Biotechnology

Three letters beamed across a lab bench may spark a revolution in wireless communication. The seemingly simple transmission of "IBM" was received by the first working radio chip to be made from the modern wonder material, graphene â€" sheets of carbon, each just one atom thick. Graphene, with its flat, hexagonal lattice, was first isolated a decade ago. It won its discoverers a Nobel prize in physics, in part because its high electrical and thermal conductivity led to broad predictions that it would completely replace silicon transistors, the key component in many electronics. This latest achievement shows that analogue circuits such as radios can indeed make use of the material, potentially leading to cheaper, more efficient wireless devices. Until now, making wireless circuits like the ones in Bluetooth and WiFi chips has not been possible with graphene transistors, because it is too delicate a material and only weakly adheres to t...

AT THE end of March several small bundles of electronics will be ploughed into a field in Cheshire, UK. The sensors will measure soil temperature and moisture content, then transmit those measurements wirelessly to the surface. It is the kind of information farmers around the world need to conserve water while still growing enough crops to feed an expanding population. Currently being tested in lab soil at the University of Manchester, UK, the sensors are cheap to produce, low-power and can be left to gather information in the soil for years without maintenance. They use radio frequency identification to communicate and harvest a small amount of power from an RFID reader mounted on a tractor that collects the data as it moves over each node, says Chuan Wang, who works on the project at the university. Another team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) â€" based in the Midwest's Corn Belt â€" is already well on the way to making ...

Ancient Chinese scrolls may solve a dilemma for futuristic electronics: how to avoid curling. Hanging scrolls traditionally used in Chinese paintings are normally stored rolled up to protect their delicate artwork. But when unrolled, the long sides will curl, potentially causing damage. Tzay-Ming Hong at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan and his colleagues decided to investigate curling scrolls after a trip to the National Palace Museum in Taipei, where they talked to art conservationists about ways to use physics to protect hanging scrolls. "Like the mounting masters before them, over the span of more than 2000 years, they did not think this problem was at all solvable," says Hong. The team modelled the problem on computers and with real paper and plastic films. They found that rolling causes the back layer of a scroll to stretch along its length. This means the paper shrinks back when the scroll is laid out flat, causing it to...

Is that a bird or a drone watching you from the telephone wire? A drone with legs can perch just like a bird â€" or land and walk on flat surfaces. Bhargav Gajjar of Vishwa Robotics in Brighton, Massachusetts, designed the legs as an add-on for small US air force drones. Small drones generally lack landing gear. Many rely on a controlled crash-landing, a somewhat crude approach compared with the elegant precision landing of a perching bird. Gajjar studied dozens of bird species and recorded their landings using a high-speed camera. His drone's legs are based on those of the American kestrel. The drone perches in an upright position with a powerful gripping action from an electric motor. Its claws are extremely sharp so that its grip is difficult to break. A remote computer uses footage from a camera fitted to the drone to control flight and get the drone into the correct position for landing. Just like a real bird, the dron...

IF YOU are the kind of person who can afford to be conscientious about what you eat, you are probably torn between rival concerns whenever you visit the supermarket. You want to keep food miles to a minimum, but you also want your greens to taste like they are fresh from the farm. Most of us, however, don't live in areas where those two ambitions are readily compatible. Hence the rising prevalence of refrigerated shipping containers, on the one hand, and pricey urban farmers' markets on the other. Enter the vertical farm. The idea of intensive cultivation inside purpose-built buildings isn't new, but it's now beginning to make economic and environmental sense, particularly given the booming appetites and megacities of Asia (see "Vertical farms sprouting all over the world"). But will such crops attract shoppers? When it comes to farming, we are accustomed to images of rolling fields and golden sunlight. Marke...

WEST GERMANY, 1972. Security services are hunting down the Baader-Meinhof gang. Knowing that the guerillas favour high-rise apartments as safe houses, they gather data on energy use, looking for apartments that consume little or no power most of the time but pay their rent in full. It pays off: one apartment fits the profile and leads to a series of arrests. You don't have to be a police target to be nervous of what your energy use says about you â€" from the hours you keep to your TV tastes. That's why Google's acquisition of a company called Nest rings alarm bells (see "Nest thermostat acquisition is Google's home invasion"). Nest makes smart thermostats that learn your behaviour and adjust the heating accordingly. Convenient and helpful â€" and a potential invasion of privacy. Nest's founders say they have no plans to share data on their customers' behaviour. But few believe that will las...

