Stem cell news — differences and ethics

Two releases from yesterday on stem cells. Number one is on the found differences between reprogrammed skin cells and embryonic stem cells. Second is a call for stem cell debates by bioethicists before the science gets too far ahead of ethical considerations.

The first release:

UCLA scientists find molecular differences between embryonic stem cells and reprogrammed skin cells

UCLA researchers have found that embryonic stem cells and skin cells reprogrammed into embryonic-like cells have inherent molecular differences, demonstrating for the first time that the two cell types are clearly distinguishable from one another.

The data from the study suggest that embryonic stem cells and the reprogrammed cells, known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, have overlapping but still distinct gene expression signatures. The differing signatures were evident regardless of where the cell lines were generated, the methods by which they were derived or the species from which they were isolated, said Bill Lowry, a researcher with the Broad Stem Cell Research Center and a study author.

“We need to keep in mind that iPS cells are not perfectly similar to embryonic stem cells,” said Lowry, an assistant professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology. “We’re not sure what this means with regard to the biology of pluripotent stem cells. At this point our analyses comprise just an observation. It could be biologically irrelevant, or it could be manifested as an advantage or a disadvantage.”

The study appears in the July 2, 2009 issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell.

The iPS cells, like embryonic stem cells, have the potential to become all of the tissues in the body. However, iPS cells don’t require the destruction of an embryo.

The study was a collaboration between the labs of Lowry and UCLA researcher Kathrin Plath, who were among the first scientists and the first in California to reprogram human skin cells into iPS cells. The researchers performed microarray gene expression profiles on embryonic stem cells and iPS cells to measure the expression of thousands of genes at once, creating a global picture of cellular function.

Lowry and Plath noted that, when the molecular signatures were compared, it was clear that certain genes were expressed differently in embryonic stem cells than they were in iPS cells. They then compared their data to that stored on a National Institutes of Health data base, submitted by laboratories worldwide. They analyzed that data to see if the genetic profiling conducted in other labs validated their findings, and again they found overlapping but distinct differences in gene expression, Lowry said.

“This suggested to us that there could be something biologically relevant causing the distinct differences to arise in multiple labs in different experiments,” Lowry said. “That answered our first question: Would the same observation be made with cell lines created and maintained in other laboratories?”

Next, UCLA researchers wanted to confirm their findings in iPS cell lines created using the latest derivation methods. The cells from the UCLA labs were derived using an older method that used integrative viruses to insert four genes into the genome of the skin cells, including some genes known to cause cancer. They analyzed cell lines derived with newer methods that do not require integration of the reprogramming factors. Their analysis again showed different molecular signatures between iPS cells and their embryo-derived counterparts, and these signatures showed a significant degree of overlap with those generated with integrative methods.

To determine if this was a phenomenon limited to human embryonic stem cells, Lowry and Plath analyzed mouse embryonic stem cells and iPS lines derived from mouse skin cells and again validated their findings. They also analyzed iPS cell lines made from mouse blood cells with the same result

“We can’t explain this, but it appears something is different about iPS cells and embryonic stem cells,” Lowry said. “And the differences are there, no matter whose lab the cells come from, whether they’re human or mouse cells or the method used to derive the iPS cells. Perhaps most importantly, many of these differences are shared amongst lines made in various ways.”

Going forward, UCLA researchers will conduct more sophisticated analyses on the genes being expressed differently in the two cell types and try to understand what is causing that differential expression. They also plan to differentiate the iPS cells into various lineages to determine if the molecular signature is carried through to the mature cells. In their current study, Lowry and Plath did not look at differentiated cells, only the iPS and embryonic stem cells themselves.

Further study is crucial, said Mark Chin, a postdoctoral fellow and first author of the study.

“It will be important to further examine these cells lines in a careful and systematic manner, as has been done with other stem cell lines, if we are to understand the role they can play in clinical therapies and what effect the observed differences have on these cells,” he said.

 

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The stem cell center was launched in 2005 with a UCLA commitment of $20 million over five years. A $20 million gift from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation in 2007 resulted in the renaming of the center. With more than 150 members, the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research is committed to a multi-disciplinary, integrated collaboration of scientific, academic and medical disciplines for the purpose of understanding adult and human embryonic stem cells. The center supports innovation, excellence and the highest ethical standards focused on stem cell research with the intent of facilitating basic scientific inquiry directed towards future clinical applications to treat disease. The center is a collaboration of the David Geffen School of Medicine, UCLA’s Jonsson Cancer Center, the Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science and the UCLA College of Letters and Science. To learn more about the center, visit our web site at http://www.stemcell.ucla.edu.

