"We've created a memory device with the physical properties of Jell-O," says Dr. Michael Dickey, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.

Conventional electronics are typically made of rigid, brittle materials and don't function well in a wet environment. "Our memory device is soft and pliable, and functions extremely well in wet environments -- similar to the human brain," Dickey says.

Prototypes of the device have not yet been optimized to hold significant amounts of memory, but work well in environments that would be hostile to traditional electronics. The devices are made using a liquid alloy of gallium and indium metals set into water-based gels, similar to gels used in biological research.

The device's ability to function in wet environments, and the biocompatibility of the gels, mean that this technology holds promise for interfacing electronics with biological systems -- such as cells, enzymes or tissue. "These properties may be used for biological sensors or for medical monitoring," Dickey says.

The device functions much like so-called "memristors," which are vaunted as a possible next-generation memory technology. The individual components of the "mushy" memory device have two states: one that conducts electricity and one that does not. These two states can be used to represent the 1s and 0s used in binary language. Most conventional electronics use electrons to create these 1s and 0s in computer chips. The mushy memory device uses charged molecules called ions to do the same thing.

In each of the memory device's circuits, the metal alloy is the circuit's electrode and sits on either side of a conductive piece of gel. When the alloy electrode is exposed to a positive charge it creates an oxidized skin that makes it resistive to electricity. We'll call that the 0. When the electrode is exposed to a negative charge, the oxidized skin disappears, and it becomes conducive to electricity. We'll call that the 1.

Normally, whenever a negative charge is applied to one side of the electrode, the positive charge would move to the other side and create another oxidized skin -- meaning the electrode would always be resistive. To solve that problem, the researchers "doped" one side of the gel slab with a polymer that prevents the formation of a stable oxidized skin. That way one electrode is always conducive -- giving the device the 1s and 0s it needs for electronic memory.

The paper was published online July 4 by Advanced Materials. The paper was co-authored by NC State Ph.D. students Hyung-Jun Koo and Ju-Hee So, and NC State INVISTA Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Orlin Velev. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

NC State's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering is part of the university's College of Engineering.

Source: Science Daily

The new technique will be immediately useful in further stem cell studies, and when perfected, could be used in stem cell therapies for a wide variety of conditions including cancers and immune ailments.

"There are further improvements that we need to make, but this takes us a significant step closer to the ultimate goal, which is to be able to take ordinary cells from a patient, induce them to become stem cells, and then use those stem cells to rebuild lost or diseased tissues, for example the patient's bone marrow," says Inder M. Verma, PhD, Irwin and Joan Jacobs Chair in Exemplary Life Science and American Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology at the Salk Institute Laboratory of Genetics. Verma is senior author of the report, which is published in the July edition of the journal Stem Cells.

Stem cell researchers have been racing towards this goal since 2006, when techniques for turning ordinary skin cells into induced pluripotential stem cells (iPSCs) were first reported. In principle, iPSCs mimic the embryonic stem cells (ESCs) from which organisms develop. Researchers now want to find the precise mixes and sequences of chemical compounds needed to coax iPSCs to mature into the tissue-specific stem cells of their choice. The latter are self-renewing, and can be transplanted into the body to produce the 'progenitor' cells that multiply locally and produce mature tissue cells.

However, researchers don't know yet how to induce iPSCs to become tissue-specific stem cells or mature tissue cells with high efficiency. "We've been producing these cells in quantities that are too low to enable them to be studied easily, much less used for therapies," says Aaron Parker, PhD, a former graduate student and now a postdoctoral researcher in Verma's lab. Parker is a co-lead-author of the paper, with Niels-Bjarne Woods, PhD, who was a postdoctoral researcher in the Verma lab at the outset of the project, and is now an assistant professor at Lund University in Sweden.

Like many other stem cell research laboratories, the Verma lab has been trying to find more efficient ways to turn iPSCs into blood-forming 'hematopoietic' stem cells (HSCs). These may be more valuable medically than any other tissue-specific stem cell, because they can supply not only oxygen-carrying red blood cells but also all the white blood cells of the immune system. "There would be an almost unlimited number of usages for true HSCs," says Verma.

For the present study, the research team sought to do a better job of mimicking the changing conditions that naturally direct ESCs to become HSCs in the womb. "We took seven lines of human ESCs and iPSCs, and experimented with different combinations and sequences of growth factors and other chemical compounds that are known to be present as ESCs move to the HSC state in a developing human," says Parker.

Applying cocktails of these factors, Parker and Woods and their colleagues induced the iPSCs and ESCs to form colonies of cells that bore the distinctive molecular markers of blood cells. With their best such cocktail they were able to detect blood-specific markers on 84% of their cells after three weeks. "That's a big jump in efficiency from what we saw in the field just a few years ago," says Parker.

The technique still has room for improvement. The researchers detected progenitor cells and mature cells from only one category or lineage: myeloid cells, which include red blood cells and primitive immune cells such as macrophages. "We didn't see any cells from the lymphoid lineage, meaning T-cells and B-cells," Parker says.

