Biotechnology

10:26 05 March 2014 There is science in this beauty. All the entries in this annual photography competition were taken by engineers from the University of Cambridge as they worked. The winning photo, which looks like a disco sun, captures laser light diffraction. A selection of entries will be on display from 10 March as part of the Cambridge Science Festival. Sandrine Ceurstemont Image 1 of 7 Winner: Diffraction sun First prize went to this image of a laser shining on a liquid crystal spatial light modulator. The diffraction of the light creates this psychedelic pattern. PhD student Ananta Palani uses a similar set-up in his research designing a microscope that can magnify tiny, fast-moving objects. This could allow us to see a virus infecting a cell, which is difficult to observe using existing technology. (Image: Ananta Palani/Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge)

Why mine for metals when we can cultivate them? (Image: Pierluigi Longo) Plants that absorb metals from the soil could clean up old mines and allow farmers to harvest valuable resources without ruining the environment still more ALAN BAKER squatted to get a closer look at the delicate white flowers that shouldn't have been there. He knew that the soil in that part of England's Peak District was laced with metals toxic to most plants. Yet here, in the desolate surroundings of an old lead mine, he had found spring sandwort flourishing. That was 45 years ago and the flowers that Baker spotted on his hike have guided his career as a plant scientist. Over the years, he and his colleagues have shown how some plants can take up certain metals in such large quantities that it is possible to "grow" a crop of metals. The idea ... To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive content.

Merely going unseen won't silence your footsteps or neutralise your body heat. Now researchers are working on true stealth The most cunning paint job may be no use as camouflage. It won't do much to hide you from the prying eye of a thermal camera, or silence an inadvertent sneeze. Even something as subtle as a shadow can give your presence away. To win in the ultimate game of hide-and-seek, what you need is an invisibility cloak that goes way beyond simply not being visible. That might seem a tall order, yet researchers are racing to perfect the technology. So could their devices make you disappear completely? This is where the future of concealment begins to look hazy. An invisible man needs to be more than just unseen (Image: Paul Reed/Associated Newspapers/Rex) First, consider what it would take to make you vanish. If you could wear something that ... To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years of archive...

MORE than 100 million people around the world are exposed to dangerous levels of arsenic, which is found naturally in groundwater but has no obvious taste or odour. Its effects build up over time, slowly poisoning the body and leading to serious problems like heart disease, cancer and reproductive issues. Now a project aims to filter it out of drinking water â€" and lock it up in the concrete of new buildings. A team at the University of California, Berkeley, is planning a trial to filter 10,000 litres of water every day in rural sites across India. Susan Amrose and her team have designed a container that can hold 600 litres of water pumped in directly from a nearby well. Inside, it is fitted with a series of steel plates. A small voltage runs through the plates, making them rust more quickly. Arsenic binds to the rust as it forms and falls to the bottom of tank, where it is collected as rusty sludge. The treated water is then pumped out. The ...

FORMULA 1 motor racing is hardly a hotbed of green activism. But if anyone knows a thing or two about squeezing the maximum amount of kinetic energy out of a litre of fuel, it is a Formula 1 engineer. Now the sport's governing body has decided to put this expertise to good use. As of this weekend, Formula 1 cars will be limited to Ford Focus-sized engines, concentrating brilliant minds on fuel efficiency issues likely to be relevant to the real world of family cars (see "7 tricks to keep F1 cars fast and fuel-efficient"). The motives are not entirely altruistic: mainstream engine-makers have drifted away from Formula 1, claiming that its challenges are "irrelevant" to their core business. Formula 1 needs them back. But that is no reason to sneer. To meet the grand challenges of the 21st century, environmental concerns need to break out of their ghetto. If Formula 1 gets petrolheads fired up about fuel efficiency, so much the...

Hear that? Acoustic sensors that detect soil movement in slopes prior to landslides may, in future, provide early warnings. This could help to avoid tragedies like the Washington mudslide on 22 March. Heavy rainfall almost certainly triggered the slide, which was the largest in the US for a decade and buried the town of Oso in Washington state. By Tuesday, 14 people were confirmed dead, with 176 unaccounted for. Smothering an area of around 2.5 square kilometres, the 1.3-kilometre-wide slide occurred at 10.45 am local time on Saturday 22 March, leaving much of the town covered in a layer of mud and debris up to 12 metres thick. The material descended from a steep, tree-covered slope overlooking the town. Landslide experts viewing photos and footage of the disaster speculate that month-long heavy rains, which ceased a few days before the slide, were probably to blame. Dave Petley, a geologist and authority on landslides a...

