Biotechnology

Continue reading page | 1 | 2 Brain chips mean we are struggling to distinguish our own thoughts from ideas implanted by advertisers. Self-driving cars restrict old-school human drivers to special recreation parks. And the optimal number of fingers is 12.5. Confused? It's a vision of the world in 25 years, as dreamed up by today's researchers in computer-human interaction (CHI). CHI normally means investigating better ways for people to interact with devices we have now, but last week attendees at the annual conference in Toronto, Canada, got ahead of themselves. They created an imaginary conference agenda for 2039 that predicts the kinds of challenges we will face with future computers â€" many of which will be implanted. "It's meant to be sort of the fringes of human-computer interaction research, what's really edgy or provocative,"says Eric Baumer of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, ...

This position is limited to 11-29-2014 with extension contingent on funding. BASIC FUNCTION: Provide leadership for the operation and day-to-day direction of the Plant Biotechnology Laboratory's (PBL) administrative and business functions (including fiscal). Manage personnel organization of the laboratory, as well as the preparation of written materials, including publications, patents, grant proposals and quarterly and annual reports. Provide oversight of and mentoring for the fiscal/administrative staff and functions for the PBL Center's projects, including development of budgets, procurement operations, financial reporting, and oversight of an annual budget averaging over $2,100,000. Laboratory functions include oversight of laboratory management and operations. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Oversee all phases of the financial and laboratory administration of the PBL, including the following: budgetary oversight of grants, overhead, and foundation accounts, as ...

Continue reading page | 1 | 2 If you could quiz Watson, IBM's all-knowing supercomputer, from an app on your phone, what would you ask it? That is the question facing app developers now that IBM has shrunk its cognitive computer from the bedroom-sized monster that won the TV quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011 to the size of just three stacked pizza boxes. Mini Watsons can now easily be installed in data centres worldwide and made available as a cloud service to cellphone users. Until now it has been unclear what type of apps would make best use of Watson's capabilities. It is no ordinary computer, answering complex questions using data mining and machine learning. On 28 April, IBM unveiled the 25 best app ideas in response to the challenge it issued at February's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. Three of the ideas will be developed, making them among the first apps powered by Watson-in-the-cloud. IBM has set aside $100 mi...

(Image: Edgar Martins) This mobile gantry, seen from a rocket's-eye view and looking up, is where the latest example of the European Space Agency's new Vega launch vehicle is taking shape. It sits at the European spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana. The 50-metre-high gantry surrounds the rocket like a monolithic cocoon, protecting ESA engineers from the elements while Vega is assembled and tested. When the rocket is ready to launch, the 1000-tonne tower will peel away on rails, leaving Vega ready for lift-off. The picture was taken by Edgar Martins, a Portuguese photographer who is documenting ESA's awe-inspiring facilities around the globe. The images are featured in an upcoming book, The Rehearsal of Space and The Poetic Impossibility to Manage the Infinite , and an exhibition of the same name opening at the Wapping Project at Bankside in London on 25 April. If you would like to reuse any co...

Regional Account Manager, Biotechnology As the Regional Account Manager for Biotechnology, you will sell the full range of Nova’s Biotechnology analytical and automation instrumentation. You will manage complex sales situations including single departmental sales, multi-departmental sales and multi-locations sales. Daily activities include: account maintenance, lead generation, product and PowerPoint presentations, instrumentation evaluations, quote generation, forecasting, and generating activity reports. This position will cover the Midwest portion of the United States. Requirements : BS degree, a strong science aptitude, and a minimum of 3 years of success selling capital instrumentation within the cell culture market and selling to process development, manufacturing and/ or research and development. As our ideal candidate, you will possess polished communication skills. You will also have well-honed presentation and demonstration skills. Your effective time management skills an...

Tiny robots could help you heal. Acting as mini technicians, they could one day assemble medical devices inside the body. A veritable construction crew of micro-scale robots already exists, from worm-like bots that can move heavy loads to muscle-powered machines that can walk across a lab bench. But until now, finer control over miniature objects has proved elusive. Eric Diller and Metin Sitti of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have created a simple version of micro-robots using rods made of magnetic materials. Each robot is about 1 millimetre long and has two gripping arms. A magnetic field is used to move the robots and operate the grippers. Shrinking doctor Previous gripping bots had to be tethered to an outside controller, making them unsuitable for use inside the human body. Other versions could not move and grip things at the same time. "We can move them while they are closed or open, it doesn't m...

