Blog: Proton-Based Transistor Could Let Machines Communicate With Living Things

Proton-Based Transistor Could Let Machines Communicate With Living Things
UW News (09/20/11) Hannah Hickey

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed a transistor that uses protons, instead of electrons, to send information, which could enable electronic devices to communicate directly with living things. "We found a biomaterial that is very good at conducting protons, and allows the potential to interface with living systems," says Washington professor Marco Rolandi. A machine that was compatible with a living system could monitor body processes such as flexing muscles and transmitting brain signals. The prototype device is a field-effect transistor, a drain and source terminal for the current. "In our device, large bio-inspired molecules can move protons, and a proton current can be switched on and off, in a way that's completely analogous to an electronic current in any other field-effect transistor," Rolandi says. The device uses a modified form of the compound chitosan, originally extracted from squid pen, because it works very well at moving protons by absorbing water and forming many hydrogen bonds that the protons are able to easily move between. "So we now have a protonic parallel to electronic circuitry that we actually start to understand rather well," Rolandi says.

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Blog: Fruit Fly Nervous System Provides New Solution to Fundamental Computer Network Problem

Fruit Fly Nervous System Provides New Solution to Fundamental Computer Network Problem
Carnegie Mellon News (PA) (01/13/11) Byron Spice

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Tel Aviv universities are drawing on inspiration from a fruit fly's nervous system to develop models for distributed computer networks. A fruit fly's nervous system cells organize themselves so that a few cells act as leaders that connect the other nerve cells together. "It is such a simple and intuitive solution, I can't believe we did not think of this 25 years ago," says Tel Aviv's Noga Alon. The researchers found that the fly's nervous system has an efficient design for networks in which the number and position of nodes is unclear, such as in wireless sensor networks, environmental monitoring, and in systems for controlling swarms of robots. In computing, developers have created distributed systems using a small set of processors that can communicate with all of the other processors in the network, a group known as the maximal independent set (MIS). However, computer scientists have struggled with determining the best way to choose an MIS, but after studying the fly's nervous system, the researchers created a computer algorithm that provides a fast solution to the MIS problem. "The run time was slightly greater than current approaches, but the biological approach is efficient and more robust because it doesn't require so many assumptions," says Carnegie Mellon professor Ziv Bar-Joseph.

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Blog: Meet the Data-Storing Bacteria [each cell can hold about 5 GB]

Meet the Data-Storing Bacteria
PC World (12/23/10) Elizabeth Fish

University of Hong Kong researchers have inserted 90 gigabytes (GB) of data into the DNA of a colony of 18 E.coli bacteria in an attempt to test its capability of storing electronic data. Bacteria possess enormous storage capacities, considering a gram contains about 10 million cells, and each cell can hold about 5 GB. Moreover, different types of cells are more radioresistant than others, which suggests that data in certain cells would survive a nuclear explosion. However, accessing that data is problematic. The researchers say that retrieving data from DNA cells currently is "tedious and expensive," and they note that stored data would be jeopardized because DNA cells can mutate. The team has only used genetically modified bacteria and copyright information data storing for testing.

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Blog: Researchers Open the Door to Biological Computers

Researchers Open the Door to Biological Computers
University of Gothenburg (Sweden) (12/09/10) Anita Fors

University of Gothenburg researchers have developed genetically altered yeast cells that can communicate with each other like electronic circuits. They say the technology could lead to complex systems in which human cells help keep the body healthy. "In the future we expect that it will be possible to use similar cell-to-cell communication systems in the human body to detect changes in the state of health, to help fight illness at an early stage, or to act as biosensors to detect pollutants in connection with our ability to break down toxic substances in the environment," says Gothenburg researcher Kentaro Furukawa. The yeast cells can sense their surroundings based on predetermined criteria and send messages to other cells using signaling molecules. The different cells can be fixed together to build more complex circuits, including electronic functions. "Even though engineered cells can't do the same job as a real computer, our study paves the way for building complex constructions from these cells," Furukawa says.

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