Research Watch

Make sure to check out this week’s ERN: energy-storing wind turbines, self-repairing biological solar cells, tiny fuel cells and more.

Make sure to check out this week’s ERN: wind-powered vehicles, titania leaves, coffee grounds and more.

Turns out that stovetops produce a lot of very small nanoparticles that are a threat to respiratory and cardiovascular health.

Researchers have known that burners on gas and electric stovetops emit nanoparticles when they’re used, but until now they hadn’t been able to measure the smallest nanoparticles — those under 10 nanometers. A study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that stovetops produce as much as 10 times as many particles under 10 nanometers as nanoparticles over that size.

Nanoparticles readily enter the bloodstream through the lungs, pass through cell membranes and accumulate in organs. Nanoparticle toxicity is related to its surface; nanoparticles of a substance are more toxic than the same mass of larger particles of the same substance.

I guess we’ll have to update the old saying. If you can’t stand the nanoparticles, get out of the kitchen.

Interesting news from around the science press:

A locked-in syndrome patient with an electrode implanted in his brain was able to control a speech synthesizer with his thoughts, according to an item in Nature News. He was able to produce vowel sounds, and people could eventually “speak” whole sentences this way. Talk about speaking your mind.

Marijuana has the potential for warding off the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, according to an item in Scientific American. It looks like pot improves memory by reducing inflammation and stimulating the growth of new brain cells. What was that about short-term memory loss?

Infrared light stimulates the inner ear nerve cells responsible for hearing, according to an item in New Scientist. It’s possible that future laser-based cochlear implants could significantly improve the quality of hearing aids. I guess that’d be called hearing the light.

An item in the current issue of our sister publication ERN spotlights a growing debate in the biofuels community about whether net energy — the amount of energy a fuel produces minus the energy it consumes — is helpful or harmful as a measure of a biofuel’s sustainability. Some researchers say a broader set of metrics is needed.

A pair of items in the current issue of our sister publication ERN point out that the installed base of gasoline and diesel engines are getting some attention from energy researchers.

One item puts a twist on the idea of using electric fields to manipulate fluids. Researchers have experimented with using electric fields to control smart fluids for decades. Researchers at Temple University are sending fuel through an electric field to boost automobile mileage.

The other item is about a method for making everyday gasoline, diesel and jet fuel green, or at least as green as liquid hydrocarbon fuels can be.

The physics of light is at the fore of the current TRN. The lead item, Quantum weirdness promises better imaging, reveals a new application of quantum physics. The item Reversing time promises invisibility could open a practical route to invisibility shields.

Speaking of light, take a look at the current ERN. You’ll find six advances in drawing energy from sunlight. My favorites have to do with bugs and plants.

An item in the current TRN issue about computing via visual perception has me wondering if the method could be adapted to take advantage of one of the great strengths of the human brain: pattern recognition. Is it possible to pose a problem mathematically so that the correct answer has a discernible pattern when all of the possible answers are represented visually?

Imagine scanning through a three-dimensional cloud of random dots, lines or shapes — the solution space in math jargon — until you come to a part of the cloud that has a pattern. The coordinates of the pattern within the cloud would map to the mathematical representation of the solution.

Today researchers struggle with translating complicated pattern recognition problems into the stepwise logic of computers in order to give the machines humanlike vision and language understanding. Perhaps someday researchers will work on translating numbercrunching problems into the perceptual logic of the human brain.

The news item also reminded me of a distopian science fiction story that horrified me as a kid. A captive blind girl was periodically brought to a room where a machine plugged itself into her eye sockets. If I remember right, she was forced to react to or manipulate blurry shapes, and both the interface and the process were painful. The suggestion was that humans, or at least some humans, had literally become cogs in the machine, or what today we might call human coprocessors.

Can anyone tell me the author and title of that story? I haven’t been able to track it down. Let me know at eric [at] trnmag.com.

Lux Research is forecasting that the market for nanotechnology-based products will grow from $147 billion in 2007 to $3.1 trillion by 2015 — ballooning to 21 times its 2007 size over eight years. Nanotech research and development spending was up to $13.5 billion last year, with corporate spending passing government spending for the first time.

As I’ve posted before, this is not necessarily good for your health.

If you’re hoping to have your picture taken at the North Pole, plan carefully. You might need a boat. Scientists are projecting that this summer global warming-induced Arctic melting will leave the North Pole ice-free for the first time in history. Complete summer melting of Arctic ice is still years and possibly decades away, but a watery North Pole is an ominous milestone.