A 3D printer made this battery. It’s as small as a grain of sand. Credit: Ke Sun, Teng-Sing Wei, Jennifer Lewis, Shen J. Dillon

It’s the century of smalls, where tiny devices are top dog. Computers shrink into tablets, phones are limited only by screen size, and mini-microphones can fit onto a pair of spectacles or atop a tiny flying robot. Why not? If you’re going to bug someone, you may as well use a robot bug.

As microchips become more and more micro, one thing holding us back is the battery. To get a decent battery life, you still need a rather large and heavy battery. Even my humble Nokia (circa 2002, still works like a charm) is half as heavy if you take out the battery. Think how light my pocket could be with a better battery!

Light pockets are one thing, a light heart is another.

Pace makers depend on lithium iodine-polyvinylpyride batteries, and they must be reliable and long-lasting.

“The battery occupies major portion of the pulse generator in terms of weight, volume, and size. The most important factor for a cardiac pacemaker battery is its reliability. Unlike many consumer products, batteries in implantable devices cannot be replaced. They are hard wired at the time of manufacture before the device is hermetically sealed… In general the power source of the implantable device is the only component which has a known predictable service life, which in turn determines the service life of the implanted device itself.” – Mallela, Ilankumaran & Rao “Trends in Cardiac Pacemaker Batteries” Indian Pacing and Electrophysiology Journal.

Don’t get me wrong, batteries have come a long way over the past twenty years. But there’s always more juice to be squeezed, and when it comes to juicy technology you can’t go past the 3D printer.

To make the sand-sized batteries, a team from Harvard University and the University of Illinois printed layers of concentrated lithium oxide-based inks. The 3D printer squeezed out tightly interlacing anodes (red) and cathodes (purple) using a nozzle finer than a human hair. The ink hardened as it was placed. Then they enclosed the stacks of electrodes in a container and filled it with an electrolyte solution.

The tiny battery was built with interlacing stacks of anode and cathode. Credit: Ke Sun, Bok Yeop Ahn, Jennifer Lewis, Shen J. Dillon

Tests showed some impressive results for battery performance.

“The electrochemical performance is comparable to commercial batteries in terms of charge and discharge rate, cycle life and energy densities. We’re just able to achieve this on a much smaller scale,” Researcher Shen J. Dillon, University of Illinois, said in the press release.

Tiny and powerful batteries could make all sorts of new devices possible. Medical devices used not just for treating illness, but also for sensing infection or blood sugar levels, perhaps. Iron Man suits, now that would be exciting. And wafer-thin laptops, tablets and phones. Maybe I’ll wait until these new batteries hit the market before I update my Nokia…

The research was published in Advanced Materials yesterday, and here’s a video of the 3D printer in action.

Sun, K., Wei, T., Ahn, B., Seo, J., Dillon, S., & Lewis, J. (2013). 3D Printing of Interdigitated Li-Ion Microbattery Architectures Advanced Materials DOI: 10.1002/adma.201301036

In another video he talks about having to re-learn guitar in zero gravity, as his brain had to adjust for the lack of weight in his arm. At first, he would overshoot the frets because his arm felt weightless. Plus he would bumping into things while playing.

Chris Hadfield has 17 videos in his YouTube account, showing why you can’t cry in space (well, you can, but it just pools in your eye) and shaking up a can of coke while living on the ocean floor.

What a handsome chap! Tesla aged 36, photo by Napoleon Sarony.

This is the best crowd-funded campaign I’ve ever seen, mostly thanks to The Oatmeal. If you haven’t seen The Oatmeal’s web comics, well hurry over and find out why Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived.

To put it briefly: Tesla was genius who wanted to give all his inventions away for free, his story ended really sadly Edison took advantage of him, stole his ideas and refused to pay him, destroyed generators and blocked Tesla’s project to provide free wireless energy. That’s right. Free. Power. Wirelessly. We could have that right now if Edison wasn’t such a jerk.

And to top it all off – history has mostly forgotten him. Just like it has forgotten Alfred Wallace, who worked out the Origin of Species at the same time as Darwin – from the jungles of the Malay Archipelago. On that subject, I highly recommend watching “Bill Bailey’s Jungle Adventure,” which follows his magnificent adventures catching flying frogs and malaria.

Tesla demonstrates wireless power.

