Scientists at Newcastle University have pioneered breakthrough technology in the fight to cut greenhouse gases.

The Newcastle University team, led by Michael North, Professor of Organic Chemistry, has developed a highly energy-efficient method of converting waste carbon dioxide (CO2) into chemical compounds known as cyclic carbonates.

The team estimates that the technology has the potential to use up to 48 million tonnes of waste CO2 per year, reducing the UK’s emissions by about four percent.

Cyclic carbonates are widely used in the manufacture of products including solvents, paint-strippers, biodegradable packaging, as well as having applications in the chemical industry. Cyclic carbonates also have potential for use in the manufacture of a new class of efficient anti-knocking agents in petrol. Anti-knocking agents make petrol burn better, increasing fuel efficiency and reducing CO2 emissions.

The conversion technique relies upon the use of a catalyst to force a chemical reaction between CO2 and an epoxide, converting waste CO2 into this cyclic carbonate, a chemical for which there is significant commercial demand.

The reaction between CO2 and epoxides is well known, but one which, until now, required a lot of energy, needing high temperatures and high pressures to work successfully. The current process also requires the use of ultra-pure CO2 , which is costly to produce.

The Newcastle team has succeeded in developing an exceptionally active catalyst, derived from aluminium, which can drive the reaction necessary to turn waste carbon dioxide into cyclic carbonates at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, vastly reducing the energy input required.

Professor North said: ‘One of the main scientific challenges facing the human race in the 21st century is controlling global warming that results from increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

‘One solution to this problem, currently being given serious consideration, is carbon capture and storage, which involves concentrating and compressing CO2 and then storing it,’ he said. ‘However, long-term storage remains to be demonstrated’.

To date, alternative solutions for converting CO2 emissions into a useful product has required a process so energy intensive that they generate more CO2 than they consume.

Professor North compares the process developed by his team to that of a catalytic converter fitted to a car. ‘If our catalyst could be employed at the source of high-concentration CO2 production, for example in the exhaust stream of a fossil-fuel power station, we could take out the carbon dioxide, turn it into a commercially-valuable product and at the same time eliminate the need to store waste CO2′, he said.

Professor North believes that, once it is fully developed, the technology has the potential to utilise a significant amount of the UK’s CO2 emissions every year.

‘To satisfy the current market for cyclic carbonates, we estimate that our technology could use up to 18 million tonnes of waste CO2 per year, and a further 30 million tonnes if it is used as an anti-knocking agent.

‘Using 48 million tonnes of waste CO2 would account for about four percent of the UK’s CO2 emissions, which is a pretty good contribution from one technology,’ commented Professor North. The technique has been proven to work successfully in the lab. Professor North and his team are currently carrying out further lab-based work to optimise the efficiency of the technology, following which they plan to scale-up to a pilot plant.

[Melanie Reed @ Newcastle University]

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A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but humans may have even less to work with than previously thought. University of Missouri researchers found that the average person can keep just three or four things in their “working memory” or conscious mind at one time. This finding may lead to better ways to assess and help people with attention-deficit and focus difficulties, improve classroom performance and enhance test scores.

“Most people believe the human mind is incredibly complex,” said Jeff Rouder, associate professor of psychology in the MU College of Arts and Science. “We were able to use a relatively simple experiment and look at how many objects can be in maintained in the human conscious mind at any one time. We found that every person has the capacity to hold a certain number of objects in his or her mind. Working memory is like the number of memory registers in a computer. Every object takes one register and each individual has a fixed number of registers. Limits in working memory are important because working memory is the mental process of holding information in a short-term, readily accessible, easily manipulated form where it can be combined, rearranged and stored more productively.”

“We know that this kind of memory is really important in daily life,” said co-author Nelson Cowan, psychology professor at Mizzou and an expert in working memory theory. “If a person is trying to do a math problem, there are partial results to keep in mind as that person solves the problem. When people are going to do any tasks in the house-like remembering the location of keys, turning off the stove, combining ingredients for a cake or recalling a phone number-they use working memory to keep in mind all the different aspects of the tasks.”

Rouder said that to remember a series of items, people will use “chunking,” or grouping, to put together different items. It can be difficult for someone to remember nine random letters. But if that same person is asked to remember nine letters organized in acronyms, IBM-CIA-FBI, for example, the person only has to use three slots in working memory. The difficulty in measuring working memory capacity is assuring that each item presented cannot be grouped together with others to form a larger chunk.

The researchers conducted a simple experiment involving an array of small, scattered, different-colored squares, to test their theory of working memory. The participant saw two, five or eight squares in the array, depending on the trial. The array was then “wiped out” by another display consisting of the same squares, minus the colors. Finally, the participant was shown a single color in one location and was asked to indicate whether the color in that spot had changed from the original array.

“How an individual does this test depends on working memory,” Cowan said. “The results indicating that people have a fixed capacity provide evidence of simplicity in the mind. Many other theorists have suggested that the amount of working memory is circumstance-dependent, depends on a particular test, that there is nothing general we can get out of it, and that it’s complex. We found the mind to be less complex in this case and that should be of great use in the future.”

Working memory is closely related to attention because it requires attention to hold a number of items in mind at once. People with high working memory capacity have more focus. Those with a lower attention span are more easily distracted. This fact may help researchers help people with attention deficit disorders.

The researchers emphasized that the unique result of their study was that “the data were explained to surprising accuracy by a very simple mental model in which participants either used a register of working memory or, if all registers were full, guessed randomly.”

Rouder and Cowan’s study, “An assessment of fixed-capacity models of visual working memory,” was published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other members of the research team are Richard Morey, Christopher Zwilling, Candice Morey and Michael Pratte.

[Bryan E. Jones @ University of Missouri-Columbia]

New nanotechnology consumer products are coming on the market at the rate of 3-4 per week, a finding based on the latest update to the nanotechnology consumer product inventory maintained by the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN).

One of the new items among the more than 600 products now in the inventory is Swissdent Nanowhitening Toothpaste with “calcium peroxides, in the form of nano-particles.” Today, in testimony before the Senate Commerce Committee, PEN Project Director David Rejeski cited Ace Silver Plus-another of the nine nano toothpastes in the inventory-as an example of the upsurge in nanotechnology consumer products in stores. The hearing marks the start of U.S. Senate debate on the future direction of the annual $1.5 billion federal investment in nanotechnology research and development (R&D).

The number of consumer products using nanotechnology has grown from 212 to 609 since PEN launched the world’s first online inventory of manufacturer-identified nanotech goods in March 2006. Health and fitness items, which includes cosmetics and sunscreens, represent 60 percent of inventory products. The colorful and searchable list of nanotechnology merchandise-containing everything from nanotech diamonds and cooking oil, to golf clubs and iPhones-is available free at www.nanotechproject.org/consumerproducts.

There are 35 automotive products in the PEN inventory, including the Hummer H2. General Motors Corporation bills the H2 as having a cargo bed that “uses about seven pounds of molded in color nanocomposite parts for its trim, center bridge, sail panel and box rail protector.”

Nanoscale silver is the most cited nanomaterial used. It is found in 143 products or over 20 percent of the inventory. Carbon, including carbon nanotubes and fullerenes, is the second highest nanoscale material cited. Other nanoscale materials explicitly referenced in products are zinc (including zinc oxide) and titanium (including titanium dioxide), silica and gold.

