Knowledge Update

New York, April 12 (IANS) In a first, a team of US researchers has created a bio-solar panel that can generate 5.59 microwatts of energy - a big step in the evolution of bacteria-powered energy to run small devices in remote areas where regular battery replacement is not possible.

"Once a functional bio-solar panel becomes available, it could become a permanent power source for supplying long-term power for small, wireless telemetry systems as well as wireless sensors used at remote sites where frequent battery replacement is impractical," said study co-author Seokheun "Sean" Choi from Binghamton University. 

The researchers connected nine biological-solar (bio-solar) cells in a 3x3 pattern to make a scalable and stackable bio-solar panel. 

The panel continuously generated electricity from photosynthesis and respiratory activities of the bacteria in 12-hour day-night cycles over 60 hours.

"This research could also enable crucial understanding of the photosynthetic extracellular electron transfer processes in a smaller group of microorganisms with excellent control over the microenvironment, thereby enabling a versatile platform for fundamental bio-solar cell studies," Choi noted.

A typical "traditional" solar panel on the roof of a residential house, made up of 60 cells in a 6x10 configuration, generates roughly 200 watts of electrical power at a given moment. 

The cells from this study, in a similar configuration, would generate about 0.00003726 watts. So it isn't efficient just yet but the findings open the door to future research of the bacteria itself.

"The metabolic pathways of cyanobacteria or algae are only partially understood, and their significantly low power density and low energy efficiency make them unsuitable for practical applications," noted Choi in a paper published in the journal Sensors and Actuators B: Chemical.

"There is a need for additional basic research to clarify bacterial metabolism and energy production potential for bio-solar applications," he added.​

New York, April 12 (IANS) Young smokers please take note! Smokers face more problems in finding a job and when they do find a job, they earn considerably less than their non-smoker peers, says an interesting study.

The findings showed that at 12 months, only 27 percent of smokers had found jobs compared with 56 percent of non-smokers. Among those who had found jobs by 12 months, smokers earned on average 5 US dollars less per hour than non-smokers.

"We found that smokers had a much harder time finding work than non-smokers," said lead study author Judith Prochaska from Stanford University Medical Center in the US.

The team surveyed 131 unemployed smokers and 120 unemployed non-smokers at the beginning of the study and then at six and 12 months. 

"The health harms of smoking have been established for decades and our study here provides insight into the financial harms of smoking both in terms of lower re-employment success and lower wages," Prochaska added in a paper published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.

They used survey questions and a breath test for carbon monoxide levels to classify job seekers into either daily smokers or non-smokers. 

Smokers were on average younger, less educated and in poorer health than non-smokers. 

"Such differences might influence job seekers' ability to find work," Prochaska stated.

After controlling for these variables, smokers still remained at a big disadvantage. After 12 months, the re-employment rate of smokers was 24 percent lower than that of non-smokers.

"We designed the analysis so that the smokers and non-smokers were as similar as possible in terms of the information we had on their employment records and prospects for employment at baseline," added co-author Michael Baiocchi.

Those who successfully quit smoking will have an easier time getting hired, the authors suggested.​

​London, April 13 (IANS) Researchers have for the first time found it possible to generate simultaneous immune response against diseases such as Hepatitis C virus and HIV, raising the possibility of a combined vaccination.

An estimated 2.3 million people globally are co-infected with HIV and HCV. HCV is the leading cause of non-AIDS deaths in co-infected individuals.

"While we have drugs to treat both HIV and HCV, these are out of reach for many and do not prevent reinfection," said lead researcher Lucy Dorrell, professor at University of Oxford in London. 

“Knowing that it may be possible to vaccinate a single individual against both diseases opens up huge possibilities for rolling back epidemics of disease and co-infection," added one of the researchers Ellie Barnes, professor. 

The findings showed that vaccine priming against HCV and HIV induced immune response in the body, measured by the number of HIV and HCV specific T-cells found in a sample of blood. 

These immune responses were further increased following the boost vaccination.

