Wired Petri Dish Gives Real-Time Updates

Researcher says "it's like getting continuous tweets from the cells rather than an occasional postcard."

A smart petri dish: Cells are grown directly on top of ePetri’s image sensor, the same type used in cell phones.

A new prototype petri dish can create an image of what's growing on it and send that information to a laptop, all from inside an incubator. The prototype, dubbed the ePetri, was created from Lego blocks and a cell-phone image sensor, and uses light from a Google Android smart phone.

"Normally, one leaves the cells in an incubator and just checks up on them from time to time," says Michael Elowitz, a professor of biology at Caltech, who coauthored the paper. "With ePetri, it's like getting continuous tweets from the cells rather than an occasional postcard."

A sample is placed on top of a small image-sensor chip, which uses an Android phone's LED screen as a light source. The whole device is placed in an incubator, and the image-sensor chip connects to a laptop outside through a wire. As the image sensor snaps pictures of the cells growing in real time, the laptop stitches hundreds of images together to create a high-resolution picture of what is happening on the dish.

The resolution is similar to a traditional microscope—fine enough to see the contents of cell nuclei, says senior author Changhuei Yang, professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at Caltech. The prototype was described in a paper appearing online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Peering into cells while they stay in the incubator has a number of benefits. For one, each device is its own lens-free microscope, meaning that many samples can be monitored at once automatically on the laptop. In addition, instead of using a microscope that can only focus on one tiny part of a sample, researchers get a picture of what's happening on the entire petri dish at the same time—something that would help a lot with stem cells, which often change into different types of cells and move around.

The team is also working on a self-contained system with its own incubator that could eventually stay as a desktop diagnostic tool in a doctor's office, so bacterial samples wouldn't have to be sent out to a lab for testing.

"The low cost allows you to think creatively about how this will be used in the future," says Jeffrey Morgan, a professor at Brown University who was not involved in the study. For example, the new device could cut down on time and cost for high-throughput drug screening, and create cheaper diagnostic tools. 

Jobs cause of death revealed

A copy of Steve Jobs' death certificate indicates the Apple co-founder died of respiratory arrest that resulted from pancreatic cancer that had spread to other organs.

Jobs died last Wednesday at age 56. Apple Inc. didn't disclose the cause of death, but Jobs had battled pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant in 2009.

He resigned as Apple's CEO in August while out on his third medical leave in several years.

The death certificate, released Monday by the Santa Clara County Public Health Department, says Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto. No autopsy was performed.

Jobs died the day after Apple announced its latest iPhone, the iPhone 4S, which will go on sale Friday.

- AP

Ready for movies in the cloud?

Hollywood is making a major bet this year that consumers will buy movies, instead of renting, and view them on the go.

Facing the steady decline of physical disc sales, studios from Warner Bros to Sony will launch their UltraViolet cloud-based movie storage - or "digital locker" - service.

The studios are making a push to jump-start movie sales by attracting consumers to the cloud. The new digital lockers keep purchased copies of films on remote servers for viewing any time on various devices, a move to make movie ownership more appealing.

Renting movies, far less profitable for studios, has dominated the home entertainment scene since Netflix Inc made unlimited monthly rentals cheap and convenient.

Starting this month, consumers can buy the first film discs offered with UltraViolet, a format designed to allow instant streaming or downloading on devices ranging from videogame consoles to tablets and Web-ready televisions.

Walt Disney Co, the only major film studio not backing UltraViolet, plans to kick off a similar option in the coming months called Disney Studio All Access.

With a "buy once, play anywhere" message, studios hope consumers see more benefits to owning movies. Backers are pitching flexibility for multiple devices, the promise of owning rights to a movie for a lifetime, and the advantage of a cloud-stored copy not hogging hard-drive space.

UltraViolet offers "more value for digital ownership. You can stream wherever you are," said John Calkins, executive vice president of global digital and commercial innovation at Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

PRESERVATION MODE

But will consumers embrace the idea, or has renting movies become too ingrained as the top choice for home entertainment?

While renting remains more popular than buying, interest in digital lockers as a movie-storage option has increased in the past year, according to a recent survey by accounting and consulting firm PwC. That likely stems from Apple Inc's plans to offer cloud storage for music.

"Consumers are starting to understand the benefit of storing other types of content in the cloud," said Matthew Lieberman of PwC's entertainment, media and communications practice.

Others are not sure cloud storage of movies will take off.