While polls show most Americans know little or nothing about nanotechnology, in 2006 nanotechnology was incorporated into more than $50 billion in manufactured goods. By 2014, Lux Research estimates $2.6 trillion in manufactured goods will incorporate nanotechnology-or about 15 percent of total global output. Despite a 2006 worldwide investment of $12.4 billion in nanotech R&D, comparatively little was spent on examining nanotechnology’s potential environmental, health and safety risks.

“Public trust is the ‘dark horse’ in nanotechnology’s future,” says Rejeski in his testimony. “If government and industry do not work to build public confidence in nanotechnology, consumers may reach for the ‘No-Nano’ label in the future and investors will put their money elsewhere.”

According to Rejeski, “The use of nanotechnology in consumer products and industrial applications is growing rapidly, with the products listed in the PEN inventory showing just the tip of the iceberg. Public perceptions about risks-real and perceived-can have large economic consequences. How consumers respond to these early products-in food, electronics, health care, clothing and cars-is a litmus test for broader market acceptance of nanotechnologies in the future.”

[Alex Parlini @ Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies]

A newly created microbe produces cellulose that can be turned into ethanol and other biofuels, report scientists from The University of Texas at Austin who say the microbe could provide a significant portion of the nation’s transportation fuel if production can be scaled up.

Along with cellulose, the cyanobacteria developed by Professor R. Malcolm Brown Jr. and Dr. David Nobles Jr. secrete glucose and sucrose. These simple sugars are the major sources used to produce ethanol.

“The cyanobacterium is potentially a very inexpensive source for sugars to use for ethanol and designer fuels,” says Nobles, a research associate in the Section of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.

Brown and Nobles say their cyanobacteria can be grown in production facilities on non-agricultural lands using salty water unsuitable for human consumption or crops.

Other key findings include:

• The new cyanobacteria use sunlight as an energy source to produce and excrete sugars and cellulose

• Glucose, cellulose and sucrose can be continually harvested without harming or destroying the cyanobacteria (harvesting cellulose and sugars from true algae or crops, like corn and sugarcane, requires killing the organisms and using enzymes and mechanical methods to extract the sugars)
• Cyanobacteria that can fix atmospheric nitrogen can be grown without petroleum-based fertilizer input

They recently published their research in the journal Cellulose.

Nobles made the new cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae) by giving them a set of cellulose-making genes from a non-photosynthetic “vinegar” bacterium, Acetobacter xylinum, well known as a prolific cellulose producer.

The new cyanobacteria produce a relatively pure, gel-like form of cellulose that can be broken down easily into glucose.
Dr. Malcolm Brown and Dr. David Nobles with one of the cyanobacterial strains that produce cellulose and glucose.
Click here for more information.

“The problem with cellulose harvested from plants is that it’s difficult to break down because it’s highly crystalline and mixed with lignins [for structure] and other compounds,” Nobles says.

He was surprised to discover that the cyanobacteria also secrete large amounts of glucose or sucrose, sugars that can be directly harvested from the organisms.

“The huge expense in making cellulosic ethanol and biofuels is in using enzymes and mechanical methods to break cellulose down,” says Nobles. “Using the cyanobacteria escapes these expensive processes.”

Sources being used or considered for ethanol production in the United States include switchgrass and wood (cellulose), corn (glucose) and sugarcane (sucrose). True algae are also being developed for biodiesel production.

Brown sees a major benefit in using cyanobacteria to produce ethanol is a reduction in the amount of arable land turned over to fuel production and decreased pressure on forests.
A photosynthetic cyanobacterium with chlorophyll (red) and the cellulose material (blue) it produced.
Click here for more information.

“The pressure is on all these corn farmers to produce corn for non-food sources,” says Brown, the Johnson & Johnson Centennial Chair in Plant Cell Biology. “That same demand, for sucrose, is now being put on Brazil to open up more of the Amazon rainforest to produce more sugarcane for our growing energy needs. We don’t want to do that. You’ll never get the forests back.”

Brown and Nobles calculate that the approximate area needed to produce ethanol with corn to fuel all U.S. transportation needs is around 820,000 square miles, an area almost the size of the entire Midwest.

They hypothesize they could produce an equal amount of ethanol using an area half that size with the cyanobacteria based on current levels of productivity in the lab, but they caution that there is a lot of work ahead before cyanobacteria can provide such fuel in the field. Work with laboratory scale photobioreactors has shown the potential for a 17-fold increase in productivity. If this can be achieved in the field and on a large scale, only 3.5 percent of the area growing corn could be used for cyanobacterial biofuels.

Cyanobacteria are just one of many potential solutions for renewable energy, says Brown.

“There will be many avenues to become completely energy independent, and we want to be part of the overall effort,” Brown says. “Petroleum is a precious commodity. We should be using it to make useful products, not just burning it and turning it into carbon dioxide.”

[Lee Clippard @ University of Texas at Austin]

The goal of replacing electronics with optics for processing data in computers is coming closer through cutting edge European research into the mysterious properties of “fast and slow” light. The long term aim is to boost processing speeds and data storage densities by several orders of magnitude and take the information technology industry into a new era, combining greatly improved performance with dramatically lower energy consumption.

The phenomenon of “fast and slow” light arises from the dispersion of electromagnetic waves when they interact with, and travel through, a physical medium such as a crystal. This can have the effect of slowing down the light pulses, or on occasions appearing to cause local acceleration. These speed variations have the potential for developing purely optical devices using just electromagnetic radiation, rather than electrical signals, to store and process information. In the more immediate future, these properties will be used to enhance existing hybrid communication systems combining electronic and photonic (light-based) devices. But first more fundamental research is needed, and the current state of play along with a roadmap for future projects was discussed at a recent workshop organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF).

The project achieved its main objectives of reviewing the state of the art, highlighting possible applications, and gathering a dispersed European community of scientists, according to the workshop’s convenor Marco Santagiustina. “There were two remarkable highlights: slow and fast light research has immense potential in applications like microwave and millimeter wave photonics, and secondly such applications can be targeted by making progress in a selected set of technologies,” said Santagiustina.

Light signals are already used for communication over fibre optic cables, but cannot yet be stored directly, or used for computation. This would require slowing down the light signals so that they can be buffered within a small area, and can be achieved by exploiting “fast and slow” light effects. Before the arrival of true photonic computing, there is the more immediate prospect of building optical interconnects for example in communication networks, which would reduce latency, the time taken for signals to travel from source to destination. Latency imposed by the communications network has become a significant problem in an age of globalisation where computers in different continents are cooperating in tasks that need to be executed very quickly in fractions of a second.

Another more immediate application of “fast and slow” light is likely to come from the ability in processing ultrawide band microwave signals, for radio communications, both for mobile telephony and wireless LANs. “Fast and slow” light can be harnessed to transmit radio frequencies directly over fibre, making it easier, cheaper, and more efficient to connect up base stations or wireless access points. “Radio over fiber is an existing application field destined to grow in the near future,” said Santagiustina. “This field will also represent a significant step forward for the photonic/electronic convergence. In that area the time-delay/phase-shift provided by slow and fast light devices can yield unprecedented functions.”