INSTRUCTOR (BIOTECHNOLOGY) POSITION DESCRIPTION Schenectady County Community College's Division of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Health invites applications for a full-time faculty position to lead our Biotechnology (A S.) and Biological Technician (A.A S.) programs and provide lecture and laboratory instruction in biology courses for non-majors and science majors. Other responsibilities include academic advisement, assessment, curriculum development, grant management, and service on college committees. This position reports directly to the Dean of Mathematics, Science, Technology and Health. DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES * Teaching a full-time course load including Biology/Biotechnology course lectures and laboratories. * Leading curricular development and assessment of biotechnology and biological technician degree programs. * Initiating grant development to support the biotechnology program. * Providing academic advisement to students. * Holding office hours for stu...

First, pour some graphite powder into a blender. Add water and dishwashing liquid, and mix at high speed. Congratulations, you just made the wonder material graphene. This surprisingly simple recipe is now the easiest way to mass-produce pure graphene â€" sheets of carbon just one atom thick. The material has been predicted to revolutionise the electronics industry , based on its unusual electrical and thermal properties. But until now, manufacturing high-quality graphene in large quantities has proved difficult â€" the best lab techniques manage less than half a gram per hour. "There are companies producing graphene at much higher rates, but the quality is not exceptional," says Jonathan Coleman of Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. Coleman's team was contracted by Thomas Swan, a chemicals firm based in Consett, UK, to come up with something better. From previous work they knew that it is possible to shear gra...

(Images: Tom Gauld) NASA says our furthest emissary has at last broken though into interstellar space â€" but Voyager's dispatches reveal that nothing is simple at the outer limits HEARD the joke about déjà vu? Several times. Then you've probably heard the news about NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft leaving the solar system. Its departure has hit the headlines many, many times â€" only for NASA to change its mind. Over the past decade, the veteran space probe has been in, out and even shaken all about. Last September, though, it looked like this game of space hokey-cokey was finally over. Voyager 1's normally cautious project scientist Ed Stone declared that, after 35 years, the probe had left for real. "This is humankind's historic leap into interstellar space." So why has it been so hard to tell if Voyager 1 has crossed the border from the solar ... To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, incl...

The internet will see you now. A new algorithm can track flu cases across the US by mining data from Wikipedia. The program monitors a handful of entries that a sick person or their loved ones would conceivably look up, like those on "flu season", "fever" and "epidemic". Every hour, it downloads publicly available information about how many people across the country accessed the pages. When the researchers compared their data with figures from the US Centers for Disease Control, they found they could accurately predict the number of cases in the country two weeks earlier and with a difference of just 0.27 per cent. In recent years, public health officials have been increasingly interested in trying to track illness with internet data like social media or search queries. One advantage of using Wikipedia is that its data is not controlled by a single institution, says co-author John Brownstein of Harvard Me...

Company Description PharmEng Technology is an international full service consulting firm that services pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device, nutraceutical, heath care and chemical sectors. PharmEng Technology has a proven track record of excellence which ensures all of client needs and governing regulatory expectations are met and exceeded. PharmEng Technology provides services in: -Commissioning & Qualification - Validation (Manufacturing, Lab) - Quality systems - Engineering - Regulatory Affairs - Training/Teaching As a fast pace fast growing consulting firm we are always looking for qualified scientists and engineers with the ability to create and communicate innovative and cost effective solutions to clients. This is a great opportunity to obtain a challenging career that enables you to work closely with major international clients and travel the world! We currently have projects all over the world in Canada, USA, Europe and Asia. Job Responsibilities: The individual w...

Sicilian police were looking to bust a criminal network thought to be responsible for a string of robberies, extortions and drug trafficking. They had a few leads, but wanted to know who else their suspects worked with and for. Eventually they got all the evidence they needed â€" thanks to software that traced who they were talking to and when. Called LogAnalysis, the software used metadata from some of the suspects' phones to map out the relationships between them. By plugging in information from a few people, the police could figure out who was involved, who they worked with and even what role they may have played in the crime. LogAnalysis is one example of how phone metadata â€" who someone called or texted, when they did so, where from and how long the call lasted â€" can be used to piece together someone's personal life. "The tool allows us to understand not only how people are interconnected, but also...

