GE Intelligent Platforms has purchased SmartSignal, a company started by the University of Chicago based on technology developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.

The GE acquisition demonstrates why the University of Chicago creates start-up companies to prove new technologies, said Alan Thomas, director of UChicagoTech, the university’s Office of Technology and Intellectual Property. “It’s great to see technology from Argonne that was incubated through the University of Chicago be adopted in a much wider way by such a prominent company. This is the innovation process at work,” he said.

“Part of Argonne’s mission is to partner with industry and promote the economic interests of the United States,” said Argonne Director Eric Isaacs. “This is an excellent example of how research investments can lead to new opportunities, new industries and new jobs as technology developed in the laboratory is transferred to the marketplace.”

SmartSignal provides software and services that monitor machinery and equipment, analyze data, and diagnose developing problems before they become serious. It continuously monitors approximately 12,000 assets at more than 300 sites worldwide.

“SmartSignal provides GE with proven analytic software technology that delivers real results,” said Erik Udstuen, Vice President of Software & Services for GE Intelligent Platforms. “At GE, we are always striving to solve the world’s toughest problems, and today the reliability and efficiency of the world’s infrastructure — from energy to water to transportation — is an important problem to solve. We are excited to bring SmartSignal’s advanced technology to help a broad set of customers improve their operations and proactively address problems across a wide range of their assets.”

SmartSignal, its customers and its employees have received many honors for developing and using its technology in a variety of industrial applications, including the following:

• Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards, Software Division Runner-Up, SmartSignal;
• Illinois Technology Association 2009 Lighthouse Award Winner, SmartSignal;
• M2M Magazine 2008 Top 100 Leader in M2M, SmartSignal;
• Edison Electric Institute 2007 Edison Award Winner, Great Plains Energy subsidiary Kansas City Power & Light (a SmartSignal customer).

The company is based on patented smart technology that Argonne scientists developed in the early 1990s to predict pump failures at nuclear facilities. When SmartSignal was legally incorporated in 1995, the company consisted of two employees and eight patents. The company became fully financed in 1999 and became profitable in 2007.

Based in Lisle, Ill., the company now has approximately 100 employees. The company focuses its business on the power and oil and gas industries, serving scores of clients in Europe, Asia, Africa and North America, including Chevron, GenOn, Constellation Energy, Entergy and Delta Airlines.

The research that created the patented technology was originally funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy.

Argonne, which is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, owns the license for all power-generation applications of SmartSignal’s technology. A minority shareholder in SmartSignal, the university owns the license for all other applications. Both organizations will continue to receive royalties on the patents covering the technology.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America ‘s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLCfor the U.S. Department of Energy‘s Office of Science.

- Eleanor Taylor

Certainly, this begs the question to be asked: Why aren’t we using solar technology already?

Actually, we have been using solar cells for over 50 years!  Solar cells have predominantly been made from silicon however; the cost of producing solar cells has been a major detraction from its broad use due to the price of the raw materials and processing difficulties.  Thus the burning of fossil fuels is currently a more economical way to provide households and businesses with electricity.

Solar cells utilize semiconducting materials to convert the light into electricity by the photoelectric effect, and have typically been made from inorganic materials, predominantly silicon.

An alternative to the use of silicon is organic photovoltaic devices that use organic semiconducting polymers.  They are expected to have much lower manufacturing costs, ease of processing, and provide solar cells with better properties (lightweight & flexible), meaning more affordable solar cells with broader applications.  A leader in this field is Luping Yu of The University of Chicago who has developed many semiconducting organic polymers.

Luping Yu, Professor of Chemistry at the University of Chicago

Recently, his group and collaborators at Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory have provided systematic studies on the polymer architecture at the molecular level.  These studies have identified key factors for improving the power conversion efficiency of such polymers, which could enable the design and synthesis of a new generation of organic semiconducting polymers.  The highest reported power conversion efficiency is about 8%, albeit lower than that of silicon photovoltaic devices.  Higher efficiencies would translate to lower costs for the customers.

For more information about photovoltaic cells produce electricity, check out this video!

As the world becomes increasingly conscious of the environmetal concerns of using fossil fuels for energy, let’s hope the promise of solar energy garners more attention.  Hopefully, Yu’s research opens new avenues for the practical use of this green source of energy.

Here are some additional resources to learn a little more about solar energy.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/solar-cell1.htm

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201002687/abstract

http://lupingyu.uchicago.edu/publications/naturephotonics2009.pdf

http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja808373p?journalCode=jacsat&quickLinkVolume=131&quickLinkPage=56&volume=131

A new possible application of robotic exoskeletons has now come to light, thanks to a recent study from the University of Chicago – these devices may hold the key for patients hoping to regain the use of a paralyzed limb.