Some of these functions have not yet been conceived, but the fundamental point is that converging photonics with electronics reduces delays and increases the bandwidth available, cutting costs and boosting communications capacity.

[Marco Santagiustina @ European Science Foundation]

Recent advances in technology have made removing salt from seawater and groundwater a realistic option for increasing water supplies in some parts of the U.S., and desalination will likely have a niche in meeting the nation’s future water needs, says a new report from the National Research Council. However, a coordinated research effort with steady funding is required to better understand and minimize desalination’s environmental impacts — and find ways to further lower its costs and energy use.

“Uncertainties about desalination’s environmental impacts are currently a significant barrier to its wider use, and research on these effects — and ways to lessen them — should be the top priority,” said Amy K. Zander, chair of the committee that wrote the report and professor at Clarkson University, Potsdam, N.Y. “Finding ways to lower costs should also be an objective. A coordinated research effort dedicated to these goals could make desalination a more practical option for some communities facing water shortages.”

Over 97 percent of the Earth’s water — seawater and brackish groundwater — is too salty to use for drinking water or agriculture. Interest in desalination has grown in the U.S. as some regions face water shortages and contention over existing freshwater supplies. Though desalination still generates less than 0.4 percent of the water used in the U.S., the nation’s capacity to desalinate water grew by around 40 percent between 2000 and 2005, and plants now exist in every state. Most use a method called reverse osmosis, which pushes water through a membrane to separate out most of the salts.

The report recommends that federal R&D on desalination be planned and coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and funded at the level of existing desalination R&D programs — approximately $25 million a year. Currently there is no overall strategic direction to federal research on desalination, which is conducted by many agencies with varying goals. It also depends heavily on earmarks, which are unsteady sources of funding; from 2006 to 2007, federal funds declined by nearly 60 percent. Meanwhile, the private sector appears to fund the majority of the nation’s desalination research. Both the public and private sectors can contribute to the proposed research agenda, the report says.

Environmental Research Should Be Highest Priority

Substantial uncertainties remain about the environmental impacts of desalination, the report says. Limited studies suggest that desalination MAY be less environmentally harmful than many other ways to supplement water — such as diverting freshwater from sensitive ecosystems — but definitive conclusions cannot be made without further research.

Researchers should investigate the extent to which fish and other creatures get trapped in saltwater intake systems in various settings, and seek ways to mitigate this and other impacts. Studies also should examine the long-term ecological effects of disposing of the salt concentrate that remains after desalination in rivers or the sea, a common practice. In addition, environmental evaluations of new desalination plants should be conducted, including ecological monitoring before and after the plant starts operating. The results should be synthesized with existing data in a national assessment that can guide future decision making, the report says.

Desalination also has raised concerns about greenhouse gases because it uses large amounts of energy. Seawater reverse osmosis uses about 10 times more energy than traditional treatment of surface water, for example, and in most cases uses more energy than other ways of augmenting water supplies. Researchers should investigate ways to integrate alternative energy sources — such as the sun, wind, or tides — in order to lower emissions from desalination, the report says.

R&D Needed To Lower Costs, Energy Use

Recent improvements in technology have lowered desalination’s costs and energy requirements, which used to be prohibitively high. Meanwhile, other ways to augment water supplies have grown more expensive, making desalination more competitive. Finding ways to further lower costs should be another goal of the research effort, the report says.

Developing cost-effective, environmentally sustainable ways to dispose of salt concentrate should be a priority. The cost of disposing of this waste varies widely by site and has generally risen. Inland plants, in particular, have few or no cost-effective and environmentally sustainable disposal methods.

Making the membranes used in reverse osmosis more permeable could lower desalination’s energy use and costs further, as can improving the pre-treatment of water to remove sediments that can hinder membranes’ efficiency, the report says. Even with improved technologies, however, the energy used by reverse osmosis probably cannot be reduced more than 15 percent below current levels. Larger reductions in energy costs may be possible using other desalination methods that could be powered with low-grade heat left over from other industrial processes, which would otherwise go to waste. Thermal desalination is one such method, and it may be possible to develop other novel approaches.

Even if costs are lowered, the report notes, conserving water or transferring it from one use to another will in most cases remain a less expensive option than adding water through desalination or other methods.

[Sara Frueh @ The National Academies]

Researchers seeking new and more abundant sources of stem cells for use in regenerative medicine have identified a potentially unlimited, noncontroversial, easily collectable, and inexpensive source — menstrual blood.

Stromal stem cells — cells that are present in connective tissues — have recently been identified in endometrial tissues of the uterus. When the fresh growth of tissue and blood vessels is shed during each menstrual cycle, some cells with regenerative capabilities are present and collectable. While collecting menstrual blood stromal cells (MenSCs) directly from tissue would be invasive, retrieving them during the menstrual cycle would not be.

“Stromal stem cells derived from menstrual blood exhibit stem cell properties, such as the capacity for self-renewal and multipotency,” said Amit N. Patel, MD, MS, Director of Cardiac Cell Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh’s McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine. “Uterine stromal cells have similar multipotent markers found in bone marrow stem cells and originate in part from bone marrow.”

Published in the most recent issue of Cell Transplantation (Volume 17, issue 3), the study examined to what degree MenSCs demonstrated an ability to differentiate into a variety of cell lineages.

Tests showed that MenSCs could differentiate into adipogenic, chondrogenic, osteogenic, ectodermal, mesodermal, cardiogenic, and neural cell lineages. According to Patel, the sample MenSCs expanded rapidly and maintained greater than 50 percent of their telomerase activity when compared to human embryonic stem cells and better than bone marrow-derived stem cells. “Studies have demonstrated that MenSCs are easily expandable to clinical relevance and express multipotent markers at both the molecular and cellular level,” concluded Patel.

Researchers emphasized the importance of the abundance and plasticity of MenSCs. Based on the results of their studies, they noted the potential for MenSCs in regenerative transplantation therapies for many different organs and tissues. “The need for regenerative therapies using cells with the ability to engraft and differentiate is vast,” said Patel.

“The ideal cell would also have the ability to be used in an allogenic manner from donors for optimal immunogenic compatibility. Due to their ease of collection and isolation, MenSCs would be a great source of multipotent cells if they exhibit this property along with their ability to differentiate,” concluded Julie G. Allickson, Ph.D., Vice President of Laboratory Operations and Research & Development, Cryo-Cell International, Inc., the study-partner company that identified, extracted, and initially analyzed the cells. “The preliminary results are extremely encouraging and support the importance of further study of these cells in several different areas including heart disease, diabetes and neurodegenerative disease.”

Dwaine Emerich, Ph.D., a section editor for Cell Transplantation, believes that “These studies are a significant step forward in the development of transplantable stem cells for human diseases because they address major issues including routine and safe cell harvesting of renewable cells that maintain their differentiation capacity and can be scaled for widespread clinical use.”

[Amit Patel @ Cell Transplantation Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair]

Chemical engineers have developed a “self-assembling” method that could lead to an inexpensive way of making diamondlike crystals to improve optical communications and other technologies.

