Biotechnology

(Image: Raymond Beisinger) Your most intimate companion may be betraying you. Smartphones are lucrative targets for cybercriminals and keeping them true might not be as easy as we hoped IT'S 2 am. Do you know what your smartphone is up to? It may not be sleeping faithfully beside you. Seduced by a server far away, it springs to life and betrays your trust, giving away your secrets and running up quite a tab. For many, the nightmare is a reality. In 2011, for example, a cybercriminal in China gained control of hundreds of thousands of phones, remotely directing them to send premium-rate text messages, call premium toll numbers and play pay-per-view videos while their owners slept on obliviously. Other phones develop late-night gambling habits. In 2012, journalist Elise Ackerman wrote about her friend, Mike, who caught his phone playing online poker. It then used his credit card ... To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, inc...

Job Descriptions: Wedbush Securities is one of the nation's largest full-service investment banking and brokerage firms. Our San Francisco office is seeking an Equity Research Associate to join our award-winning team of sell-side equity researchers covering the biotechnology and biopharmaceutical sectors. We are specifically seeking an individual with exceptional quantitative and analytical skills and a passion for the securities industry. This is a unique opportunity to work with and learn from some of the most talented professionals in the securities industry. Responsibilities include, but are not limited to: Conduct regular scientific and market due diligence on covered companies including conducting channel checks on assigned companies Build, update and maintain financial models Assist with timely preparation of research reports Conduct surveys with key medical opinion leaders Assist with timely publication of research notes and reports Provide general support to the equ...

A citizen science effort to revive a middle-aged spacecraft has come to a close after the probe's rockets failed to fire. But there may be life in the old spacecraft yet, says Keith Cowing of space news site NASA Watch, who helped spearhead the rescue effort. "It's not a zombie, it's not a Flying Dutchman, it just ran out of gas," Cowing says. "The stereo still works and so does the air conditioner." The International Sun-Earth Explorer 3 (ISEE-3) launched in 1978 as a joint US and European mission to study how the solar wind, a flood of charged particles from the sun, interacts with our planet's magnetic field. It originally orbited at the L1 Lagrange point â€" a spot between the sun and the Earth where their combined gravitational forces effectively cancel out so smaller objects can hold still. But in the mid-1980s, ISEE-3 left its home base to orbit the sun and chase comets Gia...

Hundreds of women are raped in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo every day. A new app for doctors could help prosecute some of the perpetrators ASMA, 14, was raped at gunpoint. Two soldiers attacked her as she looked for firewood in the forest. "When I want to cry, one put a gun in my mouth while the other raped me. When the first had finished the other took his turn. I thought they were going to kill me." Asma is just one of the many hundreds of thousands who have been the victims of sexual violence during the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). A 2011 study estimated that several dozen women were being raped in the DRC every hour. Soon, stories like Asma's could be documented using a smartphone app named MediCapt. Such information may one day help bring perpetrators to justice. MediCapt was developed by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a non-profit organisation based in New York City. T...

We present the metal of many colours. Sheets of a unique alloy just a few nanometres thick take on different hues with the flick of a switch, offering a way to make full-colour displays for wearable computers such as Google Glass or smart contact lenses. The alloy germanium-antimony-tellurium (GST) can be switched between an amorphous phase, in which its molecular structure is disordered, and a highly ordered crystalline phase by the energy of a laser beam or electric current. The material is being explored for use in advanced memory chips, and is already being used in recording devices. For instance, when a laser is fired at a DVD coated in the alloy, the disc stores binary 0s and 1s as one of the two phases. The telltale reflectivity of each phase is then used to read back the data. Harish Bhaskaran and Peiman Hosseini at the University of Oxford were investigating the material's exotic optical properties, some of which appear w...