Head below the fold for the second release on a call for an ethics debate on stem cells.

Printable batteries

Yep, I’m using the title of this release for the title of this blog post because what else could be said? OMYGODWHATAMAZINGTECH? This is pretty amazing …

The release:

This release is available in German.

		IMAGE: The small, thin battery comes out of the printer and can be applied to flexible substrates. Click here for more information.

In the past, it was necessary to race to the bank for every money transfer and every bank statement. Today, bank transactions can be easily carried out at home. Now where is that piece of paper again with the TAN numbers? In the future you can spare yourself the search for the number. Simply touch your EC card and a small integrated display shows the TAN number to be used. Just type in the number and off you go. This is made possible by a printable battery that can be produced cost-effectively on a large scale. It was developed by a research team led by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Baumann of the Fraunhofer Research Institution for Electronic Nano Systems ENAS in Chemnitz together with colleagues from TU Chemnitz and Menippos GmbH. “Our goal is to be able to mass produce the batteries at a price of single digit cent range each,” states Dr. Andreas Willert, group manager at ENAS.

The characteristics of the battery differ significantly from those of conventional batteries. The printable version weighs less than one gram on the scales, is not even one millimeter thick and can therefore be integrated into bank cards, for example. The battery contains no mercury and is in this respect environmentally friendly. Its voltage is 1.5 V, which lies within the normal range. By placing several batteries in a row, voltages of 3 V, 4.5 V and 6 V can also be achieved. The new type of battery is composed of different layers: a zinc anode and a manganese cathode, among others. Zinc and manganese react with one another and produce electricity. However, the anode and the cathode layer dissipate gradually during this chemical process. Therefore, the battery is suitable for applications which have a limited life span or a limited power requirement, for instance greeting cards.

The batteries are printed using a silk-screen printing method similar to that used for t-shirts and signs. A kind of rubber lip presses the printing paste through a screen onto the substrate. A template covers the areas that are not to be printed on. Through this process it is possible to apply comparatively large quantities of printing paste, and the individual layers are slightly thicker than a hair. The researchers have already produced the batteries on a laboratory scale. At the end of this year, the first products could possibly be finished.

 

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Palin quits Alaska governorship

Precursor to a scandal, or naked national political ambition? Could easily be either one.

She’s told enough epic lies that any one of many could be coming home to bite her.  At the same time her rhetoric about how she runs Alaska — trransparency, no closed-door meetings, strong fiscal conservatism — runs almost perfectly counter to the reality on the ground. When your actual record is that of a neosocialist, obstructionist who runs regular closed-door meetings with a petty mean streak, it’s tough to counter on the national stage with opponents looking for any means to take you down.

And then again maybe she’s worried about those government checks she proudly doles out going way, way down with the price of oil severely reduced from the bulk of her time in office. That would really test her popularity in the state.

The latest in quantum computing

Hot on the heels of a post about photonic computing, here’s the latest in quantum computing — using matter qubits for quantum memory.

From the second link:

Physicists Peter Maunz and coauthors from the University of Maryland Department of Physics and National Institute of Standards and Technology in College Park, Maryland, and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, published their study in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

“Our work demonstrates a probabilistic remote entangling quantum gate,” Maunz told PhysOrg.com. “Remote entangling gates are an essential building block for quantum repeaters which facilitate quantum communication over long distances. Furthermore, the remote link established by the entangling gate could be used to interconnect remote quantum processors and thus could be an important additional possibility to scale a future quantum computer.”

As the scientists explain, their quantum gate works by entangling two ytterbium ions, each confined in its own trap positioned one meter apart. The scientists suspended the ions into either a one or a zero state using microwave radiation. The use of ion traps prevents anything from interacting with the ytterbium. This allows the ions to hold states of both zero and one simultaneously so that the ions function as qubits.

Photonic computing

Via KurzweilAI.net — There’s a lot of research going on for a next generation computer that moves beyond transistors and silicon — quantum computing is probably the big cheese in the race — but the concept of laser-based computers might just be the most interesting, and in a space of very cool tech possibly the most interesting.

