Palm reading ATMs After the Tohuku earthquake in Japan, a large number of persons could not access the ATMs because they had lost their wallets in the resulting mayhem. ATMs are normally operated by credit or debit cards. The advent of biometrics have allowed the use of finger prints or other physical features to be read, in order to beat the card thieves. However, such methods still require the insertion of cards into the ATM machines. Now a Japanese bank has announced the development of new type of machines that do not require any cards at all, so that if they were to lose their cards, they can still withdraw cash from the machines. These machines will be introduced at 10 sites in September this year by Japan’s Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank. All that will be required to authenticate a customer will be their palm print, a four-digit PIN and their date of birth. The machine will scan the palm and compare the characteristic lines on the palm with those fed in its memory—no cards of any sort needed.
Thermoelectric fabrics A new thermoelectric material, named “Power Felt” was created by a team of researchers at North Carolina’s Wake Forest University. The material has the amazing property to utilise the temperature difference between the inner side of the fabric and its outer surface. The inner surface is warmer because it is heated by body heat, while its exterior surface is cooled by the wind. This temperature difference is utilised to produce electricity.
The novel fabric can be used for a number of devices that need power to operate. A mobile phone cover could keep the phone permanently being provided with power without connecting it into an electrical socket. It could also be used to have housings made of it that can power flashlights. It could even be used to power electrical devices in your car. Efforts are underway to make a thinner fabric using carbon nanotube technology.
Fighting obesity in novel ways Obesity can have adverse effects on health, leading to reduced life expectancy. It increases the likelihood of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, certain types of cancer, and osteoarthritis. The life expectancy, on average, is reduced by six to seven years due to obesity and is believed to cause over a million deaths annually in Europe alone. About 64 per cent of cases of diabetes in men and 77 per cent of cases in women are attributed to excess body fat.
Now a compound found in peanuts and grapes has been found by scientists at Purdue University to block immature fat cells from growing into mature fat cells. The compound “piceatannol” alters the functions of the genes involved in this process of fat cell formation (“adipogenesis”). It was found that the compound binds to insulin receptors of immature fat cells in the early stage of fat cell formation. By this binding action, the compound is able to block insulin’s ability to activate genes that carry out fat cell formation.
Gold nanostars to fight cancer Materials exhibit special properties when their size is reduced to the nanometre range. It is the extraordinary properties exhibited by such materials that have resulted in the field of “nanotechnology”—a very hot area in science and engineering today. One nanometre is a billionth of a metre (or a millionth of a millimetre), and nanotechnology involves substances that have a size between 1 to 100 nanometres (nm). To give an idea of the scales involved, the DNA double helix has a diametre of 2nm while the smallest cellular life form, bacteria of genus Mycoplasma, have a length of about 200nm.
A problem associated with the treatment of cancer by chemotherapy is that the drugs used also attack normal healthy cells and cause serious side effects. Scientists have therefore been searching for ways that will allow the cancer cells to be selectively targeted rather than using the “shotgun” approach that attacks cancer cells and normal healthy cells indiscriminately. Such a targeted approach would result in a significant reduction of the drug that is used because of the much smaller mass of the cancer cells, and cause correspondingly lower side effects.
Scientists at Northwestern University have now developed gold nanostars that deliver drugs precisely to a cancer cell’s nucleus. The drug to be used against the cancer cells is attached to the star shaped gold nano-particles. These nanostars carrying the anti-cancer drug are attracted to a protein on the cancer cell’s surface. This protein acts like a tiny shuttle service, carrying the nanostars to the nucleus where the drug is released, killing the cancer cells selectively.