To keep droplets of liquid floating in midair, the device in the video above relies on a hum of sound just above the range of human hearing. This technology, called an acoustic levitator, suspends these tiny balls of liquid using two speakers that project sound waves in opposite directions, counteracting the force of gravity. Originally, NASA developed the device to simulate microgravity. Now researchers at Argonne National Lab are using it as a way to evaporate drug compounds in midair so they take on a more potent chemical form than they would in a container.
Human Stem Cells Repair Hearing Loss in Gerbils
Researchers have found a way to use human embryonic stem cells to restore hearing to gerbils. Specifically, they were able to repair damage to the nerve that connects the inner ear to the brain, as they reported in Nature this week. This type of hearing loss, which affects many people, is currently untreatable; it isn’t helped by hearing aids or cochlear implants, both of which depend on the auditory nerve to send the final signals to the brain. Applied to humans, this research could perhaps help a group that are currently without treatment for hearing loss.
Pyrex Glass Isn’t As Shatterproof As It Once Was, Report Finds
If you’ve ever poured hot water into a Pyrex glass dish and been shocked to see it fracture before your eyes, a new report may give you some insight into what’s going on. Pyrex glassware, which came out in 1915 and was long marketed as “icebox to oven” cookware that did not expand or compress when exposed to high heat or low temperatures, is no longer made of that hardy borosilicate glass. And the new stuff, scientists publishing in the American Ceramics Society Bulletin have found, doesn’t stand up well to some of the temperature changes involved in cooking.
A Flexible, Air-Filled Robot Tentacle With a Light Touch
While robots have long been invaluable when it comes to doing all sorts of heavy lifting, they lack a gentle touch. Hefting around auto parts is easy enough, but transporting eggs or glassware poses a significant challenge.
Scientists have now, however, made a flexible plastic robot tentacle that can, among other dexterities, pick flowers without crushing them, the latest of several robot appendages made of softer materials and able to accomplish delicate tasks.
The researchers control the tentacle by pumping air through three separate channels, giving it a wide range of motion and letting it reconfigure to grasp a variety of objects without being limited by the shape of its grip. The parts for the bot—mostly elastomer tubing—cost less than $10, far cheaper than the complex components of many far less flexible robotic hands.
Scientists Elicit Short-Term Memory In Slices of Rat Brain
Quick: commit this to memory. There will be a quiz.
Neuroscientists implanted artificial memories into slices of rat brain, they reported in Nature Neuroscience online. By jolting the rodent brain cells with electrical current, the researchers produced memory-like patterns of neuron activity that survived for around 10 seconds. This is the first time that researchers have created memory without a brain.
Newly Unearthed Papers From Fossil Hunters Include An Ode to Bones
Sprechen ze deutsch?
This poem in praise of the Permian amphibian Eryops was scrawled on the back of a label now in the American Museum of Natural History by Jacob Boll, a Swiss-German fossil hunter involved in a tumultuous 19th-century paleontology feud.
How to Make A Fruit-Salad Tree
How do you get a tree that produces six or seven different fruits? Grafting, of course.
The process of getting a cutting of one plant to grow on the base of another, grafting is usually used in much more mundane contexts: it’s what lets farmers grow clones of an orange tree, say, with particularly succulent fruit, for decades after the original tree dies. The vast majority of the fruit we eat comes from such clones, since letting the tree mix its genes with another might produce a totally different fruit, much less marketable than the original.
But making a tree that fruits oranges, limes, and lemons all at the same time—now that’s a work of art. At Scientific American’s Brainwaves blog, Ferris Jabr explains how such fruit salad trees, also called fruit cocktail trees, work, and points readers in the direction of a purveyor of such wonders:
Meet the Newest Cyborg, A Remote-Controlled Cockroach
What has two antennae and receives radio signals? A cockroach, of course.