Now that the land has been purchased, there’s a massive clean-up underway. Apparently there are believed to be tunnels underground that might contain some of Tesla’s original experiments, so they’ll need to be secured and explored. There are also rumours of a giant underground resonance chamber…

To celebrate, there’s hopefully going to be an event in New York over the Summer – with more details to be posted on The Oatmeal as they’re confirmed. I would go, if getting to New York was a remote possibility for me, because The Oatmeal owns a Tesla coil and is going to fry up bacon sandwiches with 20,000 volts of pure, unadulterated science awesome.

It will take time and more funds before the Science Centre is open for business, and be sure I’ll blog about it when it is.

Congratulations to the not-for-profit Tesla Science Centre who are now the proud owners of the site. In the words of The Oatmeal:

“Mr Tesla. We’re sorry humanity forgot about you for a little while. We still love you. Here’s a goddamn museum.”

Check out the happy news on The Oatmeal for more information and to donate or volunteer.

That’s been the dream since before iPhone’s were released, and it looks like it’s a step closer now. New prototypes for shape-shifting mobile devices were unveiled today at the Computer-Human Interaction Conference CHI2013 in Paris. They transform on demand, bending up to hide personal information or curving around to make a console for playing games. The press release says they can even curl into a stress ball, which doesn’t sound very healthy for a smart phone, though I can imagine it might come in handy.

Here’s a nifty video of the “Morphees” in action.

There are a few different ways the researcher’s achieved this kind of movement. Some prototypes used wires attached to motors that pulled and pushed them. Others used memory wire, which reverts to its original shape when heated by running a current through the wire.

The research was led by Dr Anne Roudaut and Professor Sriram Subramanian from the University of Bristol. They have also introduced a new metric to help guide the developing industry – “shape resolution.” Like screen resolution, shape resolution allows different devices to be compared easily, measuring the ability to stretch, bend, curve and so on.

On a related note, researcher Roel Vertegaal from Queen’s University is working on thinfilm phones, called the world’s first paper computer. The work was presented at the same conference, CHI, in 2011. Here’s a quick video. Looks incredible.

Pretty keen to head over to the next CHI conference, which is in Toronto on April 26, 2014. Though it might be easier to get to the 2015 one in Asia, as it’s a bit closer to Australia. For more info on the conferences, check out the Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction.

Happy birthday blog! Credit: Captain Skellett. License CC BY 3.0

If you want to help me celebrate, why not buy me a beer? To date, the Schooner has been running on dreams and tap water, but I received a comment just recently from someone who wanted to donate to the blog. I was floored! Such kindness! So I’ve added a PayPal donation box in the right hand column to help A Schooner of Science stay afloat. Each beer purchased will improve the quality of this blog, by lubricating the brain and bubbling the soul (not to mention offsetting server costs). Cheers!

Perrottetia dermapyrrhosa, one of the newly described species from Thailand. Credit: Somsak Panha. License CC BY 3.0

Each of the species is only found on one or a handful of hills, some of which have become limestone quarries. Pretty impressive, as a quarry is not a friendly habitat for an animal whose main predator is the boot.

As well as coming in a range of fancy colours, the new species are characterised by nothing less than the shape of their genitals. All from the Perrottetia aquilonaria has a club-shaped penis and penial hooks (sounds painful?), while P. dermapyrrhosa has a long penial sheath, long, scattered penial hooks and vaginal hooks.

It seems like snail penises are a common way to distinguish between species, and there must be quite an art to it. Take this rather lengthy description of P. aquilonaria’s junk.

“Genitalia with a long, slender penis; penial sheath short, about half of penis length; internal wall of introverted penis with black to brown penial hooks; vas deferens passes through a short section of penial sheath before connecting distally to penis; vagina and free oviduct short to long, vaginal hooks may be present; gametolytic duct and sac may not extend as far as albumin gland; seminal vesicle present with about the same length from vesicle to talon.”

If you click through to the complete article, published open-access on peer-reviewed ZooKeys, you can even see some pictures of penial hooks and vaginal corrugated folds. Come on, what else are you going to do with your day?

Perrottetia aquilonaria, another newly described species. Credit: Somsak Panha. CC BY 3.0

It all sounds rather saucy, and top-notch science research, but I got caught up on this idea of a carnivorous snail. I mean, what IS that? It sounds like something from an old Doctor Who episode, back when the creepy alien du jour was footage of maggots, zoomed in so they looked gigantic. These day’s it’s terrifying ghosts with their mouth all screamy and sideways and it looks like something from The Exorcism of Emily Rose.

