Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technology. Show all posts
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Patent Examiners in the field of Medical Technology
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
NASA Awards Space Technology Research Fellowship Grants
RELEASE : 11-246 NASA Awards Space Technology Research Fellowship Grants WASHINGTON -- NASA has selected the inaugural class of Space Technology Research Fellows. Eighty-one students will receive graduate student fellowships from NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist to pursue master's or doctoral degrees in relevant space technology disciplines at their respective institutions.
The fellowships program is managed for NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist by the agency's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. For information about the Office of the Chief Technologist and the fellowships program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/oct - end - text-only version of this release
This first class of Space Technology Fellows is part of NASA's strategy to develop the technological foundation for its future science and exploration missions. The program's goal is to provide the nation with a pipeline of highly skilled engineers and technologists to improve U.S. competitiveness.
"These fellowships will develop America's technology leaders for tomorrow, leaders that will help us out-innovate, out-educate and out-build our competitors and maintain our leadership in space," NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said. "President Obama has said, 'America's competitiveness rests on the excellence of our citizens in technical fields.' These grants are an investment in America's intellectual capital and our nation's future."
NASA Space Technology Fellows will perform innovative space technology research while building the skills necessary to become future technological leaders. Selected candidates will perform graduate student research on their respective campuses and at NASA centers and nonprofit U.S. research and development laboratories.
For a list of fellowship recipients, their research institutions and their research topics, visit: http://go.usa.gov/BfN
The fellowships program is managed for NASA's Office of the Chief Technologist by the agency's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. For information about the Office of the Chief Technologist and the fellowships program, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/oct - end - text-only version of this release
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Back to NASA Newsroom | Back to NASA HomepageThursday, April 18, 2013
Revealing hidden artwork with airport security full-body-scanner technology
In the latest achievement in efforts to see what may lie underneath the surface of great works of art, scientists today described the first use of an imaging technology like that used in airport whole-body security scanners to detect the face of an ancient Roman man hidden below the surface of a wall painting in the Louvre Museum in Paris. 
They described unveiling the image, which scientists and art historians say may be thousands of years old, during the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.
J. Bianca Jackson, Ph.D., who reported on the project, explained that it involved a fresco, which is a mural or painting done on a wall after application of fresh plaster. In a fresco, the artist's paint seeps into the wet plaster and sets as the plaster dries. The painting becomes part of the wall. The earliest known frescoes date to about 1500 B.C. and were found on the island of Crete in Greece.
"No previous imaging technique, including almost half a dozen commonly used to detect hidden images below paintings, forged signatures of artists and other information not visible on the surface has revealed a lost image in this fresco," Jackson said. "This opens to door to wider use of the technology in the world of art, and we also used the method to study a Russian religious icon and the walls of a mud hut in one of humanity's first settlements in what was ancient Turkey."
The technology is a new addition to the palette that art conservators and scientists use to see below the surface and detect changes, including fake signatures and other alterations in a painting. Termed terahertz spectroscopy, it uses beams of electromagnetic radiation that lie between microwaves, like those used in kitchen ovens, and the infrared rays used in TV remote controls. This radiation is relatively weak, does not damage paintings and does not involve exposure to harmful radiation.
"Terahertz technology has been in use for some time, especially in quality control in the pharmaceutical industry to assure the integrity of pills and capsules, in biomedical imaging and even in homeland security with those whole-body scanners that see beneath clothing at airport security check points," said Jackson, who is now with the University of Rochester. "But its use in examining artifacts and artworks is relatively new."
Artists, including some of the great masters, sometimes re-used canvases, wiping out the initial image or covered old paintings with new works. They often did this in order to avoid the expense of buying a new canvas or to enhance colors and shapes in a prior composition. Frescoes likewise got a refresh, especially when the originals faded, owners tired of the image on the wall or property changed hands.
The scientists turned to terahertz technology when suspicions surfaced that a hidden image might lie beneath the brushstrokes of a precious 19th century fresco, Trois hommes armés de lances, in the Louvre's Campana collection. Giampietro Campana was an Italian art collector in the 1800s whose treasures are now on display in museums around the world. When Campana acquired a work of art, he sometimes restored damaged parts or reworked the original. Art historians believe that Campana painted Trois hommes armés de lances after the fresco was removed from its original wall in Italy and entered his collection.
Jackson said that Campana's painting in itself is valuable, and the terahertz revelations may have added value by showing that an authentic Roman fresco lies under it.
To search for a hidden image, Jackson and colleagues, including Gerard Mourou, Ph.D., of Ècole Polytechnique, and Michel Menu, Ph.D., of the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France, and Vincent Detalle, of the Laboratoire Recherche des Monuments Historiques, probed it with terahertz technology. The process is slow, requiring a few hours to analyze a section the size of a sheet of paper.
"We were amazed, and we were delighted," said Jackson. "We could not believe our eyes as the image materialized on the screen. Underneath the top painting of the folds of a man's tunic, we saw an eye, a nose and then a mouth appear. We were seeing what likely was part of an ancient Roman fresco, thousands of years old."
Who is the man in the fresco? An imperial Roman senator? A patrician? A plebian? A great orator? A ruler who changed the course of history? Or just a wealthy, egotistical landowner who wanted to admire his image on the wall?
Jackson is leaving those questions to art historians. The team already has moved ahead and used terahertz technology to study a Russian religious icon and the walls of a mud hut in one of the earliest known human settlements in what now is the country of Turkey.
