The question they may want to ask instead is how can they prevent their child from becoming a bully.

New research to be presented on Sunday, May 1, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Denver shows that parents can play a key role in decreasing the chances that their son or daughter will harass or intimidate other children.

Researchers, led by Rashmi Shetgiri, MD, FAAP, examined the prevalence of bullying reported by parents who took part in the National Survey of Children's Health from 2003-2007. They also looked at factors that were associated with an increased or decreased risk that a child bullied others.

The survey showed nearly one in six youths 10-17 years old bullied others frequently in 2007, according to Dr. Shetgiri, assistant professor of pediatrics at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Children's Medical Center, Dallas. While the rates of parents who reported that their children harassed others frequently (defined as sometimes, usually or always) decreased from 2003 to 2007, these rates remain high, Dr. Shetgiri said.

Survey results also showed that 23 percent of children had bullied another youngster in 2003 compared to 35 percent in 2007.

Some factors that increase the likelihood that a child will bully others have persisted from 2003 to 2007. For example, children are more likely to be bullies if their parents frequently feel angry with them or feel their child bothers them a lot. In addition, children with an emotional, developmental or behavioral problem and those whose mothers report less than very good mental health also are more likely to be bullies. In fact, about one in five bullies has an emotional, developmental or behavioral problem, more than three times the rate in non-bullies, Dr. Shetgiri noted.

Other factors that seem to protect a child from becoming a bully also have persisted from 2003 to 2007. Parents who share ideas and talk with their child, and who have met most or all of their child's friends are less likely to have children who bully, Dr. Shetgiri said.

"Targeting interventions to decrease these persistent risk factors and increase the persistent protective factors could lead to decreased bullying," she said.

For example, parents can increase involvement with their children by meeting their friends and by spending time talking and sharing ideas with their children, Dr. Shetgiri suggested. "They also can find effective ways to manage any feelings of anger toward their child and can work with health care providers to make sure any emotional or behavioral concerns they have about their child, as well as their own mental health, are addressed."

Source: MedicalXpress.com

A new kind of sensor could warn emergency workers when carbon filters in the respirators they wear to avoid inhaling toxic fumes have become dangerously saturated.

In a recent issue of the journal Advanced Materials, a team of researchers from the University of California, San Diego and Tyco Electronics describe how they made the carbon nanostructures and demonstrate their potential use as microsensors for volatile organic compounds.

IMAGE: Porous photonic crystal microsensor particles on the ends of optical fibers can detect organic pollutants.

First responders protect themselves from such vapors, whose composition is often unknown, by breathing through a canister filled with activated charcoal – a gas mask. Airborne toxins stick to the carbon in the filter, trapping the dangerous materials.

As the filters become saturated, chemicals will begin to pass through. The respirator can then do more harm than good by providing an illusion of safety. But there is no easy way to determine when the filter is spent. Current safety protocols base the timing of filter changes on how long the user has worn the mask.

"The new sensors would provide a more accurate reading of how much material the carbon in the filters has actually absorbed," said team leader Michael Sailor, professor of chemistry and biochemistry and bioengineering at UC San Diego. "Because these carbon nanofibers have the same chemical properties as the activated charcoal used in respirators, they have a similar ability to absorb organic pollutants."

Sailor's team assembled the nanofibers into repeating structures called photonic crystals that reflect specific wavelengths, or colors, of light. The wing scales of the Morpho butterfly, which give the insect its brilliant iridescent coloration, are natural examples of this kind of structure.

Caption: Repeating bands of greater density give this bundle of carbon nanofiber photonic crystals a characteristic color. When the porous fibers absorb chemicals, they change color, making the material a sensitive optical sensor for chemical vapors.

Credit: Timothy Kelly, UCSD Chemistry and Biochemistry

The sensors are an iridescent color too, rather than black like ordinary carbon. That color changes when the fibers absorb toxins – a visible indication of their capacity for absorbing additional chemicals.

The agency that certifies respirators in the U.S., the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, has long sought such a sensor but the design requirements for a tiny, sensitive, inexpensive device that requires little power, have proved difficult to meet.

The materials that the team fabricated are very thin – less than half the width of a human hair. Sailor's group has previously placed similar photonic sensors on the tips of optical fibers less than a millimeter across and shown that they can be inserted into respirator cartridges. And the crystals are sensitive enough to detect chemicals such as toluene at concentrations as low as one part per million.

