Developments to Watch
Edited by Otis Port
A Good Catch of Antibiotics--from Fish
Diminutive proteins found in the gills of striped bass may hold the key to a whole new family of antibiotics. The small proteins, known as peptides, were discovered by a research team led by North Carolina State University veterinarian Edward J. Noga. Dubbed piscidins, these molecules may explain why bass and other fish are able to fight off a wide range of bacterial assaults in the ocean, Noga says. He and colleague Oskar Zaborsky have launched a startup called Norcarex Bio to refine the peptides and test their efficacy against multidrug-resistant bacteria--a growing problem in hospitals around the world.
Piscidins belong to a class of compounds called peptide antibiotics. Noga and grad student Uma Silphaduang discovered them in the fishes' mast cells--a type of immune cell common in vertebrates. Indeed, humans also produce numerous peptide antibiotics, as a group of researchers at the University of California at San Diego report in the Nov. 22 issue of Nature. They describe peptides called cathelicidins that are found in tissues of all mammals and inhibit microbe growth in culture.
By Neil Gross
This Balloon May Be a Record Buster
Next summer, two daredevil Brits hope to ascend to the edge of outer space in a balloon. Andy Elson and Colin Prescot will try to float up 132,000 feet, or 25 miles, and break a 40-year-old altitude record. That record was set by U.S. Navy pilot Malcolm D. Ross and medic Victor A. Prather Jr. Their balloon climbed to 113,740 ft. in May, 1961--the day before Alan B. Shepard rode a rocket all the way into space.
The new balloon, designed by engineer Elson, 48, will be the biggest ever built--almost as tall as the Empire State Building. Underneath, he and businessman Prescot, 51, will ride in an open gondola, protected from the frigid, essentially airless environment by Russian space suits. The helium-filled balloon will be named after QinetiQ Ltd., the commercial spinout from Britain's Defense Ministry that is footing most of the $3.5 million tab. The pair will perform various weather and communications experiments for QinetiQ during the 12-hour flight and transmit a real-time broadcast from 25 miles up. The Elson-Prescot team already holds the endurance record for balloon flight: close to 18 days aloft in 1998, when they attempted to circumnavigate the globe but had to ditch off the coast of Japan. And in 1991, Elson piloted the first hot-air balloon over Mt. Everest.
On the Way: Digital Photos That Talk--or Sing
You've heard the buzz for years. One day soon, software wizards will marry sound with digital images so you can e-mail pictures of li'l Johnny to his grandmother, and they'll really come alive. Programs such as Microsoft's PowerPoint already let users mix images and sound in presentations. And some handhelds have toyed with attachments that match sound with pictures. But all of that is a far cry from searing sounds straight onto a digital photo. "It's always been the future thing," says IDC analyst Kevin Burden. "We've been hearing promises for 10 years now."
SoundPix Inc. says the wait is nearly over. The Lake Tahoe (Nev.) startup is developing PC software that will let users embed anything from a few words to a whole song in an image. Once the message is assembled, it can be zapped via computer, cell phone, or a future handheld device with a browser and a color screen.
The software includes security features designed with medical, insurance, and real estate applications in mind. For example, users can record multiple audio clips onto a single image--and specify which recipient hears what clip. This way, a physician could send the same X-ray with different messages to a patient and a fellow doctor.
By Roger O. Crockett
Innovations
-- A structure-monitoring system being developed at Purdue University might have prevented the Nov. 12 crash of Flight 587--if structural fatigue is what led to the loss of the plane's tail. The system sends high-frequency sounds coursing through metals and composites. Then, radarlike receivers analyze the sound waves to predict impending failure. Aside from planes, wear-prone parts of turbine generators, construction vehicles, and army tanks could be monitored.
-- Researcher David Cliff at Hewlett-Packard's British lab is developing a digital disk jockey to keep dancers hopping. It patches together various sound tracks, then speeds up or slows down the tempo depending on the vibes it gets from the dance floor. These are relayed by special wrist radios that track dancers' arm movements and pulse rates.
-- What followed the Big Bang that created the universe some 15 billion years ago? Until recently, the world's biggest supercomputers couldn't shed much light because they could run only crude simulations of the formation of the very first star and its follow-on relatives. Now, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, are sharpening our picture of the first stars using the hot new IBM supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. It can chew through as many as 1.7 trillion calculations a second.
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Copyright 2001, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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