Scientists clone oldest living organism

Lomatia tasmanica has proved very difficult to successfully propagate. (Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service)

• Video: Tasmania to protect 'oldest living organism' (The Midday Report)

Tasmanian scientists have cloned what is believed to be the world's oldest living organism as part of a battle to save it from a deadly fungus.

The tree species commonly known as King's Lomatia was first discovered in Tasmania's remote south-west wilderness 70 years ago.

Carbon dating revealed the trees were more than 43,000 years old.

Botanist Natalie Tapson from the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens says the tree can only reproduce by cloning itself.

And she says all 500 stands of the tree - produced from one original plant - are under threat from the deadly root rot disease phytophthora, which is spreading rapidly through grass plains surrounding its habitat.

She says an insurance population is being established by creating clones through tissue cultures.

"When we first started we lost all the plants almost straight away," she said.

"We now have about 20 plants in tissue culture that have survived for about eight months and we're hopeful that we can keep tubing these on and get more and more plants that way."

Technology Gives 3-D View of Human Coronary Arteries

OFDI fly-through view of same patient's right coronary artery, white arrowheads indicate area of white dotted line in image at right. Credit: Massachusetts General Hospital

Click here to enlarge image

For the first time researchers are getting a detailed look at the interior of human coronary arteries, using an optical imaging technique developed at the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). In their report in the journal JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging, the research team describes how optical frequency-domain imaging (OFDI) gives three-dimensional, microscopic views of significant segments of patients' coronary arteries, visualizing areas of inflammation and plaque deposits.

"This is the first human demonstration of a technique that has the potential to change how cardiologists look at coronary arteries," says Gary Tearney, MD, PhD, of the MGH Pathology Department and the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at MGH, the study's lead author. "The wealth of information that we can now obtain will undoubtedly improve our ability to understand coronary artery disease and may allow cardiologists to diagnose and treat plaque before it leads to serious problems."

OFDI is an advance over optical coherence tomography (OCT), another imaging technology developed by the MGH investigators. While OCT examines tissues one point at a time, OFDI can look at over 1,000 points simultaneously using a device developed at MGH-Wellman. Inside a fiberoptic probe, a constantly rotating laser tip emits a light beam with an ever-changing wavelength. As the probe moves through the structure to be imaged, measuring how each wavelength is reflected back allows rapid acquisition of the data required to create the detailed microscopic images. Besides providing three-dimensional images of an artery's microstructure in seconds, the increased speed also reduces signal interference from blood, which had plagued the first-generation technology. In 2006 members of the MGH-Wellman team reported the successful use of OFDI to image the esophagus and coronary arteries of pigs.

The current study enrolled three patients scheduled to have stents placed in their coronary arteries at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Mass. After the completion of stent placement, OFDI was used to image 3- to 7-centimeter-long segments of the patients' coronary arteries including the stented areas. OFDI provided detailed images along the length of the arteries – visualizing lipid or calcium deposits, immune cells that could indicate inflammation, and the stents – and dramatic "fly-through" views looking down the artery's interior. More detailed, cross-sectional images of narrowed vascular segments revealed features associated with the type of atherosclerotic plaques that are likely to rupture and cause a heart attack.

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Tearney and his colleagues note that these findings need to be duplicated in a larger group of patients, and the time required to process the "fly-through" images – currently several hours – needs to be reduced to provide the real-time information most useful for clinical applications. Combining OFDI with intravascular ultrasound might help with another of the technique's limitations, the inability to penetrate deep into tissues.

"While more work remains, the technology is advancing at a rapid pace. We expect to see commercial devices available in a one- to two-year time frame," says Brett Bouma, PhD, of the Wellman Center, senior author of the report. "Our goal now is to help put the pieces in place to ensure that this technique will be widely available to interventional cardiologists." Bouma is an associate professor of Dermatology, and Tearney an associate professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School.

Why a Speeding Shark is Like a Golf Ball

Sharks Raise Their Scales to Dimple Their Skin Like the Surface of a Golf Ball

By DAVID ROBSON

Nov. 10, 2008—

Shortfin mako sharks can shoot through the ocean at up to 50 miles per hour (80 kilometres an hour). Now a trick that helps them to reach such speeds has been discovered  the sharks can raise their scales to create tiny wells across the surface of their skin, reducing drag like the dimples on a golf ball.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

The minute scales – just 200 micrometers long – are made from tough enamel, such as that found on teeth, giving the skin a rough texture like sandpaper. Lying flat, they had previously been found to reduce drag as the shark swims.

