Blind man uses sonar to 'see'

Blind as a bat ?

 

A Californian man who has been blind for most of his life can 'see' using sound, and is in Australia to help teach the technique to others.

Daniel Kish, who lost his sight to retinal cancer when he was just 13 months old, has dubbed his bat-like technique "flash sonar".
He uses sounds to detect objects in his environment by sensing echoes from those objects.
"It's an active form of echolocation that allows a blind individual to see using flashes of sound, instead of flashes of light," he told ABC News Breakfast.
"An individual emits flashes of sound - and they may be in the form of a tongue click - and uses those flashes to illuminate the environment and extract information from the returning soundwaves, that return from surfaces in the environment.
"And then we can construct images based on the information we have extracted."
Mr Kish combines echolocation with the use of his cane to boost his mobility, and leads groups on hiking and mountain bike adventures.
"I've always been able to do this. I think it has to do with how I was raised. I was raised to pretty much be involved in all of the other things that kids were doing," he said.
"I went to regular school, I played with sighted children, I had to have an equaliser.
"As I've grown older, my interest has turned more to developing methods of teaching it and helping blind people to learn it."
The Centre for Brain and Mind in the US has studied the activity in Mr Kish's brain as he listened to the sounds he uses in flash sonar.
Researchers found that instead of activating the area of the brain responsible for interpreting sound, the sounds activated Mr Kish's visual cortex - supporting the idea that sounds provide a visual effect that allows Mr Kish to 'see'.
Mr Kish, who heads non-profit organisation World Access for the Blind, is currently holding a series of workshops with Australian students to teach them to see in new ways.
He says many blind people use echolocation to a certain degree but are unaware of it.
"Our hope is to help blind people become more aware of it so that they can become conscious of developing and refining it and integrating it more naturally into their daily lives," he said.
"It generally helps people become more confident. They're more aware of their surroundings, they're more aware of the options they have within their surroundings.
"It enables people to interact with their environment more quickly, with more precision, with more grace.
"People can participate in a wider range of activities with greater levels of comfort and confidence. They can conduct themselves with more poise.
"It just basically adds a dimension to a person's ability to interact with the environment effectively."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-22/blind-man-sees-with-sound/3844270

How the first plant came to be

Nature | From Scientific American

A genetic analysis reveals the ancient, complex — and symbiotic — roots of photosynthesis in plants.

• David Biello

16 February 2012

The genome of Cyanophora paradoxa provides essential clues to the origin of photosynthesis in algae and plants.

Science/AAAS

An article from Scientific American.
Earth is the planet of the plants — and it all can be traced back to one green cell. The world's lush profusion of photosynthesizers — from towering redwoods to ubiquitous diatoms — owe their existence to a tiny alga eons ago that swallowed a cyanobacteria and turned it into an internal solar power plant.
By studying the genetics of a "glaucophyte" — one of a group of just 13 unique microscopic freshwater blue-green algae, sometimes called "living fossils" — an international consortium of scientists led by molecular bioscientist Dana Price of the University of Queensland, Brisbane, has elucidated the evolutionary history of plants. The glaucophyte Cyanophora paradoxa still retains a less domesticated version of this original cyanobacteria than most other plants.
According to the analysis of C. paradoxa's genome of roughly 70 million base pairs, this capture must have occurred only once because most modern plants share the genes that make the merger of photosynthesizer and larger host cell possible. That union required cooperation not just from the original host and the formerly free-ranging photosynthesizer but also, apparently, from a bacterial parasite. Chlamydia-like cells, such as Legionella (which includes the species that causes Legionnaire's disease), provided the genes that enable the ferrying of food from domesticated cyanobacteria, now known as plastids, or chloroplasts, to the host cell.
"These three entities forged the nascent organelle, and the process was aided by multiple horizontal gene transfers as well from other bacteria," explains biologist Debashish Bhattacharya of Rutgers University, whose lab led the work published in Science on 17 February. "Gene recruitment [was] likely ongoing" before the new way of life prospered and the hardened cell walls of most plants came into being.

