AGING-A BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Aging has lately been linked to mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) damage.

• Mitochondrial DNA provides energy to the cells; when damaged, they do not provide the energy they need to help you function properly and you get sick.
• Damaged mitochondrial DNA in genetic diseases is similar to damaged mitochondrial DNA seen in older humans, only the damage presents itself much sooner.
• Humans are programmed to overeat—to “store up for winter,” but by overeating, mtDNA produces oxygen radicals that damage our bodies.

Aging is definitely related to DNA [deoxyribonucleic acid] damage. But certainly, DNA damage, in and of itself, is not the whole answer.

The food that we eat is a source of our energy. Then, the air that we breathe is used to burn the food that we eat inside the mitochondria, and that is used to make heat and then energy to perform the work that we wish to do.

We eat fats and carbohydrates, specifically carbohydrates such as sugar. You can think of your mitochondria as little fireplaces; but instead of giving off light and heat, they are giving off heat plus they are trapping the light in the form of ATP [adenosine triphosphate], which is a small molecule that carries energy to the body to use for different things.

The mitochondria are unique because they have their own DNA (labeled mtDNA) and that DNA is the blueprint to determine how energy is generated and used. So, as we age in the process of making energy, the mitochondria also make oxygen radicals.Oxygen radicals over a long period of time can accumulate and ultimately kill off its agent —i.e. your body.

The mitochondrial DNA’s blueprints encode the wiring diagram for the electrical power of the house, and so if you disrupt the wiring diagram, then you don’t have the power. Then, you have the equivalent of a brownout inside the cell, which is what we call a mitochondrial genetic disease. All mitochondrial genetic diseases are energy-deficiency diseases, and they are commonly associated with things such as people feeling like they don’t have much energy; they have chronic pain; they have problems with seeing and their vision; they have problems with their heart; they have problems with their kidneys. All the kinds of tissues that need a lot of energy do not function well because the energy is not there.

The quantity of oxygen radicals produced by the body can be controlled by controlling the quantity of excess food intake .So a balanced diet with the requisite calorie intake can hold the key to make you look more like a teenager when u may actually be a septuagenarian.

So to keep your partner more intyerested in you and to maintain the glaze of your youth better watch out for the caloriemeter!!!!

NANOPHOTONIC SWITH DISCOVERY-A STAGGERING INVENTION

The advancement of technology over the decades has been mind boggling and the latest in the march of advancement is the discovery of the nanophotonic switches by IBM researchers.I recently came to know about it from the ELECTRONICS FOR YOU magazine.Here i would like to briefly share this information.

Another significant advance in IBM'''s quest to develop next generation high-performance multi-core computer chips which transmit information internally using pulses of light travelling through silicon instead of electrical signals on copper wires.

IBM scientists have developed the world's tiniest nanophotonic switch with a footprint about 100X smaller than the cross section of a human hair. With this development, IBM scientists have taken another significant advance towards sending information inside a computer chip by using light pulses instead of electrons. The nanophotonic switch is claimed to be an important building block to control the flow of information inside future chips and can significantly speed up the chip performance while using much less energy.

“This new development is a critical addition in the quest to build an on-chip optical network,” said Yurii Vlasov, manager, silicon nanophotonics, TJ Watson Research Center, IBM. “In view of all the progress that this field has seen for the last few years it looks that our vision for on-chip optical networks is becoming more and more realistic”.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Photonics, IBM unveiled the development of a silicon broadband optical switch, another key component required to enable on-chip optical interconnects. Once the electrical signals have been converted into pulses of light, this switching device performs the key role of 'directing traffic' within the network, ensuring that optical messages from one processor core can efficiently get to any of the other cores on the chip.

The IBM team demonstrated that their switch has several critical characteristics which make it ideally suited to on-chip applications. First, the switch is extremely compact. As many as 2,000 would fit side-by-side in an area of one sq.mm, easily meeting integration requirements for future multi-core processors.

