A very promising field of nanomotor research are DNA nanomachines. These are synthetic DNA assemblies that switch between defined molecular shapes upon stimulation by external triggers. They can be controlled by a variety of methods that include pH changes and the addition of other molecular components, such as small molecule effectors, proteins and DNA strands. Researchers have now designed and built a simple DNA machine that is capable of continuous rotation with controlled speed and direction - a function that might be very useful for example for molecular transport. This machine is driven by an externally controlled electric field. When this field is oscillated between four directions, it continuously reorients a rotor DNA that is asymmetrically attached to a DNA axle.
‘Wet’ computing systems to boost processing power
A new kind of information processing technology inspired by chemical processes in living systems is being developed by researchers at the University of Southampton.
New Energy Unveils Patent-Pending Technology to ‘Spray’ Solar Cells onto See-Thru Windows to Generate Electricity
New Energy Technologies, Inc., developer of MotionPower technologies for generating sustainable electricity from the kinetic energy of moving vehicles and SolarWindow technologies capable of generating electricity on see-thru glass windows, today announced that researchers have developed a novel, patent-pending process for spraying solar cells and their related components onto glass.
CINTRA nanotechnology laboratory opens its doors in Singapore
Nanyang Technical University, the National Centre of Scientific Research and the Thales Group of Companies inked a Memorandum of Understanding to establish the CNRS International-NTU-Thales Research Alliance (CINTRA) Laboratory - a state-of-the-art research facility focused on developing nanotechnologies for defence and commercial applications.
Riesenatome eingesperrt in Mikroglaszellen
Forscher haben gezeigt, dass Riesenatome unter bestimmten Umstaenden ohne grosse Stoerung in kleinsten Mikroglaszellen eingesperrt und beobachtet werden koennen.
New NeoFox Sport Handheld Optical O2 Sensor from Ocean Optics
The NeoFox Sport from Ocean Optics is a portable, handheld optical oxygen sensor for measuring dissolved and gaseous oxygen pressure in a variety of media. The sensor uses a proprietary sol-gel coating that is embedded with an oxygen indicator and can be applied to patches or probes.
Noliac Offers Unique Amplified Piezoelectric Actuator As Prototyp
Noliac offers a design of lightweight, temperature stable and highly dynamic amplified piezoelectric actuators. The combinations of stroke and force are numerous; thus, the unique amplified actuator is offered as a custom product only designed for your specific needs.
Green Touch Initiative targets 1000-fold improvement in energy efficiency by transforming communications networks
The world took a big step closer today to a green and more sustainable communications future with the launch of Green Touch, a global consortium organized by Bell Labs whose goal is to create the technologies needed to make communications networks 1000 times more energy efficient than they are today.
Wasserstoff aus dem Reagenzglas
Die umweltfreundliche Herstellung ausreichender Mengen Wasserstoffs beschaeftigt die Forschung seit langem. Als mikroskopisch kleine Fabrik steht dabei die Gruenalge Chlamydomonas reinhardtii im Mittelpunkt, die unter Stress Wasserstoff bilden kann. Bochumer Biologen ist es jetzt gelungen, die dafuer verantwortlichen Bestandteile der Alge zu isolieren und die Produktion ins Reagenzglas zu verlegen.
Physicists achieve quantum entanglement in solid-state circuits
For the first time, physicists have convincingly demonstrated that physically separated particles in solid-state devices can be quantum-mechanically entangled. The achievement is analogous to the quantum entanglement of light, except that it involves particles in circuitry instead of photons in optical systems.
Gedruckte Schaltungen aus Nano-Pasten
Die Ausbildung von ueberdurchschnittlich qualifizierten jungen Ingenieuren und Ingenieurinnen im Graduiertenkolleg 'Disperse Systeme fuer Elektronikanwendungen' der Uni Erlangen-Nuernberg ist bis zum Herbst 2014 gesichert. Die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft uebernimmt die Foerderung ab April 2010 fuer weitere viereinhalb Jahre; die Foerdersumme betraegt 5,16 Millionen Euro.
Nova Integrated Metrology for Etch Deployed by a Major Foundry in Asia Pacific
Nova Measuring Instruments Ltd. provider of leading edge stand-alone metrology and the market leader of integrated metrology solutions to the semiconductor process control market, today announced that a major foundry in Asia Pacific has decided to deploy its NovaScan Integrated Metrology (IM) solution coupled with NovaMARS shape profiling software, for 45nm gate Etch Advanced Process Control.
ETH Zurich founded 24 spin-offs in 2009, including nanotechnology companies
Despite the difficult economic climate, many researchers from ETH Zurich founded a company last year. The university recorded no fewer than 24 new spin-offs in 2009 - the most ever in a single year.