If there’s anything cooler than wearable robots, it’s moving things with your mind, and that’s exactly what these robots are designed to facilitate.  In their study, published last month in The Journal of Neuroscience, a research team led by Nicholas Hatsopoulos set up a system that translated brain wave activity of monkeys into the motion of a cursor on a screen, allowing a monkey to control the movement of the cursor using only its thoughts.

A robotic sleeve was fitted around the monkey’s arm, which moved the arm along with the motion of the cursor.  The researchers found that the robotic sleeve, which gave the monkey sensory feedback about how the cursor was moving, greatly improved the ability of the monkey to mentally manipulate the cursor.

The idea for the use of the robot came from what is known about how the brain usually controls movement of the body.  Imagine moving your arm: first, your brain tells your arm where to go.  As your arm moves, nerves in your arm relay information back to the brain about the arm’s position.  This allows the brain to make a new informed decision about where to move the arm next.  If the arm is paralyzed due to illness or injury, the brain can’t control the movement of the arm, but can often still receive information about the arm’s position (depending on the extent of the damage).

This is where the wearable robots come in – the robot does the job of moving the arm in response to instructions from the brain, and the arm keeps the brain updated about its motion.  In the study, this sensory feedback, so-called proprioception, allowed the monkeys to more quickly and more directly move the cursor on the screen towards targets compared to the case where the arm remained stationary.

Previous instances of devices that can be controlled by brain activity have relied on visual feedback alone, where the patient must watch the movement of the device.  The use of the robotic arm to add proprioceptive feedback more closely mimics motor control in healthy individuals.

The results presented by Hatsopoulos and his team are promising for patients with a paralyzed limb – devices with proprioception capabilities would offer a patient not only improved control, but also the ability to move the limb while looking away or with closed eyes.

Are robotic exoskeletons in the future for restoring the use of paralyzed limbs?  Only time will tell, but it’s safe to say that robot suits aren’t just for Ironman anymore.

See the press release from the University of Chicago here: http://www.uchospitals.edu/news/2010/20101214-robot-arm.html

Want to learn more about devices that can be controlled by the brain? Watch this video of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh explaining how monkeys mentally control a robotic arm!

About the Author

Minna is a Ph.D. candidate in Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University

In her current research, Minna is working to solve mysteries about how organisms form biological minerals (such as bones and shells) by looking at them in new ways using X-ray microscopes at the Advanced Photon Source.  Most of her work involves a type of green algae that she hopes to use for cleanup of radioactive waste, but she’s also had the opportunity to work with other fun organisms such as bees, sea urchins, mussels, and clams (although she definitely could have done without the bees).

]]> http://c2st.org/blog/move-things-with-your-mind%e2%80%a6-with-the-help-of-wearable-robots-by-minna-krejci/feed 0 http://c2st.org/press/age-doesnt-matter-new-genes-are-as-essential-as-ancient-ones http://c2st.org/press/age-doesnt-matter-new-genes-are-as-essential-as-ancient-ones#comments Mon, 03 Jan 2011 16:29:18 +0000 justin http://c2st.org/?p=4733 Courtesy: The University of Chicago Medical Center

New genes that have evolved in species as little as one million years ago — a virtual blink in evolutionary history — can be just as essential for life as ancient genes, startling new research has discovered.

Evolutionary biologists have long proposed that the genes most important to life are ancient and conserved, handed down from species to species as the “bread and butter” of biology. New genes that arise as species split off from their ancestors were thought to serve less critical roles — the “vinegar” that adds flavor to the core genes.

But when nearly 200 new genes in the fruit fly species Drosophila melanogaster were individually silenced in laboratory experiments at the University of Chicago, more than 30 percent of the knockdowns were found to kill the fly. The study, published today in Science, suggests that new genes are equally important for the successful development and survival of an organism as older genes.

“A new gene is as essential as any other gene; the importance of a gene is independent of its age,” said Manyuan Long, PhD, professor of ecology & evolution and senior author of the paper. “New genes are no longer just vinegar, they are now equally likely to be butter and bread. We were shocked.”

The study used technology called RNA interference to permanently block the transcription of each targeted gene into its functional product from the beginning of a fly’s life. Of the 195 young genes tested, 59 were lethal (30 percent), causing the fly to die during its development. When the same method was applied to a sample of older genes, a statistically similar figure was found: 86 of 245 genes (35 percent) were lethal when silenced.