NORTH CAROLINA BIOTECHNOLOGY CENTER VICE PRESIDENT, AGRICULTURAL BIOTECHNOLOGY The North Carolina Biotechnology Center is seeking qualified applicants for the position of Vice President, Agricultural Biotechnology. This position is responsible for developing projects and programs all across the state and in specific regions of the state around the convergence of agriculture and biotechnology. This Agricultural Biotechnology Initiative promotes economic development of agricultural biotechnology in North Carolina and requires an entrepreneurial spirit. Responsibilities include establishing goals for program planning and budget preparation, coordinating and managing personnel and resources, facilitating communications between the Agricultural Biotechnology Development Program and other Center programs, and representing the Agricultural Biotechnology Development Program to external parties. Work duties include supervision and office management, development of department goals and strategie...

(Image: Sean Lynch/Caters News) YOU are looking at a colour no one can see. If you visited these grassy fields in Nepal's Annapurna Himalayan range, as New York-based photographer Sean Lynch did, they would look bright green. Crucially, though, they also reflect near-infrared light, which lies just beyond the range our eyes can sense. The fuchsia colour in Lynch's photo is created when this invisible light hits a special dye in the photographic film. "None of us will ever actually experience this 'colour'," says Paul Lucey, a geophysicist at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. Fields like these are a great way to showcase this imaging technique because plants reflect infrared light especially well. They do this for the same reason they shun green light: to make photosynthesis, which prefers blue and red light, as efficient as possible. Such invisible reflections aren't just cool â€" they reveal imp...

Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Bono have all done it. Soon robots will have a chance to deliver their own TED talks. That's the latest challenge to the field of artificial intelligence, announced yesterday by the non-profit X Prize Foundation. The foundation's mission is to galvanise breakthroughs in science and technology by offering piles of cash to anyone who can meet an ambitious goal. For example, in 2004 the makers of SpaceShipOne won $10 million for being the first private organisation to fly to the edge of space twice within a two-week period. But would putting a robot on stage and asking it to give a talk in the style of the TED presentations â€" known for their polished delivery of complex information in a wide range of fields of scientific discovery and innovation â€" really challenge researchers to advance the field of artificial intelligence? The rules of the contest are still being hashed out, and the ...

Now you can measure everything under the sun with the technology you carry. A wristband that monitors exposure to UV rays allows users to soak up the light needed to make vitamin D without getting burned, and without the need for sunscreen. "Vitamin D deficiency is pandemic around the world," says Karin Edgett, co-founder of UVA+B SunFriend. The vitamin is important for managing calcium levels in the body and maintaining healthy bones. In recent years it has also been implicated in reducing the risk of diabetes, arthritis and cancers such as breast cancer. Although sunscreens protect from the harmful effects of the sun's rays â€" including skin cancer â€" they also stop the skin absorbing UVB rays, needed to make vitamin D. "There are huge numbers of people who are aware the sun is healthy, but don't know how much they need," Edgett says. Safer rays She hopes the UVA+B SunFriend will ...

PART-TIME BIOTECHNOLOGY INSTRUCTOR Foothill-De Anza Community College District is establishing a pool of qualified applicants for this position. Applications will be accepted continuously until otherwise noted. Applications will remain on file for two years from date received or last submitted. SELECTION PROCEDURE: Applications will be screened by appropriate department representatives on an as-needed basis. Qualified applicants who best meet the needs of the division will be contacted for an interview. DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES OF THE POSITION INCLUDE: Standard duties expected of all part-time faculty include the performance of instructional, counselor or librarian duties as assigned, evaluation and assessment of student work, and submission of grades. In addition, part-time faculty are expected to participate in evaluations of their performance including administrator, peer and/or student evaluations. Part-time faculty may al...

We are prone to see intent rather than accident in the unexplained. Cue conspiracy theories when a plane goes missing, says a psychology researcher When a lack of conclusive information leaves a factual vacuum after a headline-grabbing event, conspiracy theorists rush to fill it. In the case of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, their take ranges from relatively plausible (perhaps the plane was hijacked, or destroyed by a bomb) to nonsensical (it was abducted by aliens or made invisible using advanced technology). While we wait for answers, I, along with colleagues Chris French and Christopher Thresher-Andrews at Goldsmiths, University of London, wanted to see how many people were jumping to the conclusion that foul play was involved. We asked over 400 people to rank six possible scenarios for the jet's disappearance â€" three accidental, three conspiratorial â€" from most to least plausible. The most popular scenario in...