Source: EurekAlert

Now, a team of head and neck surgeons from Mayo Clinic has found robotic surgery can treat cancer in the narrow, hard-to-reach area beyond the tongue at the top of the voice box. Some patients were able to avoid further treatment with chemotherapy or radiation, and most could resume normal eating and speaking.

"We've known it's useful for tongue base and tonsil cancers, but we wanted to assess its effectiveness in the larynx," says Kerry Olsen, M.D., Mayo Clinic otolaryngologist and senior author of the study that was presented April 29 at the Combined Otolaryngological Spring Meetings in Chicago.

The investigation of transoral robotic surgery (TORS) followed nine patients for up to three years following removal of supraglottic squamous cell carcinoma, which affects the area of the larynx above the vocal cords. Most of the patients had advanced-stage disease. The results showed TORS effectively removed cancer, with "clean," disease-free margins, and was easier to perform than the approach of transoral laser microsurgery via a laryngoscope. The patients also underwent the surgical removal of their adjacent neck nodes at the same operation.

"We were pleased with the cancer outcomes," Dr. Olsen says. "We also found patients had minimal trouble after surgery, in most cases resuming normal eating, swallowing and speaking."

With TORS, the robotic arms that enter the mouth include a thin camera, an arm with a cautery or laser, and an arm with a gripping tool to retract and grasp tissue. The surgeon sits at a console, controlling the instruments and viewing the three-dimensional surgical field on a screen. "The camera improves visibility," Dr. Olsen says. "We also gain the ability to maneuver and see around corners and into tight spaces, and we believe we'll now be able to take out more throat tumors than with traditional approaches of the past."

The new application of TORS comes at the right time, Dr. Olsen notes. Cancers of the tongue and throat are on the rise. Not all patients will be candidates for robotic surgery; its use will depend on the architecture of a patient's throat and neck, along with the type and extent of the tumor. "What we know from this study is that for larynx cancer, we have another effective surgical tool available to us," he says. "We can further tailor the cancer treatment for each patient and provide individualized care."

Source: ScienceDaily

The catalyst, which is made of molybdenum disulphide nanoparticles grown on graphene, might be a real alternative to expensive platinum in future large-scale industrial and domestic applications.

Hydrogen could be an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional fossil fuels, particularly if it is electrochemically produced from ordinary seawater – a huge and abundantly available resource. However, before this can happen, scientists need to make advanced catalysts that increase the efficiency of the electrochemical hydrogen reaction (HER). Today, the most efficient HER catalysts are those made from platinum-group metals, but these are expensive.

Now, Hongjie Dai and colleagues have shown that flexible graphene oxide sheets could provide an ideal substrate for MoS2 nanoparticles. The resulting MoS2/reduced graphene oxide hybrid has a very high electrocatalytic activity for the HER that is superior to MoS2 catalysts synthesized without graphene.

(A) Schematic solvothermal synthesis with GO sheets to afford the MoS2/RGO hybrid. (B) SEM and (inset) TEM images of the MoS2/RGO hybrid. (C) Schematic solvothermal synthesis without any GO sheets, resulting in large, free MoS2 particles. (D) SEM and (inset) TEM images of the free particles. Courtesy: JACS

Catalytic edge sites

Indeed, the researches have measured a HER "Tafel slope" (which indicates the rate of a electrochemical reaction) of 41 mV/decade – a value that far exceeds the activity of previous MoS2 catalysts. This value results from the large number of catalytic edge sites on the tiny MoS2 nanoparticles and the fact that the material couples well to the underlying graphene network.

And that's not all: the hybrid catalyst also has a small overpotential, a large current density and it remains active even after 1000 cycles. "Traditional catalysts such as platinum and palladium, although very efficient, are pricey," Dai told nanotechweb.org. "Given the performance and low cost of the MoS2/RGO hybrid catalyst reported in our paper, we could foresee a possible replacement of these precious metals in future large-scale industrial and domestic applications."

The Stanford researchers made their hybrid catalysts in a solvothermal reaction of ammonium tetrathiomolybdate – (NH4)MoS4 – and hydrazine in a dimethylformaide solution of graphene oxide at 200 °C overnight. During this process, graphene oxide was reduced to RGO, and (NH4)MoS4 was reduced to MoS2on RGO by hydrazine.

"We are now working on improving our catalyst and possibly integrating it into photoelectrochemical reactions," revealed Dai.

The work was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Source: NanoTechWeb

And the technique they found can change electrical conductivity by factors of well over 100, and heat conductivity by more than threefold.

