Biotechnology

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 ...

We provide an opportunity for engineers and scientists to further their professional growth and career development in exciting, challenging ways. Put your technical degree to work on issues involving science, technology, and the law. Candidates will assist with the successful procurement of patent protection for innovative technologies, evaluate with the designs of new products, and assist with the evaluation of competitor products. Each client brings novel and diverse technologies to our firm. Therefore, the candidate will learn about a variety of new technologies, learn to identify inventive features, learn to describe the inventions, and learn to convince the Patent Office to allow a patent for the technology. The position also requires a candidate to possess the ability to explain and describe new technologies in a way that is concise and descriptive. Responsibilities and Duties: 1. Reviewing new client technologies to determin...

MAKE no bones about it: the International Space Station is about to get its first medical X-ray scanner. Astronauts will use the device to study the effects on rodents of extended periods of time spent in microgravity. Bones deteriorate quickly in space, losing about 1 to 2 per cent of their mass for every month away from Earth. Muscles and organs also suffer in low gravity. No astronaut has spent more than six months at a stretch on the ISS, so direct medical studies only cover relatively short-term effects. A good diet and strenuous exercise minimise the damage, but no one knows how the human body will fare on long-term missions to an asteroid, for example, or Mars. Mice have been kept aboard the ISS for up to 91 days, during which time they were used to study a loss in blood quality called flight anaemia, and the effects of cosmic radiation on fertility. The condition of individual a...

Beware stealthy sound waves (Image: Sam Falconer) No need to upgrade: your phone needs only its microphone to pay for a taxi or join Lady Gaga's light show. But who else is whispering in its tiny ear? IT WAS four years ago when Dragos Ruiu noticed that some of his computers were behaving bizarrely. First, software on a laptop changed unprompted. Then settings on other machines mysteriously altered â€" and data vanished. Most alarming of all, Ruiu claimed his computers seemed to be communicating with each other, even after he had severed every connection between them he could think of. It made no sense. Ruiu, a respected information-security expert based in Edmonton, Canada, began to suspect that a powerful new computer virus was at work. Yet all efforts to find it failed. Then he discovered the only way to regain f ull control of a computer was to disconnect ... To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 years ...

We provide an opportunity for engineers and scientists to further their professional growth and career development in exciting, challenging ways. Put your technical degree to work on issues involving science, technology, and the law. Candidates will assist with the successful procurement of patent protection for innovative technologies, evaluate with the designs of new products, and assist with the evaluation of competitor products. Each client brings novel and diverse technologies to our firm. Therefore, the candidate will learn about a variety of new technologies, learn to identify inventive features, learn to describe the inventions, and learn to convince the Patent Office to allow a patent for the technology. The position also requires a candidate to possess the ability to explain and describe new technologies in a way that is concise and descriptive. Responsibilities and Duties: 1. Reviewing new client technologies to determin...

VIBRATING gloves could help children learn Braille. At the moment, just 10 per cent of blind school-age kids in the US learn it, partly because there are so few teachers. The gloves created by Caitlyn Seim's team at Georgia Tech have vibrating motors at the knuckle of each finger. When one of them vibrates, the wearer presses the corresponding key (see picture), and audio feedback tells them what letter they are typing. In tests, a group of people who had never used Braille before wore the gloves while typing a set phrase. The group was then distracted by playing a game for 30 minutes. During this time, half of the participants' gloves kept pulsing in time to continuing audio cues, a concept called passive haptic learning, which has also been used to teach piano in the past. The pulses stopped for the rest of the group, while the audio carried on. Afterwards, those who received the passive haptic training were much more adept ...

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 - Serialization 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 w orld in Canada, USA, Europe and Asia. Job Overview: The role will be part of...

The first iPhone-compatible hearing aids allow music streaming and boast location-aware fine-tuning â€" one day everyone will want one WHEN it comes to personal electronics, it's difficult to imagine iPhones and hearing aids in the same sentence. I use both and know that hearing aids have a well-deserved reputation as deeply uncool lumps of beige plastic worn mainly by the elderly. Apple, on the other hand, is the epitome of cool consumer electronics. But the two are getting a lot closer. The first "Made for iPhone" hearing aids have arrived, allowing users to stream audio and data between smartphones and the device. It means hearing aids might soon be desirable, even to those who don't need them. A Bluetooth wireless protocol developed by Apple last year lets the prostheses connect directly to Apple devices, streaming audio and data while using a fraction of the power consumption of conventional Bluetooth. LiNX, made by...