Some reports had also suggested that sharks can bristle their scales, causing them to stand up on end, so Amy Lang from the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and colleagues decided to investigate whether this too could help sharks travel at high speeds.

The team created artificial shark skin with a 16 x 24 array of synthetic scales, each 2 centimetres in length and angled at 90° to the surface of the "skin".

They then placed the arrangement in a stream of water travelling at a steady 20 centimetres per second. The water contained silver-coated nanospheres, which a laser illuminated to reveal the nature of the flow around the scales.

Golf-ball effect

The experiments revealed that tiny vortices or whirlpools formed within the cavities between the scales. These vortices form a kind of "buffer layer" between the skin's surface and the fast moving fluid, preventing a turbulent wake from forming behind the shark.

Since a wake has a lower pressure than the rest of the fluid, it exerts a backwards pull on an object, decreasing its speed and making it harder to change direction.

Eliminating this wake decreases the overall drag on the shark, allowing it to travel faster and move more easily without the thick, syrupy feeling humans get as they try to move through water.

"It's like the difference between pushing a box over ball bearings instead of dragging it along the floor," says Lang. The same principle explains the dimples on golf balls, which also create mini vortices to reduce drag in this way, she says.

Ultimately, the team hope further investigations could be used to design torpedoes, underwater vehicles, and even aircraft inspired by shark skin that can move more quickly through water and change direction more easily.

Sergei Chernyshenko, an aeronautical engineer from Imperial College London, UK, describes the research as fascinating. However, he points out that while the team have shown the existence of vortices, they haven't yet quantified the extent of the effect on the shark's drag, which he thinks could be minimal.

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Research shows that our concept of time may be flawed

Time to test time

A new theory suggests that the essential fuzziness of time may be the limiting factor for a German gravitational-wave detector.

Eric Hand

Could GEO600 have detected the fundamental fuzziness of time?Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)/Leibniz University Hannover

Poets have long believed the passage of time to be unavoidable, inexorable and generally melancholic. Quantum mechanics says it is fuzzy, ticking along at minimum intervals within which the notion of time is meaningless. And Craig Hogan claims he can 'see' it — in the thus far unexplained noise of a gravitational-wave detector. "It's potentially the most transformative thing I've ever worked on," says Hogan, director of the Center for Particle Astrophysics at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. "It's actually a possibility that we can access experimentally the minimum interval of time, which we thought was out of reach."

In a classical view of the world, space and time are smooth. The minimum scales at which, according to quantum mechanics, the smoothness breaks down — the Planck length and time — can be derived from other quantities, but they have not been tested experimentally, nor would they be, given their impossibly small size.

Yet if Hogan's ideas are right, noise associated with this fundamental fuzziness should be prominent at GEO600, a joint British and German machine operating near Hannover, Germany, that is searching for gravitational waves. These waves are thought to arise during events such as the massive cosmic collisions of black holes and neutron stars. Confirmation of the idea — which could come as experimental upgrades to GEO600 are put in place over the coming year — would be a big step towards a verifiable quantum theory of gravity, a long-sought unification of quantum mechanics (the physics of the very small) with general relativity (the physics of the very big). Hogan outlines his predictions in a paper published on 30 October in Physical Review D¹.

Hocus pocus

Of course, theorists are full of extraordinary ideas that never pan out, so physicists at GEO600 are treating Hogan's ideas with a healthy dose of scepticism. "To me as an experimentalist, this all seems a bit like black magic," says Karsten Danzmann, principal investigator for GEO600, and director of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics. "It seems a bit far-fetched and artificial. But if it's true, it's Nobel-prize-winning stuff."

Hogan says that the noise could be responsible for about 70% of some unaccounted for noise that GEO600 is recording. Danzmann says it's "intriguing" that this noise just happens to be the right magnitude and shape to account for most of the 'mystery' noise that his team has been unable identify for a year now.

The predictions are based on a lower-dimensional view of spacetime: two spatial dimensions, plus time. Spacetime would be a plane of waves, travelling at the speed of light. The fundamental fuzziness of the waves, on the order of the Planck length and time, could be amplified in large systems such as gravitational-wave detectors. The third spatial dimension of the macroscopic world would be encoded in information contained in the two-dimensional waves. "It's as if, in the real world, we are living inside a hologram," says Hogan. "The illusion is almost perfect. You really need a machine like GEO600 to see it."

