The Smidgen

Can you see the eye?

A team of researchers at the University of Washington has successfully used therapeutic genes to allow colorblind, adult Squirrel Monkeys to distinguish between red and green again.  Something intriguing indeed to this colorblind man’s heart.

Though they aren’t testing the process on humans yet, it’s important to note that the monkeys were adults as it was previously thought only younger, more “plastic” brains would accept the new DNA instructions provided by the genes introduced to  the light-sensing cells at the back of the eye.

The monkeys used in this test were treated over two years ago and their improvement in color vision has remained stable since that time.  “Further research is required, however, before this comes to human clinical trials, and therapy in the clinics,” but if successful it could help about 7% of males and 1% of female who are born with colorblindness.

Personally the concept actually seems a little freaky to one day see things in a different light (spectrum) for the rest of my life, however, I’m very much ready for those tests!  NASA here I come!

Read the full article over at BBC News.

iPhones ... I mean Brains ...

Straight out of the land of “Someone Got Paid to Do This” comes the mathematical apocalypse known as When Zombies Attack!

A team of mathematicians from the University of Ottawa have taken the time (and money) to calculate how fast the spread of undead will occur should the popular doomsday scenario outbreak begin (finally!).  It’s not all bad news though as they have also determine a possible solution to stave off certain doom.  Turns out it’s quick, aggressive attacks, just like I keep saying.

In an attempt to make this sound like something more scientific and less like they are just pissing away money, the Ottawa team feels that this research can teach us something about the spread of infectious diseases.  You know what else teaches us about the spread of infectious diseases?  The study of infectious diseases … the real kind.  Go figure.

The paper’s subtitle is “Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection” changed shortly before publishing from the more accurate “How to F–k Off And Get Paid With Mathematics”.

Image Credit: Discovery News

First, the background.  When you electrically charge a block of plastic and then strike the plastic with a nail you get what we see on the left there, termed “frozen lightning”.  In truth it’s actually a series of tunnels carved out of the middle of the plastic when the electrically charged particles race toward the nail to escape the plastic, forming what looks like a lightning bolt frozen in the plastic.  Cool huh?  Good for a Mr. Wizard episode or making some scientifically interesting art … or maybe something else?

How about a vascular system?  Turns out that the tunnels are remarkable similar to the capillary system within the human body with the vein or artery at the point of the nail and the smaller tunnels the size of capillaries.  All created in only a few seconds.

So what?  Well scientists think that it will be possible to use biodegradable plastic blocks about the size of an inch thick block of post-it’s to build artificial organs.  You see the tunnels could provide a blood system and …

With a blood system, scientists can now work to implant cells that will become the actual blood vessels. Then the cells that would become the actual liver, kidney or heart would have to be implanted. As the cells grow, the plastic would harmlessly degrade, until only the organ remained.

Freaky cool, yeah?  And a whole lot faster than the usual method of photolithography (how they make computer chips) to create the tunnels.  Don’t get too excited (or freaked out) just yet though as it will be several years before they make anything that they would begin to test in animals, let alone humans.  The full scoop is on Discovery.

Take a good look at that guy, he is the face of Evil.  Well he’s at least the computer generated face of E, an artificial intelligence specifically programed to be … evil.

Yes, this does immediately make everyone say, “why?” which leads to the obvious answer, “for science!”  Selmer Bringsjord of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute created E in 2005 to study what makes people do evil things, a noble cause for sure, but now E has his own virtual world to exist in (read: conquer).

“I’ve been working on what is evil and how to formally define it,” says Bringsjord … “It’s creepy, I know it is.”

Well that doesn’t exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling but at least he knows it.  E will continue to be developed and will next learn to communicate in simple English (read: no slang) with the hopes that some day it will be used to analyze information gained on potential terrorists.

So what about the thing we’re all concerned with, when does this guy turn into the Matrix?  Bringsjord says he wouldn’t think of releasing E into the world, even purely virtual environments like Second Life without “engineering safeguards” that would be similar to Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” to prevent him from harming humans.

“Because I have a lot of faith in this approach,” he says, “E will be controlled.”

Yeah, we’re all dead.  Better read this link from Scientific American before it’s too late.

Artist's rendering of the Kelper Space Telescope. Credit: NASA

Launched in March of this year, NASA’s latest planet-hunting telescope, Kepler, has just turned in it’s first report.  The result was gas giant HAT-P-7b, a planet with an orbit of 2.2 days and a surface temperature of over 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, known as a “Hot Jupiter”.

Sure ol’ HATtie has been spotted before but what’s important is that Kepler found it within 10 days of it’s mission start and reported back with a great amount of detail about the find.

Kepler uses the transit method to find new planets which detects the dip in light from a star when a planet passes in front of it.  For HAT-P-7b this was easy because it’s so big and orbits so frequently, however, Kepler also detected HAT’s occultation (a method that my spellchecker doesn’t even know about) which measures the light dip as the planet passes behind the star.

This is significant because that amount is roughly equal to whats needed for Kepler to detect Earth-like planets using the transit method, so it proves Kepler has the power.  Now all it needs is 3 years or so to confirm the data of an Earth-like planet, you know, 365 day orbits and all.  Good thing Kepler is focusing in on about 100,000 stars at the same time huh?

Read the full story at Space.com.

Scientists at UMass Amherst and UC Berkeley have developed a new way to align nanoscale block copolymers using commercially available sapphire crystals.  Got that?  No?  Well let me see if I can break it down a bit.

Block copolymers, which are two or more chemically dissimilar polymer chains linked together, have this habit of organizing themselves into an equidistant pattern when spread out on a thin film, a pattern that computers, and especially data storage get all hot and bothered for.  The problem is, things get sloppy when the area of copolymers gets larger, making it impractical.

The sapphires come in to play because when heated to 1300 to 1500 degrees Celsius for 24 hours they reorganize their surfaces to a highly ordered pattern of sawtooth ridges and guess what, the copolymers love it.  These ridges give the copolymers a guide to follow allowing for larger areas of extremely small (I said nanoscale remember) and extremely organized patterns.

Great, now we know that but what does it all mean?  It means that with features as small as 3 nanometers you can store 10 terabits of data per square inch.  So something about the size of a quarter can hold about 125 gigabytes of data.  Now go cram that in your camera.