Where do suspicious characters hang out? (Image: Alexandr Tovstenko/Getty Images) The geographical profiling that catches serial killers can track bats to their roosts or sharks to their lairs â€" and could close in on deadly diseases too IT WAS while finishing his PhD on the mating behaviour of sticklebacks that Steven Le Comber found himself drawn to a life of crime. Le Comber was reading a 2003 interview in New Scientist with Kim Rossmo, a Canadian cop-turned-researcher whose mathematical methods for tracking down serial killers were earning him a reputation as a latter-day Sherlock Holmes. Rossmo's insight was that felons, by and large, aren't complicated characters. "Most criminals aren't Hannibal Lecters," he says. Often they act instinctively, making it possible to spot patterns in their actions. By s tudying hundreds of cases, Rossmo found that serial killers rarely target victims too close to home. But they are ... To continue reading this ar...

Minimum Requirements Must have a high school diploma or equivalent General Educational Development (GED) certificate. Must be a graduate of a physical therapy program accredited by the Commission on Accreditation in Physical Therapy Education or its equivalent. Maintain a current and unrestricted physical therapy license from any one of the United States of America, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, Guam, or the U.S. Virgin Islands. Must have a minimum of one year experience within the last two years working as a full-time PT. Have and maintain current Basic Life Support (BLS) certification. The American Heart Association Basic Life Support for Healthcare Providers is the only program accepted. BLS recertification shall be maintained in a current status at all times while the HCP is performing services under this contract. Major Responsibilities/Activities Outpatient conditions include direct access based care to a variety of orthopedic sports medicine b...

COMPUTER hackers usually get a bad press. But the mass surveillance now known to have been undertaken by the US National Security Agency and its allies may go some way towards changing that. The reason? To protect ourselves from snooping, we need to understand how it is done â€" and few people outside the intelligence services are better equipped to do so than hackers. Last year, German news magazine Der Spiegel published details of a confidential catalogue of hardware and software that the NSA used to extract information from our computers. We now report how computer-security researchers have started to reverse-engineer the spying gadgets listed in the catalogue to work out how they operate (see "Hackers reverse-engineer NSA's leaked bugging devices"). Thanks to their skills, we now know how the NSA's novel bugs capture and transmit the images being viewed on computer screens, send keystrokes as they are typed...

We want energy to be cheap, reliable and green. Can we have it all? (Image: Brett Ryder) When it comes to electricity supply, we're caught in a vicious triangle. A bold scheme that pays big business to switch off could be part of the solution IF YOU have ever played rock-paper-scissors, you'll know the frustration of having no sure winning strategy. Whip out a perfect pair of sharp scissors, and the rock might blunt them. Then again, paper smothers rock, and scissors cut paper. There's no win-win. So pity those pitting their wits against our energy demands. As consumers, we want energy to be affordable. As a society, we want our supplies to be secure and reliable. And as responsible global citizens, we want power to be clean, green and low-carbon, too. But these demands trump each other in different ways. "It's cal led the energy trilemma, because you ... To continue reading this article, subscribe to receive access to all of newscientist.com, including 20 y...

Proud of that beef bourguignon you're slaving over? Snap a pic, tag it with the smells from your kitchen and send it to your friends. That's the idea behind an app called oSnap that lets you add smells to messages. By tapping on the screen, you can select the combination of scents you want to send, which are made chemically for the recipient by a gadget called an oPhone. Up to eight of the 32 base aromas can be combined in one message, recreating more than 300,000 possible smells. At first, the base aromas will focus on food and coffee smells, says its inventor David Edwards of Harvard University, who created it with former Harvard student, Rachel Field. For example, some of the scents are smoky, onion, bergamot, green vegetable and chocolate. "One can use these base aromas â€" very much like one uses a flavour wheel â€" to produce many scents, from steak au poivre to chocolate cake, to a glass of red wine," says Edwards...

Job Summary Hyperion Biotechnology is looking for a Personnel Assistant I to work at Langley Air Force Base, VA. This position serves as professional customer service specialist and achieves customer satisfaction by delivering military HR services in a professional, courteous, and timely manner Minimum Requirements Requires functional training in Military Personnel support activities. Prior military personnel experience is preferred. The Personnel Assistant I (PA I) performs a variety of general personnel clerical tasks in such areas as records, benefits, training, and customer service. The PA I may conduct surveys and update manual and automated personnel records. Prior experience in these areas is also preferred. U.S. Citizenship is required A NACI background check is required Major Responsibilities/Activities Performs as HR specialist within a MPE work center such as Customer Service, Passport Administration, ARMS, Awards and Decorations, In & Out Processing, ID/CAC Card ...

