Scientists develop world's first 'biological Internet'

Indo-Asian News Service, October 01, 2012

Bio-engineers are harnessing the key attibutes of a virus, M13, such as its ability to package and broadcast arbitrary DNA strands, to create the first biological internet or 'Bi-Fi.'Bio-engneering researchers Monica Ortiz and Drew Endy from Stanford University have created a biological mechanism to send genetic messages from cell to cell.
The system boosts the complexity and amount of data that can be communicated between cells and could lead to greater control of biological functions within cell communities, the Journal of Biological Engineering reports.
Biological internet could lead to biosynthetic factories in which huge masses of microbes collaborate to make more complicated fuels, pharmaceuticals and other useful chemicals, including the regeneration of tissue or organs in future, according to a Stanford statement.
Ortiz was even able to broadcast her genetic messages between cells separated by a gelatinous medium at a distance greater than seven centimetres.
"That's very long-range communication, cellularly speaking," she said.
M13 is a packager of genetic messages. It reproduces within its host, taking strands of DNA strands that engineers can control wrapping them up one by one and sending them out encapsulated within proteins produced by M13 that can infect other cells.
Once inside the new hosts, they release the packaged DNA message. The M13-based system is essentially a communication channel. It acts like a wireless Internet connection that enables cells to send or receive messages, but it does not care what secrets the transmitted messages contain.
"Effectively, we've separated the message from the channel. We can now send any DNA message we want to specific cells within a complex microbial community," said Ortiz, who led the study.
It is well-known that cells naturally use various mechanisms, including chemicals, to communicate, but such messaging can be extremely limited in both complexity and bandwidth.
Simple chemical signals are typically both message and messenger two functions that cannot be separated.
"If your network connection is based on sugar then your messages are limited to 'more sugar,' 'less sugar,' or 'no sugar'" explained Endy.
Cells engineered with M13 can be programmed to communicate in much more complex, powerful ways than ever before. In harnessing DNA for cell-cell messaging the researchers have also greatly increased the amount of data they can transmit at any one time. In digital terms, they have increased the bit rate of their system.

Tags: Bi-Fi, biological Internet, M13

 

Now, there`s long-term control of allergic asthma

Last Updated: Monday, October 01, 2012,14:59

   

 

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Tags: Allergic Asthma,  Immunotherapy , Allergy shots

 

Washington: When children suffer from allergies and asthma induced by dust mites, finding relief seems an uphill task. Researchers now claim that three years of allergy shots would offer long-term control of allergic asthma.

Allergic children react to proteins within the bodies and faeces of the mites. These particles are found mostly in pillows, mattresses, carpeting, stuffed animals and upholstered furniture. Researchers say there may be as many as 19,000 dust mites in one gram of dust!

"The recommended duration of immunotherapy for long-term effectiveness has been three to five years," said Iwona Stelmach, from the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), who led the study.

"Our research shows that three years is an adequate duration for the treatment of childhood asthma associated with house dust mites. An additional two years adds no clinical benefit," adds Stelmach, quoted in the journal Annals of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.

Immunotherapy, also known as allergy shots, can alter the progression of allergic disease. The treatment eases patients of symptoms, while preventing asthma and the development of other allergies, according to an ACAAI statement.

The study found that 50 percent of children with asthma due to dust mites experienced remission after three years of treatment, with greatly reduced or no controller medications needed at that point. It has long been observed that the effectiveness of allergy shots continues long after treatment has been completed," said allergist James Sublett, who holds the chair of the ACAAI Indoor Environment Committee.

"This study is among the first to look at the benefits of different lengths of therapy. Not only does it provide long-term therapeutic benefits for both children and adults, it can reduce total healthcare costs by 33 to 41 percent."

Speech silencer among Ig Nobel prize winners

Last Updated: Friday, September 21, 2012, 10:23

 

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Tags: Speech jammer, Ig Nobel prize, Kazutaka Kurihara, Koji Tsukada

Zeenews bureau

New Delhi: A device to make incessant talkers shut up was named Thursday as a 2012 winner of the Ig Nobel prize.

Dubbed the SpeechJammer, the portable device can disrupts a person's speech by repeating his or her own voice at a delay of a few hundred milliseconds.

The echo effect of the device is just annoying enough to get someone to sputter and stop.

The device created by Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada is meant to help public speakers by alerting them if they are speaking too quickly or have taken up more than their allotted time.
"This technology ... could also be useful to ensure speakers in a meeting take turns appropriately, when a particular participant continues to speak, depriving others of the opportunity to make their fair contribution," said Kurihara, of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan.

Still, winning an Ig Nobel, an award sponsored by the Annals of Improbable Research magazine for weird and humorous scientific discoveries, in acoustics for the device's other more dubious purpose is cool too.

"Winning an Ig Nobel has been my dream as a mad scientist," he said.

As usual, the ersatz Nobels were handed out by real Nobel laureates, including 2007 economics winner Eric Maskin, who was also the prize in the "Win a Date with a Nobel Laureate" contest.

Other winners feted Thursday at Harvard University's opulent Sanders Theatre included Dutch researchers who won the psychology prize for studying why leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower look smaller; four Americans who took the neuroscience prize for demonstrating that sophisticated equipment can detect brain activity in dead fish; a British-American team that won the physics prize for explaining how and why ponytails bounce; and the U.S. General Accountability Office, which won the literature prize for a report about reports.

Rouslan Krechetnikov, an engineering professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, and graduate student Hans Meyer took home the fluid dynamics prize for research into the sloshing that goes on in coffee cup as it's carried.

Like many projects that have won Ig Nobels in the past, it started in a casual conversation based on everyday observations.

Krechetnikov and Meyer were taking a coffee break at a conference last year when they watched as others milled around trying to prevent staining their clothes.
The science of sloshing liquids has been studied before — in rocketry, for example, shifting weight can destabilize a missile or rocket — but no one's ever really studied coffee as it splashes around, Krechetnikov said.

"It is one of those cases where we were interested in explaining the phenomena, but not changing it," he said.

The reason coffee spills?: A person's walking speed, their mental focus and, surprisingly enough, noise.

Are there practical applications? You could design a better coffee cup by using what Krechetnikov calls "a series of annular ring baffles arranged around the inner wall of the container to achieve sloshing suppression," although those solutions are impractical.

"We just wanted to satisfy our curiosity and, given the results, to share what we learned with the scientific community through peer-reviewed literature," he said.

The 22nd annual Ig Nobels ceremony, with the theme "The Universe," featured the usual doses of zaniness, including the traditional launching of hundreds of paper airplanes and the world premiere of an opera entitled "The Intelligent Designer and the Universe," about an insane wealthy man who bequeaths his fortune to have someone design a beautiful dress for the universe.

"Personally, this goes along with my view of science," Krechetnikov said. "There should be a fun side to it."

(With Agency inputs)

First Published: Friday, September 21, 2012, 10:19