviously pretty close, so that’s likely not a big difference. For businesses in Japan, having two geographically separate regions is a major boon as far as being able to add additional redundancies and disaster recovery is concerned, though.

“Two cloud regions in-country provide improved business continuity planning with distributed, secure infrastructure needed to meet IT and business requirements for disaster recovery,” Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian writes in today’s announcement.

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