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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 31, 2014 at 6:06am

DuPont's Power of Shunya wins four gold medals at DMAi Echo Awards in India
DuPont's 'Power of Shunya', a branded content and activation initiative, received four gold medals at the recently held DMAi Awards.
DuPont's “Power of Shunya”, a branded content and activation initiative, received four gold medals at the recently held Direct Marketing Association India (DMAi) Awards.

The initiative won gold medals in the categories of creativity in direct response, branded content, the craft of animation, and effectiveness. DMAi Awards, in alliance with DMA International Echo Awards, honour creative excellence in marketing and advertising campaigns that have raised the bar on originality, response strategy, interactivity and marketing impact.

At its core, the Power of Shunya is a collaborative and science driven platform consisting of two television series – The Quest for Zero and The Challenge for Zero. The programmes showcased companies and individuals that epitomise the spirit of Indian ingenuity and how science-driven solutions can help solve some of the key challenges facing India.

Jitin Munjal, regional director, South Asia & ASEAN, Corporate Marketing & Sales, DuPont, said, “At DuPont, we believe in the power of collaboration to address the world’s most important challenges. We created the Power of Shunya initiative to start a conversation about the various challenges facing India, and how science can play an important role in solving them. The success of this programme and these gold medals clearly demonstrate the power of branded content and activation efforts to build customer engagement and reinforce DuPont’s position as a preferred innovation partner and scientific thought leader.”

http://www.financialexpress.com/news/duponts-power-of-shunya-wins-f...

http://www.powerofshunya.com/Winner.aspx

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 30, 2014 at 6:10am

Have been waiting to have one, love this self driving car Designed to operate safely and autonomously without requiring human intervention. They won’t have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal… because they don’t need them. Google's software and sensors will do all the work. They will take you where you want to go at the push of a button. And that's an important step toward improving road safety and transforming mobility for millions of people.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 30, 2014 at 6:05am

A new study finds that shining a low-power laser on damaged rat teeth activates molecular growth factors already present in the tissue. These growth factors cue stem cells to generate dentin, the bonelike substance that teeth are mostly made of.

Researchers also found that when mice were missing those growth factors or when the factors were blocked from working, the stem cells would not regenerate dentin when exposed to laser light. That finding confirms the important role these signaling pathways play in dental development. The study, led by David Mooney at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, is in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
Laser Light Coaxes Damaged Rodent Tooth Repair
Low-power laser light shined on damaged rat teeth activates growth factors that cue stem cells to generate the tooth constituent dentin, leading to regeneration.
http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/6/238/238ra69

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 29, 2014 at 9:03am

Fast Growing Bornean Trees Important For Carbon Cycling
Rainforests in Borneo produce 50 percent more wood biomass than comparable forests in the Amazon, scientists say.
An international collaboration including scientists from Taiwan and Malaysia has found that certain species of trees in Bornean rainforests achieve faster wood growth rates than even the most productive forests in the Amazon. The research, published in the Journal of Ecology, suggests that these trees may play an important role in mitigating global warming through carbon sequestration
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2745.12263/abstract...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 29, 2014 at 9:00am

What is Quantum Tunneling?
Scientists from Japan have demonstrated that an important physical effect accounts for the dynamics of a quantum tunneling system
A team of Japanese scientists has found new experimental evidence for a fundamental quantum mechanical phenomenon, resolving previously unverified hypotheses about the dynamics of quantum tunneling.

In quantum mechanics, the Aharonov-Bohm (AB) effect describes the observation in which an electrically charged particle is affected by an electromagnetic field despite lying outside its region. A fundamental phenomenon believed to be caused by interactions between the electromagnetic field potential and the particle’s wavefunction, the AB effect has been used by physicists to explain and make predictions about the behavior of particles.

Led by Shinji Urabe, professor at Osaka University, the team investigated quantum tunneling using two-dimensional ionic structures in a “linear Paul trap” that captures ions into a region. Quantum tunneling is a phenomenon describing how particles can be transmitted across a supposedly insurmountable barrier.

By manipulating the ground state of an ion using laser cooling and arranging three calcium ions in a triangular structure, the research, which was published in Nature Communications, demonstrated that the charged particles contained in the quantum tunneling system behave in accordance to the AB effect.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2014/140513/ncomms4868/full/ncomms4868...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 29, 2014 at 8:58am

30% of world is now fat - and I am not one among them!
Almost a third of the world is now fat, and no country has been able to curb obesity rates in the last three decades, according to a new global analysis.

Researchers found more than 2 billion people worldwide are now overweight or obese. The highest rates were in the Middle East and North Africa, where nearly 60 percent of men and 65 percent of women are heavy. The U.S. has about 13 percent of the world's fat population, a greater percentage than any other country. China and India combined have about 15 percent.
There was a strong link between income and obesity; as people get richer, their waistlines also tend to start bulging. He said scientists have noticed accompanying spikes in diabetes and that rates of cancers linked to weight, like pancreatic cancer, are also rising.