They may not be lions and tigers, but carnivorous snails are nonetheless vicious. Some of the species we have in Australia are small and are probably in your garden right now, others are big black ones that live in the Victorian rainforest.

Carnivorous snails hunt other snails, following their slime trail until they catch up with them. Now, most snails have a tongue like a rasp, and they eat lettuce leaves and such by simply licking them away with their tongue-which-works-like-teeth. Carnivorous snails upsize the rasp for big-ass hooks, and when they catch up with their prey they give them a lick and stick their hooks in.

If you’ve ever poked a snail, you know they slip inside their shell and produce gross foam to stop you poking them (no means no). Unfortunately they try the same trick when they get licked by a carnivorous snail, and the attacker has already shoved its hooks in so the snail unwittingly sucks the hunter right into its shell with it. Then the predator just licks away until there’s nothing left.

Actually, that does sound like a creepy Doctor Who episode.

Carnivorous snails also hunt worms, hooking ‘em and eating ‘em like spaghetti. There’s a great discussion of carnivorous worms on land and sea here on the ABC Radio website.

The research was performed by Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and the Natural History Museum, London.

Siriboon, T., Sutcharit, C., Naggs, F., & Panha, S. (2013). Three new species of the carnivorous snail genus Perrottetia Kobelt, 1905 from Thailand (Pulmonata, Streptaxidae) ZooKeys, 287, 41-57 DOI: 10.3897/zookeys.287.4572

I had just over a month in my home town (during which time I haven’t blogged so much, as I was seeing everybody back home and the house I was staying in didn’t have internet access), and then had to move again. This time to Melbourne, a larger city full of trendy coffee shops, where my partner is studying at University.

It’s a seven hour drive from Adelaide to Melbourne, and the cat would be coming too. Oh dear. Phobos is not one for cars. Like me, she prefers fresh air and sunshine to exhaust and headlights. She’s not good at hiding her displeasure. On the short trips we’ve taken before, she spends the entire time mewling most heartbreakingly, building up into a reverberating crescendo of “RAAAAAaaaaaaAAAAAaaaawaaarrrrr” and then panting for air. It’s quite upsetting.

That, for seven hours? Forget it! So we went to the vet and got some cat sedatives.

The vet gave us some ACP 10mg tablets, the active ingredient is Acepromazine. It is used for pets, including cats, dogs and sometimes horses. In the UK it’s not allowed to be used in horses intended for human consumption, which is hilarious in light of all the ruckus lately about humans eating horses without intending to. Perhaps a little anti-anxiety medication in the “steaks” would not have gone awry?

I shouldn’t jest, I was in the UK when the story broke and I’m pretty sure I accidentally ate horse. I must remember not to eat meat in the UK… you’d think we’d remember that from the mad cow outbreak in the 80′s. Speaking of mad cow, the fourth case in the US was identified in April 2012 in California, perhaps a month before I was there last year. Sure, it was in a dairy cow and bovine spongiform encephalopathy is not passed on by milk, but still…

Anyway, back to the cat! I gave her one tablet and within 15 minutes it had kicked in. Her eyes became unfocused and her third eyelids crept up. I’m glad the vet warned me of that one, it looked creepy – a layer of pinkish white arising from the corner of her nose and covering about a third of her eyes. The third eyelid has a protective function and it’s visible if the eye is injured, as a side effect of sedation, and during deep sleep.

Next she lost some motor control of her back legs and tail, like she had to move her whole hips to get her legs to move forward. Later she would start stepping backwards when she tried to curl into a ball, until she hit a wall and then stopped. She looked like a cowboy kitty.

The real test was when we got her in the car. She had a halfhearted meow or two, tried to look out the window, and then sat on my lap and rested quite peacefully. Acepromazine is an anti-anxiety drug, and she really didn’t seem anxious at all. Every hour or so she’d go for a little walk across our lap and quickly get worn out and go back to sitting with us or sleeping.

So it seemed good to me. She seemed less stressed.

Acepromazine

Perhaps it’s partly an age thing… I’m not sure I would sedate a kitten, for example. I have no problem with adult humans sedating themselves on flights, in fact I have a friend who does it due to extreme anxiety and sinus pain. But that’s also a question of consent, and even a grown cat can’t consent to taking drugs.