Another drawback was that the blood cell population they produced from ESCs and iPSCs contained short-lived progenitors and mature blood cells but no indefinitely renewing, transplantable HSCs. Their cocktail, they believed, either pushed the cells past the HSC state to the progenitor state too quickly, or made the maturing cells skip the HSC state entirely.

From this and other labs' results, the team hypothesized the existence of an intermediate, pre-hematopoietic type of stem cell, produced by ESCs and iPSCs and in turn producing HSCs. "We know that HSCs appear in a particular region of mammals during embryonic development, and our idea is that these pre-hematopoietic stem cells are there and are somehow made to mature into HSCs," says Parker. "So our lab is now going to focus on finding the precise maturation signals provided by that embryonic region to produce these true, transplantable HSCs."

Once that is done, researchers will need to make a number of further refinements to improve the safety of HSCs intended for human patients. "But we're now tantalizingly close to our ultimate goal," says Verma.

The other authors who contributed to the work were Roksana Moraghebi, of Lund University's Stem Cell Center; Margaret K. Lutz, Amy L. Firth, Kristen J. Brennand, W. Travis Berggren and Fred H. Gage of the Salk Institute Laboratory for Genetics; Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte of the Salk Institute Gene Expression Laboratory; and Angel Raya of the Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona, Spain.

Source: ScienceDaily

Hybrid solar collectors combine photovoltaic solar cells that convert sunlight into electricity with a solar heater that provides warm water.

Roest built a prototype and also built an actual solar simulator that he used to test the efficiency of his prototype. There turned out to be considerable commercial interest in this solar simulator. This motivated Roest and a partner to start the TU Delft spin-off company Eternal Sun, so they could put the solar simulator on the market. Eternal Sun recently came out on top at the European finals of the BE.Project, a competition for student-entrepreneurs.

Solar collector

A hybrid solar collector is a combination of a photovoltaic solar panel and a thermal solar collector. The residual heat from the PV solar panel is used to heat water. The water flows through a system of pipes on a copper sheet. A great deal of heat is needed to heat the water in the pipes. That is why the solar collector has been fitted with a transparent cover that helps to retain the heat. Unfortunately, the material used in the PV solar cell degrades quickly under temperatures of around 120 degrees. As a result, its efficiency is reduced by around 20 per cent and it has a lifespan of between five and ten years.

For his graduation research as part of a Master's degree in Sustainable Energy Technology, Stefan Roest developed a new type of hybrid solar collector with increased electrical efficiency and a longer lifespan. For a start, Roest's solar collector does not require a transparent cover. The water flows through a large number of small aluminium channels directly under the solar panel instead of through copper tubing and a copper sheet. Consequently, less heat is required to heat the water sufficiently for household use. Roest also chose not to use a crystalline silicon PV solar panel, opting for a thin film solar panel instead. It is easier to draw heat from this type of solar cell. Getting rid of the cover meant that the heat of the solar panel could be limited to around 80 degrees.

An additional benefit of thin film solar panels is that these perform relatively well at high temperatures. At a temperature of 80 degrees, an efficiency loss of around 10 per cent occurs, instead of the 20 per cent in the case of crystalline silicon solar panels. Roest's hybrid solar collector has an estimated lifespan of 15 to 20 years.

Roest developed the new solar collector under the supervision of the professor of Photovoltaic Materials and Devices, Miro Zeman, who comments: "This innovative design could play an important role in the development of affordable and efficient hybrid systems for household use."

Solar simulator

Roest developed a special solar simulator to measure the efficiency of his prototype. Almost immediately, there was commercial interest in this simulator and the relevant technology was quickly patented by TU Delft. Roest and his partner Chokri Mousaoui have since introduced the simulator onto the market via their TU Delft spin-off company Eternal Sun. Eternal Sun recently came out on top in the European finals of the BE.Project competition for students from top universities with an innovative business case, which was organised by the technology consulting company BearingPoint. The Eternal Sun team has now grown to include six students and recent graduates, and five solar simulators have already been sold since January.

Roest's affinity with solar energy goes back quite a while. In 2007, he was the team leader of the Nuon Solar Team that won the World Solar Challenge in Australia with the solar car Nuna4.

Source: ScienceDaily

A lawsuit was filed on November 23rd 2011 US time, that could end the secret government that has ruled Western civilization for at least the past 300 years. The lawsuit claims that close to $1 trillion was stolen by, among others, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and the UN, former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and the Italian government, Giancarlo Bruno and the Davos World Economic forum and others believed to include many of the owners of the US Federal Reserve Board. The lawsuit was filed in New York by Neil Keenan, acting as representative of the Dragon family, a reclusive group of wealthy Asian families. This filing is the result of extensive evidence gathering by international police and law-enforcement agencies including Interpol, the CIA, the Japanese Security Police, Eastern European secret services and has the backing of the Pentagon as well as the armed forces of Russia and China.

Benjamin Fulford interviews David Rockefeller about illuminati, asian opposition.

