Piezoelectric devices promise to draw power from your footsteps or heartbeat, change the channel on your TV, and complete all sorts of helpful tasks — but they generally work in the nano-mechanical realm, requiring synthetic materials to function. Now for the first time, scientists have built a piezoelectric device using biological materials — in this case, viruses. Future sneakers may come with a customized viral mat on the bottom, with millions of would-be pathogens working together to power your mp3 player.

Piezoelectrics use an accumulated charge in a solid material, which is generated in response to an applied stress. It holds promise for things like implantable medical devices, shoe-powered chargers and so on. Many new piezoelectrics use nano- or micro-structured materials that can be costly and toxic to work with, however. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory wanted to test viruses’ ability to work as power generators, to see whether they could serve as constantly regenerating sources of power.

What’s more, viruses can be useful construction workers. We have seen other researchers using them to build solar panels, for instance. This is partly because of viruses’ proclivity for self-arranging, which can eliminate some of the laborious assembly processes required for nanoscale engineering.

Scientists led by Seung-Wuk Lee, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Physical Biosciences Division, worked with a bacteria-attacking virus called M13, a rod-shaped phage that can be easily genetically modified and naturally orients itself into neatly ordered rows. It turns out the virus has piezoelectric properties, too. With some careful engineering that added negatively charged molecules, the team was able to boost the viral voltage and pile them up into a mat. A 20-layer-thick viral mat turned out to have the strongest piezoelectric effect.

The team tested their viral generator with a small LCD display, seen above. It works by tapping a finger on a small electrode, which has been coated with these engineered M13 phages. The phages’ proteins bend and twist in response, essentially converting the force of the finger-tap into electricity. It supplies about one-fourth the voltage of one AAA battery, according to LBNL. Not bad for a bunch of viruses.

The research appears this week in Nature Nanotechnology.

[via Science Daily]

We haven’t heard much about if from NASA yet, but the Telegraph is reporting that the space agency will soon begin training up an international crew of astronauts for a potential manned mission to an asteroid slated for later in the next decade. Starting next month, six astronauts are headed to the NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operation (NEEMO), the underwater habitat off the Florida coast that will serve as a simulator for the long duration mission to an asteroid, the UK outlet reports.

The multinational team of asteroid astronauts, which includes Britain’s first official astronaut with the European Space Agency, will spend its time living in tight quarters 65 feet beneath the ocean surface for 12 days, during which time crew members will undertake simulated spacewalks on the seafloor and learn to pilot vehicles in much the same way they would if they were working in proximity to an asteroid.

A manned asteroid mission would of course be unprecedented (if the private sector doesn’t get there first), operating far beyond mankind’s furthest point of exploration on the moon’s surface. A trip to an asteroid could take astronauts up to three million miles away. It would likely take a year to make the round trip, and astronauts might remain there for up to a month.

Details of NASA’s vision for such a mission are to be presented to the international community at the Japan Geoscience Union meeting later this month. The agency will also present details underlying a robotic asteroid rendezvous mission that it hopes will return samples from an asteroid by 2016 as a precursor to any manned mission.

[Telegraph]

Your office mates, whether they’re people or pets, can probably tell when you’re feeling stretched too thin — heavy sighs, hand-wringing and general signs of stress are fairly easy to spot. Yet your computer takes no notice, its beach ball of death spinning away incessantly and its processor failing utterly to work any faster. Now a new brain-computer interface could turn your computer into a more sympathetic partner, taking over some of your tasks when it senses you’re overworked.

The system, called Brainput, is designed to detect when a person’s workload becomes excessive and to modify said workload to make it easier. Erin Treacy Solovey, a postdoc at MIT, uses functional near-infrared spectroscopy to monitor brain activity and aid this brain-computer interaction.