The next logical step in this conversation was “Do cat sedatives work on humans too?” And now I’m settled in Melbourne with high speed cable internet, I can tell you the answer for Acepromazine is yes, as it was used as an antipsychotic in humans during the 1950′s. However, it is no longer used in humans, and one of the reason’s that it is prescribed by vets is because it is much less likely to be misused recreationally than a morphine-based drug.

Chlorpromazine

I agree, I think there is an overprescription of behavioural and mood drugs. All drugs have side-effects, and they should be taken seriously – especially if someone is taking a drug long-term. Also, in my opinion, western society today has a particularly strict view on “normal” and people who don’t fit in with the norm are medicalised.

Chlorpromazine is still used long-term as a treatment for schizophrenia, and I’d rather not give an opinion on that because it’s such a complex issue. However, a long-term usage as prescribed by doctors is surely different to the descriptions in One Flew which was decades ago, very extreme, and let’s not forget, fictional. Both are different again to a short-term one-dose of the closely related Acepromazine to a cat.

It’s hard (often impossible) to know what’s happening in an animal’s head. Hell, it’s hard enough to know what’s happening in your own head sometimes! It’s entirely possible that she hated the experience, that she felt vulnerable and dissociated and confused – but there’s no evidence that this was the case. However, I do know (as far as it is possible to know) that she hates being in a car when she’s not sedated because she cries and cries. So for such a long journey I think the benefits outweighed the risks.

Altogether, I was pleased with Acepromazine. Phobos has completely recovered and is back to her usual inquisitive, scampering self.

One of the things I was most excited to see on my trip to London this month was the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Over 200 years of science history are within those walls, where Michael Faraday toyed with electricity and magnetism in the basement.

Today the basement is a museum, but it still has Faraday’s lab down there – at least a recreation – right opposite a mini modern lab all sterile white and bright. Personally I loved Faraday’s soft yellow lamplight on parchment and sprinkling of dark carbon… the old lived-in laboratory, where the mind is encouraged to jump between ideas and tinker with equipment. Give me a well-stocked garage over a chrome kitchen any day! I hate bright lights *hiss* *hides in the shadows*. I may be part vampire. I hear that’s trendy right now.

The museum wasn’t terribly interactive, but it was brilliantly nerdy – as in “ooh, this is the actual journal Michael Faraday wrote his results in.” That was cool actually, they had one journal full of experiences from taking different drugs (like laughing gas) where the scientist described what it felt like to be under the influence. There was a lot of drawings of Isaac Newton’s name (like a teenager might doodle in love hearts) – apparently he was an inspiration.

It’s a terribly fancy establishment, a nod to the days of top hats and cravats in illustrious May Fair. Right from the moment you walk through those big wooden doors you feel like you’ve stepped into a manor house, with proper marble busts of notable minds beside the staircase. If a cluttered desk of a scientist hides the lofty ideals of science, the Royal Institution sees to it that the art is esteemed and valued.

Painting by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (1793-1864)

Nonetheless it’s not a stuffy sort of place, especially not in December when they hold the Christmas lectures – which are more like shows for students with explosions and bright colourful demonstrations. As much as it values brilliant minds, it values young ones too. Children are encouraged not just at Christmas time but in the standard lectures too, I’ll get to that shortly.

Apparently the beautiful building and new conference rooms and updated lecture halls have come with a hefty price tag, that has now put the RiGB into several million pounds worth of debt. There’s now an online petition for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills to purchase the building (for 60 million pounds) to allow the RiGB to stay in their historic building indefinitely.

Off topic, it just occurs to me that a lot of Aboriginal Australians lost their historic land, and 60 million pounds would buy quite a lot of it back. Guess that’s not relevant though.

If you’re keen, you can read and sign the petition to save the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

I feel sure the government won’t let something as historic and important as the RiGB to simply be sold and moved. It would be such a waste. Even if they don’t buy the whole building, I’m sure they would sort something out.

On a snowy Friday night I was lucky enough to attend one of the monthly lectures, which was on biology and quantum physics titled “Quantum life: how physics can revolutionise biology”. It was one of those topics which is incredibly hard to wrap your head around, because the quantum world is so counterintuitive and downright weird that even Niels Bohr said “if you aren’t confused by quantum mechanics, you haven’t really understood it.”

For example, the speaker Prof Jim Al-Khalili said that during photosynthesis an energised electron will appear to take multiple paths through a cell to its destination, find out which is the most efficient, and then rewind time and decide it took the most efficient route all along. Say wha???