On November 13, 2007 Fulford received a tip that David Rockefeller was on his turf, and without hesitation Fulford arranged to meet with him to ask some questions. It is not odd for a reporter who's career has been filled with Financial News jobs, to sit down with the former head of Chase Bank, Except when its Benjamin Fulford and David Rockefeller. Earlier this year Benjamin Fulford interviewed Heizo Takenaka, a former finance minister in Japan and confronted him about "having sold the Japanese financial system over to the Rockefellers and Rothschilds." According to Fulford this interview made a lot of people angry. He says a professional assassin showed up and told him to accept a job of great importance or be killed. The following day Fulford claims to have been contacted by a powerful Asian Secret Society with more than 6 million members that have targeted the Illuminati. They asked Fulford to represent them, negotiate for them, and offered him protection in return. Benjamin Fulford was Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief for Forbes Magazine for seven years, until 2005 when he quit because of the "extensive corporate censorship and mingling of advertising and editorial at the magazine. 

The ultimate defendants in this legal action are believed to be the same cabal behind the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy and many other major international crimes.

This particular lawsuit was triggered by the illegal detainment of two Japanese citizens,  Akihiko Yamaguchi and Mitsuyoshi Watanabe, as well as the seizure of $134.5 billion in bonds they were holding in Italy on June 3, 2009. After the bonds were stolen, self-described 33rd degree Freemason Leo Zagami contacted this writer and said the Montecarlo P2 masonic lodge could cash the bonds with the help of Vatican banker Daniel Dal Bosco. This writer forwarded the information, via a member of the UK Royal family, to the dragon family who entrusted a further $1 trillion worth of similar bonds to the plaintiff Neil Keenan. Keenan then, after much negotiation, entrusted the bonds to Dal Bosco.

Dal Bosco subsequently absconded with the bonds and was followed 24-hours a day by various intelligence service agents to see what he would do with them. The Dal Bosco trail led to the Davos World forum, the UN, the Italian government and the Vatican, among other places. Following this, Keenan was approached by a who’s who of powerful figures including top Vatican officials, Wall Street bankers, European nobles and former US presidents, most offering him astronomical bribes to go away. He was also poisoned with ricin and nearly killed.

According to Keenan “The roots of this case go back to between 1927 and 1938, when, under arrangements made between T.V. Soong (Finance Minister of China) and Henry Morgethau, Secretary of the Treasury, The United States Government purchased some 50 million ounces of silver and leased vast amounts of gold from the Nationalist Chinese Government, known as Kuomintang. For all the treasure handed in, certificates were given to those who surrendered their precious metals.”

Many of the bonds seized by Dal Bosco are backed with the Chinese gold taken by the Federal Reserve Board during those years and never returned to its legal owners.

Other bonds seized were Kennedy bonds. These bonds were backed by gold held in trust for the people of the planet and were supposed to be used to finance the economic development of the world. Instead they have mostly been stolen and misused by members of the cabal that has seized control of the Western financial system on behalf of private interests.

The original signatory to the Kennedy bonds was former Indonesian President Soekarno. Soekarno’s heir Dr. Seno Edy Soekanto has given Keenan power of attorney to return to their rightful owners the Kennedy bonds and other property allocated to the people of the world via something known as the global collateral accounts.

The lawsuit is only the first salvo in a legal battle to restore control of the global financial system to the people and governments of the world as well as the rightful owners of historical assets that have been seized by members of the banking cartel.

The lawsuit has been filed as Civil Action #8500 at the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York on November 23, 2011.

Background information on the problems with the global financial system

By Neil Keenan and Keith Scott.

The entire cause of the problem.

The United States is a private corporation owned by the British Crown (Rothchilds), the Bank of England (Rothchilds) and the Vatican (Rothchilds again). It was previously called the Virginia Company until 3/9/33 when it was dissolved by Roosevelt under the Emergency Banking Act. On 5/5/33 Congress elected to dissolve the Gold Standard and Sovereign Authority of the U.S. and all of its official capacities including government offices, departments and officers. The U.S. is a corporation, not a nation. The Federal Reserve is neither Federal, nor a Reserve. It is a private counterfeiting organization run by Jewish bankers who lend the money they print out of thin air at interest while we keep on paying these criminals to fleece the People.

That technology of theft and deception that has been exported from the United States through their promotion of this fraud as the paradigm of global finance is an obscenity that has set the seeds of its own destruction.

This has been compounded by the refusal of ordinary people to realize, know and understand that it is the duplicity of Governments and the deceit and endless greed of bankers that combined to simply fleece them like the apathetic sheep they are. Apathy and ignorance of the truth, creates belief in the lie. The truth is self-evident, but most people choose to neither hear it nor understand it. The debts of the Federal Reserve are the debts of a private corporation that is robbing the people of the United States.

The United States Dollar is a Federal Reserve Note and the obligations against the currency are the obligations of the Federal Reserve, not the people of the United States.