The new report was paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and published online Thursday in the journal, Lancet.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 29, 2014 at 8:41am

Carbon in deeper soil threatening our climate
Deep soils can contain long-buried stocks of organic carbon which could, through erosion, agriculture, deforestation, mining and other human activities, contribute to global climate change.

"There is a lot of carbon at depths where nobody is measuring," said Erika Marin-Spiotta, assistant professor of geography at University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US.

It was assumed that there was little carbon in deeper soils and so most studies so far focused only the top 30 centimetres.

"Our study is showing that we are potentially grossly underestimating carbon in soils," Marin-Spiotta added.

The soil studied by Marin-Spiotta and her colleagues, known as the Brady soil, formed between 15,000 and 13,500 years ago in what is now Nebraska, Kansas and other parts of the Great Plains.

It lies up to six-and-a-half metres below the present-day surface and was buried by a vast accumulation of windborne dust known as loess beginning about 10,000 years ago, when the glaciers that covered much of North America began to retreat.

The study appeared in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 29, 2014 at 8:24am

Protection against chemical weapons
Researchers at Oregon State University have discovered that some compounds called polyoxoniobates can degrade and decontaminate nerve agents such as the deadly sarin gas, and have other characteristics that may make them ideal for protective suits, masks or other clothing. The use of polyoxoniobates for this purpose had never before been demonstrated, scientists said, and the discovery could have important implications for both military and civilian protection.
The study findings were just published in the European Journal of Inorganic Chemistry.

Some other compounds exist that can decontaminate nerve gases, researchers said, but they are organic, unstable, degraded by sunlight and have other characteristics that make them undesirable for protective clothing -- or they are inorganic, but cannot be used on fabrics or surfaces.

By contrast, the polyoxoniobates are inorganic, do not degrade in normal environmental conditions, dissolve easily and it should be able to incorporate them onto surfaces, fabrics and other material.
"As stable, inorganic compounds they have an important potential to decontaminate and protect against these deadly nerve gases."
Besides protection against nerve gas, their chemistry might allow them to function as a catalyst that could absorb carbon dioxide and find use in carbon sequestration at fossil-fuel power plants -- but little has been done yet to explore that potential.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 29, 2014 at 8:19am

Using thoughts to control airplanes
Pilots of the future may be able to control their aircraft by merely thinking commands, scientists say.

Researchers at the Technische Universitat Munchen (TUM) in Germany have demonstrated the feasibility of flying via brain control - with astonishing accuracy.
The scientists have logged their first breakthrough: They succeeded in demonstrating that brain-controlled flight is indeed possible -- with amazing precision. Seven subjects took part in the flight simulator tests. They had varying levels of flight experience, including one person without any practical cockpit experience whatsoever. The accuracy with which the test subjects stayed on course by merely thinking commands would have sufficed, in part, to fulfill the requirements of a flying license test. "One of the subjects was able to follow eight out of ten target headings with a deviation of only 10 degrees," reports Fricke. Several of the subjects also managed the landing approach under poor visibility. One test pilot even landed within only few meters of the centerline.

The TU München scientists are now focusing in particular on the question of how the requirements for the control system and flight dynamics need to be altered to accommodate the new control method. Normally, pilots feel resistance in steering and must exert significant force when the loads induced on the aircraft become too large. This feedback is missing when using brain control. The researchers are thus looking for alternative methods of feedback to signal when the envelope is pushed too hard, for example.

Electrical potentials are converted into control commands

In order for humans and machines to communicate, brain waves of the pilots are measured using electroencephalography (EEG) electrodes connected to a cap. An algorithm developed by scientists from the Department of Biological Psychology and Neuroergonomics at the Berlin Institute of Technology allows the program to decipher electrical potentials and convert them into useful control commands.

Only the very clearly defined electrical brain impulses required for control are recognized by the brain-computer interface. "This is pure signal processing," emphasizes Fricke. Mind reading is not possible.

The researchers will present their results end of September at the "Deutscher Luft- und Raumfahrtkongress."

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on May 29, 2014 at 8:15am

Scientists develop new hybrid energy transfer system
Scientists from the University of Southampton, in collaboration with the Universities of Sheffield and Crete, have developed a new hybrid energy transfer system, which mimics the processes responsible for photosynthesis. From photosynthesis to respiration, the processes of light absorption and its transfer into energy represent elementary and essential reactions that occur in any biological living system.

This energy transfer is known as Forster Resonance Energy Transfer (FRET), a radiationless transmission of energy that occurs on the nanometer scale from a donor molecule to an acceptor molecule. The donor molecule is the dye or chromophore that initially absorbs the energy and the acceptor is the chromophore to which the energy is subsequently transferred without any molecular collision. However, FRET is a strongly distance dependent process which occurs over a scale of typically 1 to 10 nm.

In a new study, published in the journal Nature Materials, the researchers demonstrate an alternate non-radiative, intermolecular energy transfer that exploits the intermediating role of light confined in an optical cavity. The advantage of this new technique which exploits the formation of quantum states admixture of light and matter, is the length over which the interaction takes places, that is in fact, considerably longer than conventional FRET-type processes.

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