The part I most remember was a kid, probably 10 years old, asking at the end of the lecture whether a particle moving faster than the speed of light would constitute a paradox by Einstein’s theory and rip the fabric of space and time. No joke, a 10 year old. Mind. Blown. Everyone applauded, and Al-Khalili agreed it would, but fortunately that neutrino particle travelling faster than light which was announced a couple of years ago actually wasn’t, there was a mistake with the equipment. So the fabric is intact, no paradoxes have yet been found.

Since I’ve been back in Adelaide I’ve visited the sister institute, the RiAus a couple of times for Fringe events. It’s great to see it’s still going strong and thankfully a financially independent group that isn’t suffering the same issues as the RiGB. Though the RiAus is a bit smaller, I prefer the casual atmosphere it has and the fact that speakers are encouraged to mingle with the audience after a show. Just that fact is what makes science more accessible to the public, because it pulls down the boundaries and invites dialogue. I quite wanted to speak to Al-Khalili after the quantum life event, but he was taken into another room behind a curtain, and if he reappeared later I didn’t see it.

Far-advanced tuberculosis diagnosed by x-ray. Image from the CDC, accessed on Wikipedia.

Tuberculosis is a major health issue, with around a third of the world’s population infected with the bacteria mycobacterium tuberculosis. Not all these people actually have signs of illness, only 10% will go on to have any symptoms during their life. For the rest it remains latent, the bacteria is present but not causing any problems.

As tuberculosis is only contagious and dangerous when it’s active, that’s usually what people test for. Chest x-rays can check whether TB has affected the lungs, and are required for people travelling from high-TB countries to low-TB countries including Australia and the United Kingdom. The other avenue for diagnoses is the slightly grosser method of analysing the gunk people cough up, to see if there’s bacteria in it. For  mycobacterium tuberculosis, growing a sample in agar takes weeks.

A breath test would be a much safer and faster way to see if bacteria are present in the lungs, and that’s what our first paper is looking at. Researchers from the University of Vermont are finding out whether bacteria can be identified by their “chemical fingerprint,” a cocktail of chemicals that makes its way from the lungs to the breath. Their research is published in the Journal of Breath Research.

Now, it’s some time before police can pull you over for a quick TB test when you’ve been swerving off the road from a coughing fit. “Honestly, it’s just the flu!” But it’s got to be a cheaper option for many countries with low health care budgets.

TB poster, image from Wikipedia.

Read more about it here.

TB can be cured with a course of antibiotics, or more specifically a combination of several antibiotics that have to be taken for six months. Like Golden Staph, the bacteria that causes tuberculosis is becoming increasingly drug resistant. Drug resistant strains need different antibiotics and take 18 months or more to cure.

In Papua New Guinea, extensively drug resistant TB is a problem. A recent outbreak there and movement of patients to better health facilities in Queensland and the Torres Strait Islands has triggered alarm and, frankly, scaremongering media reports and political backlash. You can read about it on the Conversation, because I’ve been out of Aus too long to be in on the goss (but I’m back in a month, yay!)

The next weapon against drug resistant TB may come in the unlikely form of a traditional toothbrush. The South African toothbrush tree contains a compound called diospyrin, which inactivates an enzyme critical for bacteria reproduction (but does not affect the similar enzyme found in human cells.) The enzyme is a DNA gyrase… would you care to know how it works?

When DNA is replicated, the two strands normally joined in a double helix are broken apart, and you can imagine it’s like putting your fingers into a rope and pulling apart the strands. If this imaginary rope is a circle (as DNA in bacteria is) then it can’t just unwind itself at the ends. Instead, things will get messy, and the DNA will coil and twist up on itself. These “positive supercoils” are a bit like like twisting a shoelace until it bunches up, and is bad for the DNA. Gyrases relax the positive supercoils by cutting the DNA and moving one strand to the other side, then joining them up again.

Circular DNA supercoiling. Image by Richard Wheeler.

By stopping gyrase activity, the bacteria can’t replicate its DNA. The research by a team from the UK and South Africa described how this compound from the toothbrush tree interferes with gyrase, and importantly, that it acts in a different way to existing antibiotics. This will hopefully be a chink to exploit in the armour of drug resistant bacteria.

Here’s the paper from the Journal of Biological Chemistry and the press release.

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net