Second, the device is able to route a huge amount of data since many different wavelengths or 'colours' of light can be switched simultaneously. With each wavelength carrying data at up to 40 Gb/s, it is possible to switch an aggregate bandwidth exceeding 1 Tb/s -- a requirement for routing large messages between distant cores.

Last but not least, the optical switch is capable of operating within a realistic on-chip environment, where the temperature of the chip itself can change dramatically in the vicinity of 'hot-spots', which move around depending upon the way the processors are functioning at any given moment. IBM scientists believe this temperature-drift tolerant operation to be one of the most critical requirements for on-chip optical networks.

An important trend in the microelectronics industry is to increase the parallelism in computation by multi-threading, by building large scale multi-chip systems and, more recently, by increasing the number of cores on a single chip. For example, the IBM Cell processor which powers Sony’s PlayStation 3 gaming console consists of nine 'brains', or cores, on a single chip. As users continue to demand greater computing performance, chip designers plan to increase this number to tens or even hundreds of cores.

This approach, however, only makes sense if each core can receive and transmit large messages from all other cores on the chip simultaneously. The individual cores located on today’s multi-core microprocessors communicate with one another over millions of tiny copper wires. However, this copper wiring would simply use up too much power and be incapable of transmitting the enormous amount of information required to enable massively multi-core processors.

IBM researchers are exploring an alternative solution to this problem by connecting cores using pulses of light in an on-chip optical network based on silicon nanophotonic integrated circuits. Like a long-haul fibre-optic network, such an extremely miniature on-chip network will transmit, receive and route messages between individual cores that are encoded as a pulses of light. It is envisioned that using light instead of wires, as much as 100 times more information can be sent between cores, while using 10 times less power and consequently generating less heat.

Silent, microchip-sized 'fan' has no moving parts, yet produces enough wind to cool a laptop

Engineers harnessing the same physical property that drives silent household air purifiers have created a miniaturized device that is now ready for testing as a silent, ultra-thin, low-power and low maintenance cooling system for laptop computers and other electronic devices.

The compact, solid-state fan, developed with support from NSF's Small Business Innovation Research program, is the most powerful and energy efficient fan of its size. It produces three times the flow rate of a typical small mechanical fan and is one-fourth the size.

Dan Schlitz and Vishal Singhal of Thorrn Micro Technologies, Inc., of Marietta, Ga. will present their RSD5 solid-state fan at the 24th Annual Semiconductor Thermal Measurement, Modeling and Management Symposium (Semi-Therm) in San Jose, Calif., on March 17, 2008. The device is the culmination of six years of research that began while the researchers were NSF-supported graduate students at Purdue University.

"The RSD5 is one of the most significant advancements in electronics cooling since heat pipes. It could change the cooling paradigm for mobile electronics," said Singhal.

The RSD5 incorporates a series of live wires that generate a micro-scale plasma (an ion-rich gas that has free electrons that conduct electricity). The wires lie within un-charged conducting plates that are contoured into half-cylindrical shape to partially envelop the wires.

Within the intense electric field that results, ions push neutral air molecules from the wire to the plate, generating a wind. The phenomenon is called corona wind.

"The technology is a breakthrough in the design and development of semiconductors as it brings an elegant and cost effective solution to the heating problems that have plagued the industry," said Juan Figueroa, the NSF SBIR program officer who oversaw the research.

With the breakthrough of the contoured surface, the researchers were able to control the micro-scale discharge to produce maximum airflow without risk of sparks or electrical arcing. As a result, the new device yields a breeze as swift as 2.4 meters per second, as compared to airflows of 0.7 to 1.7 meters per second from larger, mechanical fans.

The contoured platform is a part of the device heat sink, a trick that enabled Schlitz and Singhal to both eliminate some of the device's bulk and increase the effectiveness of the airflow.

"The technology has the power to cool a 25-watt chip with a device smaller than 1 cubic-cm and can someday be integrated into silicon to make self-cooling chips," said Schlitz.

This device is also more dust-tolerant than predecessors. While dust attraction is ideal for living-room-scale fans that that provide both air flow and filtration, debris can be a devastating obstacle when the goal is to cool an electrical component.