Colin Angle is co-founder and CEO of iRobot in Bedford, Massachusetts. The company recently created a brushless version of the Roomba vacuum, and this week released a telepresent robot called Ava 500. Its Packbots will also look for bombs at the football World Cup in Brazil this year. We caught up with Angle earlier this month People dress up Roomba vacuum cleaners . Soldiers mourn bomb-disposal Packbots. Are these responses to your robots a surprise? If you ask someone who doesn't own a Roomba if they would name it, they almost violently say, "No, why would I name my vacuum cleaner?" Yet once they own one, over 80 per cent of people do. In the beginning of Roomba, we all took turns answering the support line. Once, a woman called and explained that her robot had a defective motor. I said, "Send it back, we'll send you a new one." She said, "No, I'm not sending you Rosie." Do you sympathise with that perso...

The Regional Account Manager for Biotechnology will be a top performing Account Manager selling the full range of Nova's Biotechnology analytical and automation instrumentation. The Account Manager will manage complex sales situations including single departmental sales, multi-departmental sales and often multi-locations sales. Daily activities include tasks such as account maintenance, lead generation, product and PowerPoint presentations, instrumentation evaluations, quote generation, forecasting, and the reporting of activities. Requirements: BS degree, a strong science aptitude, and a minimum of 3-5 years of documented success in capital instrumentation sales, preferably within the biotechnology industry. Must have strong communication skills, the ability to interact well with customers who have science and technical backgrounds, strong organizational and time management skills, and strong presentation and demonstration skills...

The Malaysian Airlines jet missing with 239 people on board did indeed turn back from its point of last contact in the South China Sea and headed west towards the Andaman Sea and the Indian Ocean instead, independent analyses of military radar data and satellite signals by Malaysian, US and British experts reveal. It means that the massive one-week-old, multinational air and sea search in the South China Sea has been called off, Malaysian prime minister Najib Razak said in a 15 March statement. Instead the search will now be focussed on two possible flight paths that have been identified by triangulating signals from the plane that reached a geostationary Inmarsat satellite. Those paths comprise a northern corridor from the border of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan to northern Thailand, and a southern corridor from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean. The analyses also confirm that the plane flew on well after its point of last contact...

THERE is a clean-up going on down under. Australia plans to track shards of space junk and blast them with lasers to prevent the kind of space crash depicted in the movie Gravity . Earth is surrounded by a diffuse cloud of space debris, ranging from lost screws to parts of old rockets. Even a tiny shard could damage satellites or pose a danger to astronauts on the International Space Station. And when two pieces of junk collide at high speeds, they break up into smaller pieces, which are tougher to track. With a small population spread across a wide area, Australia relies heavily on satellites to deliver services. So later this year, a new centre, funded by A$20 million from the Australian government, will begin to track tiny pieces of debris and try to predict their future trajectories. The centre will operate from the Mount Stromolo Observatory in Canberra. The ultimate aim is to knock shards of space debris out of their orbits usi...

As a Biotechnology Intern you will have the opportunity to work in our Infectious Disease R&D group to gain professional experience developing IVD tests for a molecular diagnostic company. The Biotechnology Intern will provide laboratory support for a team of scientists. Duties include conducting DNA/RNA extractions; performing quantitative PCR assay optimization; and confirming Cepheid GeneXpert results. Flexibility is important in adjusting to changes in work volume and focus. Estimated duration of internship: 3 months, 40 hours per week. Responsibilities: This is lab-bench position where the candidate will be responsible for optimizing assay performance for a our GeneXpert system. Candidate will work closely with other scientists and be responsible for documenting work in a lab notebook and for writing up reports describing experiment design and summarizing experimental results. Optimize PCR assay conditions Prepare and p...

The missing Malaysia Airlines jet sent at least two bursts of technical data back to the airline before it disappeared, New Scientist has learned. The data may help investigators understand what went wrong with the aircraft, no trace of which has yet been found. To aid maintenance, most airlines use the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which automatically collates and files four technical reports during every flight so that engineers can spot problems. These reports are sent via VHF radio or satellite at take-off, during the climb, at some point while cruising, and on landing. Malaysia Airlines has not revealed if it has learned anything from ACARS data, or if it has any. Its eleventh media statement since the plane disappeared said: "All Malaysia Airlines aircraft are equipped with… ACARS which transmits data automatically. Nevertheless, there were no distress calls and no information was relayed." ...

Nine nations have joined the attempt to find the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that disappeared with 239 people on board on a midnight flight out of Kuala Lumpur on Friday. The operation now involves 34 aircraft, 40 ships and a battery of search and rescue technologies. Coordinated by Malaysian authorities from a control centre in Kuala Lumpur, the nations contributing to the search for flight MH370 include Vietnam, France, Indonesia, Australia, China and the United States. There were 154 Chinese nationals on the missing flight, and the country has so far contributed four warships, a coastguard cutter and three search-and-rescue ships. More are said to be on the way. The US has flown a Lockheed Martin P-3C long-range search aircraft from its base in Okinawa, Japan, to Kuala Lumpur to undertake 10-hour nonstop search missions. And the USS Pinckney, a guided missile destroyer, has steamed into the Gulf of Thailand so that its two Sikorsk...

