Artificial 'plants' could fuel future cars

PTI | Sep 9, 2015, 06.42 PM IST

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A research team has created an artificial leaf that produces methane, the primary component of natural gas, using a combination of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria.

LOS ANGELES: Scientists have taken a big step towards creating artificial 'plants' that can use only sunlight to make gasoline and natural gas to run future cars without polluting the environment.

A research team has created an artificial leaf that produces methane, the primary component of natural gas, using a combination of semiconducting nanowires and bacteria.

The research builds on a similar hybrid system that yielded butanol, a component in gasoline, and a variety of biochemical building blocks.

It is a major advance towards synthetic photosynthesis, a type of solar power based on the ability of plants to transform sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into sugars.

Instead of sugars, however, synthetic photosynthesis seeks to produce liquid fuels that can be stored for months or years and distributed through existing energy infrastructure.

In a roundtable discussion on his recent breakthroughs and the future of synthetic photosynthesis, Peidong Yang, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley said his hybrid inorganic/biological systems give researchers new tools to study photosynthesis - and learn its secrets.

"We're good at generating electrons from light efficiently, but chemical synthesis always limited our systems in the past," said Yang, also a co-director of the Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute.

"One purpose of this experiment was to show we could integrate bacterial catalysts with semiconductor technology. This lets us understand and optimise a truly synthetic photosynthesis system," said Yang.

"Burning fossil fuels is putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than natural photosynthesis can take it out. A system that pulls every carbon that we burn out of the air and converts it into fuel is truly carbon neutral," said Thomas Moore, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Arizona State University.

Ultimately, researchers hope to create an entirely synthetic system that is more robust and efficient than its natural counterpart.

To do that, they need model systems to study nature's best designs, especially the catalysts that convert water and carbon dioxide into sugars at room temperatures.

"This is not about mimicking nature directly or literally," said Ted Sargent, the vice-dean of research for the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering at University of Toronto.

"Instead, it is about learning nature's guidelines, its rules on how to make a compellingly efficient and selective catalyst, and then using these insights to create better-engineered solutions," said Sargent.

The study was published in the journal PNAS.

Google's  Response To Microsoft Using Google To Increase Bing Relevance

from the get-over-it dept

It's inevitable as a company gets bigger and older that rather than just competing in the market, it starts attacking competitors and accusing them of doing something "wrong." It's too bad that Google appears to have reached this stage. There have been plenty of stories lately about Google's decreasing relevance and how its search results have been getting worse. There are plenty of ways to respond to this and improving search quality should be the main focus. But it looks like Google has, instead, decided to call out competitors. Specifically, Google set up an elaborate and pointless "sting operation," which appears to show that Microsoft uses Google results as a part of its overall relevance algorithm. Basically, it looks like for users who have the Bing toolbar installed, Microsoft aggregates some search information, perhaps including Google results, and weighs them (only partially) into its own algorithm.

This seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Google's search results are public and as an established player in the market, almost every comparison of alternative search engines, including Bing, compares it to Google. So, making use of Google data to improve its own rankings seems like a rather smart move.

Remember, too, that Google's own search algorithm is based on viewing what people are doing online and coming up with a ranking based on that. How is that any different than Microsoft viewing a variety of information online -- including Google's own search rankings -- and using that as the basis of its own rankings? But instead of recognizing that this is all perfectly reasonable, Google starts acting like the RIAA, accusing Microsoft of "cheating" and doing something that is potentially illegal. It even pops out this line from Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow who apparently oversees Google's search ranking algorithm.

"I've got no problem with a competitor developing an innovative algorithm. But copying is not innovation, in my book."

As if Google hasn't copied the work of others in the past? The very basis for the original Page Rank was "copied" from Jon Kleinberg's research and then built upon that work. It was not a direct copy, just as Microsoft's search results are not a direct copy. For Google to attack a competitor for using open information on the web -- the same way it does -- seems like the height of hypocrisy. It's fine for Google to crawl and index whatever sites it wants in order to set up its ranking algorithms, but the second someone looks at Google's own rankings as part of their own determination, suddenly its "cheating"?

This seems like the latest in a series of indications that Google has moved past the innovation stage into the "protecting its turf" stage. That would be a shame.

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i am curious,beg to know ;why  Google acts childish every day

Sperm harpoon the egg to fertilize, new research suggests

AFP Relaxnews | 31 August, 2015 09:08

Thanks to new discoveries at the University of Virginia in the US, new hypothesis on how conception occurs could be around the corner.
Image by: AFP Relaxnews ©Sashkin/shutterstock.com

A sperm cell latches on to its target with spiky filaments that emerge from its head, say scientists at the University of Virginia (UVA) School of Medicine in the US whose 14 years of research led to the discovery.

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Their finding is featured on the cover of the scientific journal Andrology, in which their corresponding paper was published.
"This finding has really captured our imagination," says UVA reproduction researcher John Herr, PhD, of the Department of Cell Biology, adding that they have come up with an entirely new hypothesis about what happens at conception.
The research has implications for our understanding of the protein architecture of the sperm head, specifically in an organelle called the acrosomal matrix.
"One of the major proteins that is abundant in the acrosome [in the anterior region of the sperm head] is crystallizing into filaments, and we now postulate they're involved in penetrating the egg," says Dr. Herr.
This protein was discovered years ago in Dr. Herr's lab in collaboration with the lab of Wladek Minor, PhD and they named it "sperm lyzosyme-like protein" (SLLP1).
Minor and his team captured the protein within a static crystal, which they chilled to cryogenic temperatures (approximately below 180 degrees C or below 292 degrees F) for protection, then zapped it with X-rays.
Observing the direction of the X-rays, the scientists were able to determine the protein's shape in a process they compare to mapping out a shipwreck with a sonar.
It's the first protein from that part of the sperm to have a crystal structure and it's the first mammalian sperm protein that can bind to eggs, says Heping Zheng, the lead author of the paper.
Spring-boarding from their new understanding of the protein, the researchers aim to explore how fertilization works in the most precise detail.
The study builds on previous groundbreaking research from Herr's lab -- that time featured on the cover of the journal Biology of Reproduction, which published the corresponding paper in March.
Here, it was reported that the protein ESP1 (as it relates to the gene SPESP1) remains intact during fusion, acting as a stabilizer, while the rest of the sperm head undergoes dramatic changes.
"Getting at the molecular components of the fertilization event has a lot of practical applications -- as well as intellectual value -- because you want to account for all the major components involved in the essential events of the fertilization cascade," says Dr. Herr.