Monthly Archives: August 2013

University of Virginia (US) moving bioinspired materials closer to commercialization

An Aug. 19, 2013 news item on Nanowerk highlights an early-stage commercialization bioinspired project at the University of Virginia,

Mool Gupta, Langley Distinguished Professor in the university’s department of electrical and computer engineering, and director of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Lasers and Plasmas, has developed a method using high-powered lasers and nanotechnology to create a similar texture (to lotus leaves] that repels water, captures sunlight and prevents the buildup of ice.

These textured materials can be used over large areas and potentially could have important applications in products where ice poses a danger, for example, in aviation, the automobile industry, the military, in protecting communication towers, blades that generate wind energy, bridges, roofs, ships, satellite dishes, and even snowboards.

The Aug. 19, 2013 US National Science Foundation news release by Marlene Cimons, which originated the news item,  gives more detail about the technical aspects of  this project,

Gupta and his research team first made a piece of textured metal that serves as a mold to mass-produce many pieces of plastic with the same micro-texture. The replication process is similar to the one used in manufacturing compact discs. The difference, of course, is that the CD master mold contains specific information, like a voice, whereas, “in our case we are not writing any information, we are creating a micro-texture,” Gupta says.

“You create one piece of metal that has the texture,” Gupta adds. “For multiple pieces of plastic with the texture, you use the one master made of metal to stamp out multiple pieces. Thus, whatever features are in your master are replicated in the special plastic. Once we create that texture, if you put a drop of water on the texture, the water rolls down and doesn’t stick to it, just like a lotus leaf. We have created a human-made structure that repels water, just like the lotus leaf.”

The process of making the metal with the special texture works like this: the scientists take high-powered lasers, with energy beams 20 million times higher than that of a laser pointer, for example, and focus the beams on a metal surface. The metal absorbs the laser light and heats to a melting temperature of about 1200 degrees Centigrade, or higher, a process that rearranges the surface material to form a microtexture.

“All of this happens in less than 0.1 millionth of a second,” Gupta says. “The microtexture is self-organized. By scanning the focused laser beam, we achieve a large area of microtexture. The produced microtexture is used as a stamper to replicate microtexture in polymers. The stamper can be used many, many times, allowing a low cost manufacturing process. The generated microtextured polymer surface shows very high water repellency.”

The news release next describes the commercialization efforts,

In the fall of 2011, Gupta was among the first group of scientists to receive a $50,000 NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) award, which supports a set of activities and programs that prepare scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the laboratory into the commercial world.

Such results may be translated through I-Corps into technologies with near-term benefits for the economy and society. It is a public-private partnership program that teaches grantees to identify valuable product opportunities that can emerge from academic research, and offers entrepreneurship training to faculty and student participants.

The other project members are Paul Caffrey, a doctoral candidate under Gupta’s supervision, and Martin Skelly of Charleston, S.C., a veteran of banking in the former Soviet Union who serves as business mentor and is involved in new business investments.

The team participated in a three-day entrepreneurship workshop at Stanford University run by entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley. “We are still pursuing the commercial potential,” Gupta says. “The idea is to look at what market can use this technology, how big the market is, and how long it will take to get into it.”

First Canadian student team (Surrey’s Princess Margaret Secondary) wins NASA’s global space competition

Third time lucky for Sumit (Bhupinder) Rathore, a third-year Simon Fraser University computer-engineering student,  and Joe Sihota, physics teacher, who both coached a team of students from Princess Margaret Secondary school on to a win at the annual International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) at NASA’s (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas.  From the Aug. 19, 2013 Simon Fraser University news release,

Grumbo Aerospace, the winning team of the annual International Space Settlement Design Competition (ISSDC) at NASA’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, Texas, is the first such team to include Canadian high school students. [emphases mine]

Thanks to the tutelage of Rathore and physics teacher Joe Sihota, 10 Princess Margaret Secondary School students in Surrey became the first Canadian semi-finalists to make it to the competition’s invitation-only final.

ISSDC organizers, who are allied with NASA, the Boeing Company and the aerospace industry, invited student teams from 20 schools worldwide to the final.

Finalists, who had submitted winning semi-final designs for a space colony, then formed four new teams that were given company names. The companies competed for the final prize — a trophy, gold medals and a coveted list of résumé references consisting of NASA astronauts and aerospace engineers.

The competition is organized so that teams of high school students apply and if the team is successful and win a berth to NASA, it is, once arrived in Texas, broken apart and new teams formed for the final competition. Here’s a better explanation from my July 3, 2013 posting where the team was raising $10,000 for airfares and accommodation,

The competition invites high school students who are mentored by teachers (and in this case, Rathore, a student) to design a space colony for 10,000-plus people according to set specifications.

Student teams submit 40-page, on-line entries, which are assessed by aerospace industry engineers and managers allied with the contest’s sponsors, including NASA and the Boeing Company.

ISSDC organizers select eight teams as finalists that compete in a live competition to design another colony at the NASA centre. Four more teams, deemed to have submitted stellar first-round entries, are also invited to witness the final competition.

The competing teams are broken up to create new teams comprised of students from different countries, who are coached by a mentor attached to one of the original teams.

The new teams engage in 43 hours of non-stop research to design their final space colonial submissions, which are assessed by ISSDC organizers and NASA astronauts and space engineers.

The Internet is out of bounds as a source of information for the final teams. They must rely on their mentors, NASA’s library and a panel of astronauts and aerospace engineers as resources to design and present their colonies.

The winning team takes home an Oscar-type trophy embedded with a genuine meteorite and an impressive list of NASA astronauts and aerospace engineers as résumé references.

This is the third time that Rathore and Sihota have coached a team of students to the semi-finals and it is the first time Princess Margaret students have won the top prize. More from the news release,

As members of the Grumbo Aerospace company/team, the Surrey students won the approval of the nine aerospace engineers and retired astronauts judging the four final teams’ designs for a 10,000-plus, person-settlement on Earth’s moon.