It may have won its discovers the Nobel prize, but graphene now has a serious rival. "Phosphorene" â€" which has a similar structure to carbon-based graphene but is made of phosphorus atoms â€" is a natural semiconductor and so may be better at turbocharging the next generation of computers. The new material has already been used to make rudimentary transistors. Discovered 10 years ago, graphene is a form of pure carbon just a few atoms thick. This thinness causes electrons to zip across it much faster than they do across silicon, the material at the heart of today's computer chips. So the hope is that graphene chips could eventually replace silicon, leading to much faster computers. But graphene has a fundamental limitation, says Peide Ye at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. It conducts electricity a little too well. Sticky tape By contrast, silicon is a semiconductor, mea...

Spider-Man can leap off tall buildings and swing through the New York skyline by shooting a dragline from his wrist. Now there is a spider-inspired robot that can perform the same trick. It could be used to explore rocky planets, spinning itself a line to abseil down when it comes to the edge of a cliff, for example. "Spiders travel around surface-free space between tree branches and can position themselves in mid-air," says LiYu Wang, who has developed the robot alongside colleagues at the Bio-Inspired Robotics Lab at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. "There is no technology that allows a robot to do the same thing except flying, and then the amount of payload they can carry becomes a major issue." To spin the dragline, the robot uses thermoplastic adhesives, which are solid at room temperature but form a liquid when heated to around 70 °C. A stick of the material is fed into a small chamber...

Forget the charging cable: breakthroughs in inductive charging for electric vehicles mean drivers just park over a pad in the road to get more juice I'M ON a bus headed for Bletchley Park, but not to visit the UK's second-world-war codebreaking centre, I'm just along for the ride. That's because I'm on an electric bus that is one of the first vehicles to use a revolutionary inductive charging technology. Its batteries charge wirelessly when the bus stops to pick up passengers. With no need to plug in to charge, it's a breakthrough that should speed up the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EV). Charging an EV is a laborious process. The owner has to find a charging point, connect up their cable and leave the car for some hours. It's inconvenient, and cables can easily get lost or damaged. Wireless power transfer technology was developed decades ago, but low efficiency meant it was restricted to ...

Gravity wasn't all fiction: tiny pieces of high-speed orbiting debris endanger our satellites. Now Japan is set to launch an electromagnetic net to catch them SOMEWHERE in Earth's orbit, a satellite explodes into a terrifying cloud of debris. Moments later, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are left scrambling to dodge the deadly space junk. This problem isn't confined to the Oscar-nominated space thriller Gravity â€" scientists are struggling with it in real life. Now a rather unusual solution is being tested: a really big net. Next month, the Japanese space agency, JAXA, will pilot its "electrodynamic tether" for the first time. It is one of many possible solutions that have been proposed to deal with space debris (see "Catch 'em, drag 'em, blast 'em"). Hundreds of thousands of pieces of spacecraft, satellites and other equipment from human spaceflight zip around our planet, some travelling ...

Nothing for 31 months. Then a half-hour delay that drove everyone nearly mad. Finally, a triumphant signal that confirms that the comet-chaser Rosetta is alive and well, 800 million kilometres from Earth. "I'm feeling relief, elation and now excitement. We have a mission," says Mark McCaughrean, senior scientific advisor in the directorate of science and robotic exploration at ESA. For almost three years, the European Space Agency (ESA) craft has been deeply asleep because it was travelling so far from the sun that it couldn't generate enough power through its solar arrays to be kept awake. Now it is falling back towards the sun, gaining on its target comet by 800 metres every second. After a nail-biting day at ESA's mission control, we now know that an alarm clock on Rosetta woke the spacecraft at around 1000 GMT this morning, as planned. This triggered a sequence of events that culminated in the spacecraft pho...

With hours to go until we know whether the first space mission designed to land on a comet can succeed, tensions are running high at the European Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt â€" the European Space Agency's equivalent of NASA's famous mission control. I am spending the day here with the scientists and engineers at the heart of the comet-chasing Rosetta mission, and so far, it's been all about the wait. "I'm not calm, I'm not excited, I'm somewhere in between," says Roberto Porta, a member of the spacecraft operations team. Rosetta was scheduled to wake up at 1000 GMT today, after spending more than two years in a power-saving hibernation mode. Porta will be responsible for detecting the signal the wake-up was successful, which is expected later on today, at 1730 at the earliest. At stake is a billion-dollar mission to land on a comet â€" humanity's first ever attempt to do this â€" to inves...

Job Title : Biotechnology Regulatory Affairs Specialist Requisition ID : 1400124 Job Category : Analytic Services Job Type : Regular Primary Location : USA-MD: MARYLAND-FREDERICK Schedule : Full-time Remote Work Authorized : No Relocation Assistance : Not Available Travel : Yes, 10 % of the Time Clearance Level : None Employee Status : Regular Job Posting : Jan 16, 2014, 10: 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 equivale...