Researchers from the iBionicS lab at North Carolina State University have created a remote-control system to stimulate and steer cockroaches, they reported at the 34th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine & Biology Society last month. In this system, described in their paper for the conference, they equip a Madagascar hissing cockroach with an electrical circuit board with wires connecting to the tips of the cockroach’s antennae. They can then use a a joystick to send radio signals to the antennae in order to make the roach feel as though it has run into something and needs to turn away. A zap to the right antenna and the roach turns left; a zap to the left and it turns right.
Letting Fungi Munch on Violin Wood Makes for a Better Sound
Infected wood, soon to be carpeted in white fungus
File this under “news luthiers can use”: A Swiss materials scientist reports that siccing certain species of fungi on wood intended to be made into violins can result in instruments with superior sound quality, purportedly as lovely as that of a Stradivarius.
Discovered: An Amino-Acid Deficiency That Causes Neurological Problems
Our bodies are picky eaters when it comes to amino acids, and sometimes just a small screw-up can cause larger problems down the road. Scientists recently found an association between an amino-acid depleting mutation, and neurological problems in a small sample of humans. In mice with the same mutation, nutritional supplements reversed similar symptoms, offering the possibility of a treatment for the human disorder in the future. The results appeared in the journal Science. Read the rest of this entry »
On the Horizon: Corn Engineered To Survive Drought
It has been a summer of withered crops and wildfires, the U.S.’s driest in the last fifty years, during which 55 percent of the U.S. has experienced a drought. And of the land dedicated to corn production, 87 percent has been dry.
Over at Technology Review, Jessica Leber wrote about an engineering solution to the problem of parched corn: seeds bred or genetically enhanced to resist drought, some of which have been tested this summer and will be sold by three big seed companies next year.
Watch This: Super-Strong New Gel is Also Super-Stretchy
The gel doing an impersonation of a trampoline in the video above is a new synthetic material from Harvard engineers, a substance that stretches to more than 20 times its length and can withstand more force than human cartilage, the resilient tissue that cushions our joints.
Contaminated Tattoo Ink is Behind Mysterious Infections
One patient’s rash
In January of this year, a string of unusual patients began to trickle into dermatologist’s offices in Rochester, NY. They had red rashes on areas where they had recently had tattoos, and the usual treatments were not working.
The cases, 19 in all, were reported to the local department of public health. A team there learned that all the patients had developed the rash, which turned out to be a bacterial infection, within three weeks of getting a tattoo at a particular parlor. When they interviewed the tattoo artist, they learned that he had recently begun to use a new kind of grey ink. Such ink is often used to create shadow effects, and indeed, the patients’ rashes tended to be on the areas where the grey ink had been injected into their skin.
Cut Down Rain Forests, Lose Your Rain
Ulva Island rain forest in New Zealand.
It’s clear that cutting down rain forests to plant crops, however fulfilling in the short-term for a farmer, is a disaster for the millions of species living there. But it could also, in the long term, be a disaster for the farmer. A recent study in Nature combines rainfall data, satellite images showing tree cover, and atmospheric modeling to show that air that has passed over tropical forests often carries at least twice as much water as air that’s passed over less leafy land. That means that large-scale cutting of rain forests can result in catastrophic drought for hundreds of miles around.
China’s Leading Dinosaur Hunter Has Many Feathers In His Cap
Archaeopteryx lithographica
Birds are the modern descendants of dinosaurs, but the exact details of the family tree are controversial. Archaeopteryx, the winged creature found in German fossil beds whose name means “first from a feather,” was long thought to be the first bird. Last summer, a Nature paper by Xu Xing, of China’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, claimed that Archaeopteryx was related to birds but actually belonged on a separate branch of the tree, with other bird-like dinosaurs.
Scientists still debate the rightful place of Archaeopteryx in the dinosaur-bird lineage, but what’s undisputed are Xu’s contributions to paleontology. He has named 60 dinosaur species, more than any other living paleontologist, and his stamping grounds are the fossil beds of Liaoning Province, northeast of Beijing, where many of the feathered dinosaurs and early birds were discovered. Kerri Smith enumerates Xu Xing’s contributions to the study of birds and their dinosaur relatives in a profile at Nature News: Read the rest of this entry »