More information: Abstract
Terahertz pulse imaging and spectroscopy is emerging as a tool of high potential for the nondestructive investigation of historical artworks, architecture and archaeological objects for the purpose of research and conservation. We studied a section of the fresco Trois hommes armés de lances from the Louvre's Campana collection using time-domain terahertz imaging. The top painting is 19th C, while the support is composed of wall sections recovered from Roman ruins. No previous technique, including X-ray radiography, XRF, infrared photography, infrared reflectometry and UV florescence, has produced an image of a lost fresco beneath the painting. A composite of the photograph of the section and the composite terahertz image reveals a face hidden beneath the 1st man's drape. Other examples of this application will also be presented, including a Russian icon, a wall painting from the Riga Dom cathedral and a Neolithic site from Catalhoyuk Turkey.
Safety reflector technology from footwear getting new life in detecting bioterror threats
Tiny versions of the reflectors on sneakers and bicycle fenders that help ensure the safety of runners and bikers at night are moving toward another role in detecting bioterrorism threats and diagnosing everyday infectious diseases, scientists said today.
Their report on progress in using these innovative "retroreflectors"—the same technology that increases the night-time visibility of traffic signs—was among almost 12,000 on the agenda of the 245th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society.
"Our goal is the development of an ultrasensitive, all-in-one device that can quickly tell first-responders exactly which disease-causing microbe has been used in a bioterrorism attack," said Richard Willson, Ph.D., who leads the research. "In the most likely kind of attack, large numbers of people would start getting sick with symptoms that could be from multiple infectious agents. But which one? The availability of an instrument capable of detecting several agents simultaneously would greatly enhance our response to a possible bioterror attack or the emergence of a disease not often seen here."
Willson's team is developing another version of the technology intended for use in doctors' offices and clinics for rapid, on-site diagnosis of common infectious diseases before patients leave. Eliminating the need to wait for test results from an outside laboratory could allow patients to get the right treatment sooner and recover sooner, Willson noted.
One of those tests focuses on detecting norovirus, the dreaded "cruise ship virus," or "winter vomiting virus," which strikes more than 20 million people annually in the United States alone. Norovirus was in the headlines last December when it struck 220 people on the Queen Mary II.
Balakrishnan Raja, the member of Willson's team at the University of Houston (UH) who presented the report, pointed out that retroreflectors may be the most visually detectable devices ever made by humanity. They work on the project with colleagues at UH, the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston and the Sandia National Laboratories branch in Livermore, Calif. The devices reflect light directly back to its source in a way that produces extreme brightness. One version of retroreflection effect occurs when someone shines a flashlight in a mirror. The reflection is so bright that looking at it hurts.
Although most people have never heard the term "retroreflector," these devices are not new, Raja pointed out. The Apollo 11 astronauts, for instance, left a laser-ranging retroreflector on the moon during the first lunar landing mission in 1969. Scientists still use the device to study the moon's orbit. And they are ubiquitous fixtures in road signs, traffic lane markers and elsewhere in everyday life.
Willson's collaborator Paul Ruchhoeft of UH has developed a way of making retroreflectors so small that more than 200 would fit inside the period at the end of this sentence. The retroreflectors then become part of a lab-on-a-chip, or a microfluidic device, with minute channels for processing "microliter"-scale amounts of blood or other fluids. A microliter is one-millionth of a liter (a liter is about one quart). A drop of water contains about 50 microliters.
When a sample of fluid that doesn't contain disease-causing viruses or bacteria flows through those channels to the retroreflectors, they shine brightly. A sample containing bacteria, however, makes portions of the reflectors go dark, signaling a positive test result. Raja explained that the change from bright to dark is one of several advantages of the retroreflector technology, compared to existing ways of detecting disease-causing microbes. It can be detected with simple optical devices, rather than expensive, complex optics. The retroreflector technology also avoids the need to specially prepare samples for analysis and is faster.
"Right now, we have seven channels in our device," Raja said. "So we can test for seven different infections at once, but we could make more channels. That's one of our long-term goals—to multiplex the device and detect many pathogens at once."
They have demonstrated clinically useful sensitivity on samples containing Rickettsia conorii, a bioterrorism threat that causes Mediterranean spotted fever, and others are on the agenda. A new version of the technology involves retroreflector cubes that can be suspended in samples of fluid. Willson's team initially will use it on norovirus with the goal of developing a device that can raise a red flag on norovirus viral contamination and prevent the disease's wildfire-like spread.
More information: Abstract
Ultrasensitive and rapid pathogen detection generally relies on nucleic acid extraction followed by amplification, or labeling with dyes, enzymes or fluors, which require elaborate instrumentation. This work introduces embedded, microfabricated linear retroreflectors as bio-sensing surfaces, using micron-sized magnetic particles as light-blocking labels in a highly sensitive diagnostic immunoassay. Retroreflectors return light directly to its source and are easily detectable using inexpensive optics. The pathogen is immunocaptured by a sensing surface following immunomagnetic separation and concentration from a complex sample. An automated difference imaging algorithm that detects single 3.0 µm magnetic particles without optical calibration is used to quantify the number of labels bound to each from each 1 sq. mm. array of retroreflectors. An assay for the detection of Rickettsia conorii is implemented in a microfluidic format with fluidic force discrimination to enhance reproducibility and specificity, with a current limit of detection of less than 4000 bacteria per mL.
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