Posts Tagged ‘headlines’
Approved for Use: the First Birth Control for Wildlife
Keeping wildlife baby-free is a hazardous business
An amorous deer is a dangerous deer. While pursued by stags, females often crash into backyards and run into traffic (deer cause about 1.5 million car crashes each year). Insurance claims for deer collisions are three times higher in November, when the animals are usually in heat. Finally, after three decades, a new form of animal birth control has appeared, this time without side effects.
The GonaCon vaccine for whitetailed deer is the first contraceptive approved by the Environmental Protection Agency for use in the wild. After a ranger traps a female, he gives the deer an injection, rendering four out of five females infertile, and thus unattractive to males, for up to five years. When injected, the vaccine, which was developed at the National Wildlife Research Center in Colorado, makes the immune system produce antibodies that bind to gonadatropin-releasing hormones, which inhibits the release of sex pheromones. This May, Maryland became the first state to add GonaCon to its list of approved deer-control devices, alongside bullets and poison.
But trapping animals to administer vaccine injections requires a lot of labor. And in some cases, it’s very dangerous. Take, for example, the four million tusked, up to 400-pound feral hogs that cause more than $400 million in damage to the Texas economy every year by digging up sweet potato fields and rooting where they don’t belong. Feral pigs are intellegent, elusive, and sometimes violent. Duane Kraemer, a professor of veterinary medicine at Texas A&M university, is working on a pig contraceptive delivered out of a feeder. The feeder uses cameras and facial-recognition software to give a dose to pigs and not, say, raccoons. Kraemer says that he hopes to field-test his feeder this fall.
The Incredible Shrinking Shot: Needles Get a Pain-Free Makeover
SKIN DEEP
Shots cause pain in two ways: a momentary pinch from piercing the skin and a muscular ache that can last for days. In May, the FDA approved a device that releases flu vaccine directly into the skin, avoiding the muscles (and the ache) altogether. The Fluzone Intradermal microinjector’s needle is about a tenth as long as the needle on a regular syringe and the width of a human hair. And because there are more immune cells in skin than in muscle, doctors could use less vaccine per shot, which could decrease vaccine shortages. The device’s manufacturer, medical company Sanofi Pasteur, says it will start shipping it in the U.S. this fall, just in time for flu season.
LOW PRESSURE PLUNGER
Mosquitoes use a combination of vibrating mouthparts, some smooth and some serrated, to discreetly extract blood. Engineers at Kansai University in Japan created a multipart needle that works like a mosquito’s (possibly the only thing we have to admire about the ): three individually motorized 0.04-inch-long needles—a smooth one for drug delivery flanked by two jagged ones—vibrate while taking turns advancing into the skin. The mechanism requires less than a third of the pressure of a standard needle to penetrate silicone skin test samples. The engineers hypothesize that less pressure causes less skin damage, which could also mean less pain.
PRICKLY PATCH
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University have developed a dissolving microneedle patch that could painlessly deliver drugs straight into the skin, leaving behind no sharp parts that could accidentally stick someone and spread disease. About 100 dissolvable, drug-loaded polymer microneedles (each about two hundredths of an inch long) fit on a Band-Aid-like patch the size of a quarter. The patch is easy to apply and can be stored at room temperature, making it particularly useful in poor countries where refrigeration is scarce and doctors may not be available to supervise injections. In clinical studies, the patch delivers drugs with almost no pain. A commercial version could be available in five years.
Building an Underwater Microphone Modeled on Orca Ears
Some deep-diving whales, like orcas, can change their internal ear pressure to match the pressure around them, which helps them hear much better. We made a hydrophone that could do the same thing. Its sensor has three silicon diaphragms. Each is one hundredth the width of a human hair and is covered with thousands of tiny holes that let water pass through. The deeper the sensor goes, the more water flows in, equalizing the pressure and making the sensor much more sensitive to sound. That solved one problem, but it also created a new one. The diaphragms move very little when sound hits them, especially when it’s deep, because water is not very compressible. The quietest sounds in the ocean will move a diaphragm just 0.00001 nanometers; that’s almost one 10,000th of an atom’s diameter. The motion is so subtle, the approach seemed like a dead end. But it turns out it’s possible to detect that movement with lasers.
In our hydrophone, a branched fiber-optic cable runs into the sensor; one branch has a laser and the other an optical detector. The laser shines light on the diaphragms. The diaphragms bounce light back to the optical detector, which translates the reflections into a measure of sound. The hydrophone can hear a range of 160 decibels—that’s like being able to detect whispering in a library and a ton of TNT exploding 60 feet away without distortion. At the low-frequency end, it mostly hears the seismic rumblings of the planet. At the high end, it detects the sound of water molecules bouncing off the sensor.
Kilic is an applied physicist at Stanford University.
Building an Underwater Microphone Modeled on Orca Ears
Some deep-diving whales, like orcas, can change their internal ear pressure to match the pressure around them, which helps them hear much better. We made a hydrophone that could do the same thing. Its sensor has three silicon diaphragms. Each is one hundredth the width of a human hair and is covered with thousands of tiny holes that let water pass through. The deeper the sensor goes, the more water flows in, equalizing the pressure and making the sensor much more sensitive to sound. That solved one problem, but it also created a new one. The diaphragms move very little when sound hits them, especially when it’s deep, because water is not very compressible. The quietest sounds in the ocean will move a diaphragm just 0.00001 nanometers; that’s almost one 10,000th of an atom’s diameter. The motion is so subtle, the approach seemed like a dead end. But it turns out it’s possible to detect that movement with lasers.