Holographic promise

According to Hogan, the 'holographic' noise is more likely to be seen in certain detectors, because the fuzziness gets translated into noise only in the plane of the underlying wavy two-dimensional fabric of spacetime. GEO600 is less sensitive to gravity waves than are detectors such as those in LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory), two similar, large L-shaped detectors in Washington and Louisiana. But Hogan says GEO600 is more sensitive to holographic noise, because its power is locked in a beamsplitter that amplifies the peculiar transverse quality of the fuzziness.

The idea for an essentially holographic Universe has gained traction in recent years, as string theorists have found ways to trim the 10 dimensions that their theories call for. A decade ago, Juan Maldacena, now of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, put forward the idea that most of the 10 dimensions can be reduced when the information is encoded, like a hologram, in three or four basic dimensions. "The ideas of holography in string theory are extremely well accepted," says Gary Horowitz of the University of California, Santa Barbara. He adds, however, that Hogan's ideas about holography don't use conventional starting points. "There is reason to be somewhat sceptical. I don't find the theoretical motivation totally convincing."

But Hogan's predictions are striking and specific enough to get the attention of the GEO600 staff. Hogan will travel to Hannover to work with GEO600 scientists such as Harald Lück, who is leading an effort to double the sensitivity of the machine by the end of 2009. That should mean that the instrumental noise also drops. But if most of the noise remains, then it could be a sign that it is due to holographic noise, which would be fundamental, and pervasive throughout the Universe. "If the noise is still there, we have to be serious" about the observations, says Lück.

Solar-Powered Lamp Sticks to Window for Charging, Anywhere Else for Lighting

by Jaymi Heimbuch,

Photo via SCMP

A post-it style light that sticks to the window during the day for solar charging and sticks to, well, anything else at night for ambient lighting.

That sounds awesome.

Hong Kong inventor Keikko Lee has designed the magazine cover-thin light that uses 100% solar power to run, and could significantly cut down on raw materials for lighting production. While many concepts are futuristic and yeah-rights, this one sounds like it has some practical potential.

The concept is that the sticker would have electroluminescent material on one side, and solar panels on the other. It would attach to a window for day-time charging, and could stick most anywhere at all for lighting during the evenings. I assume it would use the biomimetic gecko stickiness that so many researchers are currently focusing on.

"I believe not only the product itself has to be ecological, but the manufacturing process should be ecological too, in order to make our environment better," said Lee.

Who knows if this concept will ever make it to production – though it seems plausible. With thin-film solar going on everything from backpacks to clothes, why not window-sticker lights?Stranger solar lighting has happened. But it sure puts a whole new twist on the glow-in-the-dark stickers we used to plaster all over our bedroom ceilings.

Via EarthTimes

Need a new heart? Print one

The technology is the same as that of the simple inkjet printer found in homes and offices, but Japanese scientist Makoto Nakamura is on a mission to see if it can also produce human organs.

The idea is for the printer to jet out thousands of cells per second, rather than ink droplets, and to build them up into a three-dimensional organ.

"It would be like building a huge skyscraper on a micro level using different kinds of cells and other materials instead of steel beams, concrete and glass," he said.

"Ultimately I hope to make a heart," said Dr Nakamura, professor at the graduate school of science and technology for research at the state-run University of Toyama.

While Dr Nakamura says it would take him some 20 years to develop a heart, the feat could pave the way to mass produce "good hearts" for patients waiting for transplants.

A heart made of cells originating from the patient could eliminate fears that the body would reject it.

In the emerging field of organ printing, Dr Nakamura bills his work as the world's finest printed 3D structure with living cells.

The technology works a bit like dealing with sliced fruit: an organ is cut horizontally, allowing researchers to see an array of cells on the surface.

If a printer drops cells one by one into the right spots and repeats the process for many layers, it creates a 3D organ.

Much like a printer chooses different colours, the machine can position different types of cells to drop.

Dr Nakamura has succeeded in building a tube with living cells.

It measures one millimetre in diameter and has double walls with two different kinds of cells, similar to the three-layer structure in human blood vessels.

He has also made a smaller single-wall hydrogel tube that measures one-tenth of a millimetre, as narrow as human hair.

The tubes are made by a 3D inkjet bioprinter that Dr Nakamura's team developed in a three-year project completed earlier this year at Kanagawa Academy of Science and Technology, a foundation based south-west of Tokyo.

The printer can adjust where to drop cells in the order of one-thousandth of a millimetre and produce a tube at a speed of 3 centimetres per two minutes.

- AFP

This is from 2003. http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/video/164-bod ... There is an awesome video demonstrating this and a doctor who has already transplanted multiple bladders with no rejection. The first part of the video is about successful limb regeneration.