Researchers funded by the US military are working on a way of printing new human skin as a treatment for burn victims. What’s more, they’ve using a regular inkjet printer and cartridges filled with human skill cells:

Grow your own font

Typographer Craig Ward has developed a typeface with a difference – each letter was grown from live cells and moulded into the correct shape.

Run Forrest.exe, Run!

Toyota have created a robot that can run. Not an easy task, as the machine must keep its balance whilst moving at fast speed, but the result looks promising:

Will we eventually have millions of these little guys running about the place, I wonder?

LaTeX tech

Bit of a geeky one this. LaTeX is a language used by scientists and other people to create documents containing lots of equations. I’ve used it in the past, and whilst it produces nice results, it can be tricky to use because of all the commands you have to learn. Remembering the codes for mathematical symbols can be especially difficult. Detexify allows you to draw the symbol you want with your mouse, and it will give you the code. Even if you have no use for LaTeX, it’s fun to have a play and watch the symbol recognition in action. Try drawing a smiley face!

Kill or cure?

Kill or cure? is a website that seeks to “make sense of the Daily Mail’s ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it.” Where else can you learn that ketchup prevents cancer, but toothpaste causes it?

Kids vs climate change, round 2

A while back Sam wrote a post laying out the environmental reasons not to have children. It inspired quite a debate between some commenters, and now his position has been backed up by new research. Statisticians at Oregon State University found that in the US, having one less child will have an almost 20 times larger impact on the environment than things like changing the car you drive, or recycling.

Computers are evolving – literally. While the tech world argues netbooks vs notebooks, synthetic biologists are leaving traditional computers behind altogether. A team of US scientists have engineered bacteria that can solve complex mathematical problems faster than anything made from silicon.

The research, published today in the Journal of Biological Engineering, proves that bacteria can be used to solve a puzzle known as the Hamiltonian Path Problem. Imagine you want to tour the 10 biggest cities in the UK, starting in London (number 1) and finishing in Bristol (number 10). The solution to the Hamiltonian Path Problem is the the shortest possible route you can take.

Read the rest at the Guardian

Whilst abundant worldwide, this waste liquid is not the most obvious choice for weaning the world off oil. To extract urine’s energy Gerardine Botte of Ohio University employed a process called electrolysis which uses an electric current to break up molecules. The resulting hydrogen can then be put to work as a clean source of energy.

Electrolysis has already been used to create hydrogen from water, but this requires quite a lot of energy. Botte turned to urine as a way of improving efficiency. Although urine is 95% water much of the remaining 5% is urea, a chemical compound which has four hydrogen atoms per molecule. This is twice the number found in water molecules, and the atoms are less tightly bonded so extracting the hydrogen from urea instead of water requires about a third of the energy.

Originally the research team used “synthetic” urine made by dissolving urea in water, but the process works equally as well with the genuine article. Working with human urine requires special clearance, which held up the publication of their research, says Botte.

The team are now looking at the long-term feasibility of urine hydrolysis, as well as the potential for scaling it up to industrial levels. Botte believes that existing sewage plants could be put to work generating energy, as well as cleaning up waste. “We do not need to reinvent the wheel as there are already electrolysers being used in different applications,” she says.

To mark the anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission next month, Nature are using Twitter to relive the Moon landing, 40 years on. You can follow @ApolloPlus40 in the run up to July 20th, and imagine what a mission to the Moon would be like in the internet age.

First image from Herschel

Emma covered the launch of Herschel and Planck, the two latest telescopes to be sent off in to space, and now Herschel’s first image has been beamed back.

The first Herschel image.

It shows the Whirlpool Galazy, also known as M51. First discovered by Charles Messier in 1774, it lies 23 million light-years away. Impressive stuff.

World’s first spaceport begins construction

I’ve been following the progress of Virgin Galactic for quite some time, as they bring the promise of commercial spaceflight ever closer to reality. I even blogged about the company in Just A Theory’s very first week. It’s quite exciting then to see construction begin for Spaceport America in New Mexico. The design is fantastically futuristic:

You can tell it's the future, look at all the blue lights.

Due to be completed in 18 months time, it will serve as the commercial base for Virgin Galactic, but other companies will eventually make use of the facility. I can’t wait.

“We developed an application that uses the built-in accelerometers in cell phones to recognize human writing,” said Sandip Agrawal, one of the developers of the PhonePoint Pen. “By holding the phone like a pen, you can write short messages or draw simple diagrams in the air.