Understanding the History

1.  Between 1927 and 1938, under arrangements made between T.V.Soong (Finance Minister of China) and Henry Morgethau, Secretary of the Treasury, The United States Government purchased some 50 million ounces of silver and leased vast amounts of gold from the Nationalist Chinese Government, known as Kuomintang. During this period China was partly occupied by Japanese troops and there was the fear of China being overrun by the Japanese.

2.  For all the treasure handed in, certificates were given to those who surrendered their precious metals. The surrendered precious metals and gemstones were sent to the United States under a lease agreement made between T.V. Soong and Henry Morgenthau. The Certificates became the underlying funds of the Kuomintang and were good and accepted securities.

3. In 1934 a new Securities Act was promulgated in the United States, together with the Gold Act, which required all bullion gold and gold coin to be surrendered to the Federal Reserve, a private corporation chartered to operate as the Central Bank of the United States and to be the issuer of the currency known as the United States Dollar.

4.  Domestically owned gold was purchased. Foreign Gold held by the Treasury was also surrendered to the Federal Reserve, so, was leased to the Federal Reserve. This began the series 1934 Notes issued by the Federal Reserve. These have never been redeemed and the interest cost was met by further issuances of the 1934 series FRN’s.

5. These 1934 FRN’s guarantee the lease payments and to allow the Chinese Government to continue financially. These came under the control of the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Government in China from whom the Gold had been received.  Many were left in China when the Kuomintang had to flee to Taiwan. The Gold had been nationalized by the Kuomintang who moved much of the FRN’s (but not all) to Taiwan  which was built on these notes. These Notes were the underlying wealth of Taiwan and they were good for value as they were backed by gold.

6. During the war in China, most owners of the depository notes issued by Chinese Banks were killed by the Japanese, others later being killed by both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communists, thus the Gold became property of the Nation, especially so, the Kuomintang. In Europe, Jews who had owned wealth were stripped of that wealth through various means and were then eliminated. The gold was taken either by stealth or by force, that is a reality of history.

7. The Kuomintang appointed guardians of this Gold and the securities issued by the United States; they are euphemistically known as the Dragon Family.  The Dragon Family is in fact an organization that operates between old families within China and Taiwan, and as such is above the political divide of the two independent Chinese Governments. Chinese are remarkable in this regard, that old family ties and functions supercede political arrangements which, though they might last for generations, are regarded as inconsequential over the passage of time to most Chinese. Attached to this is the wealth of several nations. The United States in support of the Kuomintang and resistance groups actually printed more of these FRN notes inside China itself. These operations were run by the CIA to buy loyalty of various factions in the fight against the communists, eventually being driven out into Burma around 1960. Largely due to the additional printing of these notes, the additional Notes were given in lieu of interest, but directed to specific persons and parties.

8  At the end of the World War II, with Communist and Kuomintang factions at war in China, the International Community and the Chinese assented to the Gold being placed under the overt control of Indonesian President Soekarno.  Soekarno then, on August 17, 1945, came to be known as M1 under United Nations Approval No. MISA 81704  “Operation Heavy Freedom. This was because much of the world’s gold had been delivered into Indonesia and the Philippines. Canada, Australia, Great Britain, India and other British Colonies sent their gold to the so called “impregnable Singapore”  The Japanese, as per the arrangements agreed to by Hirohito in the 1921 Pact Between Nations made in London, delivered much of this gold to Indonesia (Then a Dutch Colony) and to Philippines (Then a US Colony) into secret bunkers that had been mostly constructed by the Japanese between 1924 and 1945. This is why the Allied troops in Malaya had no air cover or sufficient supplies to that would have allowed them to resist the Japanese. Singapore had to fall so most of the global wealth could be “lost” into a secret system that made the gold standard redundant and fiat currencies a reality.

This gold was documented into accounts through the Swiss Commercial Bank Union Bank of Switzerland, placed under protection of the Swiss Attorney General, registered through the Swiss National Bank into the Bank for International Settlements International Collateral Combined accounts and then from within the BIS, blocked to form the Institutional Parent Registration Accounts of the Federal Reserve System.

Later President Marcos of the Philippines was appointed and held the position of M1 until 1987 and then the position was transferred to Dr. Ray C. Dam, in October of 1987, under Legal Decadency to Heir RCD1087 Far East Entire with formal Power of Attorney and Assignment of Indonesian Assets signed by Sarinah Soetiwi  (holder of the assets on behalf of the Nation of Indonesia as assigned by President Soekarno) in 1992, Dam’s authority later promulgated January 20, 1995. Dam proved to be impossible for the entire system to work with, (either because he refused to allow those who placed him in authority to steal, or because of his personal arrogance…. Difficult to know which is correct) and his authority over the Institutional parent registration Accounts set aside and the system reverted to the three Nations who had controlled these accounts since World war II, United States, Great Britain and France, who systematically and illegally subverted the established system since 1996.

9.  From this we can see that there are two functional operations. One was ownership and Depository control by the owners of the Gold and the other a control system set in place to administer and control the Collateral Combined Accounts as an independent Arbiter.  Ownership rights are held by the signatory to the Depository Accounts in Commercial Banks and Control Rights have been held by M1.