In addition, co-administration of HCV and HIV components of the boost did not impair the magnitude or breadth of either HCV or HIV specific T-cell responses compared to each alone. 

All vaccines were given as an intramuscular injection and both were well tolerated.

The study showed that the 'prime boost' approach is compatible with co-administration of vectors encoding for HIV and HCV antigens -- molecules capable of inducing an immune response to the immune system.

Following this, booster vaccinations are given with the same combination of HCV and HIV fragments.

The Phase 1 study enrolled 32 healthy volunteers in three groups. Group one received only HCV investigational vaccines at weeks 0 and 8. 

The second group received only HIV investigational vaccines following the same dosing schedule. 

The final group received both HCV and HIV investigational vaccines that were co-administered.

The study was presented at The International Liver Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain.​

​New York, April 13 (IANS) A team led by an Indian-origin professor at Columbia University has created a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras.

"Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space. While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging," said Shree K Nayar, computer science professor at Columbia University. 

"We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible," added Nayar who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, in 1984.

Nayar's team designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. 

This optical adaptation enables the device to produce high quality images over a wide range of sheet deformations.

If such an imaging system could be manufactured cheaply -- like a roll of plastic or fabric -- it could be wrapped around all kinds of things, from street poles to furniture, cars, and even people's clothing, to capture wide, seamless images with unusual fields of view. 

"The adaptive lens array we have developed is an important step towards making the concept of flexible sheet cameras viable," Nayar noted. 

"The next step will be to develop large-format detector arrays to go with the deformable lens array. The amalgamation of the two technologies will lay the foundation for a new class of cameras that expand the range of applications that benefit from imaging," he said.

The novel technology is set to be presented at the international conference on computational photography (ICCP) at Northwestern University, in Illinois from May 13 to 15.​

New York, April 14 (IANS) Imagine shirts that act as antennas for smartphones or tablets, workout clothes that monitor fitness level or even a flexible fabric cap that senses activity in the brain!

All this will soon be possible as the researchers working on wearable electronics have been able to embroider circuits into fabric with super precision -- a key step toward the design of clothes that gather, store or transmit digital information.

"A revolution is happening in the textile industry. We believe that functional textiles are an enabling technology for communications and sensing and one day, even for medical applications like imaging and health monitoring," said lead researcher John Volakis from Ohio State University.

The milestone achieved by the Ohio researchers has the potential to allow integration of electronic components such as sensors and computer memory devices into clothing with 0.1 mm precision.

With further development, the technology could also lead to sports equipment that monitor athletes' performance or a bandage that tells doctors how well the tissue beneath it is healing.

Volakis' team created the functional textiles, also called "e-textiles," on a typical tabletop sewing machine. 

Like other modern sewing machines, it embroiders thread into fabric automatically based on a pattern loaded via a computer file. 

The researchers substituted the thread with fine silver metal wires that, once embroidered, feel the same as traditional thread to the touch.

"For the first time, we've achieved the accuracy of printed metal circuit boards, so our new goal is to take advantage of the precision to incorporate receivers and other electronic components," added Volakis in a paper published in the journal IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters.

The shape of the embroidery determines the frequency of operation of the antenna or circuit.

"Shape determines function. And you never really know what shape you will need from one application to the next. So we wanted to have a technology that could embroider any shape for any application," noted Asimina Kiourti, co-author of the study.

She also incorporated some techniques common to microelectronics manufacturing to add parts to embroidered antennas and circuits.​

​London, April 12 (IANS) A team of scientists led by Oxford University has made a discovery that can improve chances of developing an effective vaccine against Tuberculosis (TB).

The researchers identified new biomarkers for TB which have shown for the first time why immunity from the widely used BCG vaccine is so variable. 

The biomarkers will also provide valuable clues to assess whether potential new vaccines could be effective, the team said.

TB remains one of the world's major killer diseases. The only available BCG vaccine works well (estimated 50 percent effective) to prevent severe disease in children but is very variable (0 percent to 80 percent effective) in adults.

With a pressing need for a TB vaccine that is more effective than BCG, the Oxford team working with colleagues from the University of Cape Town and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine set out to identify immune correlates that could facilitate TB vaccine development. 