The method, developed at Purdue University, works by positioning tiny particles onto a silicon template containing precisely spaced holes that are about one-hundredth the width of a human hair. The template is immersed in water on top of which particles are floating, and the particles automatically fill in the holes as the template is lifted.

The researchers have used the technique to create a “nearly perfect two-dimensional colloidal crystal,” or a precisely ordered layer of particles. This is a critical step toward growing three-dimensional crystals for use in optical technologies, said You-Yeon Won, an assistant professor of chemical engineering.

“Making the first layer is very difficult, so we have taken an important step in the right direction,” Won said. “Creating three-dimensional structures poses a big challenge, but I think it’s feasible.”

Findings were detailed in a paper appearing online April 9 in the journal Soft Matter, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom. The paper was written by graduate student Jaehyun Hur and Won.

The single-layer structures might be used to form “micro lenses” to improve the performance of optical equipment, such as cameras and scientific instruments, and to control the color and other optical properties of materials for consumer products.

More importantly, the technique represents one of several possible approaches to create “omni-directional photonic band gap materials.” Unlike conventional mirrored materials, which reflect light hitting the mirror at certain angles, the omni-directional materials would be “perfect mirrors,” reflecting certain wavelengths of light coming from all directions.

The materials would dramatically improve the performance of optical fibers, which contain a mirrored coating to keep light from escaping. Omni-directional coatings would increase how much light is transmitted by fiber-optics and could possibly be used in future sensor technology and “optical computers” and circuits that use light instead of electronic signals to process information.

It might be possible to use Won’s method to create special crystals with particles arranged in the same pattern as carbon atoms in diamonds. The first layer could be a starting point for growing the crystals.

“There is no conventional technology that allows you to easily fabricate the diamond-crystal structure, so our method could open the door to doing so,” Won said.

However, other researches are trying to use competing technologies to create photonic bandgap materials made not of the crystals but of different structures. One such competing concept is using photolithography, the same technology used in computer-chip manufacturing, to create structures resembling log piles made of tiny rods.

Won’s approach to precisely manipulate small particles suspended on the surface of water is difficult because inherent thermal energy causes the particles to constantly vibrate, a phenomenon called Brownian motion.

To produce the single-layer structure, the engineers used a process called Langmuir-Blodgett monolayer deposition, a standard technique used in physical chemistry, primarily to create lipid membranes for research.

“Using the Langmuir-Blodgett process offers a small window of processing opportunity to manipulate these small-size particles without getting too much interference from Brownian motion,” Won said. “The key discovery here is the process. We’ve demonstrated a new process, and we discuss the science behind this process.”

Self-assembly is potentially promising for future manufacturing because devices could be made less expensively than using conventional processes, which require complex etching and other techniques common in the semiconductor industry.

The method developed at Purdue is faster and would be far less expensive than a competing method for creating the crystals, a technique called “nano-robotics,” in which particles are individually placed in a template using a robotic arm.

“We envision that this self-assembly method will open a new possibility for mass fabricating complicated 3-D colloid crystal structures for various applications,” Won said.

The Purdue-developed technique takes about 20 minutes to create a structure that would take weeks to produce using nano-robotics.

The single layer of particles forms at the surface of water in a trough-like vessel. As the template is pulled vertically out of the trough, the particles are pushed into the template holes by capillary force, the same phenomenon that causes water to rise to a higher level in a tube placed in a pool of water. It’s critical for the particles to be spaced properly prior to the Langmuir-Blodgett deposition so that water can draw the particles into the holes in the template using capillary force, Won said.

Researchers found that it was essential to control three conditions to successfully create the layer of particles: humidity, how fast the template is lifted out of the solution and the initial density of particles in the solution.

The researchers discovered that defects form when the air is too dry.

“When we suppressed water evaporation by humidifying the area, we created a completely flat, horizontally uniform structure,” Won said. “Water evaporation causes a non-uniform structure formation on the surface. This is a huge problem because our goal is to make two-dimensional crystal structures as uniform as possible over the entire patterned region. By controlling humidity, we proved that we can solve that problem.”

It was the first time researchers had demonstrated how to create a uniform structure over the relatively large area of such a templated region, which measured about 9 square millimeters, or large enough to contain about 1.7 million particles.

The engineers were able to precisely control the particle density, or how many particles occupy a given space, by using two Teflon bars like bookends on either end of the particle layer formed on the water surface to compress the particles before being deposited.

The particles in the research had a diameter of about one micron, or millionth of a meter. Producing a high-quality single layer of micron-size particles has proven difficult for researchers until the new technique was developed.

“That’s because it is very difficult to manipulate those small particles to make a well-aligned, well-arranged structure,” Won said.

The researchers used their technique to make layers in various patterns, such as square or hexagonal.

“We can make whatever structure we want,” he said.

Other researches have created self-assembling layers of particles without controlling the spacing between particles, resulting in “close-packed structures,” which cannot be used to build three-dimensional, high-quality photonic crystals. Using a template enabled the researchers to create the precisely controlled pattern of particle spacing, a “non-close-packed” first layer, which is critical to building up to a three-dimensional crystal with an arbitrary, desired optical property.

The researchers used an optical microscope and imaging-analysis techniques to count the number of particles in the layers they created. The engineers also created a theoretical model that describes how altering the three conditions of particle density, humidity and template lifting speed affect the quality of the structures. The model has been used to determine the exact experimental conditions needed for creating the perfect crystal structure.

The particles were made of silica attached to a chemical group called hydroxyl, which is made of an oxygen and hydrogen atoms.

The Purdue researches currently are investigating how difficult it would be to create three-dimensional crystals from the two-dimensional structures. Omni-directional materials currently are prohibitively expensive to manufacture. Developing an affordable manufacturing technique would be a breakthrough, Won said.

The research has been funded in part through the Purdue Research Foundation and the American Chemical Society’s Petroleum Research Fund.

[Emil Venere @ Purdue University]

It can hold a credit card, use a keyboard with the index finger, and lift a bag weighing up to 20 kg — the world’s first commercially available prosthetic hand that can move each finger separately and has an astounding range of grip configurations. For the first time worldwide a patient at the Orthopedic University Hospital in Heidelberg has tested both the “i-LIMB” hand in comparison with another innovative prosthesis, the so called “Fluidhand.” Eighteen-year-old Soren Wolf, who was born with only one hand, is enthusiastic about its capabilities.

The new prosthetic hand developed and distributed by the Scottish company “Touch Bionics” certainly has advantages over previous models. For example, a comparable standard product from another manufacturer allows only a pinch grip using thumb, index, and middle finger, and not a grip using all five fingers. This does not allow a full-wrap grip of an object.

Myoelectric signals from the stump of the arm control the prosthesis

Complex electronics and five motors contained in the fingers enable every digit of the I-LIMB to be powered individually. A passive positioning of the thumb enables various grip configurations to be activated. The myoelectric signals from the stump control the prosthetic hand; muscle signals are picked up by electrodes on the skin and transferred to the control electronics in the prosthetic hand. Batteries provide the necessary power.

The “Fluidhand” from Karlsruhe, thus far developed only as a prototype that is also being tested in the Orthopedic University Hospital in Heidelberg, is based on a somewhat different principle. Unlike its predecessors, the new hand can close around objects, even those with irregular surfaces. A large contact surface and soft, passive form elements greatly reduce the gripping power required to hold onto such an object. The hand also feels softer, more elastic, and more natural than conventional hard prosthetic devices.