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 field-based position will cover the Mid Atlantic region of the United States. 70% travel is expected, including overnights . 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 sk...

Companion robots can't just do their jobs â€" they should be as charming as our favourite cartoon characters, says special effects roboticist Derek Scherer Humanoid robots aren't very charismatic yet. Will we want to share our lives with them? A companion robot is something you'll want to have because it does valuable work for you â€" but only if it also has an engaging character and personality, entertaining you through the way it interacts. Otherwise it will be no more interesting than a washing machine. What is going to make robots so engaging? We need look no further than the entertainment industry â€" TV, movies, animation and video games â€" to see how lifelike a synthetic creature can be. Think of Pikachu in Pokémon , or Bugs Bunny. A robot with their character traits would be pretty engaging. My perfect service robot would have the chipperness of Kermit the Frog, for instance. What do we need t...

"Yesterday," writes Tesla CEO Elon Musk in a blog post, "there was a wall of Tesla patents in the lobby of our Palo Alto headquarters. That is no longer the case. They have been removed, in the spirit of the open source movement, for the advancement of electric vehicle technology." In short, California-based Tesla is opening up its patents to competitors. Like so many of Musk's ideas, it sounds crazy but might just be brilliant. Tesla, Musk explains, was founded with the goal of taking electric cars mainstream. At the outset, it filed patents like any other company, because it was worried that bigger car manufacturers would simply copy its technology and drive it out of business. Instead, with a few exceptions, major automakers have continued to ignore alternatives to petrol engines. And Musk has decided that's even worse. So instead of protecting its intellectual property, Tesla has pledged that it "w...

Ed Damiano's son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 2000. He was 11 months old. Damiano, a biomedical engineer, decided to create a device that would help his child and millions of others better manage their disease. He set a goal of having it ready by the time his son went to college. Results from the latest clinical trials of his smartphone-linked artificial pancreas suggest he might just make that deadline. Type 1 diabetes occurs when beta islet cells in the pancreas die off. These cells sense levels of blood sugar, aka glucose, in the blood and secrete the necessary amount of insulin to keep those levels normal. Insulin also enables glucose to enter our body's cells, where it is used as a source of energy. This means an imbalance in blood sugar not only starves blood vessels and organs of energy but also keeps the blood saturated with glucose, which can cause tissue damage and sometimes lead to coma or even death. The d...

THE internet's favourite currency may be up for a second job: storing massive amounts of data. As with all cryptocurrencies, bitcoins are created by a process called "mining", which involves setting up machines to solve a series of mathematical problems. Such puzzles are a waste of computing power if they are not harnessed to solve real-world problems, says Andrew Miller at the University of Maryland. So, along with colleagues from his university and Microsoft, Miller proposes a spin-off named Permacoin, whose mining process would create an enormous archive as well as currency. "It's pretty clear that there is a lot of effort being consumed," says Miller. "It would be nice if you could get more from it." His team envisions using Permacoin for data that is valuable but unwieldy to store, such as the Library of Congress, estimated to be around 200 terabytes. This is not the first time ...

WOOLLY sweaters may soon be put to work powering your electronic gadgets, thanks to a yarn-like lithium-ion battery. Small, flexible electronics promise "smart" clothes of the future, such as T-shirts loaded with sensors that can discreetly keep track of your vital signs and check for health problems. Now Huisheng Peng and his colleagues at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, have created a thread-like battery that can be woven into smart textiles to keep them running smoothly. First, the team created wires made from carbon nanotubes nested inside each other. Some wires were coated with a powder of lithium titanium oxide nanoparticles, and others with lithium manganese oxide. One of each type of wire â€" representing the battery's positive and negative terminals â€" were twisted together with a gel electrolyte and a thin strip of non-conducting material separating them. A 10-centimetre-long piece of this battery weighs just...

SOFTWARE used to keep bugs out of Microsoft Windows programs has begun shedding light on one of the big questions in modern science: how stem cells decide what type of tissue to become. Not only do the results reveal that cellular decision-making is nowhere near as complicated as expected, they also raise hopes that the software could become a key tool in regenerative medicine. "It is a sign of the convergence between carbon and silicon-based life," says Chris Mason, a regenerative medicine specialist at University College London. "World-class stem cell scientists and a world-class computer company have found common ground. It is work at such interfaces that brings the big breakthroughs." Stem cells are the putty from which all tissues of the body are made. That means they have the potential to repair damaged tissue and even grow into new organs. Embryonic stem cells hold particular promise as they ca...