Video Animation : All You Need to Know About DNA

Posted by Andreas Christodoulou

Description : 

BBC Knowledge and Learning is exploring a wide variety of topics from social history to science in a series of three-minute online Explainer documentaries, and commissioned Territory Studio to produce an animated film on the subject of DNA. 

It's hard to explain DNA replication, transcription, and protein building in an accessible but non-dumbed-down way. This quick and elegant video does it though : You get the full story with helpful visualizations in the most awesome science video about DNA.

As Will Samuel, lead designer and animator on the project explains, the approach taken wasn’t just to look into a scientific future. “We needed to find a graphic style to communicate the beauty and intricacy of DNA. We wanted to create nostalgia; taking the audience back to the days of textbook diagrams and old science documentaries, such as Carl Sagan's COSMOS and IBM’s POWER OF TEN (1977). Using the double helix circular theme as a core design we focused on form, movement and colour to create a consistent flow to the animation, drawing on references from nature, illustrating how DNA is the core to everything around us.”

Three minutes is a short time to explore a subject where most doctorates only scratch the surface, so writer Andrew S. Walsh teamed up with molecular biologist Dr Matthew Adams to distil the script down to the most fundamental elements required to understand not only DNA’s form and function but how our understanding of these discoveries has affected the wider world. 

While this length may feel restrictive, the team found that this limitation acted as a lens, focusing the piece on the essentials. Enjoy the video!

If you liked our post then feel free to share it with your friends. I'm pretty sure they will enjoy it too! 
Do not hesitate to comment below your thoughts and let us know what you think. Send your suggestions for future articles and don't miss some of the latest trending tech news and tweets for today. Check also our Magazine and Newspaper for similar Big Stories and other Exclusives.

*by andreascy*

Scientists Unveil Rex, the Million-Dollar Bionic Man

Posted by Andreas Christodoulou

Description : 

A sign of how far the science of robotics has come is today's topic. The world is changing in a rapid way and most of the difficulties of the past are now engineering challenges. Leaders in the field discover impressive techniques that science fiction becomes part of everyday life. 

Swiss psychologist Bertolt Mayer was born without a left hand but now has a £30,000 bionic replacement - which could soon be obsolete. On the picture below he views "Rex", a two-meter tall artificial human, at the Science Museum in central London that was assembled for his documentary entitled "How to Build a Bionic Man".

Mayer was used as the model for the "bionic man," (including his face and his other favorite features), whom British roboticist designers claim is the world's first complete bionic man.

"I’ve looked for new bionic technologies, out of personal interest, for a very long time and...until five to six years ago nothing much was happening. Then suddenly we get this explosion of innovation," he told reporters.

Costing more than £500,000 to build, the human-like machine is featuring the latest in prosthetic technology like artificial organs (including a pancreas, kidney, spleen, trachea) as well as fully functioning limbs and synthetic blood (a blood circulatory system made of nano-particles that are able to bind oxygen and give them off, just like real blood can do). It even has sight.

Robotics expert Richard Walker, and Prof Alexander Seifalian of University College London, explained to the BBC's John Maguire how aspects of technology for helping physically handicapped people, were brought together for the project. Enjoy the video!

Learn more on Gizmag.

Amazing right? :) If you like this topic then definitely you will love our robotics section. If you get deeper on our Blog you will completely change your idea of what robots can do. You could bring forward your opinions and suggestions by using the comments box or the contact form. Spread our voice to your social circles and don't forget to subscribe on our feeds for more. 

*by andreascy* 

The Infinite Stretch of the Universe

Posted by Andreas Christodoulou

Description : 

The size of the universe is incomprehensibly big. Similarly, the particles that make of the universe that we know are incomprehensibly small. Just imagining how big the solar system actually is, which is just a small dot in the universe as a whole, is nearly impossible. In order to have any type of understanding of the size of the universe, we must compare objects throughout the universe against the size of objects we already know. 

The observable universe is estimated by scientists to have a diameter of over 8.8*10E^26 meters, or 96 billion light years. For comparison's sake, the Milky Way Galaxy, which is the home of planet Earth, is a tiny fraction of that size, 120,000 light years across.

Source: Number Sleuth

A tiny grain of rice measures at 0.008*0.0025 meters big. Skin cells and viruses are thousands of times smaller than the smallest observed objects to the human eye. Yet, a single atom of hydrogen is billions of times smaller than that.

Magnifying the Universe by Number Sleuth. 

Amazing right? :) Check out this page for more.. ;) 

*by andreascy*

Chemistry World : Why can we walk on custard? Hitting custard with an aluminium rod

Posted by Andreas Christodoulou

Description :

As once famously demonstrated on a UK television show (video), you can walk over a swimming pool filled with custard. Two US physicists have now explained why. 

Being a mixture of cornflour and milk, with a dash a vanilla essence, instant custard consists of a dense suspension of microscopic particles. Such suspensions are well known to harden on impact, but no one really knew why. Most scientists thought it had something to do with a process known as shear thickening, whereby these suspensions become more viscous when a shear force is applied to them. 

The problem with this explanation, though, is that shear forces are applied parallel to the suspension, whereas an impact, such as that produced by walking over custard, applies a force at right angles. 

"All references to this phenomenon in the literature were invoked in tiny shear experiments and this is very different from running on the surface - imagine sliding an object across the surface instead of smacking the object into the surface," explains Scott Waitukaitis at the University of Chicago, US. "What's more, these experiments always exhibited a maximum in stress which they could not exceed, suggesting that the suspensions were 10-100 times too weak for running on the surface to be possible." 

So, together with his colleague Heinrich Jaeger, Waitukaitis decided to investigate what happened when he dropped an aluminium rod onto 25 litres of custard or, more accurately, a suspension of cornflour and water. To do this, he studied the impact using a variety of different techniques, including high-speed video, an accelerometer, a force sensor and x-ray videography. 

What he discovered (video) was that the force of the impact squashed the particles in the suspension together, forming a depression in the surface and an expanding solid region of jammed together particles below this depression. Just like the way in which a snowplough jams snow particles together into a solid mass. As a result, the falling rod initially comes to an almost complete halt on the surface of the suspension, before slowly sinking as the solid region gradually "melts" away. 

"The impact causes the particles below to compact into a temporarily jammed solid, which grows out from the impact site in a manner reminiscent of a snowplough," Waitukaitis tells Chemistry World. 

Itai Cohen, a physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, US, who also explores the behaviour of particle suspensions, thinks this is a great piece of work. "It was a joy to read the Waitukaitis and Jaeger paper," he says. "The mechanism proposed by the authors to explain the effect is very simple and well supported by their experimental data." 

As well as explaining why we can walk on custard, this work could also have important practical applications. "There aren't many materials out there that can switch from soft to hard almost instantaneously," says Waitukaitis. "What's more, these materials do it automatically – they sense how hard they are being hit and respond accordingly. This has obvious usefulness in everything from construction to hydraulics to personal protection."

Liked our topic? Check also :

Chemistry World : Making graphene supercapacitors with a DVD writer

*by andreascy*

Science Nation : New 3D Structures Assemble with Remarkable Precision

Posted by Andreas Christodoulou

Description :

While it is relatively straightforward to build a box on the macroscale, it is much more challenging at smaller micro and nanometer length scales. 

At those sizes, 3D structures are too small to be assembled by any machine and they must be guided to assemble on their own. 

And now, interdisciplinary research by engineers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland and mathematicians at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island has led to a breakthrough showing that higher order polyhedra can indeed fold up and assemble themselves. 

With support from the National Science Foundation, Brown University mathematician Govind Menon and Johns Hopkins University chemical and biomolecular engineer David Gracias are developing self-assembling 3-D micro and nanostructures which can be used in a number of applications, including medicine. 

You liked this topic? Then feel free to discover a collection of NSF Studies featured on our blogsite. You'll definitely love them! Don't forget to subscribe on our RSS feed for even more updates and news served to your feed reader or email inbox. We never spam. Promise! 

*by andreascy*

OSA : Researchers discover a new path for light through metal

Posted by Andreas Christodoulou

Description :

Helping bridge the gap between photonics and electronics, researchers from Purdue University have coaxed a thin film of titanium nitride into transporting plasmons, tiny electron excitations coupled to light that can direct and manipulate optical signals on the nanoscale. 

Titanium nitride's addition to the short list of surface-plasmon-supporting materials, formerly composed only of metals, could point the way to a new class of optoelectronic devices with unprecedented speed and efficiency. "We have found that titanium nitride is a promising candidate for an entirely new class of technologies based on plasmonics and metamaterials," said Alexandra Boltasseva, a researcher at Purdue and an author on a paper published March 27 in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optical Materials Express. "This is particularly compelling because surface plasmons resolve a basic mismatch between wavelength-scale optical devices and the much smaller components of integrated electronic circuits."

Value of Plasmons :

Metals carry electricity with ease, but normally do nothing to transmit light waves. Surface plasmons, unusual light-coupled oscillations that form on the surface of metallic materials, are the exception to that rule. When excited on the surface of metals by light waves of specific frequencies, plasmons are able to retain that same frequency, but with wavelengths that are orders-of-magnitude smaller, cramming visible and near-infrared light into the realm of the nanoscale.

In the world of electronics and optics, that 100-fold contraction is a boon. Circuits that direct the paths of electrons operate on a much smaller scale than optical light waves, so engineers must either rely on small but relatively sluggish electrons for information processing or bulk up to accommodate the zippy photons. Plasmons represent the best of both worlds and are already at the heart of a number of optoelectronic devices. They have not had widespread use, however, due to the dearth of materials that readily generate them and the fact that metals, in most cases, cannot be integrated with semiconductor devices.

Plasmonic Materials :

Until now, the best candidates for plasmonic materials were gold and silver. These noble metals, however, are not compatible with standard silicon manufacturing technologies, limiting their use in commercial products. Silver is the metal with the best optical and surface plasmon properties, but it forms grainy, or semi-continuous, thin films. Silver also easily degrades in air, which causes loss of optical signal, making it a less-attractive material in plasmon technologies.

In an effort to overcome these drawbacks, Boltasseva and her team chose to study titanium nitride - a ceramic material that is commonly used as a barrier metal in microelectronics and to coat metal surfaces such as medical implants or machine tooling parts- because they could manipulate its properties in the manufacturing process. It also could be easily integrated into silicon products, and grown crystal-by-crystal, forming highly uniform, ultrathin films - properties that metals do not share.

To test its plasmonic capabilities, the researchers deposited a very thin, very even film of titanium nitride on a sapphire surface. They were able to confirm that titanium nitride supported the propagation of surface plasmons almost as efficiently as gold. Silver, under perfect conditions, was still more efficient for plasmonic applications, but its acknowledged signal loss limited its practical applications.

To further improve the performance of titanium nitride, the researchers are now looking into a manufacturing method known as molecular beam epitaxy, which would enable them to grow the films and layered structures known as superlattices crystal-by-crystal.

Technologies and Potential Applications :

In addition to plasmonics, the researchers also speculate that titanium nitride may have applications in metamaterials, which are engineered materials that can be tailored for almost any application because of their extraordinary response to electromagnetic, acoustic, and thermal waves. Recently proposed applications of metamaterials include invisibility cloaks, optical black holes, nanoscale optics, data storage, and quantum information processing.

The search for alternatives to noble metals with improved optical properties, easier fabrication and integration capabilities could ultimately lead to real-life applications for plasmonics and metamaterials.

"Plasmonics is an important technology for nanoscale optical circuits, sensing, and data storage because it can focus light down to nanoscale," notes Boltasseva. "Titanium nitride is a promising candidate in the near-infrared and visible wavelength ranges. Unlike gold and silver, titanium nitride is compatible with standard semiconductor manufacturing technology and provides many advantages in its nanofabrication and integration."

According to the researchers, titanium nitride-based devices could provide nearly the same performance for some plasmonic applications. While noble metals like silver would still be the best choice for specific applications like negative index metamaterials, titanium nitride could outperform noble metals in other metamaterial and transformation optics devices, such as those based on hyperbolic metamaterials.

Source: Optical Society of America

*by andreascy*

Beat Intel, Get Your 14 nm Process Development Kit Now!

Posted by Andreas Christodoulou

Description :

The industry’s first process development kit (PDK) for 14nm logic chips has been announced by Imec. This early-version PDK contains all elements for design assessment of the 14nm node through device compact models, parasitic extraction, design rules, parameterized cells (pcells), and basic logic cells. 

It anticipates the introduction of a number of new technologies like the use of FinFET transistors, which have a larger drive per unit footprint and higher performance at low supply voltages compared to the traditional planar technologies. Evolutions of this PDK will gradually also introduce the use of high-mobility channel materials. The PDK includes elements of both immersion- and EUV lithography, opening the way for a gradual transition from 193nm immersion to EUV lithography.

Starting from the PDK a first test chip is now being designed. This chip, planned for the second half of 2012, will allow testing the device-, interconnect-, process- and litho assumptions, as well as performance and power of circuits implemented at the tight area budgets of the 14nm node.

*by andreascy*

The Smallest Laser in the world is Smaller Than Dust

Posted by Andreas Christodoulou

Description :

What is the biggest constraint in creating tiny lasers? Pump power. Yes sir, all lasers require a certain amount of pump power from an outside source to begin emitting a coherent beam of light and the smaller a laser is, the greater the pump power needed to reach this state. The laser cavity consists of a tiny metal rod enclosed by a ring of metal-coated, quantum wells of semiconductor material. 

A team of researchers from the University of California has developed a technique that uses quantum electrodynamic effects in coaxial nanocavities to lower the amount of pump power needed. This allowed them to build the world’s smallest room-temperature, continuous wave laser. The whole device is only half a micron in diameter (human hair has on average a thickness of 50 micron).

The nanolaser design appears to be scalable – meaning that they could be shrunk to even smaller sizes – an important feature that would make it possible to harvest laser light from even smaller structures. Applications for such lasers could include tiny biochemical sensors or high-resolution displays, but the researchers are still working out the theory behind how these tiny lasers operate. They would also like to find a way to pump the lasers electrically instead of optically.

*by andreascy*