Science and Engineering Blog

France - Luc Chatel, Secretary of State for Industry, announced Monday a call for projects with a budget of 250 million euros to finance the development of vehicles decarbonation.The call for projects concerning electric and hybrid cars rechargeable like their equipment.250 million euros will be allocated in the form of soft loans limited to 50% of the investment and the total by the end of 2010.”These loans, at a time when it is very difficult to obtain finance on the market, can have a real impact and a real effective,” said Secretary of State for Industry.Projects will be selected on the basis of “innovative industrial products based on technologies validated, their financial viability, the prospects for marketing supported by market research and prospects for job creation,” said Luc Chatel.The loan falls within the auto pact announced on 9 February by the Government to support the automotive sector, in addition to 400 million euros allocated to finance the research, as the 50 million paid by the ADEME (Agence of the Environment and Energy Management). manufacturers Renault and PSA have each received a government subsidy of 3 million.

Oregon, United States - After studying how birds move and breathe, a team of scientists says that they do not fall but not of the dinosaurs would have evolved independently.For decades, we know that the femur in the bird is nearly frozen, preventing these animals from running easily.But researchers at the University of Oregon have discovered that the bones also maintains their lungs, allowing them to breathe in the air. All other animals have walked on Earth, including humans, elephants, lizards and dinosaurs theropods (family, which includes the T-Rex) have a femur free of any movement.The discovery could force paleontologists to reconsider their belief that modern birds are direct descendants of old carnivorous dinosaurs. “It’s surprising that we did not understand a basic element of the biology of birds,” says researcher John Ruben American.Characteristics such as feathers, wings, and unique way that the birds to move to would be developed separately.Dinosaurs and birds have all flourished during the Cretaceous, there are 145 to 65 million years.The Archeopterix, long considered the oldest bird, lived there 150 million years when dinosaurs appeared earlier, there are 200 million years.According to Professor Ruben, birds and dinosaurs share a common ancestor, Karamuru vorax, who walked the earth there are 250 million years.”It seems now clear that birds have evolved their own side and not descended directly from dinosaurs theropods” concluded John Reuben.

Lyon, France - At the 48th Salon du Bourget aerospace, students from INSA Lyon prepare to unveil the first airship powered by solar energy.
This summer he will conduct its first manned flight, over the Channel.
A collaboration of about thirty students from large schools such as technical schools, the solar airship named Nephelios show will be presented to the Air Show to be held from 15 to 21 June. The upper part of the airship envelope is covered with flexible solar panels and power generated is transmitted to the engine power of the device which is located behind the steering pod.The project called Sol ‘R required a funding of 150 000, provided in part by Total, the ADEME and INSA Lyon.It is also sponsored by Gérard Feldzer, french famous aviator, now director of the museum of the air and the space Bourget. The construction of Nephelios is not yet complete, it is at the stage of the assembly, but its first flight test soon.This summer, it should be able to cross the English Channel. The Solar Airship is considered a real alternative to oil in the aviation sector. In addition to their low impact on the environment, airships interest more because of their ability to carry heavy loads and bulky.

Indonesia, Red Sea - Five new species of pygmy seahorses newly discovered in the Red Sea and Indonesia. All are less than 2.5 inches, dimensions that make them among the smallest known species of the genus. These new species of seahorses, as described in studies dated December 2008 and January 2009, are the first discovered since the last five years. Their discovery was made possible by repeated dives Wednesday Red and Indonesia, where the skills of scientists and photographers submarines, coupled with the sharp eye of local divers, have identified these specimens extremely discreet in the mid - coral reefs.Some of these species had been sighted in the past but had not yet been described. In the case of the hippocampus of pygmy Debelius, seen in 1993, it took more than 15 years to formally describe the species, named in honor of Helmut Debelius, the diver who has identified this tiny inhabitant of the Red Sea.Sara Lourie, McGill University (Canada), co-author of the study in December 2008 which identified some of these animals, said he seemed logical for scientists to name species in honor of local divers and photographers, without the work which they were never known.

How to get rid of invasive algae on ponds or along the beaches, the rotting of aquatic life? In the journal Applied Acoustics, a British team confirmed that ultrasound can help in the fight against this plague.