Because the young genes tested only appeared between 1 and 35 million years ago, the data suggests that new genes with new functions can become an essential part of a species’ biology much faster than previously thought. A new gene may become indispensable by forming interactions with older genes that control important functions, said Sidi Chen, University of Chicago graduate student and first author of the study.

“New genes come in and quickly interact with older genes, and if that interaction is favorable by helping the organism survive or reproduce better, it is favored by natural selection and stays in the genome,” Chen said. “After a while, it becomes essential, and the organism literally cannot live without the gene any more. It’s something like love: You fall in love with someone and then you cannot live without them.”

The indispensable nature of new genes also questions long-held beliefs about the shared features of development across different species. In 1866, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel famously hypothesized that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” after observing that the early steps of development are shared by animals as different as fly and man.

Biologists subsequently predicted and confirmed that the same ancient, essential genes would be the conductors of this early development in all species. This principle enabled the use of model organisms, including flies, mice, and rats, to be used for research on the mechanisms of human disease.

Intriguingly, in the new study, deleting many of the new genes causes flies to die during middle or late stages of development, while older genes were lethal during early development. So while ancient genes essential for the early steps of development are shared, newer genes unique to each species may take over the later developmental stages that make each species unique. For example, many new genes in the study were found to be involved with metamorphosis, the mid-life stage that drastically transforms the body plan in animals.

“This may change the way we view the developmental program,” Long said. “Each species has a different species-specific developmental program shaped by natural selection, and we can no longer say that from Drosophila to humans the development of different organisms is just encoded by the same genetic program. The story is much more complicated than what we used to believe.”

As such, a full understanding of biological diversity may require a new focus on genes unique to each organism.

“I think it has important implications on human health,” Chen said. “Animal models have proven to be very useful and important for dissecting human disease. But if our intuition is correct, some important health information for humans will reside in the unique parts of the human genome.”

The newfound importance of young genes and unique developmental programs may have a dramatic impact on the field, Long said. The discovery will also inspire new research directions examining how quickly new genes can become essential and their exact role in species-specific development.

“Biologists have long assumed, quite reasonably, that ancient genes have survived natural selection because they are essential to life and that new genes are generally less critical to an organism’s development,” said Irene Eckstrand, PhD, who manages Dr. Long’s and other evolutionary biology grants at the National Institutes of Health.  “This important study suggests that this assumption is flawed, unlocking new questions that could lead to a deeper understanding of evolutionary processes and their impact on human health.”

The study, “New genes in Drosophila quickly become essential,” is published in the December 17 issue of Science. Chen, Long, and Yong Zhang of the University of Chicago are authors of the study.

The work was funded by grants from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the Chicago Biomedical Consortium.

Professor Roberto Lang, Director of the University of Chicago Noninvasive Cardiac Imaging lab, talks about the wonders of a new “3D Echo” technique.  This new technique allows a surgeon an “unprecedented, accurate” view of the location of the procedure, before he or she begins surgery.

University of Chicago Hospitals

Preparation is an important part of any surgery, and anticipating what a surgeon will see in the operating room is crucial to a procedure’s success. Echocardiography, the use of sound waves to take functional images of the heart, has been a key part of this surgical preparation for decades. With new advances in three-dimensional echocardiography, or “3D Echo,” this role is growing larger and larger, allowing cardiologists to assist surgeons in more exact diagnosis of heart disease and determining the best surgical plan to correct that dysfunction.

“This is progressing very quickly and in many diseases, it really, really changes the way that people think about cardiology,” says Roberto Lang, professor of medicine and the director of the Noninvasive Cardiac Imaging Lab at the University of Chicago Medical Center. “We can look at the heart and tell the surgeon what he or she is going to encounter at the time of surgery.”

At the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in November, Lang and colleagues presented several exciting new uses of 3D Echo to improve surgical procedures and patient outcomes. On Science Life, Lang talks about these new directions for 3D Echo, and features in a video on the procedure filmed earlier this year at the Medical Center.

]]> http://c2st.org/blog/your-heart-in-3d/feed 0 http://c2st.org/press/dark-matter-hunt-deepens-at-ont-mine-by-emily-chung http://c2st.org/press/dark-matter-hunt-deepens-at-ont-mine-by-emily-chung#comments Sat, 04 Dec 2010 05:31:26 +0000 justin http://c2st.org/?p=4392 Courtesy: CBC News

The hunt for an unknown particle that could explain one of the great mysteries of the universe has ramped up at SNOLAB, the deepest underground physics lab in the world.