“Fluidhand” prosthetic device offers better finishing and better grip function

The flexible drives are located directly in the movable finger joints and operate on the biological principle of the spider leg — to flex the joints, elastic chambers are pumped up by miniature hydraulics. In this way, index finger, middle finger and thumb can be moved independently. The prosthetic hand gives the stump feedback, enabling the amputee to sense the strength of the grip.

Thus far, Soren has been the only patient in Heidelberg who has tested both models. “This experience is very important for us,” says Simon Steffen, Director of the Department of Upper Extremities at the Orthopedic University Hospital in Heidelberg. The two new models were the best of those tested, with a slight advantage for Fluidhand because of its better finishing, the programmed grip configurations, power feedback, and the more easily adjustable controls. However, this prosthetic device is not in serial production. “First the developers have to find a company to produce it,” says Alfons Fuchs, Director of Orthopedics Engineering at the Orthopedic University Hospital in Heidelberg, as the costs of manufacturing it are comparatively high. However it is possible to produce an individual model. Thus far, only one patient in the world has received a Fluidhand for everyday use. A second patient will soon be fitted with this innovative prosthesis in Heidelberg.

[Dr. Annette Tuffs @ University Hospital Heidelberg]

The world was in shock when in 2001 the Taliban destroyed two ancient colossal Buddha statues in the Afghan region of Bamiyan. Behind those statues, there are caves decorated with precious paintings from 5th to 9th century A.D. The caves also suffered from Taliban destruction, as well as from a severe natural environment, but today they have become the source of a major discovery. Scientists have proved, thanks to experiments performed at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF), that the paintings were made of oil, hundreds of years before the technique was “invented” in Europe. Results are published today in the peer-reviewed Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry.

In many European history and art books, oil painting is said to have started in the 15th century in Europe. But scientists from the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Tokyo (Japan), the Centre of Research and Restoration of the French Museums-CNRS (France), the Getty Conservation Institute (United States) and the ESRF have recently identified drying oils in some of the samples they studied from the Bamiyan caves. Painted in the mid-7th century A.D., the murals show scenes with Buddhas in vermilion robes sitting cross-legged amid palm leaves and mythical creatures. The scientists discovered that 12 out of the 50 caves were painted with oil painting technique, using perhaps walnut and poppy seed drying oils.

A combination of synchrotron techniques such as infrared micro-spectroscopy, micro X-ray fluorescence, micro X-ray absorption spectroscopy or micro X-ray diffraction was crucial for the outcome of the work. “On one hand, the paintings are arranged as superposition of multiple layers, which can be very thin. The micrometric beam provided by synchrotron sources was hence essential to analyze separately each of these layers. On the other hand, these paintings are made with inorganic pigments mixed in organic binders, so we needed different techniques to get the full picture” Marine Cotte, a research scientist at CNRS and an ESRF scientific collaborator explains.

The results showed a high diversity of pigments as well as binders and the scientists identified original ingredients and alteration compounds. Apart from oil-based paint layers, some of the layers were made of natural resins, proteins, gums, and, in some cases, a resinous, varnish-like layer. Protein-based material can indicate the use of hide glue or egg. Within the various pigments, the scientists found a high use of lead whites. These lead carbonates were often used, since Antiquity up to modern times, not only in paintings but also in cosmetics as face whiteners.

“This is the earliest clear example of oil paintings in the world, although drying oils were already used by ancient Romans and Egyptians, but only as medicines and cosmetics,” explains Yoko Taniguchi, leader of the team.

The paintings are probably the work of artists who traveled on the Silk Road, the ancient trade route between China, across Central Asia’s desert to the West. However, there are very few studies about this region. “Due to political reasons research on paintings in Central Asia is scarce. We were fortunate to get the opportunity from UNESCO, as a part of conservation project for the World Heritage site Bamiyan, to study these samples and we hope that future research may provide deeper understanding of the painting techniques along the Silk Road and the Eurasian area,” says Taniguchi.

The results were presented in a scientific conference in Japan last January, but are only published today in a peer-reviewed journal.

[Montserrat Capellas @ European Synchrotron Radiation Facility]

The old adage, “We are what we eat,” may be the latest recipe for success when it comes to curbing the perils of global climate warming. Despite the recent popular attention to the distance that food travels from farm to plate, aka “food miles,” Carnegie Mellon researchers Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews argue in an upcoming article in the prestigious Environmental Science & Technology journal that it is dietary choice, not food miles, which most determines a household’s food-related climate impacts.

“Our analysis shows that despite all the attention given to food miles, the distance that food travels is only around 11% of the average American household’s food-related greenhouse gas emissions,” said Weber, a research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s department of civil and environmental engineering and engineering and public policy.

The researchers report that fruit, vegetables, meat and milk produced closer to home rack up fewer petroleum-based transport miles than foods trucked cross country to your table. Yet despite the large distances involved — the average distance traveled for food in the U.S. is estimated at 4,000-5,000 miles — the large non-energy based greenhouse gas emissions associated with producing food make food production matter much more than distance traveled.

The authors suggest that eating less red meat and/or dairy products may be a more effective way for concerned citizens to lower their food-related climate impacts. They estimate that shifting to an entirely local diet would reduce the equivalent greenhouse gas emissions as driving 1,000 miles, while changing only one day per week’s meat and dairy-based calories to chicken, fish, or vegetables would have about the same impact. Shifting entirely from an average American diet to a vegetable-based one would reduce the same emissions as 8,000 miles driven per year.

“Where you get your food from is a relevant factor in family food decisions, but what you are eating - and the processes needed to make it - is much more important from a climate change perspective,” said Matthews, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon.

[Chriss Swaney @ Carnegie Mellon University]

How good are we at guessing other people’s likes and dislikes? Ever bring a favorite dish to a potluck — only to watch it go uneaten? Or receive an unwelcome shock when a cherished product is discontinued for lack of sales? People have the tendency to assume the whole world likes what we like, reveals new research from the June 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. However, we don’t generalize the same way when it comes to things we hate.

“The degree of false consensus depends on whether a person likes or dislikes an item,” explain Andrew D. Gershoff (University of Michigan), Ashesh Mukherjee (McGill University), and Anirban Mukhopadhyay (University of Michigan).

Participants in one study were asked to choose a movie they like. They were then asked to guess what percentage of their peers liked the movie as well. On average, people estimated that 51.2 percent of other people also liked the movie, a significant overestimate. They also estimated that only 18.2 percent of people, on average, disliked it — a reflection of the belief that more people agree with us than disagree.

In contrast, when asked to choose a movie they dislike and make the same estimate, participants were less self-centered: they thought people would agree and disagree with their opinion in roughly the same numbers.

As the researchers explain, “This finding arises from a deeper truth about the human mind, namely that things we like are seen to contain primarily good characteristics, while things we dislike are seen to contain a mix of bad, neutral, or good characteristics.”

We might even like everything about an item — except for one unforgivable, deal-breaking trait.

“This difference leads us to make more exaggerated predictions that people like the same things we do, compared to predictions that people will dislike the same things that we dislike,” the researchers add.

