Australian Researchers Brew Recipe For Long Life Beer

Australian beer drinkers will soon have the option of buying a beer with a much longer shelf life, a new type of malt barley, developed by Adelaide researchers and a Japanese brewer, can curb beers propensity of tasting stale when left on the shelf.

The new barley variety ‘SouthernStar’ is the results of collaboration between the University of Adelaide and Sapporo Breweries. Importantly this new barley is not genetically modified, it’s been produced using conventional – albeit high tech – breeding techniques, utilising data from the recently completed Barley Genome Project .

South Australian farmers are to begin commercial production of the barley this year. Commercial crops grown in 2013 will be harvested in November/December, processed into malt in the first half of 2014 and used for commercial beer production in the later part of 2014 :: Read the full article »»»»

Garvin Institute Discover Critical Breast Cancer Protien

Australian researchers have discovered a key factor explaining the lack of effectiveness of some breast cancer treatments. Associate Professor Chris Ormandy from Sydney’s Garvan Institute says a protein he has been studying for a decade plays a critical role in the development of breast cancer.

The researchers have shown how a ‘transcription factor’ causes breast cancer to develop an aggressive subtype that lacks sensitivity to oestrogen and does not respond to anti-oestrogen therapies such as Tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors.

Transcription factors are molecules that switch genes on or off. In this case, the transcription factor known as ‘ELF5’ inhibits sensitivity to oestrogen very early in the life of a breast cancer cell :: Read the full article »»»»

Star Studded Line-up Announces Planetary Resources Asteroid Mining

What do Larry Page, Sergy Brin, Eric Schmidt, Ross Perot, K Ram Shriram, James Cameron, Peter H. Diamandis and Cahrles Simonyi  have in common? Last week one may have surmised ‘Their Pubicist’. The group had the internet all wobbly over rumours that they we’re about to start-up an inter-planetary galactic mining company. The press release – bottom of this page – was all about combining space exploration with resource extraction made it all but obvious that somebody was going to announce some very ambitious plans surrounding asteroid mining. Turns out it’s not a new idea, just a press junket!  Planetary Resources has officially unveiled its plans to mine in space.

Planetary Resources – www.planetaryresources.com -  the 3 year old company whose backers include the above list of luminaries, used the  Museum of Flight  in Seattle, Washington to launch a bold plan to prospect on resource-rich asteroids in space not far from Earth :: Read the full article »»»»

University of Pennsylvania’s GRASP Lab Unleashes Swarm of Nano Quadrotors

Remote-controlled quadrotor robots have been around for some time, but in the following video just released by a research team at the University of Pennsylvania’s General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception - GRASP – Lab, science fiction edges much closer to science fact as a swarm of the Nano Quadrotors perform some astounding maneuvers.

Admittedly, use of the term “nano” may be stretching things a bit, but even so, the capable little robots provide an interesting glimpse into what the future may hold for surveillance, search and rescue, light construction and warfare.

GRASP robotics researchers Alex Kushleyev, Daniel Mellinger and Vijay Kumar teamed up with developer KMel Robotics to program teams of up to twenty agile-flight-capable quadrotors to fly in various complex formations.

BAL Turns Seaweed Into Biofuel Using Genetically Engineered Terrestrial E-Coli Microbes

Researchers have genetically engineered microbes to process brown seaweed into biofuel. The work by researchers including Dr Yasuo Yoshikuni from Bio-Architecture Lab - BAL -  have partnered with DuPont, the US Department of Energy’s ARPA-E labs, and Norway’s Statoil to develop a chemistry that would unlock the energy in seaweed, creating a fuel that’s cheaper than any alternatives produced to date. In this vision of the not-so-distant future, BAL  foresee large underwater farms as a source of renewable energy.

BAL has built three seaweed farms on the Pacific coast of Chile. The BAL researchers have focused on brown seaweed because of  its high sugar content, which provides a good biomass. What makes brown seaweed a super green energy source? Brown seaweed doesn’t compete with food crops for land or fresh water, making it an übergrün energy source. Yoshikuni says “the seaweed uses a different type of carbohydrate called an alginate which cannot be broken down by the land based E. coli – Escherichia coli - bacteria normally used in industry”.

“This bottleneck means biofuel from seaweed is too expensive to compete with regular petroleum-based fuels,” Dr Yoshikuni said.

To overcome the problem, Dr Yoshikuni and his colleagues examined a marine microbe called Vibrio splendidus, which naturally metabolises and consumes seaweed in the ocean. ”We don’t know if we can scale up these microbes so we genetically engineered terrestrial E. coli microbes instead,” Dr Yoshikuni said. Read the full article »»»»

MoS2 Molybdenum Disulphide: The Future is No Longer Silicon Based?

Researchers have uncovered a material that they say has distinct advantages over traditional silicon and even graphene for use in electronics. Molybdenite, this mineral is abundant in nature and is commonly used as an element in steel alloys or, thanks to its similarity in appearance and feel to graphite, as an additive in lubricant. Incredibly the mineral has never before been studied for use in electronics, which appears to have been an oversight with new research showing that molybdenite is a very effective semiconductor that could enable smaller and more energy efficient transistors, computer chips and solar cells.

Andras Kis, director of Switzerland’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures, announced last week that the first working molybdenite chip has been successfully tested: “We have built an initial prototype, putting from two to six serial transistors in place, and shown that basic binary logic operations were possible, which proves that we can make a larger chip.” Read the full article »»»»

Global Warming Atmospheric CO2 Link Questioned

High levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may have less of an impact on the rate of global warming than previously feared, a new study suggests.

Associate Professor Schmittner notes that many previous studies only looked at periods spanning from 1850 to today, thus not taking into account a fully integrated palaeoclimate data on a global scale.

The authors of the study stress that global warming is real and that increases in atmospheric CO2, which has doubled from pre-industrial standards, will have multiple serious impacts.

But more severe estimates that predict temperatures could rise up to an average of 10 degrees Celsius are unlikely, the researchers report in the journal Science.

The new study suggests temperatures will rise on average 2.3 degrees under the same conditions :: Read the full article »»»»