In fact, such a confluence of events is so rare that evolutionary biologists have found only one other example: the photosynthetic amoeba Paulinella domesticated cyanobacteria roughly 60 million years ago. "The amoeba plastid is still a 'work in progress' in evolutionary terms," Bhattacharya notes. "We are now analyzing the genome sequence from Paulinella to gain some answers" as to how these events occur.

The work provides the strongest support yet for the hypothesis of late biologist Lynn Margulis, who first proposed in the 1960s to widespread criticism the theory that all modern plant cells derived from such a symbiotic union, notes biologist Frederick Spiegel of the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, who was not involved in the work. That thinking suggests that all plants are actually chimeras — hybrid creatures cobbled together from the genetic bits of this ancestral union, including the enabling parasitic bacteria.
The remaining question is why this complex union took place roughly 1.6 billion years ago. One suggestion is that local conditions may have made it more beneficial for predators of cyanobacteria to stop eating and start absorbing, due to a scarcity of prey and an abundance of sunlight. "When the food runs out but sunlight is abundant, then photosynthesis works better" to support an organism, Bhattacharya notes. And from that forced union a supergroup of extremely successful organisms — the plants — sprang.

Nature

doi:10.1038/nature.2012.10048

http://www.nature.com/news/how-the-first-plant-came-to-be-1.10048

New Flame Retardant Substance

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-02-08/afac-launches-flame-retardant-substance/3819280

Rio Tinto reboots robot trains for US$518m

Rio Tinto has once again put autonomous trains on its agenda, saying that it will spend US$518 million on these driverless trains.

(Credit: Rio Tinto)

The first of these driverless trains will be launched in 2014 with the "AutoHaul" automated train program. The program itself will be completed in 2015.
Having driverless trains will allow the company to increase Pilbara production capacity without needing to buy more trains. It will also provide productivity improvements, according to the company, because it won't need to schedule driver-changeover times, and the automated trains will use fuel more efficiently.
This is the second time that the company has embarked upon the path of autonomous trains; it announced in 2009 that it intended to spend $371 million on driverless trains.
The trains were supposed to come online either last year or this year; however, the project was put on hold in 2009, when the financial crisis hit.
The company said at the time that the "easing of market growth" had "reduced the urgency" of the project. It also said that the project would resume when there was a pick-up in market demand.
In 2009, only a "lesser proportion" of the original budget had been spent.
Now it seems that Rio Tinto has decided that the project is viable. Last month, it released a report, which said that the costs of mining automation are outweighed by its benefits.
Today's announcement — along with Rio Tinto's decision to source 150 automated trucks from Komatsu for the Pilbara operations, which was announced in November last year — ensures Rio Tinto's lead place in the large-scale use of automation.
"Expanding Pilbara iron ore production is a high-return and low-risk investment for Rio Tinto that will enhance shareholder value. Automation will help us meet our expansion targets in a safe, more efficient and cost-effective way.
"Automation also helps us address the significant skills shortage facing the industry, providing a valuable opportunity to improve productivity."

He said, however, that he expects to see an overall increase in job numbers.
The AutoHaul train program is subject to state government and other approvals, according to the company.
The automated trucks and trains are part of Rio Tinto's 2008 "Mine of the Future" program. Aside from the trucks and the trains, the company has also been trialling a remote ship loader, and has opened a remote mining-operations centre as part of the project.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/rio-tinto-reboots-robot-trains-for-us518m-339332044.htm

Australian University achieves perfect single-atom transistor

Seeking to keep Moore's Law on pace, researchers have developed a repeatable technique for assembling a single-atom version of the transistor — the building block of semiconductors and computers.