Laser light switch could leave transistors in the shade

NewScientist Tech, July 1, 2009 An optical transistor that uses one laser beam to control another could form the heart of a future generation of ultrafast photonic computers, overcoming the speed limits with wires, say Swiss researchers. Using a green beam to switch an orange output beam from weak to strong is analogous to the way a transistor‘s control electrode switches a current between “on” and “off” voltages, and hence the 0s and 1s of digital data. And doing it with a single molecule means billions could be packed into future photonic chips.   Read Original Article>>

Second Life contributes to social research

I’ve blogged on MMORPGs and social research here and here amonst other times, and I still find it fascinating — although not surprising — that university research is turning to virtual communities for social research. It’s real people interacting and simply by its nature everything collected is both data rich and pre-formatted for the most part. A researchers dream.

The latest release on virtual communities and social research (aside from dk: I spotted a typo in the release. Can you find it?):

Second Life data offers window into how trends spread

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Do friends wear the same style of shoe or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors?

Social scientists don’t know for sure. They’re still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn’t keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences.

But the virtual world Second Life does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have taken advantage of this unique information to study how “gestures” make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.

Roughly half of the gestures the researchers studied made their way through the virtual world friend by friend.

“We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets,” said Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Adamic is an author of a paper on the research that graduate student Eytan Bakshy will present on July 7 at the Association for Computer Machinery’s Conference on Electronic Conference in Stanford, Calif. Bakshy is a doctoral student in the School of Information.

“There’s been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds,” Adamic said. “We’re not saying this is exactly how people share in the real world, but we believe it does have some relevance.”

This study is one of the first to model social influence in a virtual world because of the rarity of having access to information about how information, assets or ideas propagate. In Second Life, the previous owner of a gesture is listed.

The researchers also found that the gestures that spread from friend to friend were not distributed as broadly as ones that were distributed outside of the social network, such as those acquired in stores or as give-aways.

And they discovered that the early adopters of gestures who are among the first 5-10 percent to acquire new assets are not the same as the influencers, who tend to distribute them most broadly. This aligns with what social scientists have found.

“In our study, we sought to develop a more rigorous understanding of social processes that underlies many cultural and economic phenomena,” Bakshy said. “While some of our findings may seem quite intuitive, what I find most exciting is that we were actually able to test some rather controversial and competing hypotheses about the role of social networks in influence.”

The researchers examined 130 days worth of gesture transfers in late 2008 and early 2009. They looked at 100,229 users and 106,499 gestures. They obtained the data from Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life. Personally-identifying information had been removed.

 

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The paper is called, “Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content.” The research is funded by the National Science Foundation. Physics graduate student Brian Karrer is also a co-author.

For more information:

Full text of paper:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ladamic/

ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce:
http://www.sigecom.org/ec09/

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera sending images

NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera is sending back it’s first images from the lunar exploration. It should be both interesting and cool to see what comes in as the mission really kicks into gear.

The release:

New focus on the moon

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera releases its first images of the moon

		IMAGE: This Locator Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera’s Narrow Angle Camera image shows the position of the first two images. This image is 253×1000 pixels or 3,542 meters (2.2 miles) wide by… Click here for more information.

TEMPE, Ariz. – NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has taken and received its first images of the Moon, kicking off the year-long mapping mission of Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor. The LROC imaging system, under the watchful eyes of Arizona State University professor Mark Robison, the principal investigator, consists of two Narrow Angle Cameras (NACs) to provide high-resolution black-and-white images, a Wide Angle Camera (WAC) to provide images in seven color bands over a 60-kilometer (37.28-mile) swath, and a Sequence and Compressor System (SCS) supporting data acquisition for both cameras.

NASA reports that the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which launched June 18, is performing exceptionally well and spacecraft checkout is proceeding smoothly, so smoothly in fact that LROC was given an early, but short (two orbits) opportunity Tuesday evening to measure temperatures and background values while imaging. Since LRO is in a terminator orbit, much of the area photographed was in shadows, which is actually a good situation for performing engineering checks of camera settings, according to Robinson, with ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration. Much to the delight of the LROC team, a few of the images captured dramatic views of the surface.

“Our first images were taken along the Moon’s terminator – the dividing line between day and night – making us initially unsure of how they would turn out,” says Robinson. “Because of the deep shadowing, subtle topography is exaggerated suggesting a craggy and inhospitable surface. In reality, the area is similar to the region where the Apollo 16 astronauts comfortably explored in 1972. Though these images are magnificent in their own right, the main message is that LROC is nearly ready to begin its mission.”

LROC NAC: Two details from one of the first images

LRO was 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) above the lunar surface when the summed mode image was taken, resulting in a resolution of approximately 1.4-meters/pixel (34.4°S, 6.0°W). Incredible levels of detail are visible in these two (1000 pixel-by-1000 pixel) cutouts from the full image (2532 pixels-by-53,248 pixels). The NAC data shown has not been calibrated, and the pixel values were stretched to enhance contrast.