I KNOW I'm no longer myself when I see my own body standing beside me. What's more, when I look down, I see the body of a man. Then I lift my arms, and the other "me" moves her arms in time. It's an odd feeling. I'm wearing an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset as part of a system developed by Yifei Chai at Imperial College London that gives you the illusion of inhabiting another body. It is Chai's body I see where my own should be. He is standing next to me, wearing a head-mounted, twin wide-angle camera to film my body and his own. These two perspectives are sent to my headset where they are flipped â€" I see myself as having his body and my body appears next to me. But that's not all. My movements are being tracked by a Kinect camera. Chai is wearing a suit full of electrical stimulators that force his arms into the same position as mine. This enhances the illusion: when I look down, the movement of the ...

Job Description Summary The Mathematics and Science Division of Babson College invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Biotechnology (with a health sciences focus) starting September 1, 2015. The ideal candidate will have a Ph.D. degree in a biotechnology related field, an outstanding teaching record, an enthusiasm for developing and delivering innovative science courses for undergraduate business students, and an interest in and comfort with teaching interdisciplinary courses drawing from a broad range of science disciplines. The candidate must have an active research agenda and effectively demonstrate that it can be carried out within Babson’s existing laboratory facilities or through cooperation with other laboratories. Babson encourages and supports collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to research. In addition the applicant must have strong personal communication skills and exhibit a desire to engage with the Babson community to provide both divi...

HUMANS have never encountered a more intelligent life form, but this will change if we create machines that greatly surpass our cognitive abilities. Then our fate will depend on the will of such a "superintelligence", much as the fate of gorillas today depends more on what we do than on gorillas themselves. We therefore have reason to be curious about what these superintelligences will want. Is there a way to engineer their motivation systems so that their preferences will coincide with ours? And supposing a superintelligence starts out human-friendly, is there some way to guarantee that it will remain benevolent even as it creates ever more capable successor-versions of itself? These questions â€" which are perhaps the most momentous that our species will ever confront â€" call for a new science of advanced artificial agents. Most of the work answering these questions remains to be done, yet over ... To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access ...

Say hello to the next generation of space cowboys. This week, private aerospace firm FireFly Space Systems in Austin, Texas, revealed the design of the FireFly Alpha, a shiny new vehicle that aims to launch lightweight satellites at low cost. FireFly was founded in January this year and has former SpaceX and Virgin Galactic employees on staff. The company's mission is to reduce costs for lighter loads going to low Earth orbit, such as constellations of small satellites used for communications networks or monitoring Earth. Most probes like this currently piggyback into space on larger missions that can afford to fly on big rockets. But that means small satellite operators have a limited choice of launch dates and orbits. To improve efficiency, the FireFly Alpha will use an unusual engine design called an aerospike, which has a wedge-shaped nozzle to produce thrust, rather than the traditional bell shape. Aerospike engines have been...

A little mineral with a sunny disposition, perovskite is cheap and ubiquitous (Image: Gary Cook/Visuals Unlimited, Inc/Getty) The solar cell of the future will be flexible, highly efficient and oh-so cheap â€" just as long as we can make it work in the rain GOOD things come to those who wait, and Tsutomu Miyasaka had waited a long time. Knowing that a solar cell can be made using just about any pigment â€" coffee, chlorophyll, red wine â€" the Japanese physicist had spent years testing all sorts of colourful substances in the hope of finding one as efficient as it was cheap. Then, one day in April 2007, a student walked into his lab at the University of Tokyo, carrying a lump of an unremarkable mineral called perovskite. It proved to be the start of something entirely remarkable. When Miyasaka reported the results from his first perovskite solar ... To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archiv...

We are currently seeking a registered Patent Agent/registered Patent Attorney with a background in biotechnology/chemistry to join our Intellectual Property (IP) Department in any of our Boston/NY/DC/Chicago/Stamford/Hartford offices. A PhD (molecular/cell biology, biochemistry, medical science, immunology, chemistry, etc.) and 2-3 years previous patent prosecution experience are required. Successful candidates will have superior academic credentials and writing skills as well as a solid foundation in patent prosecution and patent application drafting. Applications for this opening will only be accepted online through the self-apply link: https://selfapply.edwardswildman.com/viRecruitSelfApply/Default.aspx Edwards Wildman Palmer is an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment and will not be discriminated against on the basis of disability or veteran status. Search firms, please contact legalrecrui...

