Launch longest line of high-speed trains in the world from China!!!

China launched services Wednesday on the world's longest high-speed rail route, the latest milestone in the country's rapid and—sometimes troubled—super fast rail network.
The opening of the new 2,298-kilometre (1,425-mile) line between Beijing and Guangzhou means passengers will be whisked from the capital to the southern commercial hub in just eight hours, compared with the 22 hours previously required.

State broadcaster China Central Television showed the 9:00 am (0100 GMT) departure of the first train live from Beijing West Railway Station and its arrival later in Guangzhou at about 5:00 pm. It also carried occasional live reports inside the train throughout the day, showing passengers toting cameras to apparently snap commemorative photos, as well as shots from outside as it sped through the countryside.

 Another train departed Guangzhou for the capital at 10:00 am, the official Xinhua news agency reported. The train departing Beijing travelled at an average speed of 300 kilometres per hour and made stops in four cities—Shijiazhuang, Zhengzhou, Wuhan on the Yangtze River and Changsha before arriving in Guangzhou.

 State media have reported that December 26 was chosen to start passenger service on the Beijing-Guangzhou line to commemorate the birth in 1893 of revered Chinese leader Mao Zedong. The Beijing-Guangzhou route was made possible with the completion of a line between Zhengzhou and Beijing. High-speed sections linking Zhengzhou and Wuhan and Wuhan and Guangzhou were already in service.
China's high-speed rail network was only established in 2007, but has fast become the world's largest. Xinhua said that China now operates 9,300 kilometres of high-speed railways. The state-run China Daily newspaper reported Wednesday that the nation's high-speed rail network is set to jump to 50,000 kilometres by 2020, with four main lines running north and south and another four east and west.

China has relied on technology transfers from foreign companies, including France's Alstom, Germany's Siemens and Japan's Kawasaki Heavy Industries, to develop its high-speed rail network. But the country is now seeking to capitalise on what it has learned and has been building high-speed rail networks in foreign countries such as Turkey and Venezuela, and has ambitions further afield.

The China News Service reported Wednesday that the major type of train running on the Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed rail route is produced by state-owned China CNR Corp., headquartered in Beijng and founded in June 2008. China's domestic network, while a symbol of its emergence as the world's second-largest economy, has also been plagued by graft and safety scandals, such as a collision in July 2011 that killed 40 people.

The accident was China's worst rail disaster since 2008 and caused a torrent of public criticism aimed at the government amid accusations that authorities compromised safety in their rush to expand the network. Authorities said they have taken steps ahead of the new line's opening to improve maintenance and inspection of infrastructure, and emergency response measures.

"The emergency rescue system and all kinds of emergency pre-plans are established to improve emergency response ability," according to a ministry booklet. Still, safety concerns remain. The Global Times newspaper, with close ties to China's ruling Communist Party, on Wednesday quoted a Ministry of Railways official acknowledging continuing problems despite intense efforts to solve them during trial runs.

"We can't make sure it's error-proof in the future, and we have been subject to a lot of pressure from the public," Zhao Chunlei, deputy chief of the ministry's transportation department, told the paper. The train's opening means that it will be in service over China's Lunar New Year holiday period, which falls in mid-February next year. Hundreds of millions of people travel across the country during that period to visit their ancestral hometowns in the world's largest annual migration.

Physorg

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A nanoscale window to the biological world!!

A novel microfluidics platform allowed viewing of
 structural details of rotavirus double-layered particles;
the 3-D graphic of the virus, in purple, was reconstructed
from data gathered by the new technique. Credit: Virginia Tech

If the key to winning battles is knowing both your enemy and yourself, then scientists are now well on their way toward becoming the Sun Tzus of medicine by taking a giant step toward a priceless advantage – the ability to see the soldiers in action on the battlefield.                                                           

Investigators at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute have invented a way to directly image biological structures at their most fundamental level and in their natural habitats. The technique is a major advancement toward the ultimate goal of imaging biological processes in action at the atomic level.

 "It's sort of like the difference between seeing Han Solo frozen in carbonite and watching him walk around blasting stormtroopers," said Deborah Kelly, an assistant professor at the VTC Research Institute and a lead author on the paper describing the first successful test of the new technique.

"Seeing viruses, for example, in action in their natural environment is invaluable." The technique involves taking two silicon-nitride microchips with windows etched in their centers and pressing them together until only a 150-nanometer space between them remains.

The researchers then fill this pocket with a liquid resembling the natural environment of the biological structure to be imaged, creating a microfluidic chamber. Then, because free-floating structures yield images with poor resolution, the researchers coat the microchip's interior surface with a layer of natural biological tethers, such as antibodies, which naturally grab onto a virus and hold it in place.

In a recent study in Lab on a Chip, Kelly joined Sarah McDonald, also an assistant professor at the VTC Research Institute, to prove that the technique works. McDonald provided a pure sample of rotavirus double-layered particles for the study. "What's missing in the field of structural biology right now is dynamics – how things move in time," said McDonald. "Debbie is developing technologies to bridge that gap, because that's clearly the next big breakthrough that structural biology needs.