10. So it was, that the entire world supply of bullion and coinage gold was withdrawn and fiat currencies became the order of the day. However, underneath the notes and money issued by the Federal Reserve was the underlying wealth within a centralized system that Nations was intended to be used equitably, but Bankers determined they would use to raid national economies.

11.  In 1963, President John F. Kennedy entered into an Agreement with President Soekarno to provide the funds to allow the United States Treasury to print its own currency, thus subverting the “right” to print the currency held by the Federal Reserve. The Agreement would have transferred some 59,000 tons of gold to underpin this currency. The problem with this was that the US domestic currency would have then been backed by gold which would have been a violation of international agreements meant to stabilize currencies.  11 days after signing this agreement, President Kennedy was assassinated.  President Johnson the suspended EO11110 as issued by Kennedy and transferred the bullion to the Federal Reserve. The Green Hilton Agreement was not implemented until 1968 when Soekarno fell from office and when Global Trade made it imperative that the world have a Global Currency. As the Gold had been transferred to the US Treasury in 1968, a series of Bonds known as Kennedy Bonds were issued in order to honor the terms of the Green Hilton Agreement made between Kennedy and Soekarno, the 1968 terms of the gold delivery to the United States being different than made in 1934.  When after 30 years, interest had not been paid as promised, a reissue of the bonds in an increased number were issued as commemorative notes and were accepted by the owners of the Gold, the Dragon Family.

12. From copies of Bank documents received by Neil Keenan, within the Green Hilton Memorial Agreement, the funds the amounts of gold and platinum are specified. These amounts of gold are certificated and the certificates and ledger copies with full and exact identification and recognition codes are available. These certificates are further proven by the bank reports, copies of which are now held by Neil Keenan. The truth of these instruments can be vigorously defended through documentation in our hands and further through interrogation of the Black Screens where the off ledger collateral is held, together with an interrogation of the grey and blue screens where we will find enormous fraud from the illegal use of these assets.

13. In the few documents we present with this complaint we can see that the assets have been deposited, the counter-assets created and presented to the depositors, the depositors have been cheated for over 70 years through the intentional and fraudulent failure of the Obligor to honor the Agreements.

14. In recent weeks we have come into possession of the books and records of the late President Soekarno, and all the codes and ledgers of the Global Accounts. The size of these accounts can be seen by reviewing the Collective Agreement between the Garuda Memorial Hilton Indonesia and the Green Memorial Hilton Geneva, established, structured and made operational between 1961 and final signature in 1972. Under this Agreement the assets of the international collateral combined were established and brought forward, then, within a short period of time misused to change the operating systems of banks.

15. Reviewing these books, we can now see that Banks set aside the notion of operating under the Charters they hold as banks, instead of being Banks they became like very poor casino operators and traders, selling what they do not own. The records in our possession, signed and registered by the receiving and managing commercial bank, show the underlying funds in numbers and amounts that stagger the imagination. The Green Hilton and Garuda Memorial Agreements demonstrate clearly the value of the global account system.

a)  Gold and Platinum Deposits ran into millions of tons.

b)  1934 series Federal Reserve System Bonds, Notes issued in 1928 , Kennedy Bonds ran into Quadrillions of US Dollars, Dragon Bonds are all recorded and acknowledged within the Green Hilton and Memorial Hilton Collective Agreements. Both Assets in the form of Bullion surrendered to the Global Accounts through the United States Government and then entrusted to a private corporation, the Federal Reserve System.

Source: http://benjaminfulford.typepad.com

The camera was invented in the lab of Alyosha Molnar, Cornell assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and developed by a group led by Patrick Gill, a postdoctoral associate. Their working prototype, detailed online in the journal Optics Letters (July 6, 2011), is 100th of a millimeter thick, and one-half millimeter on each side. The camera resolves images about 20 pixels across -- not portrait studio quality, but enough to shed light on previously hard-to-see things.

"It's not going to be a camera with which people take family portraits, but there are a lot of applications out there that require just a little bit of dim vision," Gill said.

In fact, Gill, whose other research interests involve making sense of how the brain's neurons fire under certain stimuli, began this invention as a side project related to work on developing lens-less implantable systems for imaging brain activity. This type of imaging system could be useful as part of an implantable probe for imaging neurons that have been modified to glow when they are active.

Gill's camera is just a flat piece of doped silicon, which looks something like a tiny CD, with no parts that require off-chip manufacturing. As a result, it costs just a few cents to make and is incredibly small and light, as opposed to conventional small cameras on chips that cost a dollar or more and require bulky focusing optics.

The scientists call their camera a Planar Fourier Capture Array (PFCA) because it uses the principles of the Fourier transform, which is a mathematical tool that allows multiple ways of capturing the same information. Each pixel in the PFCA reports one component of the Fourier transform of the image being detected by being sensitive to a unique blend of incident angles.

While Fourier components themselves are sometimes directly useful, a bit of computation can also transform Fourier components into an image.