Job Title: Biotechnology Regulatory Affairs Specialist Requisition ID: 1400124 Job Category: Sciences Primary Location: USA-MD: MARYLAND-FREDERICK Schedule: Full-time Job Type: Regular Travel: Yes, 10 % of the Time Job Posting: Jan 16, 2014, 11:48:44 AM Description: CSC has an immediate position for a Biotechnology Regulatory Affairs Specialist. The position is located in Frederick, Maryland Essential Job Functions Develop regulatory technical writing strategy to advance a product through the national and/or international regulatory approval process at all stages of biopharmaceutical product development. Responsible for preparing regulatory applications/submissions/plans for recombinant vaccines. Generate and review documents for FDA meetings. Qualifications Basic Qualifications Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and experience Bachelor's degree in engineering, mathematics, chemistry, biology computer science, or related field preferred Four o...

The J.R. Simplot Company is a diverse, privately held organization with roots firmly planted in agriculture and related businesses. These endeavors have been around for centuries and will continue to be a vital part of the global economy. We currently have a Director Biotechnology R&D-Strawberry position available. This position is part of our Plant Sciences research group in Boise, Idaho. Summary : The Director Biotechnology R&D-Strawberry provides leadership and strategic direction for the R&D Strawberry team, through the building, management, and scaling of a strategic business dedicated to providing innovative advancements in strawberry development. Responsible for leading all activities including new product development including creating and identifying new and novel science for crop success. Responsible for all areas of strawberry product research including understanding molecular technology, field agronomy, and regulatory requirements. Additionally, responsible fo...

Snap out of it. Those who find themselves daydreaming when they're supposed to be reading a report may soon find a device is telling them to pay attention. A detector can now figure out when a person's attention shifts from their task and get them to focus on it again. People are thought to zone out about 20-40 per cent of the time; these instances have been found to result in performance failures, poor memory recall and low reading comprehension ( Science , DOI: 10.1126/science.1192439 ). To combat the issue, Sidney D'Mello and Robert Bixler at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana hit on the idea of making interfaces intelligent enough to spot a user's waning attention and take action. Their software tracks a person's eye movements with a commercial eye tracker. The system figures out if the person's mind is on the task by observing specific features in the way the eyes move, such as how long they fixate on...

These are waves worth catching. Generating tiny swells in a dish of saline solution prompts beads, copper powder and even cells to assemble into a panoply of intricate patterns. It could offer a simple way to build elaborate structures that may be useful for microelectronics and making human tissue. Many attempts at small-scale construction build structures piece by piece, which can be time-consuming for complex products. Other methods can only use specific building blocks, such as magnetic materials . Now a team led by Utkan Demirci at Stanford University in California has found a way to quickly build micro-sized structures from almost anything, using a "liquid template". The team started by making acrylic containers, each roughly 1 centimetre by 1 centimetre, but sculpted in various shapes. They filled the containers with saline solution and connected them to a vibration generator and amplifier to create acoustic pressure . ...

An algorithm schedules and manages the nightly engineering work on one of the world's best subway systems â€" and does it more efficiently than any human could JUST after midnight, the last subway car slips into its sidings in Hong Kong and an army of engineers goes to work. In a typical week, 10,000 people carry out 2600 engineering works across the system â€" from grinding rough rails smooth and replacing tracks to checking for damage. People might do the work, but they don't choose what needs doing. Instead, each task is scheduled and managed by artificial intelligence. Hong Kong has one of the world's best subway systems. It has a 99.9 per cent on time record â€" far better than London Underground or New York's subway. It is owned and run by MTR Corporation, which also runs systems in Stockholm, Melbourne, London and Beijing. MTR is now planning to roll out its AI overseer to the other networks it manages. ...