Rathore, along with Jack Bacon, a pioneering space-technology engineer dubbed the next Carl Sagan, helped coach Grumbo Aerospace to its final victory. Previously recognized by NASA as a gifted teacher, Rathore credits competition seasoning, time management and his personal passion for lunar life with transforming his Surrey protégés into third-time-lucky victors.

“This year I was fortunate enough to have some of the old members returning from my last year’s team,” notes Rathore. “They were very familiar with the stress and unexpected challenges of the final. They were more mentally prepared for the time management required to make on-the-fly creative decisions about the final settlement’s design.

“’The location of the final settlement design on the Earth’s moon worked in our favour. As a huge fan of the moon, I was familiar with most of its settlement design-challenges. I supplied our team with a lot of research to help design requested commercial and industrial ventures, such as a manufacturing base and a tourism centre.”

In citing Grumbo Aerospace as the winning team, the judges praised its attention to detail and creativity in including elements such as hiking and wedding opportunities and self-repairing exterior structures.

The team’s manufacturing base produced computer components, orbital-computing installations, spacesuits and spaceship modules. It included a processing unit to convert lunar raw ore into finished products for use in space-based construction.

The team’s tourism base featured a hotel with earthly and lunar views, special vehicles for tourism travel to all the Apollo landing sites, a spacesuit for tourists and many tourism-oriented lunar-based activities.

Congratulations!

Nano-pesticides or nanopesticides or nano pesticides

It’s the spelling that’s driving me nuts. In the last year it seems to have gotten quite higgledy piggledy and so we have this salad of one word, two words, and hyphenated words for anything  prepended by nano.  I hope it settles soon but in the meantime, here’s an Aug. 12, 2013 news item on Azonano concerning nano-pesticides,

Research is urgently needed to evaluate the risks and benefits of nano-pesticides to human and environmental health. Melanie Kah and Thilo Hofmann from the Department of Environmental Geosciences of the University of Vienna recently performed an extensive analysis of this emerging field of research.

The results were published June 6th in the internationally recognised journal “Critical Reviews in Environmental Science and Technology”. The study presents the current scientific state of art on nano-pesticides and identifies direction priorities for future research.

The University of Vienna June 20, 2012  press release, which originated the news item (I’ll explain the one year gap later in this posting), describes some of the concerns raised in the study,

Nano-pesticides encompass a great variety of products, some of which are already on the market. The application of nano-pesticides would be the only intentional diffuse input of large quantities of engineered nano-particles into the environment. Innovation always results in both drawbacks and benefits for human and environmental health. Nano-pesticides may reduce environmental contamination through the reduction in pesticide application rates and reduced losses. However, nano-pesticides may also create new kinds of contamination of soils and waterways due to enhanced transport, longer persistence and higher toxicity.

The current level of knowledge does not allow a fair assessment of the advantages and disadvantages that will result from the use of nano-pesticides. As a prerequisite for such assessment, a better understanding of the fate and effect of nano-pesticides after their application is required. The suitability of current regulations should also be analyzed so that refinements can be implemented if needed. Research on nano-pesticides is therefore a priority for preserving the quality of both the food chain and the environment.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Nano-pesticides: state of knowledge, environmental fate and exposure modeling: Melanie Kah, Sabine Beulke, Karen Tiede and Thilo Hofmann. Critical Reviews of Environmental Science and Technology, Volume 43, Issue 16, 2013 , pages 1823-1867 DOI: 10.1080/10643389.2012.671750

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10643389.2012.671750

There was a 2012 version of this paper posted, which was when the press release was originally written and posted at the University of Vienna website, but June 2013 is when the paper was officially published. It is behind a paywall but thankfully one of the authors, Melanie Kah, gave Katy Edgington an interview about the study for Edgington’s June 26, 2012 article on scienceomega.com,

“Although some research is ongoing, one application that is fairly well-developed involves the injection of nanoscale zero-valent iron particles into groundwater to degrade certain contaminants. This is an example of something that is still under development but which is already being applied, as the technique is currently in use on a large scale in the United States.” [says Kah]

A project is underway in the department which aims to help make the technique more widely applicable, and another – at the complete opposite end of the scale in terms of its development – is looking at a potential application for carbon nanotubes.

“People have suggested that carbon nanotubes could be used to replace activated carbon, the material used worldwide to decontaminate water,” clarified Dr Kah. “It is suggested that carbon nanotubes have different properties which will complement activated carbon, but this is only at the laboratory scale so far.”

It is important to steer clear of making broad generalisations about the risks and benefits of nanopesticides as compared to conventional pesticides, Dr Kah emphasised. They cannot be considered as a single entity; rather each case must be taken on its own merits.

In their review of the literature on the topic, the authors also discuss how the adequacy of existing legislation and regulation may be affected in light of the development of nanopesticides in various forms.

“I think it is far too early to propose any amendments to the current regulation,” Dr Kah stated. “It appears from our analysis that a lot of nanopesticides would be well covered by the European regulation on plant protection products because this regulation is very thorough; indeed it is probably the strictest in the world.”

I imagine that since the initial publication of the paper and the interview, there may have been a few changes to the paper and refinements to Kah’s ideas but the Edgington article does provides some interesting insight, especially if you don’t have access to the paper.

Baba Brinkman’s Don’t Sleep With Mean People’ crowdfunding campaign and first two videos from Battle Rap Histories of Epic Science available

I have two music and science-related items, the first concerning Baba Brinkiman, a Canadian rapper who’s been mentioned here many times, and the second concerns Tom McFadden who raps science and creates rapping programs where children rap science.

