I believe this is the next step on the way to the development of nanotech cell repair mechanisms. With this kind of detail, developers will know exactly what environment the nanobots will be dealing with:

“We have shown that at ultrasonic frequencies, intracellular nanomaterial causes sufficient wave scattering that a probe outside the cell can detect it,” said Ali Passian of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. “This provides a non-invasive way of looking inside a cell, so eliminating the need to cut up the cell or inject artificial light-emitting molecules into it to find out whether or not a certain type of nanoparticle is present.”

Nanoparticles show great promise for medical applications, such as drug delivery, but their toxic effects need to be investigated. Scientists would therefore like to visualize nanoparticles inside cell structures to see how the particles enter and interact with cells.

The team, which includes researchers from the University of Tennessee and Northwestern University in Illinois, exposed mice to single-walled carbon nanohorn particles. The researchers killed the mice a few days later and isolated macrophages from the animals’ lungs and red blood cells. They placed the cells on a substrate that they vibrated at ultrasonic frequencies of around 4 MHz.

Travelling vibrations
As the vibrations travel through the cells, different delays or phase shifts are created depending on the cell’s composition. By measuring these phase shifts, Passian and colleagues were able to build up a map of the cell interior (see figure). Analysis of the maps revealed nanoparticles between about 70 and 110 nm in size inside lung macrophages and blood cells.

“Our method provides an alternative way to study a cell under ambient conditions without the need to place it in a vacuum, coat it with metal, bombard it with electrons or insert other molecules into it,” explained Passian. “This is not the case with other techniques, such as electron microscopy or fluorescence tagging.”

IN 1968 3M chemist Spencer Silver invented a glue that didn’t stick very well.

“Pessimists would have called this a failure; Silver viewed it as a challenging puzzle. What could an underachieving adhesive be useful for? Silver pondered this question, and he posed it to his 3M colleagues as well. But while many people found the adhesive scientifically interesting, no one proposed any practical applications for it. In time, Silver decided one potential product was a bulletin board, and in the early seventies, 3M introduced a product called the Post-it Bulletin Board. �It was literally a piece of paper that had a photograph of a cork bulletin board on it,� recalls Pat Gaudio Edwards, a former 3M marketing coordinator. The photograph was covered with a layer of Silver�s glue, so you could stick a document to it without using a thumbtack.

Sales were disappointing, however. Part of the problem was that it wasn�t just documents that stuck to the board�s surface; dust did, too. Perhaps more importantly, there just wasn�t much demand for a better bulletin board. To create a truly great product, you need a truly great problem, and the truth was, traditional bulletin boards worked fine for most people. Thumbtacks weren�t that costly, and who cared if they left a hole in, say, the flyer announcing the annual company picnic? For super-fussy collectors of corporate communications ephemera, the Post-it Bulletin Board was a dream product. For everyone else, it was just a linty photo of a genuine cork bulletin board.

Still, Silver continued to believe in his unusual adhesive, and he continued to evangelize about it to his 3M colleagues. At every in-house 3M seminar where there was an available slot, Silver demonstrated his discovery, and it was at one of these seminars that Fry�s golfing partner first heard about the substance. Intrigued, Fry attended one of Silver�s presentations, too. But like everyone else who�d seen the glue, a potential use for it stumped him.

And then one day, in the North Presbyterian Church in North St. Paul, inspiration struck…”

…[what Phil said]

Whatever attenuation is caused by the short interval is certainly compensated by repetition; either within the same 20-something second ad, or the ad itself is repeated (sometimes more than once within a given barrage of adds)

I would really like to know if there is an emergent pattern that arises among all the advertisers fighting for mindshare; something like Game of Life glider-guns or oscillators for example.

The Post-It note has an amusing side-bar. Fry made several hundred prototype pads of Post-It notes and distributed them among senior management secretaries for evaluation. When they ran out they came to him for more and found out there were no more. It drove them crazy because they had become so handy.

This story was documented 10 years ago in a tv program called (if my memory serves) “In Search of Excellence”

Now that’s what I call a well-documented blog comment!

Actually, I was just going on what Brady said in the linked article:

“People had never tested whether people could remember this much detail about this many objects,” said researcher Timothy Brady, a cognitive neuroscientist at MIT. “Nobody actually pushed it this far.”

But either way — if such capabilities were known and understood before this particular research, the amazing part is that we (or at least I) never heard much about it.

Standing (1973) showed people 10,000 photographs for 5 seconds each. In forced choice recognition, they were on average 86% correct on first test, and dropped only 11% at a test 2 days later. Standing, Conezio, & Haber (1970) showed a similar result with 2560 stimuli – up to 90% recognition accuracy even after 3 days.

While Standing (1973) has been criticized for having forced choice recognition pairs that were relatively easily distinguishable, Standing et al. (1970) used distractors that were mirror-reversals of the targets. They also reduced stimulus exposure time to as little as 1 second per item with no real effect on recognition accuracy.

Shepard (1967) started this approach with a study using 612 stimuli. So, it’s just not accurate to say that no-one ever thought of doing this sort of thing before. Brady has improved on the paradigm, certainly, but his results are not the least bit surprising to anyone with any background in memory research.

Refs:
Shepard, R.N. (1967). Recognition memory for words, sentences, and pictures. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 6, 156�163.

Standing, L. (1973). Learning 10,000 pictures. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Vol. 25(2), 207-222.

Standing, L., Conezio, J., & Haber, R.N. (1970). Perception and memory for pictures: Single trial learning of 2500 visual stimuli. Psychonomic Science, 19, 73�74.