Tag Archives: technology

How Does Technology Use Correlate with Our Mental Well-Being?

Posted on November 20, 2017 by | 1 comment

Source: https://www.inc.com/issie-lapowsky/inside-massive-tech-land-grab-teenagers.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

The advancement of technology is increasing at a dramatic rate with new technological breakthroughs every year. Nowadays, it’s quite difficult to find someone who doesn’t use technology at all. Every year, the percentage of the population using technology increases. This is shown in a study conducted by Pew Research Center in 2017 where in America, about 95% of the population owns a cellphone of some kind compared to only 35% of the population in 2011. That is about a 10% increase in cellphone ownership every year!

Also, the amount of time adolescents spend online has more than doubled from an average of 8 hr per week in 2005 to 18.9 hr per week today!

This goes to show just how dependent we are on cellphones, computers, television, etc. So, the question here, asked by all parents is: “does modern technology improve or degrade the mental well-being of the younger generation?”. Although some studies have been conducted, none have been rigorously examined.

The answer to this question was found in a study conducted by Andrew Przybylski, a psychologist at the University of Oxford and Netta Weinstein, a psychologist at Cardiff University in Wale. Andrew and Netta wanted to determine the correlation between digital-screen time and mental well-being of adolescents. They used the digital “Goldilocks” hypothesis where it describes that “too little” tech use deprives young people of important social information and peer pursuits, whereas “too much” may displace other meaningful activities.

They surveyed 120,000, 15-year-old participants across England. The survey asked the participants about their engagement in different kinds of digital activities during their free time and about their life satisfaction and happiness over the past 2 weeks.

Surprisingly, the results they found was quite the opposite to many contrary beliefs.

Figure 1. Mental well-being as a function of daily digital-screen time on weekdays and weekends. Results are shown for time spent (a) using smartphones, (b) playing video games, (c) using computers, and (d) watching TV and movies

From the figure above, the results show that moderate use of technology correlates with improved mental well-being. However, the longer the technology is used, the teens’ well-being starts to decline.

This study indicated that moderate use of technology in the modern world actually may not be so harmful and may actually be advantageous in a very online connected world that we live in today.

So, to all parents out there, there is no harm for your children to spend some time on their cellphone or laptop. And to all teens out there, although it’s nice to go on Facebook and Twitter, you should also spend some time with your family and friends out in the real world as well.

-Ziyi Wang

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Method of the Year: Cryo-electron Microscopy

Posted on November 14, 2017 by | Leave a comment
Cr to Nicolae Sfetcu

High Resolution of Detailed Structures (Credits to Nicolae Sfetcu)

About one month ago, Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson awarded the Nobel Price in Chemistry 2017 for developing the cryo-electron microscopy. The National Institutes of Health named cryo-electron microscopy ‘method of the year’. Cryo-electron microscopy can image frozen-hydrated specimens in native state without dyes at low temperatures through electron microscopy. Using this technology, scientists have produced three-dimensional images to target cancer drugs and demystify the Zika virus.

Cancer drug target visualized at atomic resolution (credits to NIH Image Gallery)

Actually, the development of cryo-electron microscopy has a long history. Previously, scientists used cumbersome dyes, stains or labels to visualize cell function, which would change the behaviour of the cell function and only provide a coarse two-dimensional image. This made scientists hard to understand molecular biology clearly since how the components in the cells looked like and what functions they performed remained unknown.

However, from 1975 to 1986, Joachim Frank stitched two-dimensional micrographs together to yield a sharp three-dimensional image. In 1990, Richard Henderson used this principle to visualize a protein in three-dimensional down to atoms with an electron microscope. In the early 1980s, Jacques Dubochet discovered that water would form a solid shell without freezing by rapidly cooling a specimen before putting it in an electron microscope, which could keep biological structures in original shape during scanning. They produced the desired atomic resolution in 2013. And researchers can now routinely produce three-dimensional structures of biomolecules.

