Tech

According to a study in an issue of Medical Decision Making, in the case of a large-scale, covert anthrax attack on a large city, hospitals would be overwhelmed. This is because even with an extremely effective public health response, there would be expected delays in detecting the attack and initiating a response to it, as well as a huge strain on resources.

Researchers have developed a new technique that allows them to make a movie of bacteria infecting their living host.

Whilst most studies of bacterial infection are done after the death of the infected organism, this system developed by scientists at the University of Bath and University of Exeter is the first to follow the progress of infection in real-time with living organisms.

Much like humans, materials are capable of some pretty remarkable things when they're placed under pressure. In fact, under the right conditions, materials can even produce electricity.

The many dozens of researchers who helped test the machine allowed Chinook's handlers to work out the bugs. Because there are so few clusters of this size, the testing was a vital part of the process, and the more realistic the testing, the better.

"If you just have a few people running large jobs, the amount of communication back and forth between the nodes is very different than if you have a hundred people running calculations of various sizes and in various places on the machine," said PNNL's Erich Vorpagel, who manages all research projects on Chinook at EMSL.

By studying gold nanoparticles with highly uniform sizes and shapes, scientists now understand how they lose energy, a key step towards producing nanoscale detectors for weighing any single atom.

Such ultrasensitive measurements could ultimately be used in areas such as medical research and diagnostics, enabling the detection of minuscule disease-causing agents such as viruses and prions at the single molecule level.

Researchers are interested in nanosized materials because the smaller the components of a detection device, the more sensitive it is.

Scientists are closer to understanding how to grow replacement bones with stem cell technology, thanks to research published today in the journal Nature Materials.

Many scientists are currently trying to create bone-like materials, derived from stem cells, to implant into patients who have damaged or fractured bones, or who have had parts of diseased bones removed. The idea is that, ultimately, these bone-like materials could be inserted into cavities so that real bone could meld with it and repair the bone.

Concerns about dwindling fossil fuel resources, current levels of petroleum consumption, and growing pressure to shift to more sustainable energy sources are among the many factors prompting the transition from our current energy infrastructure to one that uses less carbon and requires the efficient conversion of energy. This necessitates collecting energy from ambient sources including wind, solar, and geothermal power, and converting it into appropriate forms for distributing electricity.