Another study of ice cream sundaes found that those who liked a certain flavor combination — say, mint ice cream with walnuts and hot fudge — overestimated that people would share their fondness for the sundae by 9.9 percent. Those who disliked it only overestimated that people would share their repulsion by 0.8 percent.

They conclude: “Our research indicates that decision-makers in such situations need to be highly sensitive to the danger of over-projecting their own likes, more so than their own dislikes.”

Andrew D. Gershoff, Ashesh Mukherjee, and Anirban Mukhopadhyay, “What’s Not to Like? Preference Asymmetry in the False Consensus Effect.” Journal of Consumer Research: June 2008.

[Suzanne Wu @ University of Chicago Press Journals]

Philanthropy just got easier and a lot more accessible to the public thanks to the social networking power of the Internet and a ground-breaking partnership between a young British entrepreneur, a global health think tank, and an African medical research institute.

Debuted April 20 to offer individuals a meaningful way to mark World Malaria Day (Friday, April 25), its creators hope MalariaEngage.org will do for African research what YouTube did for sharing videos and what eBay did for trading things — open it up in a creative and engaging way to the vast global community through the World Wide Web.

At MalariaEngage.org, people can enlist directly in the anti-malaria battle by contributing $10 or more to an initial choice of seven highly varied projects involving selected scientists in developing countries. Over time, new projects will replace those that reach their funding goal (the original seven have objectives ranging from $10,000 to $50,000). The site features a discussion area where supporters can interact with researchers and each other, obtain news and photos of both funded and proposed projects, a running tally of money raised, and stories from the front lines in the war against the scourge of malaria.

Borne by mosquitos, malaria is a preventable disease that infects an estimated 515 million people yearly and kills between one and three million annually, the vast majority of them children in sub-Saharan Africa — an estimated 3,000 child victims daily.

It is the leading cause of death in Tanzania, where the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) researchers proposed the initial suite of seven cutting-edge projects chosen to launch MalariaEngage.org.

The team behind MalariaEngage.org includes 25-year-old Tom Hadfield, a self-described “part-time student and full-time entrepreneur” who came to national attention in his native Britain when Soccernet, a Web site he developed as a high school student in his bedroom, was sold at age 17 to ESPN for $40 million.

Honoured as a Global Leader of Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2001 and now studying at Harvard, Tom has parlayed his dot-com success and passion for launching entrepreneurial projects into innovative ways of tackling the planet’s oldest and most intractable problems.

“It’s shocking that thousands of people are dying every day from a preventable disease,” says Hadfield. “When I came back from Africa last summer, a lot of people asked me what they can do to help.

“By encouraging individual participation and involvement, we will create international communities of common interest,” he says. “This is the essence of social networking — MalariaEngage.org connects people who want to help directly with researchers working in Africa on malaria prevention, treatment and capacity building projects. Everyone can help and I urge them to discover, learn, join, contribute, get results, share experiences and invite others to participate.”

Hadfield notes MalariaEngage.org will fit seamlessly into other social networking sites such as Facebook, whose users can add malaria research projects as a “cause” on their profile, join groups of project supporters, and communicate with others dedicated to helping eradicate malaria.

“When we tap into all that energy and creativity to promote and raise funds for malaria research projects, not just in Tanzania but elsewhere in Africa and the developing world, who knows what might be achieved?”

Hadfield co-founded MalariaEngage.org with leading global health professors Peter A. Singer and Abdallah S. Daar at Canada’s McLaughlin-Rotman Centre for Global Health at University Health Network and University of Toronto (MRC), the project’s lead partner.

Says Dr. Singer, MD: “Everyone recognizes that one of the most significant ethical challenges facing the world today is the inequity in global health. Life expectancy in industrialized countries is 80 years and rising; whilst in many African countries it is 40 years and falling. The key ethical value underlying efforts to do something about these inequities is solidarity.

“Many young people in the US, Canada, Europe and other industrialized countries feel a sense of solidarity with kids in Africa, but there is not much they can do to act on this ethical intuition. MalariaEngage.org was designed to give them a channel to do something in practice about that ethical value of solidarity, to mobilize a vast untapped pool of support — not just to raise funds but also to create a worldwide community of people committed to changing the face of global health,” he says.

“Imagine a world where like-minded people in the US, Canada, Europe and other industrialized nations are tightly connected in efforts to find solutions to malaria — one of the great, and unnecessary, plagues affecting humankind.”

According to Dr. Daar, MD: “Malaria is an ongoing global health catastrophe that must be addressed by empowering researchers in the developing world to find solutions to their countries’ own problems through creative, properly capitalized research programs. Tapping the talent and motivation of developing country scientists is critical if we’re going to win this fight.”

If this initial proof of concept is successful, MalariaEngage.org will scale up by involving other African-based institutions fighting malaria, he adds.

[Terry Collins @ MalariaEngage.org]

Geotimes magazine examines Google’s efforts to develop affordable renewable energy in the April issue, available online and on newsstands now.

Google, Inc. launched RE<C: Renewable Energy cheaper than Coal in November 2007. The goal is to bring renewable energy, such as solar, wind and geothermal, to prices low enough to compete with coal within the next 10 years.

Energy from coal-fired power plants runs from 2 to 4 cents per kilowatt hour, making it the cheapest energy source worldwide. Its price and availability make it the most used energy source in the world. But while it is affordable, it also accounts for at least 20 percent of the global greenhouse emissions. Currently, wind and geothermal energy cost on average at least 5 cents per kilowatt hour, while solar energy is even more expensive at 10 to 40 cents per kilowatt hour. To make these energy sources widely available and attractive to consumers, prices have to drop. Improved ways to efficiently harness these renewable resources to turn them into power are close at hand, but Google thinks a serious push is needed to develop these technologies to make them more accessible to the general public.

Learn about Google’s investments to improve technology on already existing renewable energy sources in the latest issue of Geotimes magazine, available now on newsstands and on the Web.

[Megan Sever @ American Geological Institute]

Although the digital age is well under way, one crucial detail remains to be worked out — how to store vast amounts of digital information in a way that allows future generations to recover it.

“The problem is how to build a large-scale data storage system to last 50 to 100 years,” said Ethan Miller, associate professor of computer science in the Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Tape libraries are widely used for data storage, but digital tape has many shortcomings as an archival medium. Miller’s group has come up with a new approach, called Pergamum, which uses hard disk drives to provide energy-efficient, cost-effective storage. The declining cost of hard drives has made them more competitive with tape, and they offer numerous advantages for searching and retreiving data. “It’s like the difference between a VCR and TiVo,” Miller said.

Pergamum, named after the ancient Greek library that made the transition from fragile papyrus to more durable parchment, is a distributed network of intelligent, disk-based storage devices. The team that developed it includes UCSC graduate students Mark Storer and Kevin Greenan, along with researcher Kaladhar Voruganti of NetApp (formerly Network Appliance), a company that focuses on storage and data management solutions.

Archival storage is a big issue for businesses, partly due to legal requirements for the preservation of financial and business records, and also because data mining strategies can turn stored data into a valuable resource. Long-term storage is also a growing issue for individuals who are filling their personal computers with digital photos, movies, and documents.