We are used to smartphones communicating using their regular 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth â€" but it turns out there's another way. A system called Pulse uses the magnetic field sensor, or magnetometer, for the compass app in iPhones and Android phones, to receive messages in the form of a varying magnetic field produced by a nearby electromagnet. The transmission rate is pretty slow â€" only 40 bits per second â€" and it only works over a range of 2 centimetres. But that has its own advantages, say Vassilis Kostakos and colleagues at the University of Oulu in Finland, who have built a test electromagnet system that communicated with Android phones to show that the idea works. By encoding data in a varying magnetic field they have shown they can transmit anything from a web address to a MIDI music sequence from the electromagnet to the phone. That means a small electromagnet embedded in an interactive street poster ...

The internet of things is about to go from buzzword to reality as your house wakes up to dozens of communicating appliances â€" but who will own the hub? THE race for the smart home is on. Last week, Nest Labs of Palo Alto, California, made the software behind its internet-connected thermostat and smoke detector systems accessible to outside developers. The move opens the door for anyone to build apps that work with Nest's products â€" which have found their way into more than a million homes since the company was founded in 2010. Nest Labs says that more than 5000 developers are interested in tapping into its system. These include home appliance giant Whirlpool, fitness tracking pioneer Jawbone, and car maker Mercedes Benz. At Google's annual I/O developer conference on 26 June, Nest's founder Matt Rogers said this opening up will let developers do "supercool stuff that they could never have done alone". Nest, ...

Hauled from the sea like an oversized jellyfish, this soggy saucer could one day drop humans on the dusty surface of Mars. On Saturday, NASA lifted the doughnut-shaped airbag high over the Pacific Ocean and then let it fall back to Earth, testing an inflatable system for putting human missions on the Red Planet. Most successful robot landings have used some combination of parachutes, airbags and retro-rockets to safely slow the descent from the edge of Mars's thin atmosphere to its rust-coloured surface. And in 2012, the 1-tonne Curiosity rover pioneered the ambitious "sky crane" system, which lowered the rover to the surface on tethers suspended from a hovering platform. But human missions will need to bring tens or hundreds of times more mass to the surface in one trip, and existing technologies do not scale up well. Ripped chute The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator is an inflatable system that reduces sp...

A mighty X-ray warrior is going to spring forth to hunt monster black holes and chart interstellar storms. The European Space Agency (ESA) last week approved plans for the Athena X-ray space telescope, which will be the largest of its kind ever built. Costing about €1 billion, the flagship project will launch in 2028. It will weigh in at 5 tonnes, be about 12 metres long and will provide 100 times greater sensitivity than existing X-ray missions. The telescope will have two main X-ray eyes. The Wide Field Imager instrument will look at relatively large areas of sky, scanning for X-ray emissions from supermassive black holes in the early universe. "To find those, you need to make very deep images of the X-ray sky over a very wide area, because those objects are quite rare," says Kirpal Nandra of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, who is leading the project. Athena's other eye, th...

Have a look at any ancient artefact and there's probably something there that you cannot see: stone corners that have long since chipped off; carvings rubbed away by time; or once-glorious colours that have faded. Now those missing features can be brought back to life, thanks to Revealing Flashlight, a system that projects computer-generated models on to real objects, filling in missing details wherever its spotlight lands. The system has been piloted at the Allard Pierson Museum at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where it illuminated lost pigmentation on a fragment from an Egyptian tomb. It has also been used to highlight the contours of a 3D-printed replica of a statue of Isis from the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and to help viewers decipher inscriptions on an Egyptian stela. "We have more and more virtual objects available, either from real objects that have been scanned or virtually created objects that have been 3D print...

For six weeks this summer, coinciding with the Farnborough International Air Show, gigantic, unprepossessing buildings with names like Q121 and R52 are humming, droning and singing in celebration. It's all part of an installation created by sound artist Thor McIntyre-Burnie that utilises the buildings' exceptional acoustic properties. The buildings in Hampshire, UK, are the wind tunnels that shaped the Spitfire's peculiar, elliptical wings, as well as guiding designs for supersonic aircraft from as far back as 1942. Now they are open to the public for the first time. Finished in 1935, Q121 is a steel and reinforced concrete building some 15 metres high, housing Britain's largest wind tunnel. Designed to channel air in the most efficient manner, the tunnel boasts extraordinary acoustics. The machine's massive fan once drove air at 185 kilometres an hour into the maw of a concrete throat. Reinforced concrete vanes turned the gale ...