Solovey and her colleagues used the fNIRS to determine when a person was multitasking, analyzing brain signals in earlier experiments to isolate patterns of activity. They could distinguish three specific states of multitasking, and developed classification algorithms for these patterns. The system works by strapping a fNIRS sensor on a user’s forehead — because hair interferes with the signal, for one thing, and also because the area tracks the anterior prefrontal cortex, which is involved in high-level processing.

Solovey and colleagues used Brainput with virtual robots, which were designed to adapt to the mental states of a dozen human volunteers. The volunteers had to send a pair of robots through a maze to find a WiFi signal, continually switching between both robots to keep them on the right paths and prevent them from crashing. As the volunteers’ brains began in a specific type of multitasking — a detectable state of activity known as branching — the robots took on more of the work.

Such a system could guard against distracted drivers by helping out when a person’s attention is just too divided. Or it could help workers who must juggle several tasks at once, perhaps air traffic controllers. “In any activity involving multitasking or
information overload, we could expect to see improvements in the user’s performance and experience,” Solovey and her colleagues write.

A paper on the Brainput system was presented last week at a Computer Human Interaction Conference in Austin, Texas.

[Technology Review via Extreme Tech]

Hat tip to astronomer Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy for digging up this gem of an image snapped by astronaut Don Petit aboard the International Space Station. Culled from NASA’s Flickr stream, the composite is a series of eighteen 30-second exposures stitched together to capture the motion of the ISS around the Earth, trailing the light from cities and auroras below as well as stars above.

The result is something close to psychedelic. Download the wallpaper-worthy super high-res version over at NASA: 2Explore’s Flickr stream, which, by the way, is chock full of interesting astrophotography. Like this. And this.

[Bad Astronomy]

The year 2245 is just too distant — we should build and commission a real USS Enterprise right now, cracking the champagne across her hull within 20 years, according to an enterprising engineer. The gigantic ship would use ion propulsion, powered by a 1.5-GW nuclear reactor, and could reach Mars in three months and the moon in three days. Its 0.3-mile-diameter, magnetically suspended gravity wheel spinning at 2 RPM would provide 1G of gravity, and the thing looks just like the “Star Trek” ship of lore.

This project is the brainchild of an engineer who calls himself BTE Dan. As in “Build The Enterprise,” which is also the name of his brand-new website.

“We have the technological reach to build the first generation of the spaceship known as the USS Enterprise – so let’s do it,” BTE Dan writes. He even sifts through the federal budget and proposes tax hikes and spending cuts to cover the $1 trillion cost.

Though the “Star Trek” connection lends the project an air of sci-fi fun, BTE Dan is hardly the only engineer dreaming up a next-generation spaceship to the stars. DARPA’s 100-Year Starship project is designed partly to foster ideas just like this one, from a project planning roadmap to a real ship.

The so-called Gen1 Enterprise would be built in space and would serve a triple function, as a space station, spaceport and traveling spaceship “all in one!” BTE Dan says. It won’t cruise the galaxy at light speed, unfortunately, but it could explore new worlds right in our own neighborhood, providing a constant acceleration to reach distant targets much more quickly. Its first missions would be to the moon, Venus, Mars and maybe Europa. Universe Today notes the ship’s onboard laser would be used to sear through the moon’s ice crust to allow a ship to drop into its oceans. Three additional nuclear reactors would provide electricity for this laser and other ship needs.

BTE Dan also crunched some numbers to prove he’s really serious. He proposes a matrix of tax increases and budget cuts in defense, health and human services, housing and urban development, education, energy and more. But he promises they will be small cuts and small tax increases, Universe Today notes. “These changes to spending and taxes will not sink the republic,” BuildTheEnterprise.org reads.

BTE Dan identifies himself as a “systems engineer and electrical engineer who has worked at a Fortune 500 company for the past 30 years,” Universe Today says. He is on Twitter as @BTEDan and he says he’s setting up a Facebook page where you can all go and like his project. His website keeps crashing, but we’ll let you know if we hear back from him.

[via Universe Today]