“It’s a new way of changing and controlling the properties” of materials — in this case a class called percolated composite materials — by controlling their temperature, says Gang Chen, MIT’s Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering and director of the Pappalardo Micro and Nano Engineering Laboratories. Chen is the senior author of a paper describing the process that was published online on April 19 and will appear in a forthcoming issue ofNature Communications. The paper’s lead authors are former MIT visiting scholars Ruiting Zheng of Beijing Normal University and Jinwei Gao of South China Normal University, along with current MIT graduate student Jianjian Wang. The research was partly supported by grants from the National Science Foundation.

The system Chen and his colleagues developed could be applied to many different materials for either thermal or electrical applications. The finding is so novel, Chen says, that the researchers hope some of their peers will respond with an immediate, “I have a use for that!”

An artistic rendering of the suspension as it freezes shows graphite flakes clumping together to form a connected network (dark spiky shapes at center), as they are pushed into place by the crystals that form as the liquid hexadecane surrounding them begins to freeze. Image: Jonathan Tong

One potential use of the new system, Chen explains, is for a fuse to protect electronic circuitry. In that application, the material would conduct electricity with little resistance under normal, room-temperature conditions. But if the circuit begins to heat up, that heat would increase the material’s resistance, until at some threshold temperature it essentially blocks the flow, acting like a blown fuse. But then, instead of needing to be reset, as the circuit cools down the resistance decreases and the circuit automatically resumes its function.

Another possible application is for storing heat, such as from a solar thermal collector system, later using it to heat water or homes or to generate electricity. The system’s much-improved thermal conductivity in the solid state helps it transfer heat.

Essentially, what the researchers did was suspend tiny flakes of one material in a liquid that, like water, forms crystals as it solidifies. For their initial experiments, they used flakes of graphite suspended in liquid hexadecane, but they showed the generality of their process by demonstrating the control of conductivity in other combinations of materials as well. The liquid used in this research has a melting point close to room temperature — advantageous for operations near ambient conditions — but the principle should be applicable for high-temperature use as well.

The process works because when the liquid freezes, the pressure of its forming crystal structure pushes the floating particles into closer contact, increasing their electrical and thermal conductance. When it melts, that pressure is relieved and the conductivity goes down. In their experiments, the researchers used a suspension that contained just 0.2 percent graphite flakes by volume. Such suspensions are remarkably stable: Particles remain suspended indefinitely in the liquid, as was shown by examining a container of the mixture three months after mixing.

By selecting different fluids and different materials suspended within that liquid, the critical temperature at which the change takes place can be adjusted at will, Chen says.

“Using phase change to control the conductivity of nanocomposites is a very clever idea,” says Li Shi, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Shi adds that as far as he knows “this is the first report of this novel approach” to producing such a reversible system.

“I think this is a very crucial result,” says Joseph Heremans, professor of physics and of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Ohio State University. “Heat switches exist,” but involve separate parts made of different materials, whereas “here we have a system with no macroscopic moving parts,” he says. “This is excellent work.”

Source: PhysOrg

The calculation would have taken a single computer processor unit (CPU) 1,500 years to calculate, but scientists from IBM and the University of Newcastle managed to complete this work in just a few months on IBM's "BlueGene/P" supercomputer, which is designed to run continuously at one quadrillion calculations per second.

Their work was based on a mathematical formula discovered a decade ago in part by the Department of Energy's David H. Bailey, the Chief Technologist of the Computational Research Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Australian team took Bailey’s program, which ran on a single PC processor, and made it run faster and in parallel on thousands of independent processors.

David H. Bailey Photo courtesy of Lawrence Berkely National Lab

"What is interesting in these computations is that until just a few years ago, it was widely believed that such mathematical objects were forever beyond the reach of human reasoning or machine computation," Bailey said.  
 
"Once again we see the utter futility in placing limits on human ingenuity and technology."
 
A binary digit or "bit" is the “DNA” of all computing. In a computer, everything is represented as strings of zeroes and ones. The decimal number 12, for instance, is represented as "1100," and the fraction 9/16 is represented as “0.1001.”  So as one might imagine, calculating the sixty-trillionth binary digit of a number is quite a feat.
 