Brinkman is coming to the end of a crowdfunding campaign, which hasn’t been mentioned here before, Don’t Sleep With Mean People on the RocketHub platform. Baba is trying to raise $15,000 to do this,

The goal of this crowdfunding campaign is to make “Don’t Sleep With Mean People” a globally recognizable meme, a scientifically-informed peace movement driven by one of the most powerful forces nature has ever invented: sexual selection. The slogan already has a theme song, which is part of the off-Broadway theatre production The Rap Guide to Evolution. With the money from this campaign we will produce both a short documentary film and a professional-quality music video (complete with goofy, easily-imitated dance routine) and hire a publicity company to promote the work across multiple media platforms. In the end, we hope “Don’t Sleep With Mean People” will be bigger than Gangnam Style, and a hell of a lot more useful.

The beauty of “Don’t Sleep With Mean People” is that it works on multiple levels. At the deepest level, it has the potential to transform our species by reducing the frequency of “mean genes” in the human gene pool. But even in the short term, once people learn that bad behaviour is a one way ticket to celibacy, the world will very rapidly become a more peaceful and cooperative place.

Currently the slogan “Mean People Suck” bears the weight of the world’s anti-mean sentiments, but unfortunately it isn’t an actionable statement. We aim to replace it with something people can put into daily practice. At present, “Mean People Suck” is mentioned on 196,000 unique websites, while “Don’t Sleep With Mean People” is only mentioned on 5,670. By spreading the slogan on T-Shirts, billboards, bumper stickers, and viral YouTube videos (…), we aim to reverse this trend.

Previously successful applications of “Don’t Sleep With Mean People” include the play Lysistrata by Aristophanes (c. 411 BC), and the Liberian “sex strike activism” of Leymah Gbowee. In both cases the courageous actions of women were the key to punishing bad behaviour in men, and our campaign takes the same approach. Darwin’s theory of evolution predicts the lower-investing sex (usually males) will tend towards fiercer competition for mates, while the higher-investing sex (usually females) will be relatively choosier and will thus wield more “selective” power.

By encouraging everyone – and especially women – to choose less-mean sex partners, we hope to evolve the world into a better place.

As of today, Aug. 19, 2013, there are 11 more days left to the campaign. From the campaign FAQs,

What will you spend the money on?
Film production costs for the music video and short documentary, promotion, and fulfillment of our obligations to deliver the Goods you’ve earned.

What happens if you don’t hit your $15,000 target?
We’ll make a lower-budget short film and music video and promote them without professional help.

Now on to Tom McFadden and his successful crowdfunding campaign Battle Rap Histories of Epic Science (Brahe’s Battles); which was featured  in my Mar. 28, 2013 posting. Now, David Bruggeman provides an update in his Aug. 16, 2013 posting on the Pasco Phronesis blog,

Tom McFadden’s Brahe’s B.A.T.T.L.E.S. project has dropped two nuggets of video goodness of late, one of which is racing through the interwebs.  A conceptual cousin of the New York City-based Science Genius project, McFadden’s project centers around scientific matters of debate, if not controversy. First one out of the chute involves the matter of Rosalind Franklin and her under-credited role in developing the model of DNA.

Here’s the Rosalind Franklin rap (David has included both this rap and the project’s more recently released rap [Pluto] in his posting),

I love it. I’ve written about Franklin before, both in a Jan. 16, 2012 posting which mentions a proposed movie about her and in a Jan. 28, 2010 posting which features a ‘Rosalind’ scarf’ in the context of science knitting.

You can comment and participate in McFadden’s project on this YouTube channel or on McFadden’s Science with Tom blog.

Resistive memory from University of California Riverside (replacing flash memory in mobile devices) and Boise State University (neuron chips)

Today, (Aug. 19, 2 013)I have two items on memristors. First, Dexter Johnson provides some context for understanding why a University of California Riverside research team’s approach to creating memristors is exciting some interest in his Aug. 17, 2013 posting (Nanoclast blog on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website), Note: Links have been removed,

The heralding of the memristor, or resistive memory, and the long-anticipated demise of flash memory have both been tracking on opposite trajectories with resistive memory expected to displace flash ever since the memristor was first discovered by Stanley Williams’ group at Hewlett Packard in 2008.

The memristor has been on a rapid development track ever since and has been promised to be commercially available as early as 2014, enabling 10 times greater embedded memory for mobile devices than currently available.

The obsolescence of flash memory at the hands of the latest nanotechnology has been predicted for longer than the commercial introduction of the memristor. But just at the moment it appears it’s going to reach its limits in storage capacity along comes a new way to push its capabilities to new heights, sometimes thanks to a nanomaterial like graphene.

In addition to the graphene promise, Dexter goes on to discuss another development,  which could push memory capabilities and which is mentioned in an Aug. 14, 2013 news item on ScienceDaily (and elsewhere),

A team at the University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering has developed a novel way to build what many see as the next generation memory storage devices for portable electronic devices including smart phones, tablets, laptops and digital cameras.

The device is based on the principles of resistive memory [memristor], which can be used to create memory cells that are smaller, operate at a higher speed and offer more storage capacity than flash memory cells, the current industry standard. Terabytes, not gigbytes, will be the norm with resistive memory.

The key advancement in the UC Riverside research is the creation of a zinc oxide nano-island on silicon. It eliminates the need for a second element called a selector device, which is often a diode.

The Aug. 13, 2013 University of California Riverside news release by Sean Nealon, which originated the news item, further describes the limitations of flash memory and reinforces the importance of being able to eliminate a component (selector device),

Flash memory has been the standard in the electronics industry for decades. But, as flash continues to get smaller and users want higher storage capacity, it appears to reaching the end of its lifespan, Liu [Jianlin Liu, a professor of electrical engineering] said.

With that in mind, resistive memory is receiving significant attention from academia and the electronics industry because it has a simple structure, high-density integration, fast operation and long endurance.

Researchers have also found that resistive memory can be scaled down in the sub 10-nanometer scale. (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.) Current flash memory devices are roughly using a feature size twice as large.