Shooting a laser at polystyrene beads, scientists have made a mirror that is held together by light. The creation could be a step towards putting ultra-light mirrors in space that would be big enough to see continents and forests on planets orbiting far-off stars. Current space telescopes have limited vision because is it costly and complicated to send large, heavy mirrors into orbit. The mirror on NASA's premiere planet hunter, the Kepler space telescope, is just 1.4 metres across and cannot see planets directly. Instead Kepler spots the tiny changes in brightness when a world crosses in front of its host star. When NASA's James Webb Space Telescope launches in a few years, it will carry the largest mirror yet into space: a 6.5-metre behemoth made of 18 interlocking segments. To fit into the launch vehicle, the mirror itself will have to be folded up and then unfolded in space. Jean-Marc Fournier of the Swiss Federal Institut...

THEY might not seem at all stable as they batter into light bulbs but moths have inspired an autopilot for drones. Small drones find it difficult to fly in strong winds and cluttered environments. So Physical Sciences Inc (PSI) based in Andover, Massachusetts, in association with the US military, filmed hawk moths to see how they manage to stay aloft. The firm used a motion-tracking system familiar to film-makers, attaching reflective beads to moth wings and recording the moth's flight via high-speed cameras. The moth's ability to react very quickly to disturbances in the air seems to be key to its success. While moths do collide with things, they can recover quickly. "Typically they recover stability in about one wing beat," says PSI's Thomas Vaneck. The resulting algorithms have been built into a new quadrotor drone, unveiled this month, called InstantEye. This weighs less than 500 grams but can fly in winds ...

High School Biotechnology Teacher (2014-2015) The Denver Schools of Science and Technology (DSST) seeks a High School Biotechnology Teacher to join one of the leading charter school organizations in Colorado. DSST Public Schools seeks teachers with a track-record of raising student achievement to join a team of educators dedicated to providing a rigorous college preparatory program to a diverse population. At DSST Public Schools, teachers are leaders who are responsible for developing and implementing DSST’s curriculum. Teachers also play an integral role in ensuring student success through the support of our school culture, the development and instruction of a rigorous core curriculum, and the use of data to drive their daily practice. DSST Public Schools Overview: The Denver Schools of Science and Technology (DSST) operates a network of tuition-free, open-enrollment STEM charter schools. All DSST Public schools are part of the Denver Public Schools (DPS) district and s...

I. JOB IDENTIFICATION A. JOB TITLE: Sales Correspondent, Bio B. SUPERVISOR: Director, International Distribution, Biotechnology C. ESSENTIAL FUNCTION: Process sales orders, prepare shipping documents, print and organize pick lists, send invoices to customers; handle incoming customer calls to place orders and check order status and/or pricing; maintain Sales Order files; maintain customer contact information; forward sales leads to PAÂ's; provide assistance to PAÂ's Sales Consultants and FASÂ's; serve as backup to other associates and receptionist. II. JOB QUALIFICATIONS A. EDUCATION: High School diploma a minimum, associate degree preferred. B. EXPERIENCE: 1. Minimum five (5) years of experience in office environment. 2. Experience with Personal Computers (example: word processing and spreadsheets) 3. Ability to effectively use office equipment (such as; copier / calculator / fax machine / multi-extension telephone / typewriter). 4. Some experience with order pro...

Thinking of crowdfunding your start-up? Then don't make potential contributors feel guilty if they don't cough up some cash. Instead, couch your pitches in language that makes clear that those investing in a project will be rewarded with freebies like T-shirts and discounted purchasing deals on the product when it hits the market. Those are just two of the messages to emerge from a detailed linguistic analysis of tens of thousands of successful and unsuccessful pitches posted on the Kickstarter crowdfunding website during 2012. After noticing that some projects fail to get funded even after attracting positive media attention at launch, researchers Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta wondered if the way a pitch is written, rather than the inventiveness of the project or the quality of the video explaining the idea, play a role in hitting funding targets. What really got them intereste...

High-definition TV delivered the crispest picture we had ever seen, from breathtaking nature footage to the wrinkles on Brad Pitt's face. That's nothing â€" the next TV you buy will be four times as sharp. After years of gimmicky innovations such as 3D, gesture recognition and on-screen apps, ultra high-definition is finally a technology that could take off. Ultra high-definition is also known as 4K, which refers to the 3840-pixel horizontal resolution of the screens â€" in other words, nearly 4000. This is four times the 1080-pixel resolution of current high-definition screens, and creates much finer detail and greater texture. Even close up the picture doesn't pixelate. Kevin Spacey's on board Most major manufacturers, including Sony, Samsung and LG, already have 4K products on the way. More important to the technology's uptake will be the fact that a host of content producers and distributo...