“The accelerometer converts the gestures to images, which can be sent to any e-mail address for future reference,” Ionut Constandache said. “Also, say you’re in a class and there is an interesting slide on the screen. We foresee being able to take a photo of the slide and write a quick note on it for future reference. The potential uses are practically limitless. That this prototype works validates the feasibility of such a pen.”

Whilst I can see the appeal of this, I’m not sure what more it offers over just using buttons or a touchpad keyboard. Perhaps if the keys are too small for you it would be useful alternative, but I think I’ll pass.

Perhaps more useful is this second story: Nokia are working on a phone that charges itself without being plugged in. This seemingly magical feat is made possible by sucking in power from the sea of electromagnetic energy that surrounds the modern world.

We are constantly wading through radio, TV and WiFi signals emanating from all directions, and scientists at the Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge have created a phone that harvests tiny amounts of power from a wide range of frequencies. So far though they have only achieved a tiny 5 milliwatts, which isn’t much use. Their next goal is 20 milliwatts, which would allow a phone to remain on standby indefinitely. Ultimately they hope to reach 50 milliwatts, enough to slowly recharge the handset.

You’re going to have to wait a while for both of these new gadgets though. In the case of PhonePoint Pen the team expect to put a prototype up for download in the next few months, but the recharging phones are at least three to five years off.

Well, obviously they haven’t only just comes across it. Using Deep Impact, a probe launched by NASA in 2005 to study a comet by smashing in to it, researchers devised a new planet-hunting method by re-discovering Earth. By imagining themselves as aliens hunting for planets like our own, they were able to ‘discover’ that Earth does indeed have liquid surface water.

By making two separate 24-hour observations of Earth’s light intensity, in wavelengths from near ultraviolet to near infrared, the researchers were able to monitor the changes in brightness as the Earth rotates and cloud-cover shifts. These changes show up as deviations from an average colour. Two wavelengths were dominant: red for long wavelengths and blue for short.

Interpreting red as land masses and blue as ocean water, the team were able to make colour maps of the planet as it rotated. Comparing this to the real Earth, the oceans became crystal clear. Nicolas Cowan, a University of Washington doctoral student, explains:

“You could tell that there were liquid oceans on the planet. The idea is that to have liquid water the planet would have to be in its system’s habitable zone, but being in the habitable zone doesn’t guarantee having liquid water.”

Cowan, who is lead author of a paper explaining the research and due to be published in Astrophysical Journal, hopes that their new technique will guide the construction of future Earth-hunter telescopes. Just don’t expect to be going for an extrasolar dip any time soon.

The project regularly farms out data from signals captured by the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico straight to your desktop. Then when you pop out for a quick cuppa it uses your computer to trawl the radio waves for signs of artificial messages sent by alien civilisations.

Unsurprisingly the search thus far has been fruitless. The usual needle and haystack analogies just don’t cut it when it comes to what the project is looking for. For a more in depth look the current state of SETI, including where astronomers are looking and how likely they are to find them, you can read my account of it here. To borrow a quote from it, what the astronomers behind SETI@home are doing is “casting their nets a few times into a vast ocean of interstellar signals, searching for a minute bottle that may, perhaps, contain a tiny piece of paper.” That’s the thing, we don’t even know if what we are looking for exists, let alone exactly where to look for it.

However, we shouldn’t give up hope of receiving an interstellar phone call from our galactic cousins. The work SETI@home continues to do, based wholly on charitable donations, could yet provide the most momentous discovery in the history of science. Happy Birthday SETI@home!

Research led by scientists at the University of St Andrews and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has resulted in new battery design that is both ligher and smaller than its predecessors – a definite plus for electric cars.

The STAIR (St Andrews Air) cell, designed with the help of partners in Strathclyde and Newcastle, uses porous carbon as a replacement for lithium cobalt oxide. This change of material, combined with a more compact size, means that the new batteries will be much cheaper.

The battery is charged as normal, but as its energy is drained oxygen from the air is drawn through its surface. Then, the oxygen reacts with the pores in the carbon to create more energy and recharge the draining battery.

Oxygen drawn from the air reacts within the porous carbon to release the electrical charge in this lithium-air battery.

Leading the four-year research project is Professor Peter Bruce of the St Andrews Chemistry Department:

“Our target is to get a five to ten fold increase in storage capacity, which is beyond the horizon of current lithium batteries. Our results so far are very encouraging and have far exceeded our expectations.

“The key is to use oxygen in the air as a re-agent, rather than carry the necessary chemicals around inside the battery.”

You won’t be running on air just yet though, as further investigation in to the chemical reaction of the battery is needed. The team hope to build a small STAIR cell prototype soon, with the intention to power small devices such as mobile phones or MP3 players.