Resistive memory usually has a metal-oxide-metal structure in connection with a selector device. The UC Riverside team has demonstrated a novel alternative way by forming self-assembled zinc oxide nano-islands on silicon. Using a conductive atomic force microscope, the researchers observed three operation modes from the same device structure, essentially eliminating the need for a separate selector device.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the researchers’ published paper,

Multimode Resistive Switching in Single ZnO Nanoisland System by Jing Qi, Mario Olmedo, Jian-Guo Zheng, & Jianlin Liu. Scientific Reports 3, Article number: 2405 doi:10.1038/srep02405 Published 12 August 2013

This study is open access.

Meanwhile, Boise State University (Idaho, US) is celebrating a new project, CIF: Small: Realizing Chip-scale Bio-inspired Spiking Neural Networks with Monolithically Integrated Nano-scale Memristors, which was announced in an Aug. 17, 2013 news item on Azonano,

Electrical and computer engineering faculty Elisa Barney Smith, Kris Campbell and Vishal Saxena are joining forces on a project titled “CIF: Small: Realizing Chip-scale Bio-inspired Spiking Neural Networks with Monolithically Integrated Nano-scale Memristors.”

Team members are experts in machine learning (artificial intelligence), integrated circuit design and memristor devices. Funded by a three-year, $500,000 National Science Foundation grant, they have taken on the challenge of developing a new kind of computing architecture that works more like a brain than a traditional digital computer.

“By mimicking the brain’s billions of interconnections and pattern recognition capabilities, we may ultimately introduce a new paradigm in speed and power, and potentially enable systems that include the ability to learn, adapt and respond to their environment,” said Barney Smith, who is the principal investigator on the grant.

The Aug. 14, 2013 Boise State University news release by Kathleen Tuck, which originated the news item, describes the team’s focus on mimicking the brain’s capabilities ,

One of the first memristors was built in Campbell’s Boise State lab, which has the distinction of being one of only five or six labs worldwide that are up to the task.

The team’s research builds on recent work from scientists who have derived mathematical algorithms to explain the electrical interaction between brain synapses and neurons.

“By employing these models in combination with a new device technology that exhibits similar electrical response to the neural synapses, we will design entirely new computing chips that mimic how the brain processes information,” said Barney Smith.

Even better, these new chips will consume power at an order of magnitude lower than current computing processors, despite the fact that they match existing chips in physical dimensions. This will open the door for ultra low-power electronics intended for applications with scarce energy resources, such as in space, environmental sensors or biomedical implants.

Once the team has successfully built an artificial neural network, they will look to engage neurobiologists in parallel to what they are doing now. A proposal for that could be written in the coming year.

Barney Smith said they hope to send the first of the new neuron chips out for fabrication within weeks.

With the possibility that HP Labs will make its ‘memristor chips‘ commercially available in 2014 and neuron chips fabricated for the Boise State University researchers within weeks of this Aug. 19, 2013 date, it seems that memristors have been developed at a lightning fast pace. It’s been a fascinating process to observe.

North Korea’s nanotechnology

I don’t usually rewrite material from elsewhere (sometimes called churnalism) but since these people (Global Post, North Korea Newsletter No. 275, Aug. 15, 2013) seem very concerned about any kind of copying whatsoever and I’m determined to mention North Korea’s nanotechnology efforts on this blog for the first time., here goes.

Apparently North Korea has established a nano center as of April 2013 which was officially announced on Aug. 1, 2013 by Rodong Sinmun newspaper of the Workers’ Party of (North) Korea (WPK). They claim advances in energy, environmental conservation, medicine, farming, and light industry.

Yonhap News has an Aug. 2, 2013 news item which provides some detail,

The newspaper [WPK] monitored in Seoul said the nanotech center, built under the guidance of North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, has played a key part in developing the sector. It added that roughly 1,000 nano products and prototypes were on display at the 10th nano science exhibition that opened on Tuesday [July 30, 2013].

North Korean media started mentioning the nanotech center in April, although no detail was made public on when it was established.

It said the country’s technicians from universities and laboratories have been able to develop agricultural sterilizers, growth accelerators, air cleaners and shoes.

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on Aug. 7, 2013 claimed that due to previous efforts there are now hundreds of  nanotechnology researchers and specialists.

Quantum teleportation from a Japan-Germany collaboration

An Aug. 15, 2013 Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz press release (also on EurekAlert) has somewhat gobsmacked me with its talk of teleportation,

By means of the quantum-mechanical entanglement of spatially separated light fields, researchers in Tokyo and Mainz have managed to teleport photonic qubits with extreme reliability. This means that a decisive breakthrough has been achieved some 15 years after the first experiments in the field of optical teleportation. The success of the experiment conducted in Tokyo is attributable to the use of a hybrid technique in which two conceptually different and previously incompatible approaches were combined. “Discrete digital optical quantum information can now be transmitted continuously – at the touch of a button, if you will,” explained Professor Peter van Loock of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU). As a theoretical physicist, van Loock advised the experimental physicists in the research team headed by Professor Akira Furusawa of the University of Tokyo on how they could most efficiently perform the teleportation experiment to ultimately verify the success of quantum teleportation.

The press release goes on to describe quantum teleportation,

Quantum teleportation involves the transfer of arbitrary quantum states from a sender, dubbed Alice, to a spatially distant receiver, named Bob. This requires that Alice and Bob initially share an entangled quantum state across the space in question, e.g., in the form of entangled photons. Quantum teleportation is of fundamental importance to the processing of quantum information (quantum computing) and quantum communication. Photons are especially valued as ideal information carriers for quantum communication since they can be used to transmit signals at the speed of light. A photon can represent a quantum bit or qubit analogous to a binary digit (bit) in standard classical information processing. Such photons are known as ‘flying quantum bits.

Before explaining the new technique, there’s an overview of previous efforts,

The first attempts to teleport single photons or light particles were made by the Austrian physicist Anton Zeilinger. Various other related experiments have been performed in the meantime. However, teleportation of photonic quantum bits using conventional methods proved to have its limitations because of experimental deficiencies and difficulties with fundamental principles.

