Technology

Researchers have been able to photograph the shadow of a single atom for the first time. And this absorption imaging took five years of work. They basically wanted to investigate how few atoms are required to cast a shadow and they found it takes just one. At the heart of the effort is a super high-resolution microscope, which makes the atom's shadow dark enough to see.  People still use optical microscopes in research?  Apparently so.  And the Griffith University team claims no other facility in the world has the capability for such extreme optical imaging. They did…

Since "The Avengers" is a giant movie this year, when you think of something that shoots lightning, you might think of Thor.  If so, perhaps your clever joke would be "Can we name that Laser-Induced Plasma Channel "Mjolnir"? If you're old like me, "Star Trek" will be more your thing and "Set your phasers to fry" will be more your speed.(1) You'd better get ready either way. Researchers at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey are  developing a weapon that will shoot lightning bolts down laser beams to destroy the target, according to Army.mil, the official homepage of the US Army.…

Is it possible to lose at Rochambeau, the millenia-old game of Rock, Paper, Sissors, every single time? It shouldn't be but a new Janken robot (Janken is the Japanese name for Rock, Paper, Scissors - why is the West stuck with a French name for an ancient Egyptian game?  It's a mystery of linguistics) can win against humans without fail.   Is it psychic?  Are humans that predictable?  No, it basically cheats - if by cheating I mean being much faster than I can ever be. Humans tend to think about their opponent and anticipate what they will do, including what they think…

Is the world ready for a robot DJ? Sometimes you have to be bold.  People laughed at Microsoft when they introduced Microsoft Bob too; people didn't know they needed a graphical image of their office showing a fax machine to send a fax - until it was available.   They're not the first. You know what else people didn't know they needed before electricity?  Toast. And toasters. You never read about toast in a Dickens novel, or any other novel before the 20th century. It existed but people saw little reason to bake bread and then toast it, because fuel was not cheap.  Yet…

Over the past fifty years there has been a growth in radio technology that has completely changed our lives at many levels including our personal lives, the way we educate our kids, how we do science, and basically how we interact with the rest of the Cosmos. Here we look at three ways for treating cancer. As a long serving member of the Bioelectromagnetics Society, I thought I might also give a quick rundown of its history and something of its aims.  If you look at the history of BEMS it grew out of disparate medical research conducted in the 18th and19th centuries. Perhaps the…

A report from market research agency Conquest into the social media habits of 14-24 year olds claims that Facebook's core audience - teenagers - are starting to fall out of love with the website and that activity may have peaked amid a groundswell of dissatisfaction and concerns over privacy and even bullying.  While Facebook is most surely top dog for the short term, "Fuicide" (deleting the Facebook account) is on the rise as are claims about the damaging impact of regular and prolonged Facebook use. Grievances triggered by Facebook's culture include obsession with appearance and…

Aushon has announced the launch of Cira, a new multiplex immunoassay platform that achieves the sensitivity and reproducibility of singleplex ELISA, while substantially improving ease of use and leveraging the benefits of parallel analysis. The design produces faster results at a lower cost per sample and higher throughput without compromising the quality or consistency scientists need for their clinical studies. Aushon achieved these results from four synergistic, proprietary inventions: better microarray printing, a new circular assay design, a new high-resolution imager with built-in…

To understand the current developments in technology, one has to understand the progress of science.  The ultimate goal of science has always been to understand nature firstly and then to make it our useful servant.  Since the days of the alchemist who tried to transmute common metals into gold, we have sought to change nature to suit our own ends. The developments in science and technology were driven by the imperatives of the economic structure of societies, and a philosophical position that we could dominate the physical world.  This remained a dream (which some would…

Two studies in Nature applied DNA blood testing using the BEAMing technology to detect drug resistance mediated by KRAS mutations in colorectal cancer patients months before treatment failure was observed.   The group led by Alberto Bardelli, Ph.D., of the University of Torino, Italy describes the development of secondary resistance mutations to the anti-EGFR monoclonal antibody cetuximab (Erbitux(R)) in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (mCRC) [Misale S. et al., Nature Epub 13 June 2012].The second group led by Luis Diaz, MD and Bert Vogelstein, M.D. from Johns Hopkins…

AMSTERDAM, June 13, 2012  -- Elsevier has added a new enhancement to SciVal Strata, a web-based performance evaluation tool that allows users to conduct highly customized performance assessments of research teams and individual researchers. The new functionality provides the capacity for objective assessment of a specific selection of a researcher's work in addition to their complete publication output. This option is critical when selecting the most impactful papers to be submitted for various government or institutional assessments. In addition the enhanced functionality will prove…