Researchers were able to make a single-atom transistor with a scanning tunnelling microscope that includes the single red phosphorous atom and electrical leads for control gates and electrodes.
(Credit: UNSW)

Researchers are getting down to the atomic level in the pursuit of smaller and more powerful computers.
The University of New South Wales in Australia has announced it has made a single-atom transistor using a repeatable method, a development that could lead to computing devices that use these tiny building blocks.
About two years ago, a team of researchers from the Helsinki University of Technology, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the University of Melbourne in Australia announced the creation of a single-atom transistor designed around a single phosphorus atom in silicon.
Now a new paper published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology describes a technique for making this type of transistor with very precise control. That opens up the possibility that the method can be automated and single-atom transistors could be manufactured, according to the group at the UNSW.
"The thing that's unique about the work that we've done is that we have, with atomic precision, positioned this single atom within our device," said Martin Fuechsle from the lab. That level of control is important in order to fabricate the other components, including control gates and electrodes, needed for a working transistor, the building block of microprocessors and computers.
The lab members used a scanning tunnelling microscope to manipulate atoms at the surface of a silicon crystal. Then with a lithographic process, they laid phosphorous atoms onto the silicon substrate.
"Our group has proved that it is really possible to position one phosphorus atom in a silicon environment — exactly as we need it — with near-atomic precision, and at the same time register gates," Fuechsle said in a statement.
Group leader Professor Michelle Simmons from the UNSW said that until now single-atom transistors had been realised only by chance.
"But this device is perfect," she said in a statement.
"This is the first time anyone has shown control of a single atom in a substrate with this level of precise accuracy."

Work on alternatives to traditional microprocessor designs has been going on for years to maintain the pace of Moore's Law, which predicts that the number of transistors on a semiconductor doubles every 18 months. Intel last year announced it would start using three-dimensional transistors for its 22-nanometre process, a move designed to avoid the leakage of current that occurs at this very small scale. Other groups have pursued carbon nanotubes or graphene rather than silicon in the pursuit of miniaturisation.
The UNSW team hopes that its method of manipulating at the atomic scale can form the basis for quantum computers, machines that use the effects of quantum mechanics, specifically the spin of electrons around an atom, to represent digital information.
"This individual position (of a phosphorus atom in silicon) is really important ... because it turns out that if you want to have precise control at this level, you need to position individual atoms with atomic precision with respect to control gates and electrodes," Fuechsle said.
AAP contributed to this article.
Via CNET

US to get first nuclear plant in 34 years

• by: From correspondents in Washington
• From: AP
• February 10, 2012 10:05AM

THE United States' first new nuclear power plant in a generation has won approval after federal regulators voted overnight to grant a licence for two new reactors at a site in eastern Georgia.

Atlanta's Southern Co hopes to begin operating the $14 billion reactors at its Vogtle site, south of Augusta, as soon as 2016.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved the company's plans on a 4-1 vote.

The NRC last approved construction of a nuclear plant in 1978, a year before a partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania. That accident raised fears of a radiation release and brought new reactor orders to a near halt.

The planned reactors, along with two others in South Carolina expected to win approval in coming months, are the remnants of a once-anticipated building boom that the power industry dubbed the "nuclear renaissance".

The head of an industry lobbying group said the Vogtle project could be the start of a smaller renaissance that expands nuclear power in the United States.

"This is a historic day," said Marvin Fertel, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

He said the NRC vote "sounds a clarion call to the world that the United States recognises the importance of expanding nuclear energy as a key component of a low-carbon energy future that is central to job creation, diversity of electricity supply and energy security".

President Barack Obama and other proponents say greater use of nuclear power could cut the nation's reliance on fossil fuels and create energy without producing emissions blamed for global warming.

The Obama Administration has offered the Vogtle project $8.3 billion in federal loan guarantees as part of its pledge to expand nuclear power.

More than two dozen nuclear reactors have been proposed in recent years, but experts say only five or six new reactors are likely to be completed by the end of the decade.

The once-expected nuclear power boom has been plagued by a series of problems, from the prolonged economic downturn to the sharp drop in the price of natural gas and the March 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/breaking-news/us-to-get-first-nuclear-plant-in-34-years/story-e6freonx-1226267581630