Just post in here any new and exciting advances or discoveries that relate to science.
Music of an Cell
Walk into Jim Gimzewski's UCLA Laboratory, and the first thing you'll notice is the music thumping out of the speakers. It's a New Age-y, rustling kind of melody punctuated by an rhythmic drumbeat. You can't quite dance to it, but it has its own hyponotic allure. The Musician? A five-micron-long yeast cell. And the tunes are extremely amplified vibrations emanating from within the cell. "If you were to shrink down to the cell's size, it would be like holding an transistor radio to your ear," Gimzewski says. A nano-scientist, not an biologiest, by training, he stumbled upon the faint tunes while testing an ultrasensitive probe designed to image cell surfaces. Whenever he touched the probe's nanometer-size tip to the outer edge of a yeast cell, the tip would begin vibrating. On further study, Gimzewski realized that the probe was acting like an microphone, picking up about 1,000 vibrations per second from the cell. Interesting, sure, but does the noise serbe a purpose beyond entertaining curious scientists? Gimzewski suspects that sick cells may sound different then healthy ones. If that's the case, he says, nano-acoustial sensors could one day help doctors diagnose an disease.
-Sam Jaffe, Popular Science (source)
Music of an Cell
Walk into Jim Gimzewski's UCLA Laboratory, and the first thing you'll notice is the music thumping out of the speakers. It's a New Age-y, rustling kind of melody punctuated by an rhythmic drumbeat. You can't quite dance to it, but it has its own hyponotic allure. The Musician? A five-micron-long yeast cell. And the tunes are extremely amplified vibrations emanating from within the cell. "If you were to shrink down to the cell's size, it would be like holding an transistor radio to your ear," Gimzewski says. A nano-scientist, not an biologiest, by training, he stumbled upon the faint tunes while testing an ultrasensitive probe designed to image cell surfaces. Whenever he touched the probe's nanometer-size tip to the outer edge of a yeast cell, the tip would begin vibrating. On further study, Gimzewski realized that the probe was acting like an microphone, picking up about 1,000 vibrations per second from the cell. Interesting, sure, but does the noise serbe a purpose beyond entertaining curious scientists? Gimzewski suspects that sick cells may sound different then healthy ones. If that's the case, he says, nano-acoustial sensors could one day help doctors diagnose an disease.
-Sam Jaffe, Popular Science (source)