The team, led by professor Helen McShane and Dr Helen Fletcher, studied immune responses in infants in South Africa who were taking part in a TB vaccine trial.

The team carried out tests for 22 possible factors. 

“These are useful results. They show that antigen-specific T cells are important in protection against TB but that activated T cells increase the risk,” explained professor McShane from Oxford in a paper that appeared in the journal Nature Communications.

“For the first time we have some evidence of how BCG might work and also what could block it from working. Although there is still much work to do, these findings may bring us a step closer to developing a more effective vaccine for TB,” added Dr Fletcher from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The team is working to develop an effective TB vaccine aimed at protecting more people from the disease.​

​New York, April 13 (IANS) World-renowned British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking on Tuesday teamed up with Russian billionaire Yuri Milner and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a $100 million effort to make tiny spaceships capable of interstellar space travel.

Hawking and Milner made the joint announcement at a press conference held at One World Observatory in New York City on Tuesday, Xinhua reported.

The project, dubbed "Breakthrough Starshot," is a research and engineering programme that aims to build laser beam propelled "nanocrafts" that can travel at 20 percent of lightspeed -- more than 1,000 times faster than current fastest spacecraft.

According to Milner, once the "nanocrafts" are built, they could reach Alpha Centauri, a star 4.37 light-years away, approximately 20 years in a fly-by mission.

Alpha Centauri is one of the closest star systems to the solar system and the current fastest spacecraft would have to spend 30,000 years to get there.

The "nanocrafts" are gram-scale robotic spacecrafts consisting of two main parts: a computer CPU sized "StarChip" and a "Lightsail" made with metamaterials no more than a few hundred atoms thick.

Although weighing just a few grams, the "StarChip" is a fully functional space probe, which carries various equipment including cameras, navigation and communication.

"The 'StarChip' can be mass-produced at the cost of an iPhone," Milner said.

The "nanocrafts" can then be propelled into space by a powerful laser beam, which according to Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist and panelist at the news conference, will carry a power of 100 gigawatt.

"This is the power needed to lift off a space shuttle," Loeb said.

Milner and the scientists believe that with the rising power and falling costs of lasers, the entire process is practical within a couple of years.

"Fifteen years ago, it would not have made sense to make this investment. Now we have looked at the numbers, and it does," Milner said.

The project was part of the Breakthrough Initiatives first launched in July 2015 by Hawking and Milner, including a series of research plans to scan the 100 galaxies closest to the Milky Way in search for aliens. "Starshot" is its newest endeavor.

Hawking believes that human's innate sense to transcend limits is the driving force behind the project. "Gravity pins us to the ground, but I just flew to America."

While one cannot hear the joking tone through Hawking's voice synthesizer, his humour had been easily received.

What the scientists are looking for is not just reaching Alpha Centauri, but what can be learned during the efforts.

"A lot of science will be learned by the process of going through this, making this happen," said panelist Mae Jemison, a former NASA astronaut. 

"There is big task ahead, there's a big leap in getting something of a micro size to go at some percentage of the speed of light. That will have all kinds of reverberations."

Tuesday also marked the 55th anniversary of the first human space flight by Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

"Today we commit to this next great leap into the cosmos because we are human and our nature is to fly," Hawking said.​

New York, April 13 (IANS) An image taken in 1917 and kept on an astronomical glass plate with the Carnegie Institution for Science (CIS) has revealed the first-ever evidence of a planetary system beyond our own Sun.

The unexpected find was recognised in the process of researching an article about planetary systems surrounding white dwarf stars in the journal New Astronomy Reviews.

The Review's author Jay Farihi from University College London and Carnegie Observatories' director John Mulchaey were looking for a plate in the Carnegie archive that contained a spectrum of van Maanen's star.

It is a white dwarf discovered by Dutch-American astronomer Adriaan van Maanen in the very year the plate was made.

Stellar spectra images allowed 19th century astronomers to develop a system for classifying stars that is still used today. 