According to Professor Jonathan Borwein of the University of Newcastle, this work represents the largest single computation done for any mathematical object to date. The idea for this project sparked when IBM Australia was looking for something to do related to "Pi Day" (March 14) on a new IBM BlueGene/P computer system. Borwein proposed running Bailey’s formula for Pi-squared, as the calculation had been done for Pi itself. The team also calculated Catalan’s constant, another important number that arises in mathematics.
 
Why Pi?

The importance of Pi has long been known -- multiply it by the diameter of any circle to get the circumference. Ancient Egyptians used this number in their design of the pyramids, meanwhile ancient scholars in Jerusalem, India, Babylon, Greece and China used this proportions in their studies of architecture and symbols.
 
Yet despite its longevity, Pi is one of the most mysterious numbers in mathematics. Because it is "irrational," Pi can never be expressed as a finite decimal number and humanity will never have anything but approximations of it. So why bother solving Pi to the ten trillionth decimal unit? After all, a value of Pi to 40 digits would be more than enough to compute the circumference of the Milky Way galaxy to an error less than the size of a proton.
 
According to Bailey, one application for computing the digits of Pi is to test the integrity of computer hardware and software, which is a focus of Bailey’s research at Berkeley Lab. “If two separate computations of digits of Pi, say using different algorithms, are in agreement except perhaps for a few trailing digits at the end, then almost certainly both computers performed trillions of operations flawlessly,” he says.
 
For example in 1986, a Pi-calculating program that Bailey wrote at NASA, using an algorithm due to Jonathan and Peter Borwein, detected some hardware problems in one of the original Cray-2 supercomputers that had escaped the manufacturer’s tests. Along this same line, some improved techniques for computing what is known as the fast Fourier transform on modern computer systems had their roots in efforts to accelerate computations of Pi. These improved techniques are now very widely employed in scientific and engineering applications. And of course, from a mathematical perspective it’s just plain fascinating to see the digits of Pi in action!

Source: PhysOrg

Imagine a swarm of microrobots—tiny devices a few hair widths across—swimming through your blood vessels and repairing damage, or zipping around in computer chips as a security lock, or quickly knitting together heart tissue. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Dartmouth College, and Duke University have shown how to use a single electrical signal to command a group of microrobots to self-assemble into  larger structures. The researchers hope to use this method to build biological tissues. But for microrobots to do anything like that, researchers must first figure out a good way to control them.

"When things are very small, they tend to stick together," says Jason Gorman, a robotics researcher in the Intelligent Systems Division at NIST who co-organizes an annual microrobotics competition that draws groups from around the world. "A lot of the locomotion methods that have been developed are focused on overcoming or leveraging this adhesion."

Tiny robots: This wafer holds many individual microrobots. Each robot consists of a body (about 100 micrometers long) and an arm that it uses to turn. Several of these robots can be controlled at once.
Credit: Igor Paprotny

So far, most control methods have involved pushing and pulling the tiny machines with magnetic fields. This approach has enabled them to zoom around on the face of a dime, pushing tiny objects or swim through blood vessels. However, these systems generally require complex setups of coils to generate the electromagnetic field or specialized components, and getting the robots to carry out a task can be difficult.

Bruce Donald, a professor of computer science and biochemistry at Duke, took a different approach, developing a microrobot that responds to electrostatic potential and is powered with voltage through an electric-array surface. Now he and others have demonstrated that they are able to control a group of these microrobots to create large shapes. They do this by tweaking the design of each robot a little so that each one responds to portions of the voltage with a different action, resulting in complex behaviors by the swarm.

"A good analogy is that we have multiple, remote-controlled cars but only one transmitter," says Igor Paprotny, a post doctorate scientist at UC Berkeley and one of the lead researchers on this work, which he presented last week at a talk at Harvard University. During his talk, he passed around a container holding a wafer die the size of a thumbnail. On it were more than 100 microrobots.

"What we do is slightly change how the wheels turn," he says. "Simple devices with a fairly simple behavior can be engineered to behave slightly different when you apply a global control signal. That allows a very complex set of behaviors." The robots contain an actuator called a scratch drive, which bends in response to voltage supplied through the electric array. When it releases tension, it goes forward, in a movement similar to an inchworm's. But the key to the robots' varying behavior is the arms extending from the actuators. A steering arm on a microrobot snaps down in response to a certain amount of voltage, dragging on the surface and causing the robot to turn. By snapping the arm up and down one or two times a second, the team can control how much a given robot turns. To control a swarm, the team designed each robot with an arm that reacts differently during portions of the voltage signal. Computer algorithms vary the voltage sequence, prompting the robots to move in complex ways.