What makes the experiment in Tokyo so different is the use of a hybrid technique. With its help, a completely deterministic and highly reliable quantum teleportation of photonic qubits has been achieved. The accuracy of the transfer was 79 to 82 percent for four different qubits. In addition, the qubits were teleported much more efficiently than in previous experiments, even at a low degree of entanglement.

The concept of entanglement was first formulated by Erwin Schrödinger and involves a situation in which two quantum systems, such as two light particles for example, are in a joint state, so that their behavior is mutually dependent to a greater extent than is normally (classically) possible. In the Tokyo experiment, continuous entanglement was achieved by means of entangling many photons with many other photons. This meant that the complete amplitudes and phases of two light fields were quantum correlated. Previous experiments only had a single photon entangled with another single photon – a less efficient solution. “The entanglement of photons functioned very well in the Tokyo experiment – practically at the press of a button, as soon as the laser was switched on,” said van Loock, Professor for Theory of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at Mainz University. This continuous entanglement was accomplished with the aid of so-called ‘squeezed light’, which takes the form of an ellipse in the phase space of the light field. Once entanglement has been achieved, a third light field can be attached to the transmitter. From there, in principle, any state and any number of states can be transmitted to the receiver. “In our experiment, there were precisely four sufficiently representative test states that were transferred from Alice to Bob using entanglement. Thanks to continuous entanglement, it was possible to transmit the photonic qubits in a deterministic fashion to Bob, in other words, in each run,” added van Loock.

Earlier attempts to achieve optical teleportation were performed differently and, before now, the concepts used have proved to be incompatible. Although in theory it had already been assumed that the two different strategies, from the discrete and the continuous world, needed to be combined, it represents a technological breakthrough that this has actually now been experimentally demonstrated with the help of the hybrid technique. “The two separate worlds, the discrete and the continuous, are starting to converge,” concluded van Loock.

The researchers have provided an image illustrating quantum teleportation,

Deterministic quantum teleportation of a photonic quantum bit. Each qubit that flies from the left into the teleporter leaves the teleporter on the right with a loss of quality of only around 20 percent, a value not achievable without entanglement. Courtesy University of Tokyo

Deterministic quantum teleportation of a photonic quantum bit. Each qubit that flies from the left into the teleporter leaves the teleporter on the right with a loss of quality of only around 20 percent, a value not achievable without entanglement. Courtesy University of Tokyo

Here’s a citation for and a link to the published paper,

Deterministic quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits by a hybrid technique by Shuntaro Takeda, Takahiro Mizuta, Maria Fuwa, Peter van Loock & Akira Furusawa. Nature 500, 315–318 (15 August 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12366 Published online 14 August 2013

This article  is behind a paywall although there is a preview capability (ReadCube Access) available.

Situating Science and the future

The end is in sight (2014) for Canada’s Situating Science; Science in Human Contexts network or rather,  the organization’s funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) will be exhausted sometime soon. According to their Fall 2013 newsletter, they are making plans for the future,

I. SUSTAINING THE NETWORK AND ACTIVITIES BEYOND 2014
While this year is the last for the Situating Science SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster, it is an opportunity to celebrate and build upon our successes. As part of our plans, we will follow up on last year’s “think-tank” and management meetings to set out concrete plans for sustaining the network and activities of Cluster scholars beyond its 7 years. A number of Cluster partners and stakeholders will meet during a second “think-tank” to discuss best strategies for moving forward.

The “think-tank” will dovetail nicely with a special symposium in Ottawa on Science and Society Oct. 21-23. For this symposium, the Cluster is partnering with the Institute for Science, Society and Policy to bring together scholars from various disciplines, public servants and policy workers to discuss key issues at the intersection of science and society. [emphasis mine]  The discussions will be compiled in a document to be shared with stakeholders and the wider public.

The team will continue to seek support and partnerships for projects within the scope of its objectives. Among our top priorities are a partnership to explore sciences, technologies and their publics as well as new partnerships to build upon exchanges between scholars and institutions in India, Singapore and Canada.

There’s not much information about the Science & Society symposium (mentioned in the excerpt from the newsletter)  being held Oct. 21-23, 2013 in Ottawa other than this, from the About page (the text seems as if it was lifted out of a grant proposal),

Science and Society 2013 Symposium
Emerging Agendas for Citizens and the Sciences
From the evening of Mon. Oct. 21 through Wed. Oct. 23, 2013
University of Ottawa
scienceandsociety2013@gmail.com

What?

The Mission of the symposium is to create an open forum, in the Nation’s capital, to understand and address the key issues at the interface of science, technology, society and policy. The event will display the importance of connecting disparate themes and will bring together groups not usually in contact to discuss subjects of common interest and brainstorm solutions to common challenges. It will demonstrate that collaboration among academics, students, policy makers, stakeholders and the public at large can lead to new insights, new perspectives, and a deeper understanding of the social implications of science and technology.  It will also make the discussion of science more prominent in the national dialogue.

The symposium will be a major event in Ottawa during National Science and Technology Week. It is a collaboration between the Situating Science Strategic Knowledge Cluster and Institute for Science, Society and Policy (ISSP).

Fostering dialogue between scholars, students, public servants and the general public will not only shed new light on the common challenges and opportunities facing these groups but will also point the way towards novel solutions and courses of action.

The uniqueness of the symposium consists in its aim to provide recommendations on how to envision and improve the science-society interface.  As part of their involvement in the event, all speakers and participants will be asked to address the following question:

How can we understand and improve the interplay between science and society, and improve science policies for the future?

On the basis of the debate and answers, a results document will be created in which the potentially diverging views of different groups will be analyzed and distributed among media and key decision makers.

Science and Society 2013 aims to connect different communities and uncover common goals, competing concerns and the possibility of joint strategies. It will involve and reach out to practitioners from various sectors, academics of diverse disciplines and an increasingly interested public.  At its broadest level it will explore the relationships between public policy, scientific research and the study of science itself – including but limited to how these inform one another.

