Rabbits kept alive by oxygen injections

Rabbits with blocked windpipes have been kept alive for up to 15 minutes without a single breath, after researchers injected oxygen-filled microparticles into the animals’ blood.Oxygenating the blood by bypassing the lungs in this way could save the lives of people with impaired breathing or obstructed airways, says John Kheir, a cardiologist at the Children’s Hospital Boston in Massachusetts, who led the team. The results are published today in Science Translational Medicine1.

The technique has the potential to prevent cardiac arrest and brain injury induced by oxygen deprivation, and to avoid cerebral palsy resulting from a compromised fetal blood supply.

In the past, doctors have tried to treat low levels of oxygen in the blood, or hypoxaemia, and related conditions such as cyanosis, by injecting free oxygen gas directly into the bloodstream. They had varying degrees of success, says Kheir.

In the late nineteenth century, for example, US doctor John Harvey Kellogg experimented with oxygen enemas — an idea that has been revived in recent decades in the form of bowel infusers2, says Mervyn Singer, an intensive-care specialist at University College London.

But these methods can be dangerous, because the free oxygen gas can accumulate into larger bubbles and form potentially lethal blockages called pulmonary embolisms.

Injecting oxygen in liquid form would avoid this, but the procedure would have to be done at dangerously low temperatures. The microcapsules used by Kheir and his team get the best of both worlds: they consist of single-layer spherical shells of biological molecules called lipids, each surrounding a small bubble of oxygen gas. The gaseous oxygen is thus encapsulated and suspended in a liquid emulsion, so can’t form larger bubbles.

The particles are injected directly into the bloodstream, where they mingle with circulating red blood cells. The oxygen diffuses into the cells within seconds of contact, says Kheir. “By the time the microparticles get to the lungs, the vast majority of the oxygen has been transferred to the red blood cells,” he says. This distinguishes these microcapsules from the various forms of artificial blood currently in use, which can carry oxygen around the body, but must still receive it from the lungs. …

The lipid foam is safe, says Kheir. “As the oxygen leaves them, the shells buckle and fold, with the lipids breaking off,” he says. The body then reabsorbs the lipids.

Injected rabbits survived for up to 15 minutes without breathing, and had normal blood pressure and heart rate. They showed no indication of heart, lung or liver damage caused by oxygen deprivation, or of pulmonary embolisms.

via Rabbits kept alive by oxygen injections : Nature News & Comment.

North Carolina Sea Level Rises Despite State Senators: Scientific American

Less than two weeks after the state’s senate passed a climate science-squelching bill, research shows that sea level along the coast between N.C. and Massachusetts is rising faster than anywhere on Earth

Could nature be mocking North Carolina’s law-makers? Less than two weeks after the state’s senate passed a bill banning state agencies from reporting that sea-level rise is accelerating, research has shown that the coast between North Carolina and Massachusetts is experiencing the fastest sea-level rise in the world.

Asbury Sallenger, an oceanographer at the US Geological Survey in St Petersburg, Florida, and his colleagues analysed tide-gauge records from around North America. On 24 June, they reported in Nature Climate Change that since 1980, sea-level rise between Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and Boston, Massachusetts, has accelerated to between 2 and 3.7 millimetres per year. That is three to four times the global average, and it means the coast could see 20–29 centimetres of sea-level rise on top of the metre predicted for the world as a whole by 2100 ( A. H. Sallenger Jr et al. Nature Clim. Change http://doi.org/hz4; 2012).

“Many people mistakenly think that the rate of sea-level rise is the same everywhere as glaciers and ice caps melt,” says Marcia McNutt, director of the US Geological Survey. But variations in currents and land movements can cause large regional differences.

via North Carolina Sea Level Rises Despite State Senators: Scientific American.

Photosynthesis re-wired: Chemists use nanowires to power photosynthesis

Harnessing the power of the sun has inspired scientists and engineers to look for ways to turn sunlight into clean energy to heat houses, fuel factories and power devices. While a majority of this research focuses on energy production, some researchers are looking at the potential uses of these novel solar technologies in other areas.

Boston College Assistant Professor of Chemistry Dunwei Wang’s work with silicon nanowires and his related construct, Nanonets, has shown these stable, tiny wire-like structures can be used in processes ranging from energy collection to hydrogen-generating water-splitting. …

“If we can start to use carbon dioxide and light to power reactions in organic chemistry, there’s a huge benefit to that. It allows you to bypass the middle man of fossil fuels by using light to drive the chemical reaction,” said Tan. “The key is the interaction of two fields – materials and synthetic chemistry. Separately, these fields may not have accomplished this on their own. But together, we combined our knowledge to make it work.”

During photosynthesis, plants capture sunlight and use this solar energy and carbon dioxide to fuel chemical reactions.