Modern astronomers use digital tools to image stars but for decades, they would use glass photographic plates both to take images of the sky, and to record stellar spectra.

When Farihi examined the spectrum, he found something quite extraordinary.

Carnegie's 1917 spectrum of van Maanen's star revealed the presence of heavier elements such as calcium, magnesium, and iron, which should have long since disappeared into the star's interior due to their weight.

Astronomers now know that that van Maanen's star and other white dwarfs with heavy elements in their spectra represent a type of planetary system featuring vast rings of rocky planetary remnants that deposit debris into the stellar atmosphere. 

“The unexpected realisation that this 1917 plate from our archive contains the earliest recorded evidence of a polluted white dwarf system is just incredible,” said Mulchaey. 

Planets themselves have not yet been detected orbiting van Maanen's star, nor around similar systems, but Farihi is confident it is only a matter of time.

Carnegie has one of the world's largest collections of astronomical plates with an archive that includes about 250,000 plates from three different observatories.

“We have a ton of history sitting in our basement and who knows what other finds we might unearth in the future?” asked Mulchaey.

New York, April 12 (IANS) Infants' brains can understand what they are observing and thus can copy other people's action, finds a new study providing the first evidence that directly links neural responses from the motor system to overt social behaviour in infants.

Babies understand what they are observing. There is a direct connection between observing others, understanding what others are doing, and learning how to act -- abilities which are often disrupted in developmental disabilities, including autism, the researchers said.

Like adults, infants show this response when acting themselves and when watching others' actions, suggesting that the motor system of babies may play a role in the perception of others' actions, the researchers pointed out. 

"Our research provides initial evidence that motor system recruitment is contingently linked to infants' social interactive behaviour," said lead author Courtney Filippi, doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago in the US. 

The findings showed that recruiting the motor system during action encoding predicts infants' subsequent social interactive behaviour, the researchers stated.

"This understanding on the part of a baby involves not just seeing the other person's action, but also involves the baby's own motor system, which is recruited when he or she chooses the same toy," said Helen Tager-Flusberg, professor at Boston University in the US, who was not involved in the research. 

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, showed that by the middle of their first year of life, babies begin to understand that people act intentionally.

"Here we looked at the development of social cognition, social behaviour, and the motor system, all of which are critical for human development and are often disrupted in developmental disabilities, including autism," explained co-author Amanda Woodward, professor at the Chicago University.

For the study, the team involved 36 seven-month-old infants, whose brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG), during an experiment, where each infant had to observe a person reaching out to a toy. 

Babies' brain activity predicted how they would respond to the person's behaviour.

When the infants recruited their motor system while observing the person grasp the toy, they subsequently imitated him. 

When they didn't imitate the person, there was no detectable engagement of the motor system in their brain activity as they watched him.​

Washington, April 13 (IANS) The first expandable habitats for astronauts that may help set the design of deep space habitats including on Mars is set to be installed to the International Space Station (ISS) on April 16.

Expandable habitats are designed to take up less room on a rocket but provide greater volume for living and working in space once expanded.

This first test of an expandable module will allow investigators to gauge how well the habitat performs overall and how well it protects against solar radiation, space debris and the temperature extremes of space.

Once the test period is over, BEAM will be released from the space station and will burn up during its descent through Earth's atmosphere.

The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will be attached to the station's Tranquility module over a period of about four hours, the US space agency said in a statement.

Using the robotic arm, ground controllers at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston will remove BEAM from the unpressurised trunk of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft.

NASA astronauts aboard the station will secure BEAM using common berthing mechanism controls.

BEAM was launched aboard Dragon spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on April 8.

At the end of May, the module will be expanded to nearly five times its compressed size of 7 feet in diameter by 8 feet in length to roughly 10 feet in diameter and 13 feet in length.

Astronauts will first enter the habitat about a week after expansion and, during a two-year test mission, will return to the module for a few hours several times a year to retrieve sensor data and assess conditions.

The BEAM project is co-sponsored by NASA's Advanced Exploration Systems Division and Bigelow Aerospace.​