Continue reading page | 1 | 2 Will we soon be dancing to the rhythms of our brains? (Image: James Lange/pymca.co) A neuroscientist and a musician explain how they built the Brain Stethoscope, which is both brain scanner and musical instrument Why is a cellist and sound artist collaborating with someone who deals with brain disorders? Chris Chafe: I am working with neurologist Josef Parvizi on what we think is the first â€" certainly the cheapest â€" device that turns brainwaves into both music and a powerful medical tool. In the process, I am making some of the best, most exciting electronic music of my life. What led you down this path? CC: I have been involved in other projects where I turn data into sound, for example the output captured by underground geophones from fracking, or complex structures in synthetic biology. This is called sonification. Humans have great auditory acuity when it comes t...

Thank the hackers. This week's Heartbleed vulnerability has everyone running scared (see box below to read what you might do to protect yourself). The serious crack in the foundations of the supposedly secure internet was revealed earlier this week by a software engineer probing website security in his spare time. He received a cash bounty for his work, which he then donated to the Freedom of the Press Foundation, an organisation that funds encryption tools for journalists. The idea of publicly rewarding people who discover bugs could greatly improve internet security. New Scientist spoke with Merijn Terheggen , CEO and co-founder of HackerOne, the platform through which Google's Neel Mehta received his $15,000 reward. Terheggen hopes that Heartbleed will be the first of many vulnerabilities HackerOne turns up. If his vision is fulfilled, then the rewards for discovering these dangerous holes in internet security will ramp up quickly, both in financial ...

We are currently seeking an Equity Research Associate to join our Biotechnology team in New York. Responsibilities include the following: · Work in partnership with the senior analysts to conduct extensive company and industry research · Create financial models and valuation analyses and write company reports, industry reports and investment recommendations · The associate will also interact with company management teams and play a role in the research due diligence process, such as attending conferences and polling/speaking with physicians and other industry sources · As associates develop industry expertise, they will have increasing interaction with our sales and institutional clients discussing research ideas and investment recommendations Requirements: · Strong work ethic, resourcefulness, and the ability to think critically and creatively · Strong candidates will have an intense interest in the stock market and a demonstrated record of professional, academic and per...

Vaginas grown in a lab from the recipients' own cells have been successfully transferred to the body for the first time. The surgery was carried out on four women who were born without vaginal canals because of a rare condition. The women, who were teenagers at the time of the operation, now have fully functioning sexual organs. "After the operation they were able to function normally. They had normal levels of desire, arousal, satisfaction and orgasm," says Anthony Atala at Wake Forest School of Medicine in North Carolina, who led the research. He published the results only after four to eight years had elapsed following surgery, enough time for him to be sure there were no long-term complications. The four women had undeveloped vaginas because they all have a severe form of a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (MKRH), which affects about 1 in 5000 women. They also had some abnormal development ...

Underwater "pings" are the strongest clues yet to the whereabouts of the missing Malaysian plane, flight MH370. Two batches of these ultrasound signals have now been detected by an Australian ship 1600 kilometres north-west of Perth. "I believe we are now searching in the right area," said Angus Houston, head of the Joint Agency Coordination Centre that is managing the multinational search operation from Perth, at a press conference this morning. Planes carry two flight recorders â€" the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and the flight data recorder (FDR). Both are equipped with an underwater location device that emits regular ultrasound pulses, aka pings, for 30 days after they are submerged. The Australian ship Ocean Shield first detected two ping streams on 6 April along an arc in the south Indian Ocean that satellite signals had recently pinpointed as flight MH370's final, fatal route. One lasted 140 minute...

It's a computer â€" inside a cockroach. Nano-sized entities made of DNA that are able to perform the same kind of logic operations as a silicon-based computer have been introduced into a living animal. The DNA computers â€" known as origami robots because they work by folding and unfolding strands of DNA â€" travel around the insect's body and interact with each other, as well as the insect's cells. When they uncurl, they can dispense drugs carried in their folds. "DNA nanorobots could potentially carry out complex programs that could one day be used to diagnose or treat diseases with unprecedented sophistication," says Daniel Levner, a bioengineer at the Wyss Institute at Harvard University. Levner and his colleagues at Bar Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, made the nanobots by exploiting the binding properties of DNA. When it meets a certain kind of protein, DNA unravels into two complementar...