Rescue Drone Looks Like Luke Skywalker’s Landspeeder [Military]
While this might look like something found on Tatooine, it's actually a new Israeli drone designed for rescue and cargo operations. It just had its first hovering test, so it may be in the field before too long. [Danger Room]
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Spotting Betelgeuse | Bad Astronomy
If you go outside around midnight tonight and look to the south (north for you standing-on-your-head southern hemispherites), it’ll be hard to miss Orion standing tall over the horizon. If you look at the star at the upper left, marking his right arm, you might note that it glows a ruddy orange-red. That star is the famous Betelgeuse, one of the brightest in the night sky.
But your view of it probably isn’t as good as that of some French astronomers who got this awesome shot of Betelgeuse:
Cooool. Literally. Betelegeuse is a red supergiant, a massive star nearing the end of its life; in a few millennia (or a few hundred) it’ll explode as a supernova. But for now it’s a swollen monster, cooler than the Sun, but intrinsically a lot more luminous because, simply, there’s so much of it.
Even with our most powerful telescopes, most normal stars would be an unresolved dot at a distance of 640 light years. But because Betelgeuse is so frakkin’ big, we can resolve using a technique called interferometry. This uses several different telescopes to collect light and adds them together in a way such that extremely small objects — well, apparently small, that is — can be resolved.
At its mind-numbing distance of nearly 4 quadrillion kilometers (2.4 quadrillion miles), mighty Betelegeuse is diminished to a mere 0.045 arcseconds across. To give you an idea of how small this is, the full Moon is about 1800 arcseconds across in the sky. An arcsecond is 1/3600th of a degree, and Betelgeuse is a tiny fraction of even that. Hubble’s resolution is about 0.1 arcseconds, so Betelgeuse is unresolved even using that famous ’scope (though using some fancy tricks some features on the star can be seen using Hubble).
Obviously, interferometry is a powerful method for looking at big stars! Using it, the astronomers were able to see two large, bright features on the surface of Betelgeuse, most likely convection spots, where hot gas is bubbling up from the star’s interior. The bigger of the two spots is about 500 K hotter than the rest of the 3600 K surface, and accounts for about 8.5% of all the light the star emits! The other is smaller and unresolved, and contributes about 5% of the light.
Mind you, the bigger of the two hot spots really is ginormous: it’s bigger than the distance of the Earth from the Sun!
Did I mention Betelegeuse is frakkin’ huge?
Techniques like this reveal a huge amount of information on objects that are otherwise far too small in apparent size to measure. We already knew Betelgeuse is a dynamic star — it changes its brightness over time, for example — but this particular image shows us the scale of the changes on the star’s surface, which can lead to models of how its interior behaves, which in turn will help us understand how supergiant stars live out their lives and eventually explode. At 640 light years away, Betelgeuse can’t hurt us when it goes supernova, but it’ll be an amazing light show… and the more we know about it, the better.
Google Docs Gets File Storage: Is This the GDrive? [Google Docs]
Google on Tuesday is making a big move with its Docs service, opening it up to all types of file uploads. This includes photos, movies, music, and ZIP archives, all of which will be stored on Google's servers.
Along with opening up Docs to additional file types, Google is also dramatically increasing the size of individual uploads. Where the company will still limit users to 500KB for Microsoft Word documents, and 10MB for PowerPoint presentations and PDFs, the new limit for all other files that cannot be converted into a Google Docs format is 250MB. This is 10 times the size of what's allowed as an attachment in the company's Web mail service Gmail.
In a post on the company's blog, Google Docs' product manager Vijay Bangaru said that the new size and file type allowances serve to make Docs a replacement for USB drives, allowing users to access their files between computers. The company is also applying the same permissions-based sharing system it has for documents that it hosts, allowing users to share files with one another.
That said, the amount of space for non-Google Docs files that are stored within Docs will only be 1GB. Users can upgrade though, and Google is planning on that.
Just like users can purchase additional space for other Google services like Picasa Web Albums and Gmail, users will soon be able to rent space from Google. For standard Google Docs users this will be 25 cents per gigabyte, per year, while Google Apps enterprise users have to pay $3.50 per gigabyte, per year. That's a hefty price difference, but customer support, and a service level agreement that guarantees uptime add costs.
Bangaru says the new file storage features will be rolling out to users within the "next couple of weeks." In the meantime, Google has been busy readying a new documents API that will take advantage of the storage, giving third-party programs read and write access. This turns Google into more of a traditional storage provider than it's ever been, completely cutting out the need to visit the Docs site itself to add or remove files. The only caveat here—and it's a big one—is that users will need to Google Apps premier edition customers to access the API, leaving free users of Docs and lesser Apps subscribers out in the cold.
Three companies that are coming out of the gate with support for this new API are Syncplicity, Manymoon, and Memeo Connect. All three will be tapping into it to do things like file sync, upload, and backup.
So is this the GDrive?
