A group of students at Harvard University have constructed 30 nanometers in diameter DNA containers. The DNA barrels could one day be used to deliver drugs or gene or protein-based therapies to specific tissues in the body. While DNA architecture previously took years to design and construct, a method developed earlier this year provides a …
A warmer world already seems to be producing a sicker world, health experts reported Tuesday, citing surges in Kenya, China and Europe of such diseases as malaria, heart ailments and dengue fever. A study of three Chinese cities found annual excess deaths totaled between 173 and 685 per million residents, Jin said. Projected over the …
AMD is making Fusion chips from x86 CPUs with on-board graphics accelerators (GPUs). Current GPUs have up to 360 Gflops of processing power. The Fusion chips aim to increase performance-per-Watt for applications such as 3D graphics, digital media and technical computing. There are two significant design challenges in developing such architectures — power management and …
The November issue of Scientific American, has an article “Seeing with Superconductors Scientific and industrial photon detectors peer into the electromagnetic realms beyond that of visible light–into the low-frequency (long-wavelength, low-energy) world of infrared and microwaves and into the high-frequency regime of x-rays and gamma rays. Superconductors can see visible and longer wavelengths and detect …
Hongjie Dai and his colleagues take a new approach for getting 100% semiconducting nanotubes. They grow a mixed bunch of semiconducting and metallic nanotubes on a silicon wafer and have them bridge the source and drain of a transistor. Then they expose the devices to methane plasma at 400 °C. The hot, ionized methane particles …
Firstly, coal power never left. New coal power went from almost 95% to 50% but it never went away. The December, 2006 issue of Discover magazine has an article about the dangers of a return to coal power and the Independent talks about what we can use to replace oil the way oil replaced coal. …
Scientists at Harvard University have developed a computer model that can fully map and predict protein folding for some 10 microseconds — about as long as some proteins take to assume their biologically stable configuration, and at least a thousand times longer than previous methods. The work could help researchers better understand the abnormal protein …
Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Intelligent Automation, Inc. (Rockville, Md.) and the University of Missouri-Columbia have modified a NIST-designed microphone array to make an “audio telescope” that could help airports more efficiently avoid costly and hazardous bird-aircraft collisions by locating and identifying birds by their calls. Worldwide, wildlife strikes –mostly …
New implantable biomedical devices that can act as artificial nerve cells, control severe pain, or allow otherwise paralyzed muscles to be moved might one day be possible thanks to developments in materials science. Nicholas Kotov of the University of Michigan, USA, and colleagues describe how they have used hollow, submicroscopic strands of carbon, carbon nanotubes, …
The use of scanning probe microscopy-based techniques to manipulate single molecules and deliver them in a precisely controlled manner to a specific target has been performed by a european research team. An atomic forcemicroscope (AFM) was used to deliver and immobilize single molecules, one at a time, on a surface. Reactive polymer molecules, attached at …
Graphic chips like the Nvidia G8800 have about 520GFLOPS of performance. Some have been adapted for more general processing using the C language and are being banded together for supercomputers with 2-40 times the performance of regular CPUs. Wired magazine talks about an array of 536 GPUs significantly outperformed some 17,485 CPUs from Linux boxes. …