Japan Radioactive Melt-Down: Robot to theRescue

As we have heard of Japan catastrophic earthquake and tsunami few weeks ago, the similar tragedy seems not yet stop. The calamity is still continued and now it happen around northern part of the country. Around the world is covered by a lot of sadness and sorrow as it occurred to the country that we are always love most. Recent Fukushima nuclear crisis is now being handle by autonomous vehicles and robots, majorly supplied by US government and companies. How can we ever imagine? Its happen just like in the movies and it is happening. This make us remind words from Einstein, imagination is more than knowledge, or at least appreciate it...

Robots supplies by iRobot, US (see more here)

Radio Signal from Saturn

Recently, NASA has spotted difference of natural radio wave signals transmitted by northern and southern hemispheres of Saturn. This new finding has open a huge discussion among scientists of how big is the planet really is. Currently, researchers approximately measure a planet based on the radio wave emitted by the particular planet. In Jupiter, for instance, the wave is measured straight to the point as there is no abnormal behavior there. However, the rotation rate of Saturn has become weird lately which may affecting its radio wave, called Saturn Kilometric Radiation (SKR). Previous exploration by NASA's Voyage ship on 1980s suggested that the measurement given by SKR indicated that the planet had 10.66 hour for a day. On the other hand, present study, collected by NASA-European Space Agency Ulysses probe and Cassini, reports that the wave burst varied by seconds to minutes. The study also suggests that the emission of the wave is actually originated at two points, which make the issue more complicated. This lead the researchers to review on previous Saturn observations. It is proven that similar pattern found in the Voyager data from 1980s and Ulysses data between 1993 - 2000. In both cases, the radio emission variations differed from one hemisphere to the other. And both times, the odd radio wave behavior came within a year of Saturnian equinoxes. This provide a new hypothesis that the the planet is actually rotating at different rate on different hemispheres (study conducted by Don Gurnett, University of Iowa, see more here).

The Sun Looks Shiner this week!

We're going to witness another biggest solar flare since 2006 this week. The flare is caused due to unexpected burst of magnetic energy kept in the Sun's atmosphere. This eruption, which is part of a series of solar flares directed right on Earth occurred lately, may be affecting our magnetic shield. So, this rare phenomenon may interrupt electrical stuffs including power grids, communication devices and even satellites. Despite of the effect to our hardware, the eruption also gives us opportunity to witness a rare wonderful view of panorama. People in northern UK can see northern light or Aurora Borealis as it will come to appear till further south. This result the sky to shine into glistening displays of red, green and purple.

Picture taken from The Washington Post.



This photo taken from the International Space Station in May 2010 shows an aurora over the southern Indian Ocean (The Christian Science Monitor)



The northern lights could be seen further south than is normal (James Pugsley/Astronomy North: picture taken from CBC News)

Let's Fight from the Inside, Lad!

Immune System (picture taken from Medicues)

In every organism, there is a system that play important role in protecting the body from all kind of intruders such as viruses, worms and pathogens. In simpler organisms, especially unicellular organisms like bacteria, the protection is performed by enzymatic systems that shielding them against viral infections. In eukaryotes, such as insects, a basic immune mechanism is found which include antimicrobial peptides that works pretty well to keep the organisms safe from unfamiliar components of the systems. More complex organisms including human, on the other hand, posses more complicated mechanisms to protect them against these intruders. In general, this system, called immune system, releases a group of machinery cells, antibody, that tackles infections from the intruders by fusing themselves with these unnecessary components as they mobilize in the bloodstream. By doing this, the intruders may not affecting or harming any process in the body.

In recent study, a group of researchers, lead by Dr. Leo James at the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, found that there is a possibility for the antibodies in immune system can work within the cells, instead of produced and take action in the bloodstream. This study showed that antibodies are not only preventing viruses from harming cells, but also can move after the viruses in the cells and perform an immunity attack from the inside. This may contradict to what has been long believed by most scientists that there is low chance for the immune components to take action when the viruses had already entering the cells.

Dr. James and co-workers showed that once the virus has entered to a cell, antibodies may suddenly attract a protein, TRIM21, to call a large cluster of proteins called proteasome. The proteasome works similar to a disposal machine where, upon called, this group of proteins will docked to TRIM21 and disassemble the virus. This process is very quick, usually before the virus has a chance to take any harmful action in the cell (for more information, go to Guardian website and this work has been published in Proceeding of the National Academic of Sciences). Therefore, this may open a new insight in drug discovery and most importantly, it is very crucial to always keep the body health in good condition as the strength of immune system is always depends on it.

The World is Not Enough - coz we can built one or more!

