May 25, 2011

Good Morning,

Not all military technology advancements deal with weaponry, as in the second article of this issue. A new device has been developed that can warm soldiers suffering from hypothermia, which will replace primitive methods of treatment such as an IV drip or wool blanket.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Many stars found to have multiple planets

BOSTON - Discoveries by NASA's Kepler spacecraft telescope
of planets orbiting distant stars show one third of them are in multiple-planet systems, astronomers say. In its two years in space, the Kepler mission has discovered 116 systems with two planets, 45 with three, eight with four, one with five and one with six planets -- for a total of 171 multiple-planet systems, astronomer David Latham of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said. "We thought we might see a few multiplanet systems," Latham said, speaking at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Boston. "Instead, we found lots of them." Kepler detects a planet by minute, periodic dips in the brightness of its parent star when the planet transits, or passes in front of it, and continuously monitors 165,000 stars in a search for such transits. A statistical analysis of the sizes of the planets Kepler has detected to date reveals "a very profound discovery," Geoff Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, said at the AAS meeting. "There are some Jupiters and some Saturns, but there are many more smaller planets out there," probably including a lot of them comparable in size to Earth, Marcy said. Finding Earth-like planets orbiting stars like our own sun, at distances where liquid water -- and possibly life -- could exist on their surfaces, is the ultimate goal of the Kepler mission, astronomers said.


Device could treat battefield hypothermia

HOBOKEN, N.J. - U.S. researchers say they've developed a new system to combat hypothermia, a deadly complication that often strikes wounded combat soldiers. Biomedical engineering students at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J., say their portable device to re-warm battlefield patients suffering from hypothermia could be a valuable addition to combat medicine, an SIT release said Monday. Loss of blood after trauma is the leading cause of combat fatalities in the U.S. armed forces and hypothermia complications associated with loss of blood are shown to reduce the chances of survival after severe trauma by 22.5 percent. "Current methods for fighting hypothermia in combat zones are to use an IV drip and wool blanket," SIT senior Geoffrey Ng said. "With these means it takes up to 16 hours to increase the core body temperature to a more stable point." The SIT system, dubbed Heat Wave, uses heated, humidified air, delivered through an oxygen mask, to take advantage of the patient's respiratory system. Since the body's entire blood volume passes through the lungs, this heat is rapidly transferred to the blood via convection. "We can decrease the time needed to resuscitate a hypothermic patient to just four hours, a 75 percent reduction in treatment time," SIT engineering graduate student Maia Hadidi said. "Not only does this increase survival rates for the patient, but it also frees up field medics so they can attend to others."


Research could lead to 'bio-batteries'

NORWICH, England - British scientists say they've found how
cells transfer electrical charge, bringing bacterial fuel
cells or "bio-batteries" a step closer. Researchers at the
University of East Anglia have demonstrated for the first
time the exact molecular structure of the proteins that en-
able bacterial cells to transfer electrical charge, a uni-
versity release said Monday. The discovery could lead to
techniques to "tether" bacteria directly to electrodes,
creating efficient microbial fuel cells or "bio-batteries."
"This is an exciting advance in our understanding of how
some bacterial species move electrons from the inside to the outside of a cell," UEA researcher Tom Clarke said. "Identifying the precise molecular structure of the key proteins involved in this process is a crucial step towards tapping into microbes as a viable future source of electricity." The research is being funded by the U.K. Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and the U.S. Department of Energy, the university said.


Process turns algae into hydrogen source

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - U.S. scientists say a new process could
lead to the production of clean, carbon-free hydrogen fuel
using bioengineered microorganisms. Researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology say many kinds of
algae and cyanobacteria, common water-dwelling microorgan-
isms, are capable of using energy from sunlight to split
water molecules and release hydrogen. The obstacle to util-
izing this for fuel production is that, under ordinary cir-
cumstances, hydrogen production takes a back seat to the
production of compounds that the organisms use to support
their own growth, an MIT release said Tuesday. However,
researchers have discovered a method to use bioengineered
proteins to reverse this preference, allowing more hydrogen
to be produced. "The algae are really not interested in
producing hydrogen, they want to produce sugar," MIT's
Iftach Yacoby said, explaining that the sugar is what they
need for their own survival, and the hydrogen is just a
byproduct. The scientists found that by introducing a multi-
tasking enzyme into the liquid where the algae are at work,
sugar production is suppressed and the organisms' energies
are redirected into hydrogen production. The process in-
creases the rate of algal hydrogen production by about 400
percent, Yacoby said. Sugar production is suppressed but
not eliminated, he said, because "if it went to zero, it
would kill the organism." Developing the process further to
produce a viable commercial system for hydrogen-fuel manu-
facturing is "a matter of time and money," Shuguang Zhang
of MIT's Center for Biomedical Engineering said.


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