This could give a whole new meaning to the phrase power dressing. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a cloth that can detect and emit noise.
The team, led by MIT Professor Yoel Fink, has reached “a new milestone on the path to functional fibres: fibres that can detect and produce sound”, MIT said.
The development transforms the usually passive nature of textiles into a virtual all-singing, all-dancing version.
“Applications could include clothes that are themselves sensitive microphones for capturing speech or monitoring bodily functions and tiny filaments that could measure blood flow in capillaries or pressure in the brain,” MIT said.
The decade-old research project aims to “develop fibres with ever more sophisticated properties, to enable fabrics that can interact with their environment,” MIT said.
The new space-age cloth could listen and make sound.
“You can actually hear them, these fibres,” Noemie Chocat, part of the lab team, said.
“If you connected them to a power supply and applied a sinusoidal current, then it would vibrate. And if you make it vibrate at audible frequencies and put it close to your ear, you could actually hear different notes or sounds coming out of it.”
The new fibres are based on a similar plastic to that used in microphones.
Researchers manipulated the fluorine content to ensure its molecules stayed lopsided. That imbalance makes the plastic piezo-electric, meaning it changes shape when an electric field is applied.
“In addition to wearable microphones and biological sensors, applications of the fibres could include loose nets that monitor the flow of water in the ocean and large-area sonar imaging systems with much higher resolutions,” MIT said.
(Reuters) – Terminal 1 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City was evacuated on Sunday due to a bomb scare, CNN reported, but it was probably a false alarm triggered by an anonymous call to the airport. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE66327N20100704
Much touted as economic miracle, under the aegis of another spendthrift,US, with no resources on its own and dependent on US market for most of its products initially,Japan is facing the after effects of paper Economic Theory.
When a Nation is solely dependent on foreign powers and limited home market, your economic future is linked to the foreign power, this will happen, especially when the power on which you depend on a power that has no gold reserves and lives on plastic money and unwittingly has allowed foreign powers like China to hold its instruments and most of its products are imported and its companies out source every thing from third countries….! well ….
Story.
Japan is at “risk of collapse” under its huge debt mountain, the country’s new prime minister has said.
This is the face of an ancient Eskimo who walked the Earth at the end of the Ice Age 4,000 years ago.
Scientists have unravelled the genome of a Prehistoric human for the first time after studying a clump of hair preserved in permafrost in Greenland.
They used advances in DNA analysis to discover certain characteristics including the colour of his skin and thickness of his hair – and to prove Eskimos originate from Asia and not North America.
Green land Permafrost where the clump of hair was found for DNA.
The artist’s reconstruction of the man, who has been named “Inuk”, is based on screening for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). These are points in the genetic code which vary from person to person.
Researchers recovered his DNA from just a dark tuft of hair that was dug up along with primitive stone tools during an archaeological excavation in the Disco Bay ice fjord area of north-west Greenland in 1986.
The hair belonged to a member of the first Eskimos called the Saqqaqs, who lived inland and hunted reindeer.
On the basis of the analysis, the individual was a male.
There are currently very few details known about Inuk’s people due to the fact that little remains from their culture.
But the new findings published in Nature suggest genomic data can now be used to identify physical traits of individuals from extinct cultures even when there are just small amounts of material, such as bones, left.
Differences in eye, hair and skin colour are largely down to SNPs, known by scientists as ‘snips’ – variations in the sequence of letters that make up a single strand of human DNA.
SNPs represent a change of just one letter in the genetic sequence. These changes, or mutations, in our DNA can have important consequences for how the gene gets physically expressed. Everyone has two copies of an SNP.
So there are several possible combinations, some of which are more heavily associated with, for example, blue eyes, than with brown eyes.
Ancient DNA expert Professor Eske Willerslev and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, analysed more than 350,000 SNPs from Inuk, comparing them with those of people from several surrounding populations to pinpoint his geographical origin.
Professor Willerslev said: ‘The sample provided us with 80 per cent of the genome of a man living in Greenland four thousand years ago. It is comparable in quality to a modern human genome.
‘We can see the man had brown eyes, brown hair and a tendency to baldness. The clump of hair we found suggests he probably died quite young.
‘We can also see he had A-plus blood type. It is a very high quality genome – to our knowledge the only one of an ancient human.’
Surprisingly, Inuk proved to be most closely related to three Old World Arctic populations – the Nganasans, Koryaks and Chukchis of the Siberian far east.
The researchers said they do not know if Inuk was part of the extinct culture that inhabited Greenland four millennia ago.
But they do conclude their work provides evidence of a migration of ancient humans from Siberia into the New World – movement that was independent of other migrations that gave rise to the modern Native American and Inuit communities.
Professor Willerslev said: ‘A single individual may, or may not, be representative of the extinct culture that inhabited Greenland some 4,000 years ago.
‘Nevertheless, we may conclude that he, and perhaps the group that once crossed the Bering Strait, did this independently from the ancestors of present-day Native Americans and Inuit, and that he shares ancestry with Arctic north-east Asians, genetic structure components of which can be identified in many of the present-day people on both sides of the Bering Sea.
The next technical challenge will be to sequence an ancient human genome from material outside the permafrost regions.
‘Although undoubtedly challenging, it will, if successful, take the emerging field of palaeogenomics to yet another level.’
But evolutionary biologists Professor David Lambert and Dr Leon Huynen, of Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, said it ‘won’t all be plain sailing’ after reviewing the journal.
They said: ‘One big problem is that the majority of ancient human remains are found in temperate and even hot environments.
‘Because the rate of degradation of ancient DNA increases exponentially with temperature, it remains to be seen whether genomic studies of hominin specimens from these regions will recover sufficient DNA to be informative.’
GeoEye has collaborated with Google Earth to share their most recent satellite imagery of Haiti, which captures the devastation wrought by the earthquake as seen from space.
Much touted as economic miracle, under the aegis of another spendthrift,US, with no resources on its own and dependent on US market for most of its products initially,Japan is facing the after effects of paper Economic Theory.
This is the face of an ancient Eskimo who walked the Earth at the end of the Ice Age 4,000 years ago.
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