"Electrostatic robots have an advantage in that their power is supplied through an electrode array that the microrobots sit on," says Gorman. "It can be very compact. Therefore, electrostatic microrobots can be embedded inside other things [like computer chips]. For magnetic robots, you have to supply electromagnetic field, and that requires a larger set-up." Others have worked on electrostatic microrobots, he adds, but this work is the furthest along.

"His research is very advanced in terms of controlling multiple microrobots," says Zoltan Nagy, a roboticist at ETH Zürich who works with groups of magnetically controlled robots called Magmites.

"Most of the work to date has been on controlling a single robot that can move around in a pre-defined area on a substrate," adds Gorman. "However, many of the applications of interest will require control of lots of robots, like a colony of ants."

So far, Paprotny has been able to control up to four robots on a single surface at once, and the robots can move several thousand times their body length per second, as detailed in a paper that is currently submitted for review. His next plan is to adapt the setup for a liquid environment so that the microrobots can assemble components of biological tissue into patterns that mimic nature.

"We're trying to come up with ways of self-assembling tissue units," says Ali Khademhosseini, an associate professor at Brigham and Women's Hospital at Harvard Medical School and a specialist in tissue engineering who is collaborating with Paprotny. "In the body, tissues are made in a hierarchical way—units repeat themselves over and over to generate larger tissue structures." Muscle tissue, for example, is made from small fibers, while liver tissue has a repeating hexagonal shape.

Khademhosseini has encased cells in jelly-like hydrogels and assembled them (using methods that include liquid-air interactions and surface tensions) into different regions to mimic biological tissues. But he thinks the self-assembling microrobots will allow more control in creating the tissues.

"We can try to combine cells and materials in microfabrication systems to come up with structures and assemble them in particular ways using the techniques Igor has developed," says Khademhosseini.

He envisions fabricating the gels and cells on top of teams of robots working in parallel to construct different parts of a tissue. "We could use the robots to do assembly," he says. "The cells, once they're assembled, come off from the robots, letting cells rearrange further to make things that are indistinguishable from natural tissue." Initially, he hopes to create small patches of heart tissues, and then things like heart muscles and valves, and assemble them all together in a heart. "That's where things are heading," he says. "But right now the challenge is we're still not very good at making each of these individual components."

Source: TechnologyReview

Monkeys are being trained to control what might be the world's most sophisticated and human-like robot arm. But they never touch the prosthetic limb or fiddle with a remote control: they guide it with their thoughts alone. If trials are successful, in a few months from now people with spinal cord injuries could learn to do the same.

In 2008, Andrew Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania published a landmark paper describing how two rhesus macaques learned to feed themselves marshmallows and fruit using a crude robotic limb controlled by electrodes implanted in their brains (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature06996). No brain-controlled prosthetic limb had ever carried out a more complex real-world task. Still, Schwartz envisioned a more elegant and nimble device that paralysed people could use - something much closer to a human hand.

Enter the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL), a bionic limb that closely approximates the form and agility of a human arm and hand. Born from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Revolutionizing Prosthetics programme, and designed by Michael McLoughlin's team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, the MPL is made from a combination of lightweight carbon fibre and high-strength alloys. It has 22 degrees of freedom, compared with the human arm's 30, and can grasp precisely and firmly without crushing fragile objects. The wrist and elbow rotate with ease and, like an average human limb, it weighs just under 4.5 kilograms.

"I would say it's very close to human dexterity," says McLoughlin. "It can't do absolutely everything - it can't cup the palm, for example - but it can control all fingers individually. I don't think there is another limb that approaches it."

A prototype of the MPL has been tested by people who have had one or both arms amputated. Researchers surgically redirect nerves that would normally control the arm into unused chest muscle, where nerve signals are interpreted by electrodes that guide the robotic limb. "One of our patients, Jesse Sullivan, was able to use the arm almost from time zero. It was a very natural thing to do," says McLoughlin. "The brain still thinks the arm is there and if you can tap into those signals, you can really achieve something amazing."

But people paralysed from the neck down cannot benefit from this technique as brain signals cannot reach the chest. So in his work with rhesus macaques, Schwartz developed an array of 100 electrodes that eavesdrops on 100 neurons in the motor cortex. Once he had learned the electrical language the cortex uses to guide arm movement, he converted those signals into instructions for a crude robotic limb with a two-finger clamp. Now Schwartz is training his monkeys again, except this time he wants to teach them to use the five-fingered MPL and perform the kind of everyday but complex tasks we take for granted.

