Technology

Heisenberg’s revenge: Energy need may cap size, ability of quantum computers

The energy required to create an accurate quantum computer may limit the ability of scientists to make these novel devices small, fast, cheap and efficient, says a University of Arkansas researcher. Quantum computing relies on using single atomic particles as units for information storage. Manipulating this information requires pulsed electromagnetic fields?which contain energy. The researcher found that the energy needed to perform a calculation is inversely proportional to the error rate: In other words, more energy means less uncertainty.

Scientists Detail Neural Circuit

Nearly 40 years ago scientists were startled to discover that the eye, far from being a still camera, actually has cells that respond to movement. Moreover, these cells are specialized to respond to movement in one direction only, such as left to right or right to left. Now, in a paper in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, have finally detailed the cellular circuit responsible for motion detection in the eye’s retina.

Scientists Grow Nano Blood Vessels

Traditional heart bypass surgeries require using veins from the leg to replace damaged blood vessels. Using a nanotechnology developed by Virginia Commonwealth University researchers, doctors soon could be using artificial blood vessels grown in a laboratory to help save half a million lives every year. The new technology produces a natural human blood vessel grown around a scaffold, or tube, made of collagen. Using a process called electrospinning, VCU scientists are making tubes as small as one millimeter in diameter. That’s more than four times smaller than the width of a drinking straw and six times smaller than the smallest commercially available vascular graft.

NASA Awards Caltech Five-Year, $8 billion JPL Contract

NASA has awarded the California Institute of Technology a new five-year contract to manage the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It is estimated the contract will cover more than $8 billion worth of work. The contract extends for five years the JPL agreement between Caltech and NASA for management of JPL beyond its current expiration date of Sept. 30, 2003. The NASA contract includes a new provision that, based on performance reviews, may extend the contract period of performance for up to an additional five years.

Scientists develop new blood test for heart disease

Scientists have developed a rapid new blood test which may help predict the likelihood of a heart attack. The research published in Nature Medicine shows how a new science called Metabonomics can be used to test for coronary artery disease, using minimally invasive procedures. The test, which only needs a few drops of blood, measures the magnetic properties of molecules in blood using high frequency radio waves, which are then analysed using an advanced computer programme capable of detecting abnormal patterns of signals associated with heart disease.

Chinese company claims cancer test advance

A Chinese medical equipment manufacturer says it will begin marketing a test kit that can detect the presence of tumour abnormal protein (TAP), from a single drop of blood. That, the company says, can provide cell diagnostics up to three years before terminal cancer is formed, and before any clinical symptoms appear.

Researchers Identify Cause of Aggressive Childhood Cancer

Researchers have generated a mouse model of a new type of tumor suppressor gene that triggers a rapidly advancing cancer that affects children. The discovery of the fast-onset cancers that result from inactivation of the gene and the technique used to generate the model will likely prove useful in studying genes involved in other forms of cancer.

Scientists Glimpse Cellular Machines at Work Inside Living Cells

Using advanced imaging technology and computational simulations, scientists have, for the first time, glimpsed the action of a cellular machine at work within living cells. The work puts forth a new concept of cellular machines as dynamic protein complexes that are continually building and rebuilding themselves within the cell, rather than the stable structures scientists have traditionally thought them to be.

Terascale Cluster Supercomputer to be Built on Linux, Itanium 2s

Hewlett-Packard and Rice University’s Computer and Information Technology Institute today announced their plans to build Texas’ fastest academic supercomputer, based on HP’s Intel Itanium 2-based workstations and servers. The Rice Terascale Cluster is expected to be the first computer at a Texas university with a peak performance of 1 teraflop, or 1 trillion floating-point operations per second. More than 30 researchers from fields as diverse as biochemistry, political science, physics and computational engineering have already booked time on RTC.

Researchers claim advance in quantum cryptography

Researchers have demonstrated a new high-speed quantum cryptography method that uses the properties of light to encrypt information into a form of code that can only be cracked by violating the physical laws of nature. The method promises security even against information security’s greatest foe: the not-yet-invented but still-feared powerful quantum computer, which could break almost any conventional code. The researchers transmitted encrypted data at the rate of 250 megabits per second. Because it uses standard lasers, detectors and other existing optical technology to transmit large bundles of photons, the protocol is more than 1,000 times faster than its main competitor, a technique based on single photons that is difficult and expensive to implement, the researchers say.

Accidental finding could lead to full-spectrum solar cell

Researchers have found that the electrical properties of the semiconductor indium nitride are different from what been previously thought — by a wide margin. The result is that an alloy incorporating the material can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight — from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet — to electrical current. “It’s as if nature designed this material on purpose to match the solar spectrum,” said one researcher involved.

Mitochondrial DNA as a Cancer Biomarker

As part of a national effort to identify biomarkers for early detection of cancer, the federal National Institute for Standards and Technology is developing safer, faster, and more efficient methods for sequencing the DNA from mitochondria, the tiny energy factories of cells. Mutations within the DNA of mitochondria — a circular strand containing more than 16,000 nucleotide base pairs — have been implicated in a variety of cancers. In one small study by Johns Hopkins University, for example, such mutations were found in lung cancer cells but not the normal cells of the same patients. NIST researchers are working to validate the mitochondrial DNA sequence measurement technology and increase the speed of the sequencing protocol. They hope that this will lead to improved methods that could be used in clinical applications.

Algorithm Predicts Interactions Between Unsolved Protein Structures

Researchers in New York have developed an algorithm that can predict interactions between proteins whose structures are unsolved. The computational tool takes protein interaction prediction to a new level because it works on proteins on which little structural information exists, providing three-dimensional models of the protein-protein complex and identifying the amino acid residues that interact. Said the team’s lead researcher: “The overall goal is to develop personalized medicine, which is based on understanding how a drug affects you versus how it affects me.”

Using Computers, Scientists Successfully Predict Evolution of E. Coli

For more than a decade, researchers have been trying to create accurate computer models of Escherichia coli (E. coli), a bacterium that makes headlines for its varied roles in food poisoning, drug manufacture and biological research. By combining laboratory data with recently completed genetic databases, researchers can craft digital colonies of organisms that mimic, and even predict, some behaviors of living cells to an accuracy of about 75 percent. Now, NSF-supported researchers at the University of California at San Diego have created a computer model that accurately predicts how E. coli metabolic systems adapt and evolve when the bacteria are placed under environmental constraints.