WOULD you dare to let a 3D printer ink your next tattoo? During a recent electronics workshop at the ENSCI-Les Ateliers design school in Paris, a group of students decided to swap a MakerBot's extruder for a pen. Within a few hours, they had modified the printer to draw simple, short-term doodles on skin. Not satisfied with temporary tattoos, the students added parts from a standard tattoo machine. The result: a printer that can give you permanent tats. After the invention was tested on simulated skin, volunteers lined up for the honour of being the first to get inked. "A lot of people were excited by the idea of being the first human tattooed by a 'robot'," writes team leader Pierre Emm in the instructions they posted online. The design is created in regular modelling software. So far, the printer can only draw simple outlines like circles. The hardest part is ensuring the skin is kept taut and fla...

Equity Research Associate - Biotechnology-259328 Description SunTrust Robinson Humphrey (STRH) is a full-service corporate and investment bank that provides comprehensive capital raising, strategic advisory, risk management, and investment solutions to serve the needs of U.S. corporate clients. Our organization offers fixed income and equity research, sales and trading for institutional investors. We are seeking an equity research teammate to support coverage of the Biotechnology sector. The position is based in New York City. The ideal candidate will have completed Series 7, 63, 86, and 87 FINRA exams and have at least 4 years of financial services experience with a sellside firm(s). Additionally an exceptional academic background is required with an advanced degree (PhD in Molecular Sciences or secondarily a MD) as well as having articles published in reputable scientific/medical forums, journals, or digests. Proven quantitative and written/verbal communication skills, outstanding...

Cooling NASA-Russia ties is a familiar game of political surrogacy, but it may spark talk on reasserting US leadership in space, says a security expert So NASA has been dragged into the fallout over Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine. An internal memo, made public this week, revealed the space agency has suspended contact with Russia, except for that concerning International Space Station (ISS) operations. The memo stated that the suspension "includes NASA travel to Russia and visits by Russian government representatives to NASA facilities, bilateral meetings, email, and teleconferences or videoconferences." This was confirmed in an official statement from NASA yesterday. Will this action influence Vladimir Putin and his apparent dream of geographically reassembling parts of the Soviet Union as a new Russian empire? That's highly unlikely. So why do it? Space has a long history of serving as a surrogate for demonstratin...

CHINA now consumes nearly as much coal as the rest of the world combined. And perhaps it always did: it seems coal was routinely burned 3500 years ago in what is now China â€" the earliest evidence we have for the practice. John Dodson at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation in Sydney, and his colleagues in China, were examining early evidence of bronze casting in northern China when they found chunks of burned coal in the ancient slag piles instead of the charcoal they expected. "We got one of the guys to take samples and he sieved out some seeds, which we radiocarbon dated in Sydney," says Dodson. The seeds were chosen because they formed at the time the coal was burned, whereas the coal formed millions of years earlier. "You can't just radiocarbon date the coal because it is already ancient carbon," he says. The results confirmed that coal had been burned in the area around 3500 years ago. The t...

Healthcare/Biotechnology Investment Banking Associate Opportunity About Piper Jaffray Investment Banking Piper Jaffray is a leading, international middle-market investment bank and institutional securities firm, serving the needs of middle market corporations, private equity groups, public entities and institutional investors. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the firm has additional investment banking offices in New York, San Francisco, and with the recent acquisition of Edgeview Partners, Charlotte. Piper Jaffray investment banking specializes in a variety of financial transactions and focuses on the needs of growth companies in the clean technology and renewables, consumer, financial technology services, health care, industrial growth, technology, media, telecommunications, and business services sectors. Piper Jaffray is one of the premier investment banks focused solely on the middle market. Because we are a dynamic and growing firm, our Associate position offers a unique...

Look out, moon. A private company has sent its lunar-lander steering system on a test flight, taking one small step towards a planned moon mission next year. Astrobotic of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is one of 18 teams competing for the Google Lunar X Prize, which offers $20 million to the first private group that lands a spacecraft on the moon, has it travel at least 500 metres, and receives two videos from their lunar vehicle. And all by the end of 2015. This week Astrobotic released video (above) of a rocket launching and landing in the Mojave desert using their hazard-detection system, which will ultimately be part of the moon lander. This uses cameras and lasers to guide the lander towards a safe touchdown. "It's like our astronaut-in-a-box," says Astrobotic's CEO John Thornton. On the test flight, the rocket shot 260 metres into the air and landed safely 250 metres away. For this first flight, the craft flew on...