If the monkeys demonstrate that it is possible to steer the arm with brainpower alone, Schwartz and colleagues will give people with spinal cord injuries a chance to try the MPL. "For someone with spinal cord injury, it's a huge deal for them to be able to feed themselves," says McLoughlin. "Nobody has achieved this level of a control in humans with a brain-controlled prosthetic. We want to take it to a higher level than in the past."

Source: NewScientist

The device, called GraVVITAS, is a standard tablet PC with touch screen technology that uses vibration and sounds to guide the visually impaired user around a diagram.

It is designed to enable the user to build a picture of the entire graphic in their mind.

Currently, visually impaired students are using tactile diagrams to understand graphics. These raised shapes and textures are produced on a particular type of paper by special purpose printers, known as embossers. This method can prove to be extremely costly and can take months to produce a textbook.

The Faculty of Information and Technology’s Professor Kim Marriott and PhD student Cagatay Goncu are working with Vision Australia to develop the new technology, that will make accessing diagrams for visually impaired students easier.

“The idea stemmed from a visually impaired student that I had years ago in a unit that was very diagrammatic,” Professor Marriott said.

“This particular student had major problems understanding the diagrams using the methods that were available to them at the time. We wanted to try to increase accessibility to diagrams and graphics in educational material, which is a huge issue for the visually impaired.”

Dr. Marriot and Mr Goncu testing out a prototype of the GraVVITAS

The device, which is currently a prototype, has small external vibrating motors that attach to the user’s fingers. These motors buzz when an object displayed on the screen is touched.

Cagatay Goncu said voice prompts and sounds also help to guide the user to read the diagram.

“The basic idea is to guide the user to find the object by using sound. Touching the object causes the sound to stop and a voice explains what that object is and any other information associated with it,” Mr. Goncu said.

“If it’s something on the left side, you will hear something in your left ear and vice-versa.”

Developing the technology has involved extensive testing with visually impaired volunteers, which has allowed researchers to have a better understanding of how they read diagrams.

The next stage of development will involve collaborating with haptic feedback specialists from the Faculty of Engineering who will further refine the touch technology associated with the device.

Source: physorg - Provided by Monash University

Four theoretical physicists, led by Allan Widom, of Northeastern University, have published a paper in arXiv, where they show a possible way for some bacteria to produce radio waves. Taking note of the fact that bacteria DNA forms in loops rather than the familiar helix seen in humans, Widom, et al, describe a process whereby free electrons that flow through such a loop by hopping from atom to atom, wind up producing photons when energy levels change.

While the paper hasn’t whipped up nearly as much controversy as happened when French virologist Luc Montagnier, (Nobel Prize winner for linking HIV and AIDS) first suggested back in 2009 that bacteria might be able to communicate with one another via radio waves, it has nonetheless sparked tremendous debate among biologists and other scientists in the field. The problem has been that Montagnier showed that when compared to pure water, samples chockfull of bacteria, emitted more radio waves, and no one could explain why.

Low-temperature electron micrograph of a cluster of E. coli bacteria, magnified 10,000 times. Each individual bacterium is oblong shaped. Photo by Eric Erbe, digital colorization by Christopher Pooley, both of USDA, ARS, EMU.

Researchers have known for years that some bacteria do communicate via nanowires, which led Widom and his team to conclude that it wasn’t so farfetched to believe more highly developed bacteria, such as E. coli or Mycoplasma pirum, might instead communicate via wireless medium.
Basing their findings on modeling, Widom and his team, calculated that the transition frequencies broadcast (0.5, 1 and 1.5 kHz) when free electrons traversed bacterial DNA loops and met with differing energy levels, corresponded with just the amount of signal emission found in the E. coli bacterial studies by Montagnier.

The problem here of course is that while the model does suggest that certain bacteria might be capable of producing radio waves, it doesn’t go anywhere towards proving that such radio waves are actually used as a means of communication, either by the sender bacterium, or another receiver. There’s no research thus far that shows any sort response to such radio waves or any sort of “message” that might be encoded in such missives; hence the current controversy about what to make of bacteria that can produce radio waves.

It’s likely these new findings will incite others to look a little deeper, however, as the main argument for rejecting Montagnier’s findings back in 2009, was that bacteria lacked a means for generating radio signals; an assertion that has now been overthrown.

Source: PhysOrg