Along the terminator, there simply is not much light – the instrument is “photon-starved,” resulting in suboptimal signal-to-noise ratios. Without summing, images taken in this circumstance would be underexposed. To compensate for low light levels, the pixels can effectively be made larger by summing adjacent pixels to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, making the image sharper, though with 2x lower resolution. At this resolution, features as small as three meters (9.8 feet) wide can be discerned.

The NAC image shows a starkly beautiful region a few kilometers east of Hell E crater, which is located on the floor of the ancient Imbrian-aged Deslandres impact structure in the lunar highlands south of Mare Nubium. Numerous small, secondary craters can be identified, including several small crater chains. Also identifiable are distinctive lineations made readily apparent by the extreme lighting, representing ejecta from a nearby impact. The quality of these early engineering test images gives the LROC science team confidence it can achieve its primary goals, including obtaining the data needed to support future human lunar exploration and utilization.

		IMAGE: This full resolution detail is from one of the first images taken by a Narrow Angle Camera, part of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera imaging system. At this scale and… Click here for more information.

Once LRO finishes commissioning operations and enters its 50-kilometer x 50-kilometer (31 miles x 31 miles) mapping orbit, a maneuver currently scheduled for mid-August, the LROC NAC will take images of over 8 percent of the Moon at 50-cm/pixel.

LROC WAC: Seeing the colors of the Moon

The LROC WAC represents a very different type of imaging system than the NAC. The WAC sees the surface in seven colors, one after the other. Looking at the raw image is akin to looking through venetian blinds, which is a little confusing at first.

First you notice the five stair step-like visible bands, and then the two lower-resolution and barely visible ultraviolet bands. During processing, these seven bands are pulled apart and seven single-filter mosaics are created that can be combined in various combinations for scientific analysis.

		IMAGE: This full resolution detail is from one of the first images taken by a Narrow Angle Camera, part of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera imaging system. Visible are distinctive trending… Click here for more information.

The WAC is designed to help place the super-high-resolution NAC images into their proper geologic context, as well as discriminate color units on the surface to help geologists map rock types and identify resources. Acquired at the same time as the NAC image, more of the Deslandres region is visible because the WAC has a field of view 20 times wider than the NAC though with substantially lower resolution. For comparison, the width of the NAC image is shown as two vertical bars in the center of the image. The WAC image shown here has not been calibrated and the pixel values were stretched to enhance contrast.

LROC is scheduled for activation July 3 to formally begin its commissioning activities. The LROC Science Operations Center, part of the School of Earth and Space Exploration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences on ASU’s Tempe campus plans to steadily release images of the lunar frontier as more data is collected and processed.

LRO will spend the next year gathering crucial data on the lunar environment that will help astronauts prepare for exploring the Moon and eventually leaving the Earth-Moon system for voyages to Mars and beyond.

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 The public can view LROC images online at http://www.nasa.gov/lro.

Additional information about the LROC instrument is at http://lroc.sese.asu.edu.

How is Obama doing on civil liberties?

Civil liberties are a major rock in the foundation of the United States and Obama ran on a group of issues that leaned heavily on civil liberties. Heading into this Fourth of July weekend, and given he’s been in office for over five months now, I think it’s a fair time to take a look at where the Obama administration is vis-a-vis civil liberties.

Not so great. This administration has been more about lip service than action on the civil liberty front. To be fair change in D.C. won’t happen overnight on any set of policies, but to date there doesn’t seem any urgency to many of the civil liberty concerns Obama ran on in the race for the Oval Office.

Here’s Cato’s Doug Bandow on Obama’s dissappointing performance:

It’s fair to say that civil liberties and limited government were not high on President George W. Bush’s priorities list.  Indeed, they probably weren’t even on the list.  Candidate Barack Obama promised “change” when he took office, and change we have gotten.  The name of the president is different.

Alas, the policies are much the same.  While it is true that President Obama has not made the same claims of unreviewable monarchical power for the chief executive–an important distinction–he has continued to sacrifice civil liberties for dubious security gains.

Reports the New York Times:

Civil libertarians recently accused President Obama of acting like former President George W. Bush, citing reports about Mr. Obama’s plans to detain terrorism suspects without trials on domestic soil after he closes the Guantánamo prison.