The hunt for an unknown particle that could explain one of the great mysteries of the universe has ramped up at the deepest underground physics lab in the world.

More dark matter detectors

Besides COUPP, two other dark matter experiments are running at SNOLAB:

• The Picasso project, involving researchers from Canada, the U.S. and the Czech Republic, uses a similar superheated liquid but in the form of droplets dispersed through a polymer gel. Their 32 detectors were installed in November 2008.
• The DEAP/CLEAN project is a collaboration of Canadian and U.S. researchers who are watching for light scintillation caused by the interaction of WIMPs with liquid argon and neon at very low temperatures. A seven-kilogram prototype has been running since 2007, but the installation of infrastructure for full-scale 360 kg and 3,600 kg experiments are underway.

Researchers from Canada, the U.S. and Europe have recently set up new experiments at SNOLAB, located two kilometres underground near Sudbury, Ont., in hopes of figuring out the composition of dark matter – invisible mass that makes up about a quarter of the universe.

“You know it’s there from the way it affects things, by their gravitation attraction to dark matter, but you can’t visibly see it,” said Nigel Smith, the director of the facility, located in a spotlessly clean offshoot of the Vale Inco Creighton Mine.

University of Chicago researcher Juan Collar and his collaborators at the Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics (COUPP) think they may have a way to make dark matter show itself.

“We expect to have possibly even the best sensitivity to dark matter particles in the world,” Collar said.

The team installed and turned on the four-kilogram dark matter particle detector at SNOLAB this summer. The researchers have been remotely keeping an eye on the device, known as a bubble chamber, ever since, tweaking the system over time. They expect to reach their maximum sensitivity to dark matter particles within the next three months.

Many physicists hypothesize dark matter is made up of a theoretical type of subatomic particle called a weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP). Unlike the matter we are familiar with, which is made up of charged particles such as protons and electrons, WIMPs don’t have any electrical charge and only interact with other particles by gravity. That makes them very difficult to detect, Smith said.

“They would pass right through the Earth without noticing, generally,” he said.

On the other hand, physicists believe there are so many of these particles that, occasionally, they should crash into the nucleus of an atom and create a detectable signal. The problem is, the tiny, faint signal would be drowned out by the roaring din of signals generated by cosmic radiation at the surface of the Earth.

Extreme clean

But deep underground in SNOLAB, the level of cosmic rays is reduced 10 millionfold, Smith said. In addition, the lab space, purposely excavated starting 2004, has been painstakingly cleaned of all dust particles and is climate controlled. Researchers have to shower before entering to make sure they don’t bring any new dust with them.

That makes Collar optimistic about being able to detect WIMPs passing through the underground lab and into his team’s bubble chamber. The old, simple technology has been used to detect subatomic particles for decades.

The steel bubble chamber vessel at SNOLAB is filled with iodotrifluoromethane, or CF3I, which is often used as a fire extinguishing liquid. The liquid is kept at 30 to 40 degrees Celsius – superheated above its boiling point. That means anything that disturbs it could cause boiling and therefore bubble formation.

The system is designed to be disturbed by a collision involving a dark matter particle.

“I like to compare it with the opening of a game of pool,” Collar said. “Your cue ball is your WIMP, and when it strikes a material, it produces this tremendous mass of material flying in all directions.”

The particle struck by the WIMP hits other particles, generating disorder and heat. That creates a bubble that grows until it is one millimetre in diameter. At that point, the bubble becomes visible to a camera that automatically detects motion and triggers a series of actions. For example, the camera will save a video of the event.

Collar believes the system has a good chance of detecting dark matter because theories suggests WIMPs should interact through one of two methods – one of which is detectable with fluorine and the other with iodine. Both iodine and fluorine are present in the bubble chamber liquid. The researchers expect that a WIMP would leave a single bubble while other kinds of particles would leave multiple bubbles.

The team plans to return in the new year with a detector that at 60 kg is 15 times bigger than the original one and is working on a 500 kg one that will be deployed in 2013.

In the meantime, SNOLAB, which is an expansion of existing facilities constructed for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) solar neutrino experiment, has been busy getting its facilities ready.

Excavation of the new lab space was only completed in 2007.

“We’ve just really finished making it clean and installing the new infrastructure there,” Smith said. “This is an extremely busy and extremely exciting time for the facility.”

The last section of lab space is expected to open in the spring of 2011.