Combining these theories, scientists could take biologically-accurate snapshots of the tiniest units of life. This technology helps scientists understand diseases better and develop better drugs. For instance, scientists found unique parts of the pathogen’s structure in the Zika virus and identified a potential target for a vaccine.

Improving resolution by cryo-EM (credits to NIH Image Gallery)

Engineers have developed better hardware to help improve cryo-electron microscopy by visualizing detailed structures instead of shapeless blobs. Scientists claim that the limited physical knowledge confines the resolution bt they will obtain better visualizations of biological structures in the coming year.

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The Future of Invisibility

Posted on October 16, 2017 by | Leave a comment

 

Credit: Lynn B

Practical cloaking technology is a long sought-after tool that has yet to be obtained. However, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy and UC Berkeley claim that this might not be true for much longer. In a recent paper, they explained that they had created a thin, flexible “skin” cloak that could hide an object from sight by channelling visible light around it. From the military to the civilian sector, disappearing from vision is undeniably desirable, leaving many eagerly waiting for new developments.

At the core of invisibility technology are metamaterials: Materials that are engineered to exhibit properties not found in nature. By designing nanostructures of a specific size, shape and orientation, electromagnetic waves can be controlled; To render an object invisible, visible light must be bent, curved, and scattered. Previous attempts at manifesting the phenomenon resulted in clumsy and easily detectable “blankets” that bent light sequentially at each layer of the material. Their key flaw was that they created a phase shift in the waves of reflected light, making them fairly noticeable under any degree of scrutiny. On the other hand, The efficacy of the “skin” cloak is in its relative simplicity, as the cloak is only 80 nanometers in thickness; instead of a thick blanket, the new technology consists of an impossibly-thin sheet. It is comprised of microscopic gold antennas, brick-like in shape and proportion, that are capable of reflecting light without changing its phase or frequency. In other words, light reflecting off of the sheet appears identical to light reflecting off of the background. This is because both reflections are of the same light: Incoming waves pass around the cloak, hit the background, and reflect back to the observer, all the while passing around (or seemingly “through”) the cloaked article. In a short video, the researchers demonstrated their ability to cause a microscopic object to completely disappear.

However, the deception doesn’t stop there; In addition to perfectly redirecting light, the cloak can be tuned in a way that one could create images that aren’t actually there. According to the researchers, “you could cover a tank with it, and make it look like a bicycle”. Despite these exciting accomplishments, it is important to remember that the technology is very much a work in progress. As such, certain flaws are still present in the design: For one, the covered object must be completely still, since the tuning of the cloak must be matched to the background. Also, the current sheet is only capable of reflecting light at one wavelength, 730 nanometers. In order to be applicable to the real-world, it would have to reflect light across the visible spectrum.

Despite these flaws, the results are promising; Real, practical invisibility technology could be right around the corner. At the turn of the 21st century, such a thing would have been relegated to the pages of sci-fi and fantasy novels, never to see (and bend) the light of day. Knowing how close we are to seeing invisibility leap from fiction to reality, you have to ask: What are other products of an over-active imagination could one day become an actuality?

 

Arjun Thomson-Kahlon

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New Advances in Structural Colouration (revised)

Posted on October 15, 2017 by | Leave a comment

There are countless examples of colouration via nanoscale texturing found in nature, such as in bird feathers and butterfly wings (shown in video below). To date, we have been primarily reliant on chemical pigmentation for colour production since many traditional structural colours have either been iridescent or have lacked sufficient colour saturation. If these shortcomings can be worked out, structural colours will be a superior alternative to pigmentary colours, and will therefore be of greater use in areas of communication, signaling, and security. Developing a technique that would allow us to generate a wide range of structural colours has proven to be a difficult task.

Structural colours are produced by the scattering of light off nanoparticles, whereas pigmentary colours are produced through the absorption of light by molecules. The reason scientists are interested in structural colours is because they are tunable, less dependent on the use of toxic organic and metal-based materials, and have proven to be more resistant to photo and chemical bleaching compared to pigmentary colours. In a recent study conducted by Dr. Xiao and a team of researchers, tiny balls of melanin were aggregated into clusters called ‘supraballs’. Individual nanoparticles of melanin are responsible for skin pigmentation and appear black, however, altering the spacing of the nanoparticles in the supraballs affects how light is scattered, thus generating a spectrum of structural colours.