Tan and Wang used silicon nanowires as a photocathode, exploiting the wire’s efficient means of converting solar energy to electrical energy. Electrons released from the atoms in the nanowires are then transferred to organic molecules to trigger chemical reactions.

In this case, the researchers used aromatic ketones, which when struck by electrons become active and attack and bind carbon dioxide. Further steps produced an acid that allowed the team to create the precursors to ibuprofen and naproxen with high selectivity and high yield, the team reports. …

via Photosynthesis re-wired: Chemists use nanowires to power photosynthesis.

Solar cyclones hold fusion reactor clues

Ten thousand gigantic tornadoes are scouring the surface of the sun. Each of these spinning magnetic storms is the size of Europe, and together they may be pumping enough energy into the solar atmosphere to heat it to millions of degrees – a power that leads one scientist to suggest we could mimic these solar tornadoes on Earth in the quest for nuclear fusion power.

… Crucially, at the top of each tornado more ultra-violet light is given off than elsewhere – a sign that the plasma is being heated at that point. Team member Robert Erdélyi at the University of Sheffield, UK, says that energy is probably channelled in the form of magnetic disturbances called torsional Alfvén waves, which race up the twisted field lines of the tornado to be dissipated as heat in the corona.

… If it works on the sun, why not on Earth? “We could steal this technique from nature,” says Erdélyi. At the ITER project in Cadarache, France, scientists are trying to generate power from nuclear fusion, which requires heating plasma to many millions of degrees. Erdélyi suggests that if we can better understand coronal heating, similar processes could be used to inject heat into a reactor. Then scaled-down solar tornadoes might bring light and heat to our homes.

via Astrophile: Solar cyclones hold fusion reactor clues – space – 27 June 2012 – New Scientist.

Scientists develop spray-on battery

Scientists in the United States have developed a paint that can store and deliver electrical power just like a battery.
Traditional lithium-ion batteries power most portable electronics. They are already pretty compact but limited to rectangular or cylindrical blocks.

Researchers at Rice University in Houston, Texas, have come up with a technique to break down each element of the traditional battery and incorporate it into a liquid that can be spray-painted in layers on virtually any surface.

“This means traditional packaging for batteries has given way to a much more flexible approach that allows all kinds of new design and integration possibilities for storage devices,” said Pulickel Ajayan, who leads the team on the project.

The rechargeable battery is made from spray-painted layers, with each representing the components of a traditional battery: two current collectors, a cathode, an anode and a polymer separator in the middle.

The paint layers were airbrushed onto ceramics, glass and stainless steel, and on diverse shapes such as the curved surface of a ceramic mug, to test how well they bond.

One limitation of the technology is in the use of difficult-to-handle liquid electrolytes and the need for a dry and oxygen-free environment when making the new device.

The researchers are looking for components that would allow construction in the open air for a more efficient production process and greater commercial viability.

Neelam Singh, who worked on the project, believes the technology could be integrated with solar cells to give any surface a stand-alone energy capture and storage capability.

The researchers tested the device using nine bathroom tiles coated with the paint and connected to each other. When they were charged, the batteries powered a set of light-emitting diodes for six hours, providing a steady 2.4 volts.

The results of the study were published on Thursday in the journal Nature Scientific Reports.

via Scientists develop spray-on battery | Reuters.

Data goes from Beijing to UC Davis at 10 gigabits per second

UC Davis recently helped test a new high-speed link between the United States and China, transferring 24 gigabytes of data from Beijing to Davis in 30 seconds.

In the demonstration, involving BGI, the world’s largest genomics organization, and the UC Davis Genome Center, the data went from Beijing to the university at a rate approaching 10 gigabits per second, equivalent to moving more than 5,400 Bluray discs in a day. One gigabyte is equal to eight gigabits.

A file of the same size sent over the public Internet a few days earlier took more than 26 hours.

The data transfer took place June 22 to demonstrate a 10-gigabit-per-second fiber-optic connection installed by the Internet2 consortium and supported by Internet2, the China Education and Research Network, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Indiana University.

“The 10-gigabit network connection is even faster than transferring data to most local hard drives,” said Dawei Lin, director of the Bioinformatics Core at the Genome Center. “It will enable scientists in the genomics-related fields to communicate and transfer data more rapidly and conveniently.”

As the cost of DNA sequencing falls, the amount of data generated is growing at an unprecedented pace. How to conveniently share this tremendous volume of data has become a significant bottleneck for researchers. …

Internet2 is a consortium that has established a dedicated high-speed data network connecting major U.S. research labs and universities. The Internet2 network is not accessible by the general public.

via UC Davis News & Information :: Dateline :: Data goes from Beijing to UC Davis at 10 gigabits per second.