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Document ActionsBreakthroughs: Berkeley research at the engineering forefrontThis virus has some nerveWe all know YouTube videos can spread like viruses, but nerves too? Bioengineering’s Seung-Wuk Lee and his student Anna Merzlyak genetically engineered a bacterial virus, or phage, called M13 to express proteins that support nerve cell growth. They cultivated the virus in bacterial cell hosts and added young neural cells called progenitors to a concentrated solution, which they then spun into long, nerve-like fibers. The neural cells were able to grow and branch along the virus scaffolding in characteristic neuron formation. Lee hopes this may one day help reverse paralysis in patients with spinal cord injuries by generating new neurons from their own tissue. www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/21991/ Miracle materialImagine the featherweight jets and other vehicles that could be designed with a hard, shatterproof, yet lightweight substance. Materials science and engineering professor Robert Ritchie and colleagues are developing the kind of miracle medium that could make this possible by mimicking naturally occurring nacre, or mother-of-pearl. They chilled a suspension of aluminum oxide and pressed the resulting strands into microscopic bricks by evaporating away the moisture, then built up a layered, porous structure and filled the spaces with polymer or metal—copycats of nature’s own protein glue—to relieve stress between the bricks. The bulk ceramics are the toughest ever made. www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/322/5907/1516 Burn noticeMechanical engineering professor Carlos Fernandez-Pello and his students study flammability in space in their combustion lab. They recently appeared on TV’s History Channel, in a show called The Universe, Space Disasters, describing how flames behave in zero gravity compared with here on Earth. Verdict: Fires are hotter and more dangerous aboard pacecraft due to higher oxygen concentrations and lower buoyancy (flames don’t burn upright). NASA is considering the research in designing the next generation of spaceships to promote safety onboard. www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2A-JHjfcZ8 Solid investmentFor every ton of Portland cement—a key ingredient in structural concrete—a ton of the greenhouse gas CO2 is generated. That’s 7 percent of CO2 emissions worldwide. With a five-year, $8 million grant from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, civil and environmental engineering professor Paulo Monteiro and colleagues will attempt to reduce this carbon load by using 3-D, nanoscale imaging and other techniques to produce cleaner, greener concrete from waste products like fly ash (a byproduct of the coal industry) and slag (a byproduct of the steel industry). They also hope to use recycled water in production and improve concrete’s long-term durability. www.kaust.edu.sa/pdf/Monteiro.pdf The safer streets of San FranciscoYou see them everywhere … at airports and traffic intersections, in big box stores and BART stations. Are video cameras actually fighting crime? A report by CITRIS researchers found that San Francisco’s Community Safety Camera Program, which in 2005 deployed 71 cameras in some of the city’s crime-prone neighborhoods, had no deterrent effect on homicides or other violent crime, a stated goal of the program. But an unexpected finding, says Richard Robinson of the SF Office of Telecommunications and Information Services, was that the cameras did deter “property crimes” like pickpocketing, purse snatching and theft, which dropped 24 percent according to the report. So the city plans to keep using the cameras, which are monitored passively in an effort to allay privacy concerns. www.citris-uc.org/files/CITRIS%20SF%20CSC%20Study%20Final%20Dec%202008.pdf Talk about cruise controlLast fall, engineers led by Wei-Bin Zhang of California Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways (PATH) showed off a 60-foot bus guided by magnets. As the coach rolled along a one-mile stretch of East 14th Street in San Leandro, California, sensors fixed to the vehicle’s belly detected magnets in the road, and the onboard computer steered accordingly. Don’t worry: a driver was on hand—er, foot—to brake and accelerate. The bus pulled up to the curb within a pinkie-finger’s width of the edge. That kind of accuracy, researchers say, could hasten passenger loading and unloading and make mass transit more efficient. www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/09/05_autobus.shtml What’s so great about sex?Fitness, it turns out—as in survival of the fittest—doesn’t explain why sexual reproduction is as rampant as it is in the natural world. But flexibility does. Sure, sex mixes genes from mother and father to create unique offspring who, if they survive, pass down their own fortunate draws from the hereditary lottery. But the same genetic shuffle can also break down winning combinations. Why? Using an analogy inspired by optimization algorithms, UC Berkeley computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou and evolutionary biologist Adi Livnat discovered that intercourse and its resulting genetic recombination actually select for something they call mixability, the ability of genetic variants to perform well in many different pairs instead of with a single ideal match.www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/11/24_reproduction.shtml Spam—a lotJunk mail. Spam. You know it, you delete it; it just keeps coming. That’s because it’s profitable, says Vern Paxson of electrical engineering and computer sciences (EECS) and his UC San Diego colleagues. The group infiltrated the Storm botnet (a network of home computers hijacked to unknowingly send junk mail) and tracked subsequent visits to an advertised website. The spammer in question, they calculated, must send out 12 million e-mails for every $100 worth of fake Viagra sold. And, given the botnet’s ability to deliver huge quantities of e-mail, that operation could yield some $2 million annually. Luckily, EECS assistant professor Dawn Song is building tools to analyze botnets in the hope of one day disabling their command centers and defending against the malware that enslaves our computers. www.icir.org/christian/spamalytics/ Contents |