Apple sells movies through iTunes and has not backed UltraViolet, a fact some industry analysts said would hurt adoption.

Ownership also remains a tough sell now that consumers can stream rented movies any time to a wide range of Internet-connected devices, which has caused a steady march downward for physical movie disc sales.

"We are in a preservation game," said James McQuivey, media technology analyst at Forrester Research. "We are trying to preserve an eroding base of DVD and Blu-ray spend. I don't see any way in which this is going to reverse this slide."

To be sure, digital lockers are in their early days. Three of Hollywood's major studios have announced titles that will come with an UltraViolet option. Time Warner unit Warner Bros is selling DVD and Blu-ray discs with UltraViolet rights for adult comedy Horrible Bosses starting on Tuesday and superhero flick Green Lantern beginning Friday.

Sony Corp jumps into the mix in early December with comedy "Friends with Benefits" and family film The Smurfs as the holiday shopping season gets in full swing. Also in December, Universal Pictures will offer an UltraViolet option with sci-fi Western Cowboys & Aliens.

Paramount and 20th Century Fox have signed on to UltraViolet but not yet announced films for the format.

Mark Teitell, general manager of the consortium that developed UltraViolet, said the initial titles are "really the beginning phase of this. It will be a ramp up."

Discs of Walt Disney and Pixar films will start coming with Disney Studio All Access rights in the next few months, said Lori MacPherson, executive vice president of global product management at Walt Disney Studios.

But films from Disney-owned Marvel Studios are not currently part of the effort.

Cloud storage "gives the benefit of ownership without the issues of long download time, storage constraints and the lack of interoperability," MacPherson said.

"It will be a game-changer for digital ownership," she said.

- Reuters

Keeping Surgical Infections at Bay With a Cocoon of Air

Shrouding incisions in a layer of purified air reduces the bacteria count by more than 80 percent.

Nimbic Systems' Air Barrier System Nimbic Systems, Inc.

A Texas company has received FDA clearance for a new kind of medical device aimed at reducing incision-site infections that result from surgical procedures. But rather than battling microorganisms with pharmaceutical cocktails or some kind of post-surgical treatment, Nimbic Systems’ Air Barrier System (ABS) keeps surgical sites free of bacteria and other bugs by creating a cocoon of purified air around the incision site for the duration of the surgery.

Infections picked up in the operating room can be as serious--if not more so--than the condition being treated by the surgery itself. Aside from threatening patient health, they are also costly--a bad Staphylococcus infection, for instance, can drive treatment costs into the six figures per patient. ABS aims to curb those infection by ensuring that pathogens never get close to a potentially susceptible site during surgery.

It’s a relatively simple setup: a reusable blower unit feeds filtered air into a sterile, disposable nozzle that is fixed in place adjacent to the incision. ABS then keeps a constant flow of purified air streaming onto the site, creating a kind of air cushion that keeps whatever microbes might be lurking around the O.R. at bay. This is particularly critical for long-duration surgeries, like procedures that implant prostheses or things like spinal or vascular operations.

As such, ABS got its first approval for use in hip replacement surgeries, where the patient’s body is open to the ambient air for an extended period. In trials, ABS proved to reduce the presence of bacteria and other micro-stuff by more than 84 percent. That’s a lot of potential infection rendered essentially harmless. Trials later this year will explore whether ABS can achieve similar results for spinal and femoral operations.

How a Team of Enthusiasts Are Mapping Dark Matter

Earthly skills like handwritten signature verification turn out to be useful on a cosmological scale as well.

Abell Elliptical Galaxy The giant elliptical galaxy ESO 325-G004, from the Abell S740 cluster.Wikimedia Commons

When the Euclid mission lifts off at the end of this decade, it will map galaxy clusters in infrared and visible light, helping to blueprint the large-scale structure of the universe. And a bunch of amateur science geeks who signed up for the competition will use their specialized skills to elucidate those findings.

The Mapping Dark Matter competition proves that Arabic handwriting analysis, glaciology and particle physics are more relevant to cosmology than anyone would have thought — and that when you ask people to solve problems for bragging rights, you get some very creative results.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory sponsored the competition in cooperation with Kaggle, a startup that hosts prediction and data modeling competitions. In all, 73 teams signed up to measure the ellipticity of galaxies in astronomy images, a key element in studying cosmology's dark materials. Physics professor David Kirkby and graduate student Daniel Margala from the University of California-Irvine won the prize and brought their findings to JPL last week.