Rotavirus is the most common cause of severe diarrhea among infants and children. By the age of 5, nearly every child in the world has been infected at least once. And although the disease tends to be easily managed in the developed world, in developing countries rotavirus kills more than 450,000 children a year. At the second step in the pathogen's life cycle, rotavirus sheds its outer layer, which allows it to enter a cell, and becomes what is called a double-layered particle.

Once its second layer is exposed, the virus is ready to begin using the cell's own infrastructure to produce more viruses. It was the viral structure at this stage that the researchers imaged in the new study. Kelly and McDonald coated the interior window of the microchip with antibodies to the virus. The antibodies, in turn, latched onto the rotaviruses that were injected into the microfluidic chamber and held them in place. The researchers then used a transmission electron microscope to image the prepared slide.

The technique worked perfectly.
The experiment gave results that resembled those achieved using traditional freezing methods to prepare rotavirus for electron microscopy, proving that the new technique can deliver accurate results. "It's the first time scientists have imaged anything on this scale in liquid," said Kelly. The next step is to continue to develop the technique with an eye toward imaging biological structures dynamically in action. Specifically, McDonald is looking to understand how rotavirus assembles, so as to better know and develop tools to combat this particular enemy of children's health.

The researchers said their ongoing collaboration is an example of the cross-disciplinary work that is becoming a hallmark of the VTC Research Institute. "It's an ideal collaboration because Sarah provides a phenomenal model system by which we can develop new technologies to move the field of microstructural biology forward," said Kelly. "It's very win-win," McDonald added. "While the virus is a great tool for Debbie to develop her techniques, her technology is critical for allowing me to understand how this deadly virus assembles and changes dynamically over time."

PhysOrg

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World's smallest reaction chamber Done!!!

Scientists from New Zealand, Austria and the UK have created the world's smallest reaction chamber, with a mixing volume that can be measured in femtoliters (million billionths of a liter).








Using this minuscule reaction chamber, lead researcher Peter Derrick, professor of chemical physics and physical chemistry and head of the Institute of Fundamental Sciences at Massey University in New Zealand, plans to study the kind of speedy, nanoscale biochemical reactions that take place inside individual cells. This work appears in the latest issue of the European Journal of Mass Spectrometry.

The reaction chamber actually consists of nothing more than a tiny spray of liquid. It is produced by a technique known as electrospray ionization, in which a liquid is converted into lots of charged droplets by exposing it to a high voltage as it exits the nozzle of a thin capillary.

Like water being sprayed out of a hose, these charged droplets form a cone shape, known as a Taylor cone, as they are emitted from the nozzle. Because the electrospray process transforms any chemical entities within the liquid into ions, it is a commonly used technique for ionizing a liquid sample prior to analysis by mass spectrometry.

In conventional electrospray ionization, the charged droplets are emitted from a single nozzle and form a single Taylor cone. Derrick realised that emitting charged droplets with different chemical compositions from two separate but adjoining nozzles would cause their respective Taylor cones to merge, potentially allowing the chemical entities in those droplets to react together.

By making the nozzles small enough, such that they produce Taylor cones with femtolitre volumes, and linking them to a mass spectrometer, this set-up could be used to study the kind of speedy, nanoscale biochemical reactions that take place within cells. "The idea was that the entities could be introduced separately through the two channels lying side-by-side into this extremely small volume," explains Derrick.

To test this approach, he and his colleagues fabricated a metal-coated dual-channel electrospray emitter, in which a single circular capillary, just 4.5 μm in diameter, is divided into two semi-circular channels. After first spraying different colour dye molecules from each channel and showing that the resultant Taylor cones merge together, the scientists sprayed the antibiotic vancyomycin from one channel and a version of the peptide it binds to from the other.

As expected, the two molecules bound to each other within the merged, femtolitre-size Taylor cone, with the whole reaction process taking just a few tens of microseconds. The resultant molecular complex formed by vancyomycin and the peptide could clearly be detected by the mass spectrometer.

"We showed that a device that works as hoped can be fabricated and that biochemical reactions do occur within the very small volume," says Derrick.

As well as offering a novel way to study biochemical reactions, this approach could provide a whole new way to conduct electrospray ionization. "This could become the standard method of doing electrospray," says Derrick, "because none of the myriad beneficial capabilities of present-day electrospray are lost through using just one channel for the sample. The other channel could then be used for compounds that can probe the chemical properties of the sample."

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by the IM Publications LLP
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World's first living synthetic cell created!!!!

A team led by rockstar Biologist Craig Venter has become the first in human history to synthesise a living cell completely from scratch. The achievement comes at the end of 10 years of research by 20 scientists, and at a cost of around $40 million (£27.7 million).

The microbe hasn't yet been officially named, but it may end up being called Mycoplasma laboratorium, referencing its origins. The goal behind the research is to be able to produce bacteria and