In our hydrophone, a branched fiber-optic cable runs into the sensor; one branch has a laser and the other an optical detector. The laser shines light on the diaphragms. The diaphragms bounce light back to the optical detector, which translates the reflections into a measure of sound. The hydrophone can hear a range of 160 decibels—that’s like being able to detect whispering in a library and a ton of TNT exploding 60 feet away without distortion. At the low-frequency end, it mostly hears the seismic rumblings of the planet. At the high end, it detects the sound of water molecules bouncing off the sensor.
Kilic is an applied physicist at Stanford University.
After Record-Making Flight, Martin Jetpack Will Soon Be on Sale
Buy one next year for just $100,000
Click here to launch a gallery looking at the finally airborne jetpack.
Martin had flown his machine thousands of times before the May launch, but never higher than a few feet. Since the jetpack’s first public flight in 2008, Martin and his team of 10 engineers haven’t changed its basic design: a two-stroke, custom-designed gas engine spins a pair of ducted fans that generate thrust. They did, however, convert the original cable-and-pulley steering system to an entirely electronic, fly-by-wire system. A cellphone-size flight-control unit made by defense contractor Rockwell Collins and commonly used in Predator UAVs allows Martin to set bounds on pitch, roll and yaw, and generally steadies flight, canceling out a new pilot’s jerky maneuvers (it also means no backflips, unfortunately). By adding remote control to the jetpack, its applications expand. A search-and-rescue team, for example, could remotely pilot a Martin Jetpack to a hard-to-reach spot in a disaster zone, instruct a victim to strap in, and fly him to safety. Or soldiers could use the jetpack to fly a mini cellphone tower to a hilltop for temporary communications.
Martin says that he hopes people will also use his jetpack for recreation. He’s designing it to meet FAA ultralight standards, which will limit the speed to 63 mph and flight time to around 30 minutes. Flyers won’t need a pilot’s license, but they will need about $100,000 to buy the rig, which includes a mandatory two-week training session. The first units could ship as early as next year.
THE PRIOR PACK
When Glenn Martin first unveiled his jetpack in 2008, it could hover only a few feet off the ground. He earned a PopSci Best of What’s New award that year, but critics argued that the jetpack would never get much higher than a few feet. The design’s fans, they said, were pushing air down off the ground for lift. Martin’s jetpack actually speeds flow to alter air pressure, generating lift at any height.
After Record-Making Flight, Martin Jetpack Will Soon Be on Sale
Buy one next year for just $100,000
Click here to launch a gallery looking at the finally airborne jetpack.
Martin had flown his machine thousands of times before the May launch, but never higher than a few feet. Since the jetpack’s first public flight in 2008, Martin and his team of 10 engineers haven’t changed its basic design: a two-stroke, custom-designed gas engine spins a pair of ducted fans that generate thrust. They did, however, convert the original cable-and-pulley steering system to an entirely electronic, fly-by-wire system. A cellphone-size flight-control unit made by defense contractor Rockwell Collins and commonly used in Predator UAVs allows Martin to set bounds on pitch, roll and yaw, and generally steadies flight, canceling out a new pilot’s jerky maneuvers (it also means no backflips, unfortunately). By adding remote control to the jetpack, its applications expand. A search-and-rescue team, for example, could remotely pilot a Martin Jetpack to a hard-to-reach spot in a disaster zone, instruct a victim to strap in, and fly him to safety. Or soldiers could use the jetpack to fly a mini cellphone tower to a hilltop for temporary communications.
Martin says that he hopes people will also use his jetpack for recreation. He’s designing it to meet FAA ultralight standards, which will limit the speed to 63 mph and flight time to around 30 minutes. Flyers won’t need a pilot’s license, but they will need about $100,000 to buy the rig, which includes a mandatory two-week training session. The first units could ship as early as next year.
THE PRIOR PACK
When Glenn Martin first unveiled his jetpack in 2008, it could hover only a few feet off the ground. He earned a PopSci Best of What’s New award that year, but critics argued that the jetpack would never get much higher than a few feet. The design’s fans, they said, were pushing air down off the ground for lift. Martin’s jetpack actually speeds flow to alter air pressure, generating lift at any height.
After Record-Making Flight, Martin Jetpack Will Soon Be on Sale
Buy one next year for just $100,000
Click here to launch a gallery looking at the finally airborne jetpack.
Martin had flown his machine thousands of times before the May launch, but never higher than a few feet. Since the jetpack’s first public flight in 2008, Martin and his team of 10 engineers haven’t changed its basic design: a two-stroke, custom-designed gas engine spins a pair of ducted fans that generate thrust. They did, however, convert the original cable-and-pulley steering system to an entirely electronic, fly-by-wire system. A cellphone-size flight-control unit made by defense contractor Rockwell Collins and commonly used in Predator UAVs allows Martin to set bounds on pitch, roll and yaw, and generally steadies flight, canceling out a new pilot’s jerky maneuvers (it also means no backflips, unfortunately). By adding remote control to the jetpack, its applications expand. A search-and-rescue team, for example, could remotely pilot a Martin Jetpack to a hard-to-reach spot in a disaster zone, instruct a victim to strap in, and fly him to safety. Or soldiers could use the jetpack to fly a mini cellphone tower to a hilltop for temporary communications.
Martin says that he hopes people will also use his jetpack for recreation. He’s designing it to meet FAA ultralight standards, which will limit the speed to 63 mph and flight time to around 30 minutes. Flyers won’t need a pilot’s license, but they will need about $100,000 to buy the rig, which includes a mandatory two-week training session. The first units could ship as early as next year.
THE PRIOR PACK
When Glenn Martin first unveiled his jetpack in 2008, it could hover only a few feet off the ground. He earned a PopSci Best of What’s New award that year, but critics argued that the jetpack would never get much higher than a few feet. The design’s fans, they said, were pushing air down off the ground for lift. Martin’s jetpack actually speeds flow to alter air pressure, generating lift at any height.