JOB TITLE: Mechanical Engineer DEPARTMENT: Development Engineering OVERVIEW: This is an exciting opportunity for a Mechanical Engineer to join a fast growing biotechnology company. This position will work in the R&D department in the development on new Biotech and Medical products. The main focus of this position is the design and development of new products from conceptualization to transfer to manufacturing. JOB TASKS & RESPONSIBILITIES: - Contribute to conceptual design and create concepts for the design of new biotech products. - Mechanical design engineering to create original designs for new products that include mechanisms, fluid handling, motion control, and disposable designs. - CAD modeling of new designs using Solidworks and design validation tools. - Conduct analysis of mechanical designs using Excel and classical analysis. Experience with structural, rotational, and thermal FEA analysis and CFD is a plus. - Develop prototypes - the engineer will work with our inter...

"OK Google. Start my car and switch on the heating." This voice command would have ben useful to many of those affected by last week's icy blast in the US and Canada. It might not be too far-fetched, now Google has partnered with four major car companies to bring its Android operating system to vehicles in 2014. Hyundai, Audi, Honda, General Motors, Google and silicon chipmaker Nvidia are the first members of the Open Automotive Alliance, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. The partnership's proposed vehicles will be the first to have built-in 4G internet, and will offer diverse applications, from entertainment to navigation. The technology will also provide the first foothold of internet connectivity for the autonomous cars of the future. Other companies are making similar moves: Apple is working on its "iOS in the car" project and is expected to announce more details later this year. Micr...

Read more: "Lifelogging: This is your life, on the record" Gordon Bell , one of the first people to chronicle his existence digitally, explains how it has changed his life and the potential pitfalls How did lifelogging take off? The secret was to be interviewed by New Scientist : your 2002 article about our MyLifeBits project was so widely read by other journalists that coverage snowballed. What devices were you logging with at first? The one device everybody has: the PC. All your email, your correspondence and documents â€" that side of your life is already in there. Then we got scanners. Then digital cameras. Then heart-rate monitoring armbands in 2002, GPS trackers in 2004 and wearable SenseCams in 2005. Data sources proliferated. Everyone has a smartphone now. Have they changed the landscape? Oh my god, yes. They have totally transformed it and made lifelogging almost implicit. They offer a very accur...

Exotic materials that bend light in extreme ways could be used to perform complex mathematical operations, creating a new kind of analogue computer. Tools for manipulating light waves have taken off in recent years thanks to the development of metamaterials. These materials have complex internal structures on scales smaller than the wavelength of the light they interact with, and so they produce unusual effects. Most famously, metamaterials promise to deliver "invisibility cloaks" that can route light around an object, making it seem to disappear. Nader Engheta at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and his colleagues decided to explore a different use for metamaterials, one that adapts the old idea of analogue computing. Today's digital computers are based on electrical switches that are either on or off. But before these machines were analogue computers based on varying electrical or mechanical properties. The slide rule i...

An online inventory of your belongings could help reduce insurance premiums â€" and let you sell things on eBay with one click Read more: "Lifelogging: This is your life, on the record" THE word "lifelogging" may bring to mind gadgets that track your fitness, take pictures throughout your day to record what you have been up to â€" even your Facebook posts. But the phenomenon is about to move beyond the realm of gym rats and the picture-obsessed into the mainstream. From making us safer drivers to letting us search our recorded memories, a host of tools promise to influence our lives like never before. Most lifeloggers gather information about themselves every day, whether by keeping a photographic record, or just measuring how far they run during a workout. But the field has spent too long focusing on gathering information, says Steve Whittaker of the University of California in Santa Cruz, a psychologist who has...

NOTE: This is a Temporary Student Intern appointment. For important information about LLNL appointments refer to the FAQs above. Assignments are typically for a full time position during the summer academic break, but may include assignments during during the academic year. Salaries are based on student academic level. Selected applicants will be required to provide transcripts. Refer to the Scholar Program website at https://scholars.llnl.gov/ for additional student employment information. NATURE AND SCOPE OF ASSIGNMENT The Biosciences and Biotechnology Division offers continuing students (undergraduate and graduate) and Bachelors and Masters recent graduates within one year the opportunity to engage in practical research experience to further their educational goals. Opportunities include both computational and experimental research on problems associated with bioenergy, microbial communities, biodefense, and innate immunity. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AT THE UNDERGRADUATE 706.1 LEVEL (NON-...