“There is a risk that an entire generation’s cultural history could be lost if people aren’t able to retrieve that data,” Storer said. “Everyone is switching to digital cameras, but we’ve never demonstrated that digital data can be reliably preserved for a long time.”

Pergamum has attracted a lot of attention from industry since Storer presented it at a leading conference in the field, the USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST ‘08), held in San Jose in February. Robin Harris, an industry consultant who writes an influential blog called StorageMojo, called the Pergamum paper his “favorite FAST ‘08 paper.”

The researchers designed the system to provide reliable, energy-efficient data storage using off-the-shelf components. It also has the ability to evolve over time as storage technologies change. “You want to avoid ‘forklift upgrades,’ where you have to get rid of the old system and transfer all your data to a whole new system,” Miller said.

According to Storer, businesses are beginning to recognize that archival storage is very different from simply backing up their data. “A backup is a safety net — you hope you won’t need it. Archival data you do want to use — it’s a valuable resource and you want to be able to mine it for information,” he said.

Tapes work well for backups, in which data are written once, rarely read, and not kept indefinitely. But archival data should be easy to read, query, browse, and search, and tape has inherent weaknesses in these areas. Existing disk-based systems offer excellent performance, but rely on power-hungry central controllers.

“Energy usage is a big issue, so a lot of our effort in designing Pergamum focused on dramatically reducing power use,” Miller said.

Pergamum uses individual building blocks consisting of a hard drive; a small, low-power processor (like the chip in an iPhone); a flash memory card; and an ethernet port. These units, called “tomes,” are connected using relatively inexpensive ethernet switches.

“Each tome is like a minicomputer, but with very low power demands,” Miller said. “When not in use, it can shut down almost completely.”

Even when active, the devices use very little power (less than 13 watts), which can be delivered over the network using Power over Ethernet technology. As a result, each unit is essentially a self-contained box with a network connection. The flash memory provides low-power, persistent storage so that many operations can be performed without activating the hard drive.

For reliability, Pergamum uses two levels of redundancy — within and between disks — to protect from both disk failures and errors in writing data to a disk (so-called “latent sector errors”). Tomes can be easily added to expand the system or to replace failed disks. And if hard disk drives become obsolete in 10 years, Pergamum won’t suffer the same fate. The system doesn’t care what the actual storage medium is, as long as the device can implement the simple protocol that will allow it to function as part of the network.

“In 50 years, the devices might use holographic storage,” Storer said. “As long as you can wrap the new storage medium in this intelligent layer that speaks the protocol, it can participate in the network.”

Pergamum is one of several related projects being developed by researchers in the Storage Systems Research Center (SSRC) at UCSC’s Baskin School of Engineering. The center’s other archival storage projects include Deep Store, which dramatically reduces the amount of space required to store data, and POTSHARDS, which provides long-term secure storage using “secret splitting” instead of traditional encryption. Both of these projects would be compatible with Pergamum, Miller said.

[Tim Stephens @ University of California - Santa Cruz]

Researchers have used the world’s thinnest material to create the world’s smallest transistor, one atom thick and ten atoms wide.

Reporting their peer-reviewed findings in the latest issue of the journal Science, Dr Kostya Novoselov and Professor Andre Geim from The School of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Manchester show that graphene can be carved into tiny electronic circuits with individual transistors having a size not much larger than that of a molecule.

The smaller the size of their transistors the better they perform, say the Manchester researchers.

In recent decades, manufacturers have crammed more and more components onto integrated circuits. As a result, the number of transistors and the power of these circuits have roughly doubled every two years. This has become known as Moore’s Law.

But the speed of cramming is now noticeably decreasing, and further miniaturisation of electronics is to experience its most fundamental challenge in the next 10 to 20 years, according to the semiconductor industry roadmap.

At the heart of the problem is the poor stability of materials if shaped in elements smaller than 10 nanometres (1) in size. At this spatial scale, all semiconductors — including silicon — oxidise, decompose and uncontrollably migrate along surfaces like water droplets on a hot plate.

Four years ago, Geim and his colleagues discovered graphene, the first known one-atom-thick material which can be viewed as a plane of atoms pulled out from graphite. Graphene has rapidly become the hottest topic in physics and materials science.

Now the Manchester team has shown that it is possible to carve out nanometre-scale transistors from a single graphene crystal. Unlike all other known materials, graphene remains highly stable and conductive even when it is cut into devices one nanometre wide.

Graphene transistors start showing advantages and good performance at sizes below 10 nanometres - the miniaturization limit at which the Silicon technology is predicted to fail.

“Previously, researchers tried to use large molecules as individual transistors to create a new kind of electronic circuits. It is like a bit of chemistry added to computer engineering”, says Novoselov. “Now one can think of designer molecules acting as transistors connected into designer computer architecture on the basis of the same material (graphene), and use the same fabrication approach that is currently used by semiconductor industry”.

“It is too early to promise graphene supercomputers,” adds Geim. “In our work, we relied on chance when making such small transistors. Unfortunately, no existing technology allows the cutting materials with true nanometre precision. But this is exactly the same challenge that all post-silicon electronics has to face. At least we now have a material that can meet such a challenge.”

“Graphene is an exciting new material with unusual properties that are promising for nanoelectronics,” comments Bob Westervelt, professor at Harvard University. “The future should be very interesting.”

A paper entitled Chaotic Dirac Billiard in Graphene Quantum Dots is published in the April 17 issue of Science. It is accompanied by a perspective article entitled “Graphene Nanoelectronics” by Westervelt. Copies of both are available on request.

[Alex Waddington @ University of Manchester]

The connection between music and mathematics has fascinated scholars for centuries.

More than 200 years ago Pythagoras reportedly discovered that pleasing musical intervals could be described using simple ratios.

And the so-called musica universalis or “music of the spheres” emerged in the Middle Ages as the philosophical idea that the proportions in the movements of the celestial bodies — the sun, moon and planets — could be viewed as a form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Now, three music professors — Clifton Callender at Florida State University, Ian Quinn at Yale University and Dmitri Tymoczko at Princeton University — have devised a new way of analyzing and categorizing music that takes advantage of the deep, complex mathematics they see enmeshed in its very fabric.

Writing in the April 18 issue of Science, the trio has outlined a method called “geometrical music theory” that translates the language of musical theory into that of contemporary geometry. They take sequences of notes, like chords, rhythms and scales, and categorize them so they can be grouped into “families.” They have found a way to assign mathematical structure to these families, so they can then be represented by points in complex geometrical spaces, much the way “x” and “y” coordinates, in the simpler system of high school algebra, correspond to points on a two-dimensional plane.

Different types of categorization produce different geometrical spaces, and reflect the different ways in which musicians over the centuries have understood music. This achievement, they expect, will allow researchers to analyze and understand music in much deeper and more satisfying ways.

The work represents a significant departure from other attempts to quantify music, according to Rachel Wells Hall of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia. In an accompanying essay, she writes that their effort, “stands out both for the breadth of its musical implications and the depth of its mathematical content.”

The method, according to its authors, allows them to analyze and compare many kinds of Western (and perhaps some non-Western) music. (The method focuses on Western-style music because concepts like “chord” are not universal in all styles.) It also incorporates many past schemes by music theorists to render music into mathematical form.