The scientists will continue working to improve the camera's resolution and efficiency, but they think their concept can lead to a myriad of applications. It could be a component in any cheap electronic system -- in devices that, for example, detect the angle of the sun or a micro-robot that requires a simple visual system to navigate.

Funding for this work was provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institutes of Health.

Source: GlobalSpec

Jan Kleissl, a professor of environmental engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

In a study in an upcoming issue of the journal Solar Energy, Kleissl and his team published what they believe are the first peer-reviewed measurements of the cooling benefits provided by solar photovoltaic panels. Using thermal imaging, researchers determined that during the day, a building’s ceiling was 5 degrees Fahrenheit cooler under solar panels than under an exposed roof. At night, the panels help hold heat in, reducing heating costs in the winter.

“Talk about positive side-effects,” said Kleissl.

As solar panels sprout on an increasing number of residential and commercial roofs, it becomes more important to consider their impact on buildings’ total energy costs, Kleissl said. His team determined that the amount saved on cooling the building amounted to getting a 5 percent discount on the solar panels’ price, over the panels’ lifetime. Or to put it another way, savings in cooling costs amounted to selling 5 percent more solar energy to the grid than the panels are actually producing— for the building researchers studied.

Data for the study was gathered over three days in April on the roof of the Powell Structural Systems Laboratory at the Jacobs School of Engineering with a thermal infrared camera. The building is equipped with tilted solar panels and solar panels that are flush with the roof. Some portions of the roof are not covered by panels.

The panels essentially act as roof shades, said Anthony Dominguez, the graduate student lead on the project.  Rather than the sun beating down onto the roof, which causes heat to be pushed through the roof and inside the ceiling of the building, photovoltaic panels take the solar beating. Then much of the heat is removed by wind blowing between the panels and the roof. The benefits are greater if there is an open gap where air can circulate between the building and the solar panel, so tilted panels provide more cooling. Also, the more efficient the solar panels, the bigger the cooling effect, said Kleissl. For the building researchers analyzed, the panels reduced the amount of heat reaching the roof by about 38 percent.

Although the measurements took place over a limited period of time, Kleissl said he is confident his team developed a model that allows them to extrapolate their findings to predict cooling effects throughout the year.

For example, in winter, the panels would keep the sun from heating up the building. But at night, they would also keep in whatever heat accumulated inside. For an area like San Diego, the two effects essentially cancel each other out, Kleissl said.

The idea for the study came about when Kleissl, Dominguez and a group of undergraduate students were preparing for an upcoming conference. They decided the undergraduates should take pictures of Powell’s roof with a thermal infrared camera. The data confirmed the team’s suspicion that the solar panels were indeed cooling the roof, and the building’s ceiling as well.

“There are more efficient ways to passively cool buildings, such as reflective roof membranes,” said Kleissl. “But, if you are considering installing solar photovoltaic, depending on your roof thermal properties, you can expect a large reduction in the amount of energy you use to cool your residence or business.”

The study was funded by a NASA Graduate Student Research Program fellowship. Kleissl’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, California Public Utilities Commission, the Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission. The authors thank the staff of the Powell Structural Lab, especially Andrew Gunthardt, for making the building available for the study.If additional funding became available, Kleissl said his team could develop a calculator that people could use to predict the cooling effect on their own roof and in their own climate-specific area. To further increase the accuracy of their models, researchers also could compare two climate-controlled, identical buildings in the same neighborhood, one with solar panels, the other without.

Source: ScienceDaily

Geologists have used temperature measurements from more than 20,000 boreholes around the world to estimate that some 44 terawatts (44 trillion watts) of heat continually flow from Earth's interior into space. Where does it come from?

Radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium in Earth's crust and mantle is a principal source, and in 2005 scientists in the KamLAND collaboration, based in Japan, first showed that there was a way to measure the contribution directly. The trick was to catch what Kamioka Liquid-scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) dubbed geoneutrinos – more precisely, geo-antineutrinos – emitted when radioactive isotopes decay.

"As a detector of geoneutrinos, KamLAND has distinct advantages," says Stuart Freedman of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), which is a major contributor to KamLAND. Freedman, a member of Berkeley Lab's Nuclear Science Division and a professor in the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, leads U.S. participation. "KamLAND was specifically designed to study antineutrinos. We are able to discriminate them from background noise and detect them with very high sensitivity."

KamLAND scientists have now published new figures for heat energy from radioactive decay in the journal Nature Geoscience. Based on the improved sensitivity of the KamLAND detector, plus several years' worth of additional data, the new estimate is not merely "consistent" with the predictions of accepted geophysical models but is precise enough to aid in refining those models.

One thing that's at least 97-percent certain is that radioactive decay supplies only about half the Earth's heat. Other sources – primordial heat left over from the planet's formation, and possibly others as well – must account for the rest.

Hunting for neutrinos from deep in the Earth

Antineutrinos are produced not only in the decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium isotopes but in a variety of others, including fission products in nuclear power reactors. In fact, reactor-produced antineutrinos were the first neutrinos to be directly detected (neutrinos and antineutrinos are distinguished from each other by the interactions in which they appear).