The problem: estimating the shapes of simulated postage-stamp-sized galaxy images that had been deliberately blurred. Kirkby’s background is in particle physics, but he’s interested in cosmology, so he was intrigued when he saw the competition online.

“It’s hard to get into a new area of research, because so much has already gone on before, and there’s so much jargon, it’s hard to work with the data,” Kirkby said in an interview. “But because this was a competition, it was a really well-designed problem. It posed the question in a way that was really easy for us to understand and jump in — they wanted to bring in unique ideas to work on the problem.”

And it worked. Right off the bat, Martin O’Leary, a Ph.D student in glaciology from Cambridge University, spends most of his time studying satellite images to detect the edges of glaciers; his techniques also applied to determining galactic edges. Then teammates Eu Jin Lok, an Australian graduate student at Deloitte, and Ali Hassaine, a signature verification specialist from Qatar University, built on O’Leary’s findings. Kirkby and Margala built an artificial neural network and were able to come up with the most accurate values for the galaxies’ ellipticity.

Jason Rhodes, an astrophysicist at JPL and an investigator on the Euclid mission, said the results will likely be incorporated into future algorithms that will measure real data.

“We’ll have the best quality of data from Euclid, and we need these techniques to fully exploit that data,” he said.

Looking for dark matter is something like looking for the wind — it’s invisible, but you can tell it’s there because of its impact on other objects. (Obviously wind has more observable effects than dark matter, but you get the idea.) Just as you might study a waving flag to infer that it’s windy, dark matter researchers look at warps in galaxy light to infer that the dark matter is present.

The Bullet Cluster:  Wikimedia Commons

The image above, of the Bullet Cluster, is probably the best example of this. It depicts two colliding clusters of galaxies that have passed through one another at unspeakably energetic speeds. As they moved past each other in opposite directions, the stars slowed down a little, and the hot gas, which is the pinkish areas, slowed down a lot. But the dark matter, which doesn’t interact with anything except gravitationally, didn’t slow down. It is represented in blue here, way ahead of the rest of the material in these clusters. It’s not directly visible in this image; the blue shading is inferred from the effect that its gravity has on background radiation. The gravity of dark matter acts like a lens, warping the passing light.

Think of a penny in a pool of water — the penny you see is distorted because the light reflecting off it has to travel through water, Rhodes explained.

“In the same way, a very distant galaxy has a shape that we see as distorted, as it is moving through the intervening dark matter,” he said.

To know how much the light has been distorted, you’d need to know the shape of the object emitting it — a galaxy that looks warped might just be a particularly ovoid galaxy. Determining galactic ellipticity helps astronomers determine how much of that ellipticity is the result of dark matter.

Kirkby and Margala came up with a model for each galaxy, involving six or seven different parameters. This global view, rather than looking at each data point on its own, was a novel approach, according to Rhodes. Then they fed the data into an artificial neural network, which they used to find the galaxies’ elliptical shapes. Kirkby said he planned to write a paper about his work.

“The astronomy community is trying to get out in front of the large data analysis problem that’s looming,” Kirkby said. “The fact that it was set up as a competition was kind of unusual for research, but I think that made it fun ... It adds a new element to research that we haven’t seen before, where people tend to work by themselves and publish papers.”

Video: A Homemade Rocket Soars 121,000 Feet in 92 Seconds

Qu8k Launches via ddeville.com

A while back, John Carmack (of “Doom” and “Quake” fame, as well as the founder of Armadillo Aerospace) issued a challenge: launch a rocket to more than 100,000 feet, get a GPS reading from up there, and recover the launch vehicle, and $5,000 is yours. Some additional benefactors pushed the Carmack prize to roughly $10,000. And as you will see in this video, Derek Deville might just claim it.

Deville’s rocket, called “Qu8k” (pronounced “quake”), launched from the Black Rock Desert in Nevada on September 30th. Ninety-two seconds later it hit its apogee, some 121,000 feet above the desert floor, before parachuting back to Earth. From there you can clearly see the darkness of space, the curvature of the Earth, and a hell of a lot of real estate below.

Alas, Deville was unable to get a GPS reading from the apogee, and thus did not fulfill all the requirements to win the Carmack prize outright. But by all accounts Qu8k did break the 100,000-feet mark, and the video clearly shows the team recovering the launch vehicle intact. As such, it seems the Carmack challenge won’t go uncompleted for much longer.

The full-length video of the launch is below (and recommended), but if your patience runs thin there’s a shortened version here.