Synthesis and Self-Assembly. Taken from: Science Advances

Altering the spacing of the nanoparticles was achieved by adding a thin silica shell to the surface of the nanoparticles to control how tightly packed they were. By varying the diameter of the silica coating, the nanoparticles formed differently nanostructured supraballs which were able to scatter light to produce a wide range of colours. Additionally, using nanoparticles of different dimensions allowed for the shading of colours to be altered. Melanin was chosen as the nanoparticle core due to its large refractive index (RI) and broadband absorption in the visible range, which reduces the scattering of incoherent light and subsequently increases colour purity. The high RI melanin core and low RI silica shell makes for higher reflectance and brighter, more vibrant colours.

Microstructures of supraballs. Taken from: Science Advances

One of the main reasons this finding is considered a breakthrough in structural colouration research is due to the simplicity of the technique used to create the supraballs. This technique contrasts previously known methods, which are far more complicated and do not have the same potential for commercial application. The silica-coated melanin nanoparticles self-assemble into supraballs clusters via a water-in-oil reverse emulsion process. The supraballs are then separated by centrifugation. This process does not rely on the use any surfactant molecules to stabilize the emulsion and is fast and easily scalable.

With all the benefits structural colours have over pigmentary colours, along with recent advances in techniques used to create the nanomaterials which generate these structural colours, it is only a matter of time before we see this technology become incorporated in a wide range of applications involving sensors, display devices, and tunable organic lasers.

– Joseph Bergvinson

 

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How does a robin know which way to fly?

Posted on October 2, 2017 by | 1 comment

How does a robin know which way to fly? This has been a scientific puzzle since the 1800s. European robins, Erithacus rubecula, are migratory birds that fly between Southern Europe and North Africa to escape harsh winters. Few wrong turns can easily land them in the coldest winter in Europe yet every year migratory birds fly to warmer places.

European robin. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Hore group at the University of Oxford proposed that perhaps this biological compass phenomena may be best explained by quantum biology. The principal from a quantum biology perspective is that when photon hits the retina of the bird’s eyes, it excites the electrons in a protein called cryptochrome. These excited electrons then exist in different spatial locations yet influence each other which is an effect known as quantum entanglement. But the challenge is that can a quantum effect really last long enough to contribute to a bird’s navigation?

The researchers used computational methods to study the radical pairs involved which are pairs of bound molecules with an unpaired electron each. They discovered that the ratio of radical pairs that follow the two chemical pathways change when exposed to a magnetic field similar to that of the Earth. Essentially, they are proposing that the birds are converting Earth’s magnetic field by a chemical reaction sensitive to subtle quantum effects.

This research has profound implications in Chemistry as many organic semiconductors, such as OLEDs which are widely used in displays for phones, televisions, computers, etc., show similar magnetic properties as the radical pairs studied here, the research team believes that findings from this study can help develop sustainable and inexpensive electronic devices.

Most Apple products are dependent on OLEDs for their cutting edge display. Source: Maxpixel

The Hore Group did not prove or disprove the quantum biology theory for a biological compass; however, they attacked the puzzle from a unique perspective by showing why it’s possible. This is an important study because this was one of the first credible evidence that nature might be using quantum mechanics to its advantage. These findings have immense implications in Science as it raises the questions: can nature teach us how to build better machines? Can we learn how nature uses and preserves these quantum chemistry effects to develop quantum technologies such as quantum computers, nanochemistry in medical treatment, etc. Physicist Jim Al-Khalili did a TED Talk on how quantum biology might explain life’s biggest questions which further explores the potential scope of this field.

Overall, quantum biology is a coming of age controversial field with limited evidence; It’s new and speculative but I do believe it’s built on solid science.

 

Mia Hasan

Mon, Oct 23

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