The KamLAND anti-neutrino detector is a vessel filled with scintillating mineral oil and lined with photomultiplier tubes (inset), the largest scintillation detector ever constructed, buried deep underground near Toyama, Japan. Credit: KamLAND Collaboration

Because neutrinos interact only by way of the weak force – and gravity, insignificant except on the scale of the cosmos – they stream through the Earth as if it were transparent. This makes them hard to spot, but on the very rare occasions when an antineutrino collides with a proton inside the KamLAND detector – a sphere filled with a thousand metric tons of scintillating mineral oil – it produces an unmistakable double signal.

The first signal comes when the antineutrino converts the proton to a neutron plus a positron (an anti-electron), which quickly annihilates when it hits an ordinary electron – a process called inverse beta decay. The faint flash of light from the ionizing positron and the annihilation process is picked up by the more than 1,800 photomultiplier tubes within the KamLAND vessel. A couple of hundred millionths of a second later the neutron from the decay is captured by a proton in the hydrogen-rich fluid and emits a gamma ray, the second signal. This "delayed coincidence" allows antineutrino interactions to be distinguished from background events such as hits from cosmic rays penetrating the kilometer of rock that overlies the detector.

Says Freedman, "It's like looking for a spy in a crowd of people on the street. You can't pick out one spy, but if there's a second spy following the first one around, the signal is still small but it's easy to spot."

KamLAND was originally designed to detect antineutrinos from more than 50 reactors in Japan, some close and some far away, in order to study the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation. Reactors produce electron neutrinos, but as they travel they oscillate into muon neutrinos and tau neutrinos; the three "flavors" are associated with the electron and its heavier cousins.

Being surrounded by nuclear reactors means KamLAND's background events from reactor antineutrinos must also be accounted for in identifying geoneutrino events. This is done by identifying the nuclear-plant antineutrinos by their characteristic energies and other factors, such as their varying rates of production versus the steady arrival of geoneutrinos. Reactor antineutrinos are calculated and subtracted from the total. What's left are the geoneutrinos.

Tracking the heat

All models of the inner Earth depend on indirect evidence. Leading models of the kind known as bulk silicate Earth (BSE) assume that the mantle and crust contain only lithophiles ("rock-loving" elements) and the core contains only siderophiles (elements that "like to be with iron"). Thus all the heat from radioactive decay comes from the crust and mantle – about eight terawatts from uranium 238 (238U), another eight terawatts from thorium 232 (232Th), and four terawatts from potassium 40 (40K).

KamLAND's double-coincidence detection method is insensitive to the low-energy part of the geoneutrino signal from 238U and 232Th and completely insensitive to 40K antineutrinos. Other kinds of radioactive decay are also missed by the detector, but compared to uranium, thorium, and potassium are negligible contributors to Earth's heat.

Additional factors that have to be taken into account include how the radioactive elements are distributed (whether uniformly or concentrated in a "sunken layer" at the core-mantle boundary), variations due to radioactive elements in the local geology (in KamLAND's case, less than 10 percent of the expected flux), antineutrinos from fission products, and how neutrinos oscillate as they travel through the crust and mantle. Alternate theories were also considered, including the speculative idea that there may be a natural nuclear reactor somewhere deep inside the Earth, where fissile elements have accumulated and initiated a sustained fission reaction.

KamLAND detected 841 candidate antineutrino events between March of 2002 and November of 2009, of which about 730 were reactor events or other background. The rest, about 111, were from radioactive decays of uranium and thorium in the Earth. These results were combined with data from the Borexino experiment at Gran Sasso in Italy to calculate the contribution of uranium and thorium to Earth's heat production. The answer was about 20 terawatts; based on models, another three terawatts were estimated to come from other isotope decays.

This is more heat energy than the most popular BSE model suggests, but still far less than Earth's total. Says Freedman, "One thing we can say with near certainty is that radioactive decay alone is not enough to account for Earth's heat energy. Whether the rest is primordial heat or comes from some other source is an unanswered question."

Better models are likely to result when many more geoneutrino detectors are located in different places around the globe, including midocean islands where the crust is thin and local concentrations of radioactivity (not to mention nuclear reactors) are at a minimum.

Says Freedman, "This is what's called an inverse problem, where you have a lot of information but also a lot of complicated inputs and variables. Sorting those out to arrive at the best explanation among many requires multiple sources of data."

Source: PhysOrg

The batteries in a standard pacemaker, for instance, are said to last for about eight years - after that, surgery is required to access the device. Implants such as heart pumps are often powered by batteries that can be recharged from outside the body, but these require a power cord that protrudes through the patient's skin, and that keeps them from being able to swim or bathe. Now, however, scientists at Germany's University of Freiburg are developing biological fuel cells, that could draw power for implants from the patient's own blood sugar.

