Category: Uncategorized

The idea of invisibility has been around in mythology and fiction for thousands of years but the Harry Potter books and

movies brought the idea of an Invisibility Cloak into the public eye.  Everyone has thought at some point about what possibilities being able to make themselves invisible would present.   But invisibility is only the stuff of fiction.. right?

 Well, right now researchers haven’t quite got to the level of Harry’s cloak but they’re certainly getting there.  There are many different approaches that are being taken towards this technology and I’m going to give an insight into a few of them.

 The first and currently most effective technology is called optical camouflage technology.  This involves a camera filming what is behind an object and this image is then projected onto the front of the object, in effect allowing you to see ‘through’ the object.  This is similar to blue screen technology used in Hollywood but in this instance what you are wearing acts as the blue screen rather than you standing in front of one.  It is just like the technology seen on James Bond’s Aston Martin in the movie Die Another Day. 

 Researchers at the University of Tokyo are leading this field and have created an ‘Invisibility Coat’ that resembles a rain jacket but is made out of retro-reflective material (that reflects and refracts the light back at the source) .  It is made from 50 micron beads that are lined up and tightly packed together.  Because the beads are so small, you can still project an image onto it regardless of how it is wrinkled.  There are many potential uses for the technology such as using it in car interiors to eliminate blind spots and be able to see right ‘through’ to the surroundings.

News Article on the Invisibility Coat

One Step Beyond: New Camouflage Technology Video

 Adaptiv technology, created by BAE systems is designed to conceal military vehicles.  It allows the vehicles to mimic the temperature outline of it’s surroundings.  This can make the vehicle invisible to both night vision systems that see infrared light and heat seeking systems which is clearly a major advantage on a  battlefield.  The technology works by projecting temperatures onto the special outer layer of the tank.  A database of recognizable outlines has been created and a tank can be made to look like anything from a cow to a truck when seen through an infrared camera.  Researchers are now working on making this technology work in other wavelengths, especially visible light, so as to create ‘true’ invisibility.  BAE estimate that the Adaptiv technology could go into production within 2 years.  Further reading and video can be found here.

 Finally, the technology that is most likely to be able to create the effect of Harry’s invisibility cloak are ‘meta-materials’ with negative refractive indexes that are being worked on by many researchers.  Meta-materials have the ability to manipulate light and can in effect bend light around them.  Last November Scientists managed to create flexible meta-materials that bent visible light for the first time.  Currently they can only be made on a small scale but this was a huge step forward.  Interestingly these meta-materials may also be used to create lenses that “can zoom to the micron level, making it possible to spot germs, chemical agents and even DNA, using basically a pair of binoculars.”

Further reading: BBC article on this finding, Wired.com article

References:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/invisibility-cloak.htm#mkcpgn=fb6

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/09/invisibility-cloak-tanks-cows/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial

Other references as links in the article above.

30 years after the first reported cases of AIDS we still do not have a cure for a disease that has killed 25 million people. 

The World Health Organization currently estimates at least 33 million people are currently infected worldwide and approximately 2 million deaths are attributed to the disease each year.  While in most western countries the impact of HIV is limited due to the use of Antiretroviral drugs with HIV+ patients sometimes having  life expectancies close to the average uninfected individual.  However in less affluent countries AIDS is a serious problem.

Now to explain how HIV/AIDS infects an individual and how the current treatments work.  The HIV virus replicates in the human body by inserting it’s genetic code into human cells, most commonly a type called CD4 cells, which then produce a large amount of HIV particles before dying soon afterwards.  Antiretroviral drugs interfere with this replication process of the HIV virus in the human body and reduce the amount of HIV to extremely low levels (so low that sometimes the presence of  HIV can’t even be detected by a standard test).  However a problem lies with ‘resting’  CD4 cells that can lie dormant for years and keep HIV’s genetic material in the body.  Then when the patient stops receiving the treatment the “HIV can re-establish itself by leaking out of these “viral resevoirs”” (avert.org).  So there is 2 potential paths for HIV cures:

1. A Sterilising Cure – A cure that would remove all infected cells.
2. A Functional Cure – A cure that will keep the virus dormant and prevent it from replicating after the discontinuation of antiretroviral drug treatment.   (Further reading on potential functional cure)