Google Liquid Galaxy Platform (figure from Google Open Source)

Let's imagine that we can discover the world with a touch of our finger.... Of course, we're have already experienced this with a help of Google Earth. But, imagine if we can built a platform with several large monitors (or maybe HD!) that simulate our world in more realistic way, with only $80,000! How is it possible?

Recently, Google has launched it's new project called Liquid Galaxy, which permits ordinary users like us to develop our own "star trek" platform to explore the world. This project, initiated as a Google 20% Project, is basically built on a cluster of computers that run Google Earth engine. For software part, we have to simply download and install Google Earth in different computers, choose one as the master and directly synchronize them through internet protocol (IP). On the other hand, for hardware part, the frame (place where we put the monitors, input devise and cockpit) is built based on the custom design and materials, as shown in figure below.

Frame Design from Google Open Source

Currently, Google has promoting this project by installing this impressive platform in their offices around the world and also displaying them in most outrageous conferences and exhibitions such as recent Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference held in San Francisco. According to Engadget, using 8 Linux-based machines, users may able to even flying through the digital skies by voice command and sheer mental strength!

Watch the video for more awesome experience!

Embryonic Stem Cell for Eye Treatment

Stem cell plays a very important role in all multi-cellular organisms. This cell is known by its ability to regenerate itself through mitotic division and differentiate into a diverse range of specific cell types. In other words, the stem cell can be exploited to produce new tissue, or even organ, for replacing or repairing damaged one. The most popular stem cell (or technically, most commonly used) is embryonic stem cell, that are isolated from the inner cell mass of early stage of embryo called blastocysts. This is due to the fact that, stem cells can differentiate into all of the particular embryonic tissues, usually when the embryo is developing, through cell culture. Recently, a group of researchers from UC Irvine reported that they have successfully utilized human stem cells to differentiate into retinal cell, represented as the first 3D tissue structures (published in Science Direct). Instead of using telescopic devices surgery to overcome vision loss on human (report and illustration from Singularity Hub), this breakthrough is seems to be more natural because it uses biological cells itself without involving any mechanical hardware. Moreover, since retinal cells are directly produced, it is possible that this discovery may revolutionizes traditional retinal transplant therapies, in the near future. In addition, culturing new retinal cells may also overcome s' retinal supply' scarcity problem. The only potential challenge of this visionary finding is the differentiation procedure is highly complicated since retina involves a complex set of cell types to allow it to work. Thus, embryonic stem cells have to be placed onto a patch of retinal pigment epithelium in order to make sure that the cultured cells may growth correctly (see the report here). However, despite of this challenge, this finding can be see as an innovative achievement to medical research and since it still in preliminary work, it may bring remarkable improvement along with hope to society all over the world.

Figure courtesy from Wiki

Can I charge my car here?

It's has been more than 20 years, we have been exposed with a lot of science fiction movies. One of the most popular is Back to The Future. The movie (and its sequels) told us a time-traveling adventure of a high school student portrayed by Michael J. Fox, who befriend with an eccentric, Enstein-like scientist played by Christopher Lloyd, who invented a time machine from a DeLorean car. In the first movie, the car is powered with plutonium but its second movie showed that the car is improved which only used garbage as its main fuel. This movie is very inspiring, especially for the futuristic time-traveling car, even though many of its fans did not satisfied with its ending, where the car is totally crashed by a mere train. Today, the long memory of futuristic cars, such in the movie, has brought back to life in reality. It's not about cars that can bring us to the past, but cars that not need petroleum as their fuel. Yes, we're going to have cars that powered by electricity and this technology may be widely used by us. Electric cars are commonly run by on-board battery packs and already known by their good performance in speed. Despite of this advantage, the main problem of this technology, the low energy capacity of these batteries making them to have relatively poor range between charge and also need a significantly long time to be recharge. However, a group of Japan Electric Vehicle Club managed to shed a light of new opportunity of this technology using their modified Daihatsu Mira, in an attempt to create a new world record of longest distance electric car traveling without recharging. The car, equipped with a Sanyo lithium ion power system containing more than 8,320 batteries, recorded a distance of 1,003.184 kilometers on a single charge (see the full news here). Therefore, this proves that the challenge of power capacity in electric car can be possibly overcome. On the other hand, many vehicle manufacturers have announced a number of projects in order to commercialize the electric cars. People around the world are now seeking for new alternatives for fossil fuel due to the environment sustainability issues. In fact, U.S. government recently planned to implement and encouraging its citizen to use electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles by 2015 (read the report here). A leading car manufacturing project, Megacity Project, announced that the company is planned to launch a new sub-brand, a sub-specification for all future electric BMW car (read the report here).