Pall is a Fortune 1000 materials science and engineering company with the broadest filtration, separation and purification capabilities in the world. Our process and product enabling technologies help our customers make good products better, safer and even possible. We provide innovative products to customers in health care, biotechnology, pharmaceutical, semiconductor, municipal drinking water, aerospace and industrial manufacturing markets. Headquartered in Long Island, NY, Pall has operations in every major country. Position Summary: This position is a key member of the Pall Life Sciences global marketing team. The Global Product Manager (GPM) will be responsible for defining and executing effective marketing programs and initiatives to maintain and support the growth of the biocontainer product range for Pall Life Sciences. This person will report functionally to the Vice President Single Use Technologies. The position will requ...

Wind resistance has met its match: an adaptable surface that can alter its aerodynamic properties to best suit the wind speeds it encounters. The surface, dubbed Smorph for Smart Morphable Surface, relies on simple mechanics to achieve this effect. "We use wrinkling," says Pedro Reis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who leads the project. The team has created a prototype out of silicon (see photo). The hollow ball is wrapped in a very thin, stiff layer of polystyrene. Lowering the pressure inside the ball causes the outer skin to wrinkle as the ball contracts, in the same way the skin of a prune does as the inner flesh dries and contracts. Reis found that these wrinkles could be made into a dimple pattern, similar to those placed on golf balls to decrease their drag. As dimple depth on the material changes with the internal pressure, this means it can be altered to give the best aerodynamics for the conditions. ...

ON YOUR last trip to the supermarket, where did you walk, what did you look at, and which products did you ultimately buy? Proximus, a start-up based in Madrid, Spain, wants to know. Using movement sensors placed around a store, Proximus tracks where individual shoppers go. By combining this data with purchase records, managers can get insights into how to organise their stores to make the most of their customers' habits. Online, many firms rely on web-analytics to learn about customer browsing and buying behaviour, says Marco Doncel Gabaldón, co-founder of Proximus. But in the physical world, decisions must be based on much patchier information. "We think that approach is wrong," Gabaldón says. "You can know the sales, but you don't know how many people pass near a product, or the conversion rate of a marketing campaign." Proximus presented its approach at the Techstars Demo Day in London last week. A ha...

BE CAREFUL you don't catch those Facebook blues. Feelings, like viruses, can spread through online social networks. A face-to-face encounter with someone who is sad or cheerful can leave us feeling the same way. This emotional contagion has been shown to last anywhere from a few seconds to weeks. A team of researchers, led by Adam Kramer at Facebook in Menlo Park, California, was curious to see if this phenomenon would occur online. To find out, they manipulated which posts showed up on the news feeds of more than 600,000 Facebook users. For one week, some users saw fewer posts with negative emotional words than usual, while others saw fewer posts with positive ones. Digital emotions proved somewhat contagious, too. People were more likely to use positive words in Facebook posts if they had been exposed to fewer negative posts throughout the week, and vice versa. The effect was significant, though modest ( PNAS , doi.org/tcg). ...

11:44 26 June 2014 Beautiful paintings need beautiful pigments. For centuries, artists have seized upon advances in the theory and technology of colour to improve their creations. Making Colour, a new exhibition running until 7 September 2014 at The National Gallery in London, tells the story of painting in every colour of the rainbow â€" and a few more besides. Sumit Paul-Choudhury Image 1 of 10 Moses Harris, The Natural System of Colours (between 1769 and 1776) People have wondered since ancient times why we see colours. Pythagoras thought they were associated with musical notes; Aristotle, with times of day; and Plato suggested that the basic colours of white, black, red and "radiant" were mixed by tears to create the spectrum we see. The modern theory of colour was born in 1672, when Isaac Newton told the Royal Society that he had split white light into its component colours with a prism. The colour of an object is ...