It was only the latest instance in which critics have argued that Mr. Obama has failed to live up to his campaign pledge “to restore our Constitution and the rule of law” and raised a pointed question: Has he, on issues related to fighting terrorism, turned out to be little different from his predecessor?

Small business and health care reform

Here’s two stories on Main Street and the health care debate.

First up is entrepreneurship and opposition to public plan health care:

The so-called “public option,” backed by President Obama and many Congressional Democrats, would set up a government-backed health insurance plan that would compete with private plans. Though details remain fuzzy, the proposal already has critics on both sides of the aisle decrying “government-run health care.” The American Medical Association and private insurers oppose any public option.

Also resisting is the National Federation of Independent Businesses, the nation’s largest and most influential small business group. A fierce critic of the Clinton administration’s health care reform efforts a decade ago, the NFIB now considers universal health care to be one of its top legislative priorities. But it wants to see that care and coverage come from the private sector.

“Our members, who are entrepreneurs and risk takers, really do fundamentally at the end of the day want lower costs and competition, but they are going to be very skeptical of something that has a lot of government involvement,” says Michelle Dimarob, the federation’s legislative policy manager. The NFIB is instead pushing for a reform plan that would provide universal coverage and cut costs by increasing competition among private insurers, likely through the creation of government-mediated insurance pools.

And batting second is a NYT blog post underscoring a range of small biz attitudes toward the debate:

Oddly, the public plan is also one of the battle lines for organizations that claim to represent small business. The National Federation of Independent Business and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce staunchly oppose a public plan; the Small Business Majority appears (pdf) to support it; while the National Small Business Association insists that if there is a public plan, it should be constrained by the same rules as private insurance.

 The legislators who will decide the issue are the handful of moderates in both parties. The conventional wisdom is that the House will pass the public plan, and its fate will rest in the hands of maybe 10 senators. But it may prove a battle in the House, too: The conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition supports only a drastically curtailed (pdf) government option, and its 49 members could tip the balance. So the question is, how will these moderates vote in the end?

Cloud computing and Wall Street

Looks like IT tight budgets at financial firms are the rubber and cloud computing is the new road.

From the link:

Can new technology initiatives help pull Wall Street out of the danger zone? A new survey released by IBM and Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) finds that IT budgets are tight on Wall Street, but things are loosening up, and there’s going to be plenty of demand for new technology initiatives in the near future as firms on the Street look to “transformational” solutions to help better manage risk.

The survey of more than 350 Wall Street IT professionals found a “significant” increase in interest in new technologies and computing models, in particular cloud computing, as firms seek to overcome budgetary restrictions and skills shortages. Almost half of the respondents now see cloud computing as a disruptive force.

The past year has seen marked growth interest in cloud computing. The number of respondents predicting that cloud computing would force significant business change more than doubled (from 21% in 2008 to 46% in 2009), making it the top disruptive technology, ahead of operational risk modeling and mobile technologies.

Major initiatives underway at most Wall Street firms include enhancing electronic trading tools (69%), improving data capacity and bandwidth (58%), and improving technology framework and infrastructure
(58%). It can be assumed that the last item includes SOA efforts.

Expanding your search engine horizons

There’s more out there in the online search space than Google, Microsoft’s Live … — er, Bing, and Yahoo. The new Wolfram|Alpha decision engine comes to mind.

Here’s five more search options from CIO.com.

Number three from the link:

Hunch

Hunch is all about a decision engine, asking the user 10 questions or less to arrive at a solution to a problem or concern. At the core of the search site is a question selection algorithm built by Hunch’s small collection of Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer scientists with backgrounds in machine learning.

The design is such that questions are asked just like a human would structure a line of questioning. The questions asked vary based on what has already been asked and how it was answered.

And Hunch is another search engine with a social aspect. The smarts are a collection of common knowledge derived from users who can submit new topics, questions to ask and decision outcomes.Hunch says its algorithm is a mathematical framework married with a group of users who provide “personality by contributing to it and making it clever, funny, and nuanced.”

Sea ice at 800 year low

Climate change is big news right now with cap-and-trade being debated in D.C., in the media and around the blogosphere. Global warming, dangerous anthropogenic interference, greenhouse gasses and polar ice reduction are words and phrases that are becoming very familiar to many people.

By any honest statistical reckoning it’s clear humanity is playing a large role in the current state of the climate, but at the same time I don’t completely buy into the extreme alarmism going on because as scientists such as Freeman Dyson are stating, we can’t model the complexity of the climate and we have no way of knowing exactly how the climate will react to a warmer planet. There are no easy answers and potentially very dire consequences in the coming decades if the worst of today’s predictions come to pass.