Signs that Google was readying Docs for file storage came in late July of last year, which is when the company quietly added the "files" menu to the Docs interface. It's since been under-utilized as a place for users to store PDFs that could be read within Google's document viewer. Attempts to upload other files that could not be converted into Google's own formats simply did not go through.
But do these changes make Google Docs the long-awaited GDrive? In a way yes, but it's far from the game-changing storage service that many thought would come by now. The expectation has always been that if Google came out with its own storage service, it would be deeply tied into its properties. And more importantly, that it would be something readily available to all users.
This time last year the company had alluded to as much, almost by accident. Bundled deep within the code of the company's "Google Pack" software (which includes a handful of Google, and non-Google software installers), was mention of a service called "GDrive." It was billed simply as a tool for online file backup and storage. That included "photos, music, and documents." The software also promised to let users access these files from a variety of locations—including the operating system and mobile phones.
Sound familiar? Google Docs now does all those things, at least with the help of some third-party programs. However, the one remaining hurdle is getting the sync to non-enterprise users, which for the time being is not happening.
There is light at the end of the tunnel though. This year, Google brings its cloud-centric Chrome OS to Netbooks, and you can be sure that storage will be an important part of the equation. It's much easier to sell the idea of a cloud-based lifestyle when you can give people a place to dump their existing files. This is especially true given what could be a very limited amount of storage in the first crop of Chrome OS hardware that will be sporting solid state drives—a technology that costs considerably more per gigabyte than platter-based hard drives.
Suddenly 25 cents a gigabyte doesn't sound so bad, does it?
Where Google still has a lot of work to do is unifying its storage offerings into one big drive that's shared across all of its services. As it stands, depending on what type of media you're giving to Google, and from what service you're uploading it to, there's a different bucket with a different limit. This is further complicated by the fact that many of the services have trouble talking to one another. If they did, it would allow Google to group search indexes into one place where users could sift through content they had stored across all of Google's properties.
While Google may get there by the launch of Chrome OS, it doesn't have to. Just consider Tuesday's news proof enough that Google, at the very least, has the ball rolling.
This story originally appeared on CNET
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Is a Scorching, Earth-Like Exoplanet a Withered Up “Hot Jupiter”? | 80beats
Once, most of exoplanets that astronomers spotted were giants, but now they’re seeing more and more new planets with masses not far off from the Earth’s. One of those newly found Earth-like exoplanets, however, may not have always been so similar to our own world: An astronomer made the case last week that the small, sweltering planet was once a mighty gas giant that shrank.
Astronomers discovered Corot-7b in September. Its diameter is roughly 1.7 times that of Earth. Based on its size and mass, its density is similar to Earth’s, indicating that it is a rocky Earth-like orb [ABC News]. But the comparisons end there. While it’s rocky like Earth, this fiery hellhole is no place for life. It orbits its star at a distance of only 1.6 million miles (we’re presently at a much more comfortable 93 million miles from our sun) and completes a revolution in only 20 hours’ time. And, NASA’s Brian Jackson argued at last week’s American Astronomical Society meeting, Corot-7b is probably just a shell of its former self, and once was a type of gas giant called a “hot Jupiter.”
Given the planet’s proximity to its star, Jackson says it would be subject to a constant blast of heat that robs it of its mass. Rock vaporized by the extreme temperatures could escape the atmosphere of Corot-7b, and the planet would’ve steadily lost mass as it moved closer to its star. It could be shedding half an Earth mass every billion years. Extrapolating backward in time, Jackson concludes that the planet may have started as a gas-giant world more akin to Jupiter or Saturn, and that its light elements were driven off [Sky & Telescope]. The gas giant case isn’t clinched; one could also argue that the planet was always rock, and just slowly lost mass over the years. Either way “this planet is disappearing before our eyes,” Dr. Jackson said in a statement [ABC News].
Elsewhere at the AAS meeting, astronomers announced a new find: the second-smallest exoplanet ever, given a mouthful of a moniker in HD156668b. The team of astronomers who discovered HD156668b used one of two Keck telescopes at the 4,145-meter (13,600-foot) summit of Mount Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The astronomers used the so-called wobble method, which measures the gravitational effects of a planet on its star [AFP]. This new world is some 80 light-years away in the Hercules constellation. It’s only four times more massive than Earth.
With the exoplanet tally now well past 400, and the planet-hunting Kepler telescope starting to spot its first distant orbs, expect the announcements to keep coming. Maybe soon we’ll even find an Earth-like world that isn’t unbelievably sizzling hot.
Related Content:
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80beats: Meet the New Neighbors: Earth-Like Worlds Orbiting Nearby Stars
DISCOVER: How Long Until We Find a Second Earth?
DISCOVER: Big Picture: The Inspiring Boom in “Super-Earths”
Image: ESO. Artist’s impression of COROT-7b.