The symposium will have an academic component during much of the day; and a public component designed for a truly broad audience and potentially involving additional collaborators.

How?

The proposed Session Themes include:
Science and Democracy; Value-Laden Science; International Lessons in Science Policy; Citizen Science; Technology and Media; Responsible Innovation and the Future of Technology; Art, Science and Technology; Open Science; Government Science; Education and the Culture of Science; and Innovation and Society.

The event will produce the following outcomes:

  • New media and political interest, in particular with respect to key issues (e.g. muzzling scientists, evidence-based decision making, the importance of public science);
  • A results document, published by the ISSP, summarizing key insights regarding science and society for distribution among media and key decision makers;
  • New thinking and debate among scholars, policymakers, scientists, students and the public;
  • New networks;
  • Dissemination of conference content in print and/or www formats and/or video/podcast/live streaming;
  • Student training and engagement.

Why?

Science and technology shape our world. They present great promise but they are also the source of much controversy and social anxiety. Like never before, there is a need for broad and informed discussion of science and technology and their place in our society.

Yet the communities that engage in, benefit from, and seek to understand science and technology are often disconnected.  Their shared interests are often misunderstood, and their common goals overlooked.  This disconnect not only impoverishes our grasp of science and technology and their social implications but can also have negative consequences for the public good, particularly at a time when Canadian science faces such profound challenges.

Who?

The partners and co-organizers of the event are the Situating Science SSHRC Strategic Knowledge Cluster and the University of Ottawa Institute for Science, Society and Policy.

The Organizing Committee consists of:

  • Marc Saner, Director, Institute for Science, Society and Policy, University of Ottawa
  • Jeremy Geelen, Project and Public Affairs Manager, Institute for Science, Society and Policy, University of Ottawa
  • Dara Marcus, Student Event Organizer, Institute for Science, Society and Policy, University of Ottawa
  • Gordon McOuat, Director, Situating Science Strategic Knowledge Cluster, University of King’s College
  • Emily Tector, Project Coordinator, Situating Science Strategic Knowledge Cluster, University of King’s College.

Each partner has a proven track record of organizing events on science and society.
Situating Science, through the various conferences, symposium and public events it has supported across Canada with its many partners from different disciplines and sectors, has explored the social and cultural significance of science and technology.  And the ISSP has held and supported several events in Ottawa dealing with cutting-edge technologies and their social and political implications.

Both partners have brought diverse groups together before.  Each has its own networks, resources and strengths that align with select themes and audiences of the symposium.  The successful combination of these capacities will make Science and Society 2013 a multi-sectorial, multi-disciplinary event that addresses issues of concern to all Canadians.

The following organizations are current supporters:

The organizers expect approximately 60 participants at the event during the day, with a much larger audience at the public sessions.

Getting back to the Situating Science Fall 2013 newsletter, there will be a number of workshops and events across the country this fall,

ATLANTIC:
Can We Sustain the Plant, and Democracy too?
Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
Oct. 3, 2013 7pm
Ondaatje Hall, Marion McCain Building, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS

Isaac Newton’s General Scholium to the Principia: Science, Religion and Metaphysics Tercentenary Workshop
October 24-26, 2013
University of King’s College, Halifax, NS

MONTREAL:

Canadian Science and Technology Historical Association Conference
UQAM, Montreal, Qc.
November 1-3, 2013

Fall Lecture Series at UQAM
All held at 12:30pm in Local N-8150, Pavillon Paul-Gérin-Lajoie, UQAM, Montreal, Qc.

Schedule:
Expérience et expérimentalisme chez John Dewey
Joëlle Zask, maître de conférences en philosophie, Université de Provence
September 11, 2013

Une fuite de phosgène à l’usine Tolochimie en 1973. Réflexions sur ce que contenir veut dire en matière de pollution atmosphérique ?
Florian Charvolin, Centre Max Weber et Université Jean Monnet
September 13, 2013

In the Kingdom of Solovia: The Rise of Growth Economics at MIT, 1956-1970
Mauro Boianovsky, Département d’économie, Universidade de Brasília
et Kevin Hoover (conférencier), Département d’économie et de philosophie, Duke University.
Coorganisée avec le Département  de sciences économiques de l’UQAM
December 6, 2013

Thomas Jefferson, Count Buffon, and a Giant Moose: When Natural History and History Collide?
Lee Dugatkin, Department of Biology, University of Louisville.
Coorganisée avec la Faculté de sciences de l’UQAM
December 13, 2013

Fall Lecture Series at McGill
Full details to be posted shortly.

Highlights:
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Director, Max-Plank Institute for the History of Science.
In partnership with the department of Social Studies of Medicine.

Steven Shapin, Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University.
In conjunction with McGill’s Mossman Lecture.

Liquid Intelligence and the Aesthetics of Fluidity Workshop
October 25-26, 2013
McCord Museum, McGill University, Montreal, Qc.

ONTARIO:

Reading Artifacts Summer Institute
August 19-23, 2013
Canadian Science and Technology Museum, Ottawa, Ont.

Science and Society Symposium
Oct. 21-23, 2013
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ont.

Technoscience Salon on Critical Itineraries
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont.

Preliminary Schedule:
Celia Lowe, Anthropology, University of Washington
September 26, 2013

Kavita Philip, Women’s Studies, UC Irvine
November 8, 2013

Others confirmed:
Fa-Ti Fan, History, Binghamton University

Stacey Langwick, Anthropology, Cornell University

Alondra Nelson, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University

SASKATCHEWAN:

Connections and Communities in Health and Medicine Conference
Manitoba-Northwest Ontario-Minnesota-Saskatchewan (MOMS) & Society for the Social History of Medicine Postgraduate (SSHM) / Early Career History of Medicine (ECHM) Conference
September 12-14, 2013
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

ALBERTA:
More than Natural Selection: A Lecture Series on Alfred Russell Wallace
October 2-30, 2013 Wednesdays at 3:30pm
Tory Building 2-58, University of Alberta

Kathleen Lowrey, Department of Anthropology, University of Alberta
October 2, 2013

Robert Smith, Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta
October 9, 2013

Andrew Berry, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University
October 16, 2013

Martin Fichman, Department of Humanities, York University
October 23, 2013

Christine Ferguson, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow
October 30, 2013

UBC [University of British Columbia]:
Details will become available online shortly.