Developing long-term relations with robots

Scientists at Queen Mary, University of London are leading an international project which is set to advance the relationship between robots and humans, as part of new European project called LIREC - Living with Robots and Interactive Companions.

LIREC aims to create a new generation of interactive, emotionally intelligent, companion technology, that is capable of long-term engagement with humans – in both a virtual (graphical) world, and in the real-world (as robots). The project will also be the first in the world to examine how we react to a familiar companion entity when it swaps from a robot body into a virtual form, for example on a computer screen.

The Queen Mary team are leading a consortium of nine other internationally leading European partners, who intend to develop and study a variety of robots and other autonomous interactive companions during the four-year project.

Professor Peter McOwan, from Queen Mary’s Department of Computer Science, explained: “We’re interested in how people can develop a long-term relationship with artificial creatures, in everyday settings. You may not be able to find a robot that can help you do the dishes anytime soon, but we’re hoping to explore how such friendly future technology could be developed, and start to predict what the intelligent machines of tomorrow might look like, and how we should treat them.”

LIREC will first look at existing technology to study people’s perceptions of robots. This includes entertainment robots like Pleo, which is an interactive toy dinosaur available commercially; and GlowBots - small wheeled robots that communicate with each other and users through colourful patterns of light.

Other robots will include ‘iCat: the Affective Chess Player’ – a robotic game buddy whose behaviour and expressions are influenced by the state of play; as well as the child-sized minimally expressive humanoid ‘KASPAR’, and ‘peoplebots’, which are enhanced by humanoid features.

LIREC will also look for inspiration in creating synthetic companions from studies of the way that humans and pet dogs bond and interact.

The £6.5m grant involves partners from seven countries and will run for four and a half years. The project kicks off on 17/18 April when the research partners convene for the first time.

Nanotechnology could solve lithium battery charging problems

Nanotechnology could improve the life of the lithium batteries used in portable devices, including laptop computers, mp3 players, and mobile phones. Research to be published in the Inderscience publication - International Journal of Nanomanufacturing - demonstrates that carbon nanotubes can prevent such batteries from losing their charge capacity over time.

Mobile phones, mp3 players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and laptop computers usually use lithium-ion batteries to give them portability. However, Li-ion batteries suffer from degradation especially when they get too hot or too cold and eventually lose the capacity to be fully recharged. This means a loss of talk time for mobile phone users and often no chance to use a laptop for the whole of a long haul flight.

The problem of the slow degradation of Li-ion batteries is usually due to the formation of a solid electrolyte interphase film that increase the batteries internal resistance and prevents a full recharge. Researchers have suggested using silicon in the composition of the negative electrode material in Li-ion batteries to improve charge capacity. However, this material leads to even faster capacity loss as it repeatedly alloys and then de-alloys during charge-discharge cycles.

Shengyang's Hui-Ming Cheng and colleagues have turned to carbon nanotubes (CNTs) to help them use silicon (Si) as the battery anode but avoid the problem of large volume change during alloying and de-alloying. Carbon nanotubes resemble rolled-up sheets of hexagonal chicken wire with a carbon atom at the crossover points of the wires and the wires themselves being the bonds between carbon atoms, and they can be up to a millimeter long but mere nanometers in diameter.

The researchers grew carbon nanotubes on the surface of tiny particles of silicon using a technique known as chemical vapor deposition in which a carbon-containing vapor decomposes and then condenses on the surface of the silicon particles forming the nanoscopic tubes. They then coated these particles with carbon released from sugar at a high temperature in a vacuum. A separate batch of silicon particles produced using sugar but without the CNTs was also prepared.

With the new Si-CNT anode material to hand, the team then investigated how well it functioned in a prototype Li-ion battery and compared the results with the material formed from sugar-coated silicon particles.

They found that after twenty cycles of the semi-cell experiments, the sugar-coated Si-CNT composite material achieved a discharge capacity of 727 milliamp hours per gram. In contrast the charge capacity of the simple sugar-coated particles had dropped to just 363 mAh per gram.