Where ever you stand on the issue of global warming, news like this is never good to read. As always, it’s a good idea to look at any research with as critical an eye as you can bring to the data, but even if the dates are off by even hundreds of years the ice in our oceans is dwindling at increasing rates.

The release:

The least sea ice in 800 years

		IMAGE: There has never been so little sea ice in the area between Svalbard and Greenland in the last 800 years. Click here for more information.

New research, which reconstructs the extent of ice in the sea between Greenland and Svalbard from the 13th century to the present indicates that there has never been so little sea ice as there is now. The research results from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, are published in the scientific journal, Climate Dynamics.

There are of course neither satellite images nor instrumental records of the climate all the way back to the 13th century, but nature has its own ‘archive’ of the climate in both ice cores and the annual growth rings of trees and we humans have made records of a great many things over the years – such as observations in the log books of ships and in harbour records. Piece all of the information together and you get a picture of how much sea ice there has been throughout time.

Modern research and historic records

“We have combined information about the climate found in ice cores from an ice cap on Svalbard and from the annual growth rings of trees in Finland and this gave us a curve of the past climate” explains Aslak Grinsted, geophysicist with the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.

In order to determine how much sea ice there has been, the researchers needed to turn to data from the logbooks of ships, which whalers and fisherman kept of their expeditions to the boundary of the sea ice. The ship logbooks are very precise and go all the way back to the 16th century. They relate at which geographical position the ice was found. Another source of information about the ice are records from harbours in Iceland, where the severity of the winters have been recorded since the end of the 18th century.

By combining the curve of the climate with the actual historical records of the distribution of the ice, researchers have been able to reconstruct the extent of the sea ice all the way back to the 13th century. Even though the 13th century was a warm period, the calculations show that there has never been so little sea ice as in the 20th century.

In the middle of the 17th century there was also a sharp decline in sea ice, but it lastet only a very brief period. The greatest cover of sea ice was in a period around 1700-1800, which is also called the ‘Little Ice Age’.

“There was a sharp change in the ice cover at the start of the 20th century,” explains Aslak Grinsted. He explains, that the ice shrank by 300.000 km2 in the space of ten years from 1910-1920. So you can see that there have been sudden changes throughout time, but here during the last few years we have had some record years with very little ice extent.

“We see that the sea ice is shrinking to a level which has not been seen in more than 800 years”, concludes Aslak Grinsted.

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Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-009-0610-z

Nanotech data storage may have hit snag

There have been high hopes for utilizing nanotechnology in data storage and the possibilities for very large storage volume in very small areas. New research from the NIST and the Institute of Solid State Physicshave uncovered an unexpected range for the “pinning effect” which is creating changes in the material 1000 times further than thought to be possible. The high range may dramatically limit how small nanotech data storage devices can become.

The release:

Unexpectedly long-range effects in advanced magnetic devices

		IMAGE: NIST MOIF (Magneto-optic imaging film) technique is unique in being able to image magnetic domains in real time while they are forming, growing and disappearing. Bright and dark regions represent… Click here for more information.

A tiny grid pattern has led materials scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Institute of Solid State Physics in Russia to an unexpected finding—the surprisingly strong and long-range effects of certain electromagnetic nanostructures used in data storage. Their recently reported findings* may add new scientific challenges to the design and manufacture of future ultra-high density data storage devices.

The team was studying the behavior of nanoscale structures that sandwich thin layers of materials with differing magnetic properties. In the past few decades such structures have been the subjects of intense research because they can have unusual and valuable magnetic properties. The data read heads on modern high-density disk drives usually exploit a version of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect, which uses such layered structures for extremely sensitive magnetic field detectors. Arrays of nanoscale sandwiches of a similar type might be used in future data storage devices that would outdo even today’s astonishingly capacious microdrives because in principle the structures could be made even smaller than the minimum practical size for the magnetic islands that record data on hard disk drives, according to NIST metallurgist Robert Shull.

The key trick is to cover a thin layer of a ferromagnetic material, in which the magnetic direction of electrons, or “spins,” tend to order themselves in the same direction, with an antiferromagnetic layer in which the spins tend to orient in opposite directions. By itself, the ferromagnetic layer will tend to magnetize in the direction of an externally imposed magnetic field—and just as easily magnetize in the opposite direction if the external field is reversed. For reasons that are still debated, the presence of the antiferromagnetic layer changes this. It biases the ferromagnet in one preferred direction, essentially pinning its field in that orientation. In a magnetoresistance read head, for example, this pinned layer serves as a reference direction that the sensor uses in detecting changing field directions on the disk that it is “reading.”.