IN THE WORKS:
Keep abreast of all the latest developments of events and activities online via our website and social media.

Planning for a national lecture series for late winter/early spring is underway. The focus of this series will be on the timely issue of science and evidence. The Cluster is also in the process of planning a special Cluster Summer Institute for next summer.

I have some news about the University of British Columbia and a Science and Technology Studies event for Fall 2013. Bruno Latour will be in Vancouver giving both lectures and seminars. There’s a lecture for which there are absolutely no tickets (but there will be a standby line)  on Monday, Sept. 23, 2013, from the Peter Wall Downtown Lecture Series event page (Note: Since this is an ‘event’ page, once the Bruno Latour lecture has been delivered, they will likely list the next lecture in their series on the page),

War and Peace in an Age of Ecological Conflict

The Vogue Theatre — Monday, September 23, 2013, at 7:30 pm

Tickets are now sold out. A standby line will be available the night of the event.

Dr. Bruno Latour is professor at Sciences Po Paris. Trained in philosophy, he has been instrumental in the development of an anthropology of science and technology. This field has had a direct impact on the philosophy of ecology and on an alternative definition of modernity. He has taught for many years in North American universities. Most of his books have been published with Harvard University Press. The most recently published is An Inquiry into Modes of Existence ‐ An Anthropology of the Moderns. All references and most articles may be found on www.bruno‐latour.fr. Bruno Latour gave the six Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion for 2013, under the title Facing Gaia, Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature, and was awarded the prestigious Holberg Prize for 2013 http://www.holbergprisen.no/en.

While politics has always been linked to geography, the Earth itself has largely been seen as playing a backstage role, the mere window-dressing for human intention and interest. With the advent of the epoch known as the ‘Anthropocene’, the Earth is no longer in the background, but very much in the foreground, in constant rivalry with human intentionality. In the meantime, human action has taken on a dimension that matches that of nature itself, and consequently the definition of geo‐politics has been transformed. Appeals to nature, therefore, do not seem to have the same pacifying and unifying effect that they did in earlier ecological movements. By drawing on anthropological and philosophical literature, this lecture will discuss this new geopolitical framework and show how the extension of politics into nature must modify our views on war and peace in the future.

About the Venue

Designed as a dual-purpose theatre to showcase both live performances and movies, the Vogue has been a preferred venue for performers, filmmakers, and audiences alike since 1941 and is prominent landmark of Vancouver’s theatre district.

The Vogue Theatre is located at:
918 Granville Street
Vancouver, BC V6Z 1L2

Parking
The closest pay parking available is behind the theatre on the 900 block of Seymour St.

Accessibility
Wheelchair spaces are located to the right of the center aisle, on the orchestra level (row 19).

Other opportunities to see Bruno Latour in Vancouver include, from a July 10, 2013 posting on the UBC Geographer blog,

Sept 25 [2013]: STS seminar

BRUNO LATOUR, Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris
An Inquiry into Modes of Existence
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Location: TBA 10am-12pm
DAY’S SCHEDULE IN DETAIL
10-12pm Discussion with Bruno about An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (Harvard UP, 2013)
5:30pm Debate with Philippe Descola at MOA [Museum of Anthropology]
“Approaches to the Anthropocene”
Contact neil.safier@ubc.ca  if you have any questions about Bruno Latour’s visit to UBC

I offer one hint about contacting Neil Safier, he was not responsive when I sent a query earlier this summer (2013) about another public workshop  (Simon Schaffer of Leviathan and the Air Pump fame) so, you may need to send more than one query to get a response.

Returning one more time to Situating Science, for those who want to see the whole Fall 2013 newsletter, here’s the PDF.

Ouch, my brain hurts! Information overload in the neurosciences

Alcino Silva, a professor of neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and of psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, has been working on the information overload problem in neuroscience for almost 30 years. In Silva’s latest effort he and his team are designing and testing  research maps, from the Aug. 8, 2013 news item  on ScienceDaily,

Before the digital age, neuroscientists got their information in the library like the rest of us. But the field’s explosion has created nearly 2 million papers — more data than any researcher can read and absorb in a lifetime.

That’s why a UCLA [University of California at Los Angeles] team has invented research maps. Equipped with an online app, the maps help neuroscientists quickly scan what is already known and plan their next study. The Aug. 8 edition of Neuron describes the findings.

The Aug. 8, 2013 UCLA news release written by Elaine Schmidt, which originated the news item, provides details about the team’s strategy for developing and testing this new tool,

Silva collaborated with Anthony Landreth, a former UCLA postdoctoral fellow, to create maps that offer simplified, interactive and unbiased summaries of research findings designed to help neuroscientists in choosing what to study next. As a testing ground for their maps, the team focused on findings in molecular and cellular cognition.

UCLA programmer Darin Gilbert Nee also created a Web-based app to help scientists expand and interact with their field’s map.

“We founded research maps on a crowd-sourcing strategy in which individual scientists add papers that interest them to a growing map of their fields,” said Silva, who started working on the problem nearly 30 years ago as a graduate student and who wrote, along with Landreth, an upcoming Oxford Press book on the subject. “Each map is interactive and searchable; scientists see as much of the map as they query, much like an online search.”

According to Silva, the map allows scientists to zero in on areas that interest them. By tracking published findings, researchers can determine what’s missing and pinpoint worthwhile experiments to pursue.