They promise equality of access to higher learning, but online courses will only succeed with better general education in place first, say two educationalists A REVOLUTION in education has been promised with a little help from technology. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free, online university-level instruction that anyone can access from anywhere, at least in theory. They have dominated headlines in the sector in recent years. Proponents have made bold claims for a fundamental change in higher education â€" drastically decreasing price and increasing access. Thomas Friedman, in an article in The New York Times , argued that nothing has greater potential to "lift more people out of poverty" and to "unlock a billion more brains to solve the world's biggest problems". Anant Agarwal, founder of MOOC-provider edX, believes they are making education "borderless, gender-blind, race-blind, class-blind, and bank account-bli...

Attempts to unmask digital currency guru Satoshi Nakamoto could prove a pivotal moment in the rise of a new economy An anonymous group of crypto-hackers? A lone mathematician? The US National Security Agency? No â€" Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious pseudonym behind the digital currency Bitcoin, has been revealed as Dorian Prentice Satoshi Nakamoto, a 64-year-old Japanese man living in Los Angeles, California. That is the claim published in Newsweek , as part of a splashy relaunch for the magazine's first print edition in over a year. Investigative reporter Leah McGrath Goodman spent two months tracking Nakamoto, speaking to his friends and family, before eventually confronting him. According to Goodman, Nakamoto acknowledged his role in Bitcoin but refused to answer questions. "I am no longer involved in that and I cannot discuss it," he is reported to have said. Online unmasking Now the story seems...

Metadata helps the US National Security Agency keep tabs on people, but it can also be used to expose surveillance, in particular state monitoring and censorship of microblogs like Twitter and Sina Weibo. Donn Morrison at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim created a computer-simulated social network, where two users were regarded as being connected if one of their posts appeared in the other's timeline. The pattern of connections between users provided the metadata that he used to analyse network behaviour. Most social networks are made up of clusters of communities, the links between them creating a characteristic structure. But when Morrison simulated the actions of state censors who deleted at least 10 percent of posts, the missing links changed the shape of the entire network, leaving it malformed and less connected. This was especially true when the censors targeted popular posts that had been retweeted. ...

City: San Francisco Address: Two Embarcadero Center Work Hours/Week: 40+ Work Environment: Office Employment Type: Permanent Pay Type: Salaried Exempt/Non-Exempt: Exempt % Travel Required: 0-25 People Manager: No Job Posting End Date: 04/04/2014 PURPOSE: Responsible for fundamental analysis of companies in the Biotechnology sector. PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES Develop an expertise in the Biotechnology sector Support and answer client queries as they relate to the sector Assist in the development and detailed modeling of company specific financial and reserve models Help maintain and develop sector specific databases Coordinate, generate and maintain research reports, presentations and databases Help coordinate quarterly and year end reporting initiatives Participate in and assist with morning comments Provide research support to analyst as required Assist with special ad-hoc projects, presentations a...

City: New York Address: 200 Vesey Street Work Hours/Week: 40+ Work Environment: Office Employment Type: Permanent Pay Type: Salaried Exempt/Non-Exempt: Exempt % Travel Required: 0-25 People Manager: No Job Posting End Date: 04/04/2014 PURPOSE: Responsible for fundamental analysis of companies in the Biotechnology sector. PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES develop an expertise in the Biotechnology sector support and answer client queries as they relate to the sector assist in the development and detailed modeling of company specific financial and reserve models help maintain and develop sector specific databases coordinate, generate and maintain research reports, presentations and databases help coordinate quarterly and year end reporting initiatives participate in and assist with morning comments provide research support to analyst as required assist with special ad-hoc projects, presentations and initiati...

Biotechnology Faculty Montgomery County Community College - United States About this company 7 reviews

AbbVie (NYSE: ABBV) is a global, research-based biopharmaceutical company formed in 2013 following separation from Abbott. AbbVie combines the focus and passion of a leading-edge biotech with the expertise and capabilities of a long-established pharmaceutical leader to develop and market advanced therapies that address some of the world’s most complex and serious diseases. In 2013, AbbVie will employ approximately 21,000 people worldwide and markets medicines in more than 170 countries. Note: Candidates must be open to extensive travel with potentially a longer term requirement to relocate based on needs of projects. Primary Function / Primary Goals / Objectives: An engineering professional who, working with little or no supervision, applies advanced scientific knowledge, engineering knowledge, mathematics, and ingenuity to complete complex assignments related to a specific technical field or discipline. A Principal Engineer has full knowledge of other related disciplines beyond ...