Researchers have long understood this pinning effect to be a short-range phenomenon. The influence of the antiferromagnetic layer is felt only a few tens of nanometers down into the ferromagnetic layer—verticallly. But what about sideways? To find out, the NIST/ISSP team started with a thin ferromagnetic film covering a silicon wafer and then added on top a grid of antiferromagnetic strips about 10 nanometers thick and 10 micrometers wide, separated by gaps of about 100 micrometers. Using an instrument that provided real-time images of the magnetization within grid the structure, the team watched the grid structure as they increased and decreased the magnetic field surrounding it.

What they found surprised them.

As expected, the ferromagnetic material directly under the grid lines showed the pinning effect, but, quite unexpectedly, so did the uncovered material in regions between the grid lines far removed from the antiferromagnetic material. “This pinning effect extends for maybe tens of nanometers down into the ferromagnet right underneath,” explains Shull, “so you might expect that there could be some residual effect maybe tens of nanometers away from it to the sides. But you wouldn’t expect it to extend 10 micrometers away—that’s 10 thousand nanometers.” In fact, the effect extends to regions 50 micrometers away from the closest antiferromagnetic strip, at least 1,000 times further than was previously known to be possible.

The ramifications, says Shull, are that engineers planning to build dense arrays of these structures onto a chip for high-performance memory or sensor devices will find interesting new scientific issues for investigation in optimizing how closely they can be packed without interfering with each other.

 

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* Y.P. Kabanov, V.I. Nikitenko, O.A. Tikhomirov, W.F. Egelhoff, A.J. Shapiro and R.D. Shull. Unexpectedly long-range influence on thin-film magnetization reversal of a ferromagnet by a rectangular array of FeMn pinning films. Physical Review B79, 144435, 2009. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.79.144435.

Moving toward quantum-encrypted communication networks

Very exciting news in milestone setting quantum-encrypted communications networking.

The release:

Researchers unite to distribute quantum keys

Researchers from across Europe have united to build the largest quantum key distribution network ever built. The efforts of 41 research and industrial organisations were realised as secure, quantum encrypted information was sent over an eight node, mesh network.

With an average link length of 20 to 30 kilometres, and the longest link being 83 kilometres, the researchers from organisations such as the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology (formerly Austrian Research Centers), id Quantique, Toshiba Research in the UK, Université de Genève, the University of Vienna, CNRS, Thales, LMU Munich, Siemens, and many more have broken all previous records and taken another huge stride towards practical implementation of secure, quantum-encrypted communication networks.

A journal paper, ‘The SECOQC Key Distribution Network in Vienna’, published as part of IOP Publishing’s New Journal of Physics‘ Focus Issue on ‘Quantum Cryptography: Theory and Practice’, illustrates the operation of the network and gives an initial estimate for transmission capacity (the maximum amount of keys that can be exchanged on a quantum key distribution, QKD, network).

Undertaken in late 2008, using the company internal glass fibre ring of Siemens and 4 of its dependencies across Vienna plus a repeater station, near St. Pölten in Lower Austria, the QKD demonstration involved secure telephone communication and video-conference as well as a rerouting experiment which demonstrated the functionality of the SEcure COmmunication network based on Quantum Cryptography (SECOQC).

One of the first practical applications to emerge from advances in the sometimes baffling study of quantum mechanics, quantum cryptography has become a soon-to-be reached benchmark in secure communications.

Quantum mechanics describes the fundamental nature of matter at the atomic level and offers very intriguing, often counter-intuitive, explanations to help us understand the building blocks that construct the world around us. Quantum cryptography uses the quantum mechanical behaviour of photons, the fundamental particles of light, to enable highly secure transmission of data beyond that achievable by classical methods.

The photons themselves are used to distribute cryptographic key to access encrypted information, such as a highly sensitive transaction file that, say, a bank wishes to keep completely confidential, which can be sent along practical communication lines, made of fibre optics. Quantum indeterminacy, the quantum mechanics dictum which states that measuring an unknown quantum state will change it, means that the information cannot be accessed by a third party without corrupting it beyond recovery and therefore making the act of hacking futile.

The researchers write, “In our paper we have put forward, for the first time, a systematic design that allows unrestricted scalability and interoperability of QKD technologies.”