“The music of the spheres isn’t really a metaphor — some musical spaces really are spheres,” said Tymoczko, an assistant professor of music at Princeton. “The whole point of making these geometric spaces is that, at the end of the day, it helps you understand music better. Having a powerful set of tools for conceptualizing music allows you to do all sorts of things you hadn’t done before.”

Like what?

“You could create new kinds of musical instruments or new kinds of toys,” he said. “You could create new kinds of visualization tools — imagine going to a classical music concert where the music was being translated visually. We could change the way we educate musicians. There are lots of practical consequences that could follow from these ideas.”

“But to me,” Tymoczko added, “the most satisfying aspect of this research is that we can now see that there is a logical structure linking many, many different musical concepts. To some extent, we can represent the history of music as a long process of exploring different symmetries and different geometries.”

Understanding music, the authors write, is a process of discarding information. For instance, suppose a musician plays middle “C” on a piano, followed by the note “E” above that and the note “G” above that. Musicians have many different terms to describe this sequence of events, such as “an ascending C major arpeggio,” “a C major chord,” or “a major chord.” The authors provide a unified mathematical framework for relating these different descriptions of the same musical event.

The trio describes five different ways of categorizing collections of notes that are similar, but not identical. They refer to these musical resemblances as the “OPTIC symmetries,” with each letter of the word “OPTIC” representing a different way of ignoring musical information — for instance, what octave the notes are in, their order, or how many times each note is repeated. The authors show that five symmetries can be combined with each other to produce a cornucopia of different musical concepts, some of which are familiar and some of which are novel.

In this way, the musicians are able to reduce musical works to their mathematical essence.

Once notes are translated into numbers and then translated again into the language of geometry the result is a rich menagerie of geometrical spaces, each inhabited by a different species of geometrical object. After all the mathematics is done, three-note chords end up on a triangular donut while chord types perch on the surface of a cone.

The broad effort follows upon earlier work by Tymoczko in which he developed geometric models for selected musical objects.

The method could help answer whether there are new scales and chords that exist but have yet to be discovered.

“Have Western composers already discovered the essential and most important musical objects?” Tymoczko asked. “If so, then Western music is more than just an arbitrary set of conventions. It may be that the basic objects of Western music are fantastically special, in which case it would be quite difficult to find alternatives to broadly traditional methods of musical organization.”

The tools for analysis also offer the exciting possibility of investigating the differences between musical styles.

“Our methods are not so great at distinguishing Aerosmith from the Rolling Stones,” Tymoczko said. “But they might allow you to visualize some of the differences between John Lennon and Paul McCartney. And they certainly help you understand more deeply how classical music relates to rock or is different from atonal music.”

[Kitta MacPherson @ Princeton University]

A computer system that can carry on a discussion with a human being by reacting to signals such as tone of voice and facial expression, is being developed by an international team including Queen’s University Belfast.

Known as SEMAINE, the project will build a Sensitive Artificial Listener (SAL) system, which will perceive a human user’s facial expression, gaze, and voice and then engage with the user. When engaging with a human, the SAL will be able to adapt its own performance and pursue different actions, depending on the non-verbal behaviour of the user.

SEMAINE is led by DFKI, the German centre for research on Artificial Intelligence: the other partners are Imperial College, London, the University of Paris 8, the University of Twente in Holland, and the Technical University of Munich. The European Commission awarded it a grant of 2.75 million after it was ranked first out of 143 bids for medium-sized projects in the area of cognitive systems and robotics.

Professor Roddy Cowie, from the School of Psychology, leads the team at Queen’s. He said: “A basic feature of human communication is that it is coloured by emotion. When we talk to another person, the words are carried on an undercurrent of signs that show them what attracts us, what bores us and so on. The fact that computers do not currently do this is one of the main reasons why communicating with them is so unlike interacting with a human. It is also one of the reasons we can find them so frustrating,” said Professor Cowie.

“SEMAINE and projects like it will change the way people interact with technology. They mean that you will be talking to your computer in 20 years time. When you do, pause for a minute, and remember that the human sciences at Queen’s helped to lay the groundwork.

“These new developments depend on connecting technology to the relevant understanding of people, and it is recognised worldwide that we have a distinctive strength in bringing psychology, linguistics and ethics to bear on the process of developing the new systems.”

SEMAINE follows on from another project, entitled HUMAINE, which was led by Professor Cowie. The HUMAINE Project (Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotion) received 4.95 million to develop interfaces that let humans use computers in a more natural way. In 2006 it won the “Grand Prize” for the best Information Society Technology Project website. HUMAINE continues in the form of a world-wide organisation for emotion-oriented computing, the HUMAINE Association, of which Professor Cowie is president.

Professor Cowie added: “Today when we use technology we adopt a style of communication that suits the machine. Through projects like HUMAINE, SEMAINE, and others linked to them, we will develop technology that will eventually communicate in ways that suit human beings.”

[Lisa Mitchell @ Queen’s University Belfast]

When a tiny, quantum-scale, hypothetical balloon is popped in a vacuum, do the particles inside spread out all over the place as predicted by classical mechanics”

The question is deceptively complex, since quantum particles do not look or act like air molecules in a real balloon. Matter at the infinitesimally small quantum scale is both a wave and a particle, and its location cannot be fixed precisely because measurement alters the system.

Now, theoretical physicists at the University of Southern California and the University of Massachusetts Boston have proven a long-standing hypothesis that quantum-scale chaos exists… sort of.

Writing in the April 17 edition of Nature, senior author Maxim Olshanii reported that when an observer attempts to measure the energies of particles coming out of a quantum balloon, the interference caused by the attempt throws the system into a final, “relaxed” state analogous to the chaotic scattering of air molecules.

The result is the same for any starting arrangement of particles, Olshanii added, since the act of measuring wipes out the differences between varying initial states.

“It’s enough to know the properties of a single stationary state of definite energy of the system to predict the properties of the thermal equilibrium (the end state),” Olshanii said.

The measurement — which must involve interaction between observer and observed, such as light traveling between the two — disrupts the “coherent” state of the system, Olshanii said.

In mathematical terms, the resulting interference reveals the final state, which had been hidden in the equations describing the initial state of the system.

“The thermal equilibrium is already encoded in an initial state,” Olshanii said. “You can see some signatures for the future equilibrium. They were already there but more masked by quantum coherences.”

The finding holds implications for the emerging fields of quantum computing and quantum information theory, said Paolo Zanardi, an associate professor of physics studying quantum information at USC.

In Zanardi’s world, researchers want to prevent coherent systems from falling into the chaos of thermal equilibrium.

“Finding such ‘unthermalizable’ states of matter and manipulating them is exactly one of those things that quantum information/computation folks like me would love to do,” Zanardi wrote. “Such states would be immune from ‘decoherence’ (loss of quantum coherence induced by the coupling with environment) that’s still the most serious, both conceptually and practically, obstacle between us and viable quantum information processing.”

Zanardi and a collaborator introduced the notion of “decoherence-free” quantum states in 1997. Researchers such as Zanardi and Daniel Lidar, associate professor of chemistry, among others, have helped make USC a major center for the study of quantum computing.

[Carl Marziali @ University of Southern California]