AIDS related discoveries have been in the news regularly in recent months.  The first of these stories was published in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology and acknowledged an unprecented number of people as helping to make the discovery.  Scientists had been trying to work out the structure of “M-PMV retroviral protease – an enzyme that plays a key role in the development of a virus similar to HIV” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-14986013), for over a decade without success.  Amazingly when the protein was given to players of an online game called Foldit it only took 10 days for the 57,000 players (that were acknowledged in the paper) to work out the lowest energy configuration of the protein.  “This result could be an important step forwards in the development of anti-Aids drugs”.  MSNBC Video on Foldit Discovery

Another recent lead in the hunt for a cure is the discovery that removing cholesterol from the membrane of HIV can stop it from damaging the immune system.  Cholesterol is necessary to keep the outer membrane fluid and the virus picks it up from the first immune cells it infects.  When the cholesterol is removed, HIV can no longer communicate and disrupt the immune system.   These findings were published in journal Blood  and scientists are now working on seeing if they can turn the inactivated virus (that no longer contains cholesterol) into a vaccine.  (Further reading on cholesterol discovery)

A third paper published recently in the journals Vaccine and Journal of Virology  by researchers in Spain details a new vaccine called MVA-B that has demonstrated promising results.  The vaccine is “made with bits of non-infectious HIV genetic material and is designed to train the body’s immune system over time to detect and fight different components of the virus”.   The vaccine has been tested on healthy volunteers (without HIV infection) and achieved an immunological response against HIV in 92% with 85% of them maintaining immunity for 12 months.  The next stage is to test the vaccine on HIV positive individuals and if these trials go well “the scientists believe they may well have found a vaccine that could turn HIV into a minor chronic infection, similar to Herpes” and would therefore only be a problem for people with compromised immune systems.  (Articles for further reading on MVA-B vaccine here and here)

With these recent discoveries this elusive cure may not be  far away and it is exciting to think that we may live to see major diseases cured  in the very near future.

In our session today, we brainstormed about some of the best practices for finding the research literature for your assignments.

Here are some of the ones we came up with together:

Strategies for finding the best resources

• Summon – a Google-like interface to the library’s collections online and print  (books, journals, theses, etc.)
  
• Research guides to find the discipline specific resources. e.g. forestry research guide
• Web of Science – has additional features: times cited sort, analyzing your results by author/conference
• Google Scholar – access through the library site to get the full-text via UBC elink
• Use the references from papers, books and textbooks. Also from sources like Wikipedia – trace the reference at the end of Wikipedia articles to primary source. Read the primary source! Don’t rely on the wiki content.

Searching Techniques

• Focus topic with additional terms/concepts – e.g. in our sample topic of global warming and forest, include another idea like finding information on the mountain pine beetle.
• Phrase Searching by using quotations around the two ore more words. e.g.  “global warming”.
• Chunk your question into the component pieces: e.g. idea 1: forests idea 2: global warming
• Boolean operator AND to join concepts together forests AND “global warming”
• Boolean operators OR to join synonyms together “global warming” OR “climate change” OR “greenhouse effect”
• Boolean operator NOT or the – sign. e.g. -South America NOT South America (be careful w/this one, as you can eliminate valuable results from your  search)

Need more help with your research? AskAway or contact Katherine Miller

Among the many celestial objects in this galaxy, there are few that stand out more than this proverbial gem of a planet. This isn’t just any gem, it’s a massive, super dense crystal made of carbon; it’s a diamond.

Recently, a research team at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia lead by Professor Matthew Bailes discovered a massive diamond planet orbiting around a pulsar star located 4000 light years away from Earth. This planet is assumed to be the extremely dense center core of a once giant planet that lost its outer layer due to the radiation emitted from the dead neutron star in which it orbits every 2.2 hours. The orbit is so tight that rotation of the planet around the pulsar would fit inside the sun.

The planet is about five times the size of Earth and weighs as much as Jupiter, but is approximately 20 times denser. The majority of the outer core has been shed leaving only 0.01% of the original mass which leads scientists to believe that it is a carbon white dwarf. According to Professor Bailes “the evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon”. Based on their research, scientists also believe that the planet is likely to contain oxygen at the surface with very rare quantities at the center of the dense carbon core. Lighter elements such as helium and hydrogen are assumed to be non-existent.

The question that some researchers are wondering now is whether the planet actually looks like a giant diamond up close. Researchers have not devised a way to look at the planet directly, but Professor Bailes has hypothesized that a beam of light hitting the planet would cause it to sparkle just like a real diamond. As long as scientists are unable to view the planet directly however, we will simply have to use our imagination and attempt to picture what this new mysterious planet could look like.

Reporter Discusses the Diamond Star on Newsy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1lRUxuo0fA