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Healthy and unhealthy brain states – what role does electrical conductivity play?

A research team in New Zealand hopes to understand the physical changes that underpin the abrupt switches in brain activity between being healthy and awake, sleeping, or having a seizure.

Marcus Wilson, a biophysicist from University of Waikato, reported on the team’s efforts to understand such brain states as natural sleep, unconsciousness and seizures by using electrical measurement technology linked with computer modelling.

Acquiring a better feel for disease

The world’s first high resolution, 3D pictures of the flexibility of living tissues could lead to significant advances in disease detection, according to Brendan Kennedy and colleagues from the University of Western Australia.

Diseased tissues such as tumours give themselves away because they tend to be stiffer than surrounding healthy cells. Doctors can try to “feel” this variation in stiffness, but the new images produced at UWA promise a much higher resolution and more objective assessment of this property.

The team’s rapidly-acquired pictures of a lacerated finger are the first step towards clinical trials for the technique, the researchers say.

Bionic valves without the batteries

Implanted medical devices may no longer need batteries, says Ajay Tikka from Victoria University in Melbourne. Instead, he and his colleagues have developed technology that can wirelessly beam power to a device implanted under the skin.

Using that power to open tiny valves remotely in implanted drug delivery technology is one potential application, according to the team from Victoria University and the University of Adelaide. Another possibility is to use such power to download data from an implanted diagnostic device, they say.

Electronic paper makes itself

The next generation of flexible displays and electronic paper could build themselves, thanks to the discovery of a way of getting the materials comprising them to self-assemble.

A compound known to switch from transparent to opaque when triggered by an electric current can be programmed to assemble itself, says Scott Jones from the University of New South Wales. The resulting arrays could form the pixels of an e-paper display.

Diamond dust adds sparkle to medical imaging

A sprinkle of diamond dust could help doctors to diagnose disease better. Ewa Rej and David Reilly from the University of Sydney are testing nanoparticles of the precious gem for their potential to improve MRI scans.

They are examining the possibility that giving patients tiny amounts of nano-diamond will boost the contrast of images, making it easier to spot disease.

Diamond’s light touch

US researchers reported on their ability to create diamond nanowires which could one day be used to power quantum computers with many times the processing power of today’s supercomputers.

These diamond nanowires can provide the steady stream of photons needed for light-based quantum computers, says Tom Babinec from the Marko Lončar’s Laboratory for Nanoscale Optics at Harvard University.

A single electron reader for silicon quantum computing

Dr Andrea Morello reported on the progress of a team led by University of New South Wales engineers and physicists which has developed a “single electron reader”, one of the key building blocks needed to make a quantum computer using silicon.

Quantum computers promise exponential increases in processing speed over today’s computers through their use of the “spin” or magnetic orientation of individual electrons to represent data in their calculations.

“Our device detects the spin state of a single electron in a single phosphorus atom implanted in a block of silicon. The spin state of the electron controls the flow of electrons in a nearby circuit,” said Dr Morello, the lead author of the paper entitled Single-shot readout of an electron spin in silicon, which was published recently in the journal Nature.

Enlightenment on a chip

CSIRO researchers reported that metallic nanoparticles can be used as components of computers powered by light rather than electric currents.

The nanoparticles can control and manipulate the flow of light in photonic circuits in computers that should be much more powerful than their electronic counterparts.

Silk microchips for instant blood tests

The major protein in silkworm silk is being used by Peter Domachuk and his colleagues at the University of Sydney as a platform for sophisticated new health tests.

The protein, fibroin, is extremely strong and so bio-friendly that it allows long-term studies of the interactions of molecules which, until now, have been too sensitive to handle in the laboratory outside of cells. Fibroin is also transparent, and can be spun into structures that manipulate light.

Peter already has sensors for oxygen, and is planning a system that allows dozens of simultaneous blood tests.

From the chaos of stirring coffee to stirring rocks and cleaning up polluted ground water

Adding to chaos underground could help manage polluted water, according to CSIRO physicist Guy Metcalfe.

His team has been working on “chaotic advection”, which describes the motion of particles carried in a flow—from smoke drifting in the air, to the mixing of the milk into your morning coffee.

The same principle can be used to trap contaminated groundwater, and keep it continually rotating within a defined area, CSIRO researchers have calculated. Or it could be applied to encourage reactions between fluids and rocks that remove pollutants.

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