Periodically, lakes, ponds and oceans are saturated with algae fueled by excess nitrogen and phosphorus from agriculture in particular. So much so that the beaches should be closed regularly, the time to collect the algae decay. Some may be harmful to human health. In addition, these plants tend to pump all the oxygen at the point of suffocating the other living beings. (See for example the images in this article Rue89 on the Olympics in Beijing last year) Read the rest of this entry »

According to Christopher Voigt, a synthetic biologist at the University of California, San Francisco, where we combine a bit of brewer’s yeast with a gene from a salt marsh plant and grow a little-known bacterium found in a French site, so we have a cheap and to drive our cars rolling.

In theory, biofuels derived from plants can be a neutral source of energy, but many of them moving to food crops.Manufactured from cellulose-a structural material in abundant crop residues and grass, can solve this problem,but there is little effective processes for doing so.

Voigt’s team was looking for a way to achieve that microbes do the hard work, converting the cellulose in crop residues and grass in chemicals called methyl halides, which can be converted, in turn, using regular gasoline a simple catalytic reaction.

There are several plants and microorganisms that produce the methyl halide in small amounts naturally, using enzymes halide methyl transferase (MHT, for its initials in English), but only knew a few of these enzymes, so the team of Voigt began a search to find more.

Tracked the databases of DNA sequences for genes that produce proteins at least 18% similar to known MHT.Then they asked for a DNA synthesis company that manufactured the 89 overlapping genes uncovered and that the spliced into the genome of the bacterium E.coli, to see which of them produce methyl halides with more efficiency.

The winner was one of the MHT previously known genes, derived from Batis maritima, known as Barilla or purslane, a plant found in salt marshes of California and the southeastern U.S.But the puzzle was still not complete.Still needed to find a body in digesting the cellulose to smaller molecules that the yeast could easily become the substrate for the enzyme MHT.

Most of the microbes that digest cellulose develop slowly and only become effective at relatively high temperatures.The researchers needed an agency to develop more or less the same speed as the yeast and the same temperature it favors: about 30 ° C.After an extensive search in the scientific literature, they found the ideal candidate: a bacterium called Actinotalea fermentans, isolated from the 80 in a garbage dump in France. This bacterium excreted acetate, so if grown alone quickly poisoned herself with this waste product, but the yeast used as feed acetate.Voigt and his colleagues had assembled the perfect team of microbes: the A. fermentans converts cellulose acetate, which in turn is transformed into methyl halides by the modified yeast.

This is an inexpensive process, which takes place at low temperature and produces methyl halide can be easily converted into fuel.Researchers are now working on improving the efficiency of the process, altering the genes of the yeast to adjust their metabolism and produce more substrate for the enzyme from acetate MHT available.
Assuming that your system could function with the same efficiency with which yeast converts sugars into ethanol, the researchers calculated that its process to produce gasoline would be much cheaper to get oil.

Source: New Scientist

Women who have created the ass too big and too small chest could soon have an option to invert the equation. Fat cells are extracted from adipose tissue, then filtered using technology developed by Cytori Therapeutics, in order to increase the proportion of adipose stem cells and, finally, are injected into the breast. So far, the treatment, which is marketed in collaboration with GE Healthcare, has been used only in women who have lost a breast due to cancer, but they are about to begin tests with healthy women in the UK.

Previous attempts to use fat cells to increase unfiltered breast did not last long: the adipose tissue appears to be reabsorbed by the body, probably due to the absence of blood vessels that feed the cells injected. Increasing the number of stem cells in the mixture that is injected, Cytori said that his approach allows the fat and the vasculature are rooted in the breast tissue. According to a Times article published in the hearts treated with stem cells are more natural because the tissue has the same softness as the rest of the chest, said Kefah Mokbel, surgeon of the London Breast Institute’s Princess Grace Hospital.According to him, the treatment offers a possibility of improvement in implants: Implants are a foreign body. They are associated with long-term complications and require replacement.Although the technique of stem cells restores the volume, does not provide strength or elevation.

Mokbel cree that the stem cell treatment may be appropriate for only modest increases in size, although more research to see if you can achieve larger increases.

The same technique has been used in Japan for six years, initially to treat women with breast deformities caused by cancer treatment and, ultimately, to increase the aesthetic breast in healthy women.

Source: Technology Review