- Emily Chung

This month physicist Juan Collar and his associates are taking their attempt to unmask the secret identity of dark matter into a Canadian mine more than a mile underground.

The team is deploying a 4–kilogram bubble chamber at SNOLab, which is part of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Ontario, Canada. A second 60–kilogram chamber will follow later this year. Scientists anticipate that dark matter particles will leave bubbles in their tracks when passing through the liquid in one of these chambers.

Dark matter accounts for nearly 90 percent of all matter in the universe. Although invisible to telescopes, scientists can observe the gravitational influence that dark matter exerts over galaxies. “There is a lot more mass than literally meets the eye,” said Collar, Associate Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago. “When you look at the matter budget of the universe, we have a big void there that we can’t explain.”

Likely suspects for what constitutes dark matter include Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) and axions. Theorists originally proposed the existence of both these groups of subatomic particles to address issues unrelated to dark matter. “These seem to be perfect to explain all of these observations that give us this evidence for dark matter, and that makes them very appealing,” Collar said.

SNOLab will be the most ambitious in a series of underground locations where Collar and his colleagues have searched for dark matter. In 2004, they established the Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics (COUPP) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

“We started with a detector the size of a test tube and now have increased the mass by a factor of more than a thousand,” said Fermilab physicist Andrew Sonnenschein. “It’s exciting to see the first bubble chamber being sent off to SNOLab, because the low level of interference we can expect from the cosmic rays there will make our search for dark matter enormously more sensitive.”

The COUPP collaboration consists of scientists from UChicago, Fermilab and Indiana University at South Bend. In 2008 the collaboration released its first results that established an old technology of particle physics—the bubble chamber—as a potential dark–matter detector.

COUPP extends to the city of Chicago’s flood–control infrastructure, called the Tunnel and Reservoir Project. The city has granted COUPP scientists access to the tunnels, 330 feet underground, to test prototypes of their instruments. The collaboration also tested instruments in a chamber 350 feet below Fermilab, and in a sub–basement of the Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research on the UChicago campus.

Collar continually seeks underground venues for his research in order to screen out false signals from various natural radiation sources, including cosmic rays from deep space. “It’s an interesting lifestyle,” Collar said.

The troublesome underground radiation sources consist of charged particles that lose energy as they traverse through a mile or more of rock. But rock has no impact on particles that interact weakly with matter, such as WIMPS, thus the move to Sudbury.

“SNOLab is a very special, spectacular place, because the infrastructure that the Canadians have developed down there is nothing short of amazing,” Collar said. Even though SNOLab sits atop a working nickel mine, conditions there are pristinely antiseptic.

“As you walk in, you have to shower to remove any trace of dust,” he said. “It’s a clean–room atmosphere, meaning that there’s essentially no specks of dust anywhere. We have to worry about such things, sources of radiation associated with dust.”

Collar also is a member of the Coherent Germanium Neutrino Technology (CoGeNT) collaboration, which operates a detector that sits nearly half a mile deep at the Soudan Underground Mine State Park in northern Minnesota. The 60–kilogram detector that Collar and colleagues will install at SNOLab later this year, meanwhile, undergoes testing in a tunnel 350 feet beneath Fermilab.

Linking the two sites is an invisible beam of neutrinos that stretches 450 miles from Fermi to Soudan. The beam is part of the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS), a particle–physics experiment that is unrelated to the search for dark matter.

The two detectors rely on entirely different techniques. CoGeNT uses a new type of germanium detector that targets the detection of light WIMPS.

“Most of us have been concentrating on intermediate–mass WIMPS for decades,” Collar said. “In the last few years the theoreticians have been telling us more and more, look, under these other sets of assumptions, it could be a lighter WIMP. This device is actually the first of its kind in the sense that it’s targeted specifically for light WIMPS. We’re seeing interesting things with it that we don’t fully understand yet.”

Collar estimates that it’ll take a decade or more for physicists to become completely convinced that they’ve seen dark–matter particles.

“It’s going to take a lot of information from very many different points of view and entirely independent techniques,” he said. “One day we’ll figure it out.

- University of Chicago News

Join C²ST and University of Chicago’s Drs. Dorian Abbot & Raymond Pierrehumbert as we look to unlock our planet’s true climate history.

For more information: Dr. Abbott’s homepage and Dr. Pierrehumbert’s homepage

Thursday May 6, 2010

Northwestern University Chicago Campus – Hughes Auditorium

303 East Superior St.

5 p.m. Registration and Reception

6 p.m. Program

THIS PROGRAM IS NOW FREE. Those who have paid in advance will be reimbursed.