“Just as a GPS map offers different levels of zoom, a research map would allow a scientist to survey a specific research area at different levels of resolution — from coarse summaries to fine-grained accounts of experimental results,” Silva said. “The map would display no more and no less detail than is necessary for the researcher’s purposes.”

Each map encodes information by classifying it into categories and scoring the weight of its evidence based on key criteria, such as reproducibility and “convergence” — when different experiments point to a single conclusion.

The team’s next step will be to automate the map-creation process. As scientists publish papers, their findings will automatically be added to the research map representing their field.

According to Silva, automation could be achieved by using journals’ existing publication process to divide an article’s findings into smaller chapters and build “nano-publications.” Publishers would use a software plug-in to render future papers machine-readable.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the published paper,

The Need for Research Maps to Navigate Published Work and Inform Experiment Planning by Anthony Landreth and Alcino J. Silva.  Neuron, Volume 79, Issue 3, 411-415, 7 August 2013 doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2013.07.024

Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I have provided a link to the HTML with thumbnail images version of the paper, which appears to  be open access (at least for now). I found this paper to be quite readable, from the Introduction,

The amount of published research in neuroscience has grown to be massive. The past three decades have accumulated more than 1.6 million articles alone. The rapid expansion of the published record has been accompanied by an unprecedented widening of the range of concepts, approaches, and techniques that individual neuroscientists are expected to be familiar with. The cutting edge of neuroscience is increasingly defined by studies demanding researchers in one area (e.g., molecular and cellular neuroscience) to have more than a passing familiarity with the tools, concepts, and literature of other areas (e.g., systems or behavioral neuroscience). [emphasis mine] As research relevant to a topic expands, it becomes increasingly more likely that researchers will be either overwhelmed or unaware of relevant results (or both).

Interestingly, neither author not any other team members (in addition to Nee, John Bickle, not mentioned in the news release, has co-written the forthcoming book with Silva and Landreth) mentioned seem to have any background in library or archival sciences or in information architecture or records management, all fields where people deal with massive amounts of information and accessibility issues. For example, the US National and Records Administration (NARA) is developing a data visualization tool (Action Science Explorer; my Dec. 9, 2011 posting profiles this project) to address some very similar issues to those faced in the neuroscience community.

Smarter ‘smart’ windows

It seems to me we may have to find a new way to discuss ‘smart’ windows as there’s only one more category after the comparative  ‘smarter’ and that’s the superlative ‘smartest’. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), please, let’s stop the madness now! That said, the Berkeley Lab issued an Aug. 14, 2013 news release  (also on EurekAlert) about it’s latest work on raising the IQ of smart windows,

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have designed a new material to make smart windows even smarter. The material is a thin coating of nanocrystals embedded in glass that can dynamically modify sunlight as it passes through a window. Unlike existing technologies, the coating provides selective control over visible light and heat-producing near-infrared (NIR) light, so windows can maximize both energy savings and occupant comfort in a wide range of climates.

Milliron’s research group is already well known for their smart-window technology that blocks NIR without blocking visible light. The technology hinges on an electrochromic effect, where a small jolt of electricity switches the material between NIR-transmitting and NIR-blocking states. This new work takes their approach to the next level by providing independent control over both visible and NIR light. The innovation was recently recognized with a 2013 R&D 100 Award and the researchers are in the early stages of commercializing their technology.

Independent control over NIR light means that occupants can have natural lighting indoors without unwanted thermal gain, reducing the need for both air-conditioning and artificial lighting. The same window can also be switched to a dark mode, blocking both light and heat, or to a bright, fully transparent mode.

“We’re very excited about the combination of unique optical function with the low-cost and environmentally friendly processing technique,” said Llordés, a project scientist working with Milliron. “That’s what turns this ‘universal smart window’ concept into a promising competitive technology.”

Here’s the specific technology that’s been developed, from the news release,

At the heart of their technology is a new “designer” electrochromic material, made from nanocrystals of indium tin oxide embedded in a glassy matrix of niobium oxide. The resulting composite material combines two distinct functionalities—one providing control over visible light and the other, control over NIR—but it is more than the sum of its parts. The researchers found a synergistic interaction in the tiny region where glassy matrix meets nanocrystal that increases the potency of the electrochromic effect, which means they can use thinner coatings without compromising performance. The key is that the way atoms connect across the nanocrystal-glass interface causes a structural rearrangement in the glass matrix. The interaction opens up space inside the glass, allowing charge to move in and out more readily. Beyond electrochromic windows, this discovery suggests new opportunities for battery materials where transport of ions through electrodes can be a challenge.

I notice they’re using indium, one of the ‘rare earths’. Last I heard, China, one of the main sources for ‘rare earths’, was limiting its exports so this seems like an odd choice of material. Perhaps now they’ve proved this can be done,  they’ll research for easily available substitutes. Here’s a link to and a citation for the published paper,

Tunable near-infrared and visible-light transmittance in nanocrystal-in-glass composites by Anna Llordés, Guillermo Garcia, Jaume Gazquez, & Delia J. Milliron. Nature 500, 323–326 (15 August 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12398 Published online 14 August 2013

Finally, the researchers have provided an illustration of indium tin oxide nanocrystals,

Nanocrystals of indium tin oxide (shown here in blue) embedded in a glassy matrix of niobium oxide (green) form a composite material that can switch between NIR-transmitting and NIR-blocking states with a small jolt of electricity. A synergistic interaction in the region where glassy matrix meets nanocrystal increases the potency of the electrochromic effect. Courtesy Berkeley Lab

Nanocrystals of indium tin oxide (shown here in blue) embedded in a glassy matrix of niobium oxide (green) form a composite material that can switch between NIR-transmitting and NIR-blocking states with a small jolt of electricity. A synergistic interaction in the region where glassy matrix meets nanocrystal increases the potency of the electrochromic effect. Courtesy Berkeley Lab