This week's headlines:
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Scientists close to cracking wheat's genetic code |
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Europe leading open source charge |
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Obama uses iPhone to win support |
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Invention: Osmotic power generation |
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Research aims for artificial nose |
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Scientists aim to deliver e-paper in full computerised colour |
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Invisibility cloak for water waves |
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Old violins reveal their secrets |
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| Scientists close to cracking wheat's genetic code |
| French scientists believe they have found a way to map the hugely
complex genetic code of wheat, the staple food for 35% of the world's
population. The move could lead to improved crop varieties that are
resistant to drought and disease at a time when surging demand has
stoked fears over future grain supply, sending prices soaring to record
highs earlier this year.
Scientists from the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in
Clermont-Ferrand, France, said they had constructed a map of the largest
wheat chromosome, chromosome 3B, and demonstrated it should be possible
to sequence the plant's entire genetic code. In the past, the wheat
genome has been viewed as all but impossible to sequence because of its
sheer size. It comprises 17bn base pairs of the chemicals that make up
DNA - five times more than the human genome. The 3B chromosome alone is
more than twice the size of the entire genome of rice, which was the
first major food crop to be sequenced six years ago.
Once the whole wheat genome is sequenced, researchers say it will be
much easier to identify genes that can be used either in conventional
plant breeding programs or to develop genetically modified crop
varieties. Scientists, meanwhile, are already using the genetic data
collected so far by the French team, with a team in Australia homing in
on a gene involved in resistance to an alarming new form of stem rust. |
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| Europe leading open source charge |
| More than half of organisations now believe that the benefits of open
source software outweigh the negatives, according to new research by
business intelligence firm Actuate.
The latest Annual Open Source Survey of around 1,000 business and IT
professionals revealed that firms are more receptive to open source
software in Europe than elsewhere, attracted by lower total cost of
ownership.
The survey also found that the number of firms believing that the
benefits of open source outweigh the inhibitors rose from 45.3% in 2007
to 54% this year. Persistent barriers to adoption remain, however,
including lack of in-house skills to implement open source software, and
a perception that there are difficulties with long-term support. |
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| Obama uses iPhone to win support |
| US Democratic candidate Barack Obama is set to turn the iPhone into a
political recruiting tool with an application aimed at getting the vote
out. The most notable feature is a 'Call Friends' option to help
organise contacts in swing states. The free application was developed by
volunteers in less than three weeks.
The campaign blog said that it hopes the 'Call Friends' feature will
generate thousands of additional personal contacts - the aim being that
these can be turned into votes. Other features include making notes on
which friends have been called, who they are supporting, and if they
need a reminder call on election day. Up-to-date news from the campaign
will also be included, as will video, photos and talking points that can
be used to convince friends to vote for the candidate.
The website said the total amount of calls the application makes are
tallied but no information leaves the phone, so the privacy of friends
and that of the user are protected. |
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| Invention: Osmotic power generation |
| Osmosis - the way water automatically flows from a weak solution into a
stronger one – is a fundamental to biological life. Now the process
could also generate our electricity. Various researchers have tested the
idea of using a semi-permeable membrane to separate freshwater and
seawater, and using the pressure generated as water flows from one to
the other to drive a turbine. But several inefficiencies plague the
process, and the river deltas and estuaries that offer the best
locations are not suited to building power stations.
Researchers from Yale University suggest an alternative design. Instead
of using salt- and freshwater, they buddy up their freshwater with a
solution of ammonia and carbon dioxide in water. The osmotic pressure
produced can be an order of magnitude higher than that produced with
salt solution. Maintaining the difference between the solutions requires
only a small amount of heat. Raising the temperature to just 40 °C is
enough to evaporate off water from the ammonia-CO2 solution to maintain
its concentration. Evaporating water from salt solution is much harder.
The evaporated water is then condensed and fed back to the freshwater
side of the osmotic engine.
The patent estimates each metre of membrane could produce 250 watts of
electrical power, compared to the 4 watts typically produced by an
equivalent area in an estuary-based plant. |
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| Research aims for artificial nose |
| Scientists at MIT say they are a step closer to developing a sensor
which mimics the workings of the human nose. The researchers claim to
have overcome one of the biggest hurdles - mass production of proteins
called 'olfactory receptors'.
