Wired News: Engineers Make Like a Tree.

Mussels are not attached as firmly in the fall as in the spring. This paper shows that the problem is not a gradual decrease in the number of byssal threads but that the threads themselves are of poorer quality later in the year. 

JEB Abstract

I’ll check into this soon, but glue from bacteria seems pretty biomimetic.  Apparently they use it to stick to rocks.

Yahoo! News.

DARPA’s latest call for proposals merited an interesting article in the Toronto Star.  The advanced projects agency has requested labs to submit research plans that will lead to :

the controlled arrival of an insect within five metres of a specified target located 100 metres away. It must then remain stationary indefinitely, unless otherwise instructed … to transmit data to sensors providing information about the local environment.

The preferred methodology is to implant computational units in the larvae and allow them to integrate with the nervous system through pupation.  A high goal indeed and one that is so far from any proven science that it certainly qualifies as ‘blue sky’ research.  Last year DARPA gave out 3.1 billion for equally outside the box, high concept research.  The Star article compares this to $325 million in similarly unconventional funding from the Canadian government.  John Polanyi, the Nobel Prize winning Canadian chemist points out that :

The long-term, out-of-the-box approach is why the U.S. is the world leader in science. Canada thinks in the short term. It’s all about wealth creation here, having business models, setting milestones for work even before it’s begun.

It is my strong belief that the most basic sort of research has to be funded at very high levels to feed ideas and capabilities into the engine of commercially applied research. DARPA is clearly an agency that manages to do this quite well. A strict accounting of the money they spend would reveal a host of failed initiatives, the by products of these are staples of research science and have had wholly unintended consequences.

TheStar.com - Uncle Sam’s scientists busy building insect army.

Imitating portions of the process of natural selection has led to the production of novel enzyme function.

By combining elements of protein engineering and directed evolution, researchers open the door to creating enzymes with diverse catalytic functions in a protein scaffold of their choice.

Hak-Sung Kim from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology recently described SIAFE – simultaneous incorporation and adjustment of functional elements. Reducing an enzyme to functional elements, then adjusting one element through random mutation, he was able to evolve new functionality from a well known enzyme. The parthway has great potential for directed evolution of enzymes that perform useful tasks.

Improving evolution - Nature Methods (subscription required)

The National Science Foundation has a CAREER award that rewards particularly promising young scientists with a 5 year (rather than the standard three year) research grant. The University of Delaware’s  Xinyan Deng has won one to study robotic flies.

…one of the goals of the research is to study the flight attributes observed in insects and to investigate the underlying principles that result in flight stability and also lead to differences in performance in order to develop a methodology and guidelines for designing flapping-wing microaerial vehicles.

Beside mathematical modeling and theoretical studies, Deng hopes to design and fabricate workable flapping-wing microaerial vehicles, or miniature flying robots, that are capable of stable and maneuverable flight with biomimetic sensors.

UD Press Release

The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a think tank based in Washington DC did a survey and found that there are more commercially available nanotech products.

Maynard and his co-workers found 212 products that use nanotechnology. This is double the number found by a similar survey carried out last year by EmTech Research, a pro-industry research group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Nearly half of these products were creams, cosmetics and supplements, designed to be applied to the skin or taken orally.

Nanobio is but a small subset of nanotech, but the increasing commercial viability has to be a good sign for the field.

Nature article (subscription required).

An interesting PDF by Roderick Wallace in which he makes a prediction about the uses of the first biomimetic artificial intelligence systems…to wit that they will be terribly unstable and prone to psychoses.

“The most likely use of the first generations of conscious machines will be to model the various forms of psychopathology, since we have little or no understanding of how consciousness is stabilized in humans or other animals.”

Psychopathic Robots Predicted. (robots.net)

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been funding several labs interested in basic sensory biology.  Their goal is to define a system that will allow remote control of a free swimming shark.  The project has been under way for two years now with the major focus on the olfactory and the electrosensory systems.   A recent meeting of the research group held in Hawaii has been reported in the New Scientist.  Jelle Atema, better known for working on lobsters, has successfully implanted an electrode in each olfactory tract that causes a shark to veer one way or another.  Tim Tricas is attempting similar things with the electrosensory system but is not yet able to build the interface with the shark.  There are apparently trials scheduled for the Atema system to be held in open ocean off Florida. 

New Scientist Article

Tricas Lab

The word biophotonics deserves a definition page on this blog.  I’ll get to that presently.  Before I do here is a site that takes a similarly broad view of the field to my own.  The University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute has a biophotonics initiative that includes the following fields:

* optical molecular motors (+ overview of computational biophotonics) (E. Gehrig and O. Hess)
* ultrafast imaging, spectroscopy and control (J. Allam)
* two-photon imaging (J. McFadden)
* applications related to wide band gap materials (D. Lancefield)
* application of optical-fibre techniques in biomedicine (A. Rogers)
* solvent effects in protein folding (?) (D. Faux)
* VCSELs for high power applications in medicine and sensing; tuneable devices for in-situ spectrometers. (S. Sweeney / T. Sale)
* ultrafast circular dichroism for biomolecular spectroscopy (B.Murdin)
* photodynamic therapy (S. Sweeney)
* new nanofabrication facilities (D. Cox)

The fourth one down encompass all those articles I have posted on butterflies and diatoms.

ATI Biophotonics page