The Romanian Ministry of Education, Research, Youth and Sport has asked universities to nominate replacements for the 19 members of the National Research Council (CNCS), Romania’s main research funding agency. Council members resigned en masse on 12 April to protest retroactive cuts in research grants.
Continue reading Romania to Replace National Research Council After Mass Resignation
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Madrid air pollution reaches alarming levels
First broadcast and published by Deutsche Welle: [html] [mp3]
You don’t have to step into the street for Madrid’s roads to pose a hazard to your health: air pollution from cars in the city might just knock you over. Scientists are finding links between the gases and disease.
Continue reading Madrid air pollution reaches alarming levels
Biofluids Fuel Microrockets
Chemistry teachers with a flair for the dramatic sometimes throw pure sodium into a body of water, causing a reaction that blows the sodium back out of the water and blows their students’ minds. Engineer Wei Gao, at the University of California, San Diego, thinks smaller. He envisions a controlled version of that reaction so small it would fit on one side of a 20-micrometer particle.
For particles that size, ordinary water is as viscous as tar is to us (see the classic lecture “Life at Low Reynolds Number,” [PDF] by Edward Purcell). One way to push through it is to use the fluid itself as fuel. In 2011, Gao and his colleagues dropped microscopic zinc particles into hydrochloric acid. The results weren’t explosive, but the researchers clocked their zinc particles scooting at 1050 μm per second, or around 100 body lengths per second. To simulate that, a 2-meter-tall human would need to swim through four tar-filled Olympic swimming pools in 1 second.
Gao’s propulsion system is great for delivering tiny payloads to a place like the stomach, which is also very acidic, but it isn’t so useful elsewhere in the body, where conditions are more benign. Such an ability would be useful, as researchers are interested in developing microrobots that deliver medical payloads precisely to their targets (see “Magnetic Microbots to Fight Cancer,” IEEE Spectrum, October 2012). Future particle-bots could deliver drugs, perform small surgeries, or repair damaged tissue.
Read the rest of this news story in IEEE Spectrum: [html] [pdf]
Spain nudges biotech from nest
The Spanish government has folded a nationwide tech transfer body into the central science foundation, ending a decade of special treatment for the biotech community. The Foundation for Genomic and Proteomic Development and Investigation, better known as Genoma España, was set up in 2002 in Madrid by the Spanish Science Ministry to incubate biotech businesses. Now its €4.5 ($6.2)-million budget is unlikely to go with it, Spanish science news outlet Materia reports. Continue reading Spain nudges biotech from nest