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FEBRUARY 9, 2004
Edited by Adam Aston Clues From A Beetle On Safer Jet Engines The Bombardier beetle is one tough bug. When harassed by a predator, the half-inch-long insect can retaliate in under a tenth of a second, blasting it with a rapid-fire jet of boiling-hot caustic gas. The beetle makes this toxic spray by combining two harmless chemicals in a millimeter-long chamber in its abdomen, then aiming the resulting agent through a turret-like nozzle at its rear. Now, Andy McIntosh, a professor of thermodynamics at Britain's University of Leeds, is creating computer-based models of the beetle's superefficient chemical reactor to help improve the reliability of jet engines. Currently, power-hungry electric reigniters are used to fire up an engine that has stalled out at high altitude. McIntosh suspects the beetle's unique heart-shaped reactor will inspire a design for a better reigniter -- one that's both smaller and uses less juice. In design, he says, it's hard to beat nature's best. Using Dye To Pinpoint Alzheimer's Research into Alzheimer's disease has long been stymied by the lack of a definitive way to detect the clumps of protein plaques and tangles that accumulate deep in the brain, killing neurons and causing mental deterioration. These deposits are found in no other form of dementia, but currently they can be identified only after the patient dies, by autopsy. A team of scientists from the University of Pittsburgh and Uppsala University in Sweden reports that a solution may be a combination of positron emission tomography (PET) and a new imaging agent called Pittsburgh Compound B. It is a fluorescent derivative of a dye used to identify plaque in Alzheimer's victims during autopsy, reengineered to allow it to cross the blood-brain barrier in living patients. In a trial of 16 patients diagnosed with probable Alzheimer's, the researchers said the dye stuck to those areas of the brain known to contain plaques when the disease is present, but not elsewhere. The work was reported in the Annals of Neurology. By Catherine Arnst   At Clinics, It's A Bug-Eat-Bug World Unleash a harmful virus into a hospital? Sounds dangerous, but in this case it's a threat only to a tough-to-kill breed of bacteria called methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Scientists at Britain's University of Warwick hope to fight the superbug by infecting it with a specially bred virus that will kill it before infection sets in. "MRSA is a huge problem for hospitals," says Warwick microbiology professor Nicholas Mann. At present, only one antibiotic will kill MRSA, and doctors say it's only a matter of time before the bug develops full resistance. After isolating so-called lysogenic phages -- viruses that live in MRSA -- Mann's team re-engineered them to attack their host. In time, he thinks the phages could be used to treat animals and plants as well, including bacterial infections on farm crops. Mann expects the method will work with other antibiotic-resistant bacteria, too. Now being tested as a nasal spray in clinical trials on human volunteers, this viral invention could hit the market within five years. By Rachel Tiplady Of Quantum Clocks And Keyboards -- Perhaps the greatest mystery of quantum physics is "entanglement." When atoms interact, they can forge a link that communicates instantaneously over vast distances. It's as if two clocks ticked in unison forever -- stop one, and the other also freezes. It seems high-tech clocks may benefit from this weirdness. Alex Kuzmich, a physicist at Georgia Institute of Technology, believes entanglement could be used to improve the precision of atomic clocks 1,000 times, to plus or minus one second in 30 billion years. Since atomic clocks help measure distance in global positioning system devices, the accuracy of GPS plots would be enhanced dramatically. Feasible? Only time will tell. 
-- Get the tiny keyboard blues when you use your personal digital assistant or handheld computer? For $99.99, there's a pocket-size antidote from iBIZ Technology (IBZT
) in Phoenix. It's a little laser gadget that projects the image of a full-size keyboard on any flat surface. The 2-ounce device uses infrared sensors to track the movement of your fingers across the virtual keyboard and can even emit audible clicks to mimic the real thing. By Otis Port
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