 

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Iran’s green wave is not over

From ABC News’ Lara Setrakian via Twitter:

@LaraABCNews And, from same source, very loud Allahu Akbars on Tehran rooftops #Iranelection

The despotic regime will not crumble quickly or easily, but the cracks in the foundation are real and fatal. The Irani people have seen the brutal truth behind the ruling mullahs and what is clearly much more a police state at this point than an Islamic republic.

Amazon and cloud computing

Did you know Amazon is in the cloud computing outsourcing business? Me either. Looks like the books and products e-tailer is now offering outsourcing for “a storage service, a compute service, a database service, a messaging service and a payment service.”

Overreach away from a core competency or a great business idea to leverage internal knowledge?

Sony going big in carbon reduction

Look for many more press releases like the one below from Sony. It’s been pretty hot lately for companies to rave about solar and other alternate power initiatives, and reducing the carbon footprint is the latest buzzy “green” option for firms to use as proof of being good global citizens.

The release from this morning:

Sony Reduces Approximately 100,000 Tons Worth of CO2 Emissions Through Use of Renewable Energy in FY2008

Sony Europe Achieves 100% Renewable Energy, U.S. Continues to Expand Efforts, 50% of Electricity Usage at Sony Group Headquarters in Japan to also Go Green

TOKYO, July 1 /PRNewswire/ — Sony Corporation is continuously working to increase energy efficiency in order to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As part of this effort, Sony is actively promoting the use of renewable energy.  By implementing initiatives such as the Green Power Certification System and the introduction of solar power generation systems, Sony reduced its global CO2 emissions by approximately 100,000 tons in fiscal year 2008.

Sony Europe has achieved independent certification that every facility with over 100 employees is powered by 100% renewable energy amounting to 190 million kWh or approximately 55,000 tons worth of CO2 emissions. Through continuous energy efficiency efforts, Sony’s European operations have reduced CO2 emissions by approximately 90% between fiscal years 2000 and 2008.

Sony Group companies in the U.S. purchased 42 million kWh of renewable energy in fiscal year 2008. This equates to a 25,000 ton reduction in CO2 from renewable energy usage. In April 2009, Sony DADC, a leading producer of optical disc media, announced that it is purchasing more than 83 million kilowatt-hours of green power in the U.S. annually – enough to meet 44% of the organization’s purchased electricity use.

Also in the U.S., continuous enhancements are being made to Sony Pictures Entertainment’s facilities and operations to increase efficiency and utilize renewable energy sources. For example, Sony Pictures is using 100% renewable energy for its Arizona data center and has installed solar photovoltaic cells on the roof of an existing building at its Culver City, California headquarters as part of a pilot solar energy program. The studio is also experimenting with renewable energy sources, such as biodiesel, in film production. According to researchers from Cornell University, the use of biodiesel fuel in production generators on the set of Columbia Pictures’ recent film, “The Taking of Pelham 123,” demonstrated the potential for a substantial decrease in carbon monoxide emissions, an element that makes up smog.

While renewable energy is less accessible in Japan, Sony today purchased Green Power Certificates equivalent to approximately 50% of the electricity to be used at Sony City (Sony’s Headquarters building in Tokyo) beginning October 1, 2009. This represents the entire daytime electricity usage at the building, and is equivalent to the annual electricity consumption of approximately 4,400 households. This is the first time that green energy has been introduced at Sony City, and is expected to result in an annual GHG emission reduction of approximately 6,800 tons. In fiscal year 2008, the Sony Group in Japan purchased a total of 55.49 million kWh in renewable energy through the Green Power Certificate System. With today’s additional purchase taking this total to 70.94 million kWh, Sony continues to be the largest purchaser of green energy in Japan.

Sony will continue to promote the use of renewable energy and implement various measures across its sites and operations to ensure ongoing energy conservation and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. All of these initiatives are part of Sony Corporation’s broader commitment to the environment, which extends from research and development of energy-efficient products, to responsible materials re-use and recycling.

Source: Sony Corporation of America
   

Web Site:  http://www.sony.com/

Europe prepped to put Iran on island

A diplomatic island, that is.

From the link:

Iran courted new levels of post-election isolation from the European Union on Wednesday as European diplomats pondered whether to withdraw the ambassadors of all 27 member nations in a dispute over the detention of the British Embassy’s local personnel.

European diplomats said that no formal decision to order their envoys home had been taken but that the measure was an option under consideration as the European Union — Iran’s biggest trading partner — tries to work out how to defuse the dispute in a way that would shield other embassies in Tehran from similar action.