The research team is being led by Dr. Sven Kerzenmacher, of Freiburg's Department of Microsystems Engineering. They are looking into the use noble metal catalysts, such as platinum, to trigger a continuous electrochemical reaction between glucose in the blood and oxygen from the surrounding tissue fluid. The use of platinum (or a similar metal) would be ideal, as the material exhibits long-term stability, it can be sterilized, and electrodes made from it wouldn't be sensitive to unwanted chemical reactions, including hydrolysis and oxidation.

The Freiburg scientists are ultimately hoping that the surfaces of implants could be covered with a thin coating of the fuel cells, which would then power the devices indefinitely.

Source: GizMag - via ZeitNews.org

In the long term the technology could be used by customers to design many different products themselves -- tailor-made to their needs and preferences.

Using new digital technology the printer allows you to create your own designs on a computer and reproduce them physically in three dimensional form in chocolate.

The project is funded as part of the Research Council UK Cross-Research Council Programme -- Digital Economy and is managed by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) on behalf of ESRC, AHRC and MRC. It is being led by the University of Exeter in collaboration with the University of Brunel and software developer Delcam.

3-D printing is a technology where a three dimensional object is created by building up successive layers of material. The technology is already used in industry to produce plastic and metal products but this is the first time the principles have been applied to chocolate.

The research has presented many challenges. Chocolate is not an easy material to work with because it requires accurate heating and cooling cycles. These variables then have to be integrated with the correct flow rates for the 3-D printing process. Researchers overcame these difficulties with the development of new temperature and heating control systems.

Research leader Dr Liang Hao, at the University of Exeter, said: "What makes this technology special is that users will be able to design and make their own products. In the long term it could be developed to help consumers custom- design many products from different materials but we've started with chocolate as it is readily available, low cost and non-hazardous. There is also no wastage as any unused or spoiled material can be eaten of course! From reproducing the shape of a child's favourite toy to a friend's face, the possibilities are endless and only limited by our creativity."

A consumer- friendly interface to design the chocolate objects is also in development. Researchers hope that an online retail business will host a website for users to upload their chocolate designs for 3-D printing and delivery.

Designs need not start from scratch, the web- based utility will also allow users to see designs created by others to modify for their own use.

Dr Hao added: "In future this kind of technology will allow people to produce and design many other products such as jewellery or household goods. Eventually we may see many mass produced products replaced by unique designs created by the customer."

EPSRC Chief Executive Professor Dave Delpy said: "This is an imaginative application of two developing technologies and a good example of how creative research can be applied to create new manufacturing and retail ideas. By combining developments in engineering with the commercial potential of the digital economy we can see a glimpse into the future of new markets -- creating new jobs and, in this case, sweet business opportunities."

Source: ScienceDaily

Ultraviolet semiconductor diode lasers are widely used in data processing, information storage and biology. Their applications have been limited, however, by size, cost and power. The current generation of ultraviolet lasers is based on a material called gallium nitride, but Jianlin Liu, a professor of electrical engineering, and his colleagues have made a breakthrough in zinc oxide nanowire waveguide lasers, which can offer smaller sizes, lower costs, higher powers and shorter wavelengths.

Until now, zinc oxide nanowires couldn't be used in real world light emission applications because of the lack of p-type, or positive type, material needed by all semiconductors. Liu solved that problem by doping the zinc oxide nanowires with antimony, a metalloid element, to create the p-type material.

The p-type zinc oxide nanowires were connected with n-type, or negative type, zinc oxide material to form a device called p-n junction diode. Powered by a battery, highly directional laser light emits only from the ends of the nanowires.

"People in the zinc oxide research community throughout the world have been trying hard to achieve this for the past decade," Liu said. "This discovery is likely to stimulate the whole field to push the technology further."

Liu's findings have been published in the July issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Co-authors are: Sheng Chu, Guoping Wang, Jieying Kong, Lin Li and Jingjian Ren, all graduate students at UC Riverside; Weihang Zhou, a student at Fudan University in China; Leonid Chernyak, a professor of physics at the University of Central Florida; Yuqing Lin, a graduate student at the University of Central Florida; and Jianze Zhao, a visiting student from Dalian University of Technology in China.

The discovery could have a wide-range of impacts.

For information storage, the zinc oxide nanowire lasers could be used to read and process much denser data on storage media such as DVDs because the ultraviolet has shorter wavelength than other lights, such as red. For example, a DVD that would store two hours of music could store four or six hours using the new type of laser.

For biology and medical therapeutics, the ultra-small laser light beam from a nanowire laser can penetrate a living cell, or excite or change its function from a bad cell to a good cell. The light could also be used to purify drinking water.

For photonics, the ultraviolet light could provide superfast data processing and transmission. Reliable small ultraviolet semiconductor diode lasers may help develop ultraviolet wireless communication technology, which is potentially better than state-of-the-art infrared communication technologies used in various electronic information systems.

While Liu and the students in his laboratory have demonstrated the p-type doping of zinc oxide and electrically powered nanowire waveguide lasing in the ultraviolet range, he said more work still needs to be done with the stability and reliability of the p-type material.

Source: EurekAlert