The human nose detects many different combinations of molecules, which
are then interpreted by the brain. It has around 300 varieties of
olfactory receptors in the membrane surrounding cells lining the nasal
passages, with each binding onto different kinds of molecule. Efforts to
manufacture artificial receptors in the numbers needed have previously
failed, as their structure simply breaks down if they are removed from
the specific environment found in the membrane and exposed to moisture.
But the MIT team was able to develop a detergent solution which
protected them during the production process. They then carried out
basic tests which showed the manufactured proteins still had the ability
to lock on to the molecules they needed to detect. The researchers said
that any device they developed could be used to aid diagnosis of
diseases, such as bladder, skin and lung cancers which all can give off
distinctive molecules. |
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| Scientists aim to deliver e-paper in full computerised colour |
| Scientists in Cambridge have launched a three-year project to create the
next generation of e-paper, which may herald the arrival of fully
interactive, all-colour computerised newspapers and magazines.
Liquavista, spun out of the Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven two years
ago, has won part of the backing from the government-funded Technology
Strategy Board. The project is also backed by Plastic Logic.
The US technology company last month unveiled a prototype e-paper that
looks much more like a sheet of A4 than the offerings of rivals such as
Amazon's Kindle and Sony eReader, which resemble paperback books. But
Plastic Logic's device is only black and white, not very flexible and
its screen updates quite slowly. Liquavista is working on a full-colour
flexible screen that would allow newspapers and other publications to
provide a much more interactive product that could include video.
The technology is based on a process called electrowetting, which uses
electricity to manipulate a thin layer of liquid so that it changes
colour. It uses far less power than a traditional LCD and, crucially,
the individual cells change fast enough to run video. |
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| Invisibility cloak for water waves |
| It should be possible to protect coastlines from tsunamis by making the
land invisible to the incoming waves. That is the claim of a group of
physicists in France and the UK, which has built a cylindrical
'invisibility cloak' that shields objects from water waves by directing
those waves around the object as if it were not there.
The team from the University of Aix-Marseille and Liverpool University,
explains that the mathematics behind the invisibility cloak involves a
geometric transform – which takes a point, inflates it and renders
anything that lies inside the resulting bubble unreachable by the waves.
The team's cloak is a shallow metal cylinder, measuring 10 cm across.
The cylinder does not have solid walls but instead consists of a series
of rods arranged in 100 identical sectors and seven concentric rings.
The object functions just like a whirlpool. The liquid enters through
the gaps between the rods, swirls around the concentric rings and then
enters the far side of the cylinder so as to leave the central region
entirely free of liquid. The trick is to transform the waves so that
they have a greater velocity along the circumference of the rings than
along the radii, therefore slowing down the liquid as it approaches the
centre and forcing it out the far side. |
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| Old violins reveal their secrets |
| Why do the violins made by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù sound so
good? Now a study has finally identified a measurable sound quality that
distinguishes these old violins from cheap, factory-made instruments.
After spending ten years painstakingly measuring the acoustics of
violins rated from 'bad' to 'excellent' by professional musicians,
George Bissinger of East Carolina University says that the 'excellent'
old Italian violins in his sample show a significantly stronger acoustic
response in the lower octaves than do the 'bad' violins, whereas those
rated merely 'good' have intermediate values. The high-quality tone is
caused by a single mode of vibration of air inside the body, which
radiates sound strongly through the violin's f-holes.
Bissinger measured all manner of sound characteristics for the 17
instruments in his sample, which ranged from legendary Stradivari
instruments to mass-produced beginners instruments. He focused on the
properties of the key vibrational resonances or 'modes' of the
instruments, recording the frequencies of these modes, the radiativity,
the degree of focusing in specific directions (directivity), the
flexibility of the wooden body plates, and the amount of damping of the
sound. The two Stradivarius instruments showed respectively the highest
and the lowest degrees of directivity in the sample. But crucially, the
best violins showed a more even radiation of sound across the range of
acoustic frequencies that they generate. In particular, the greater
strength of their lowest-octave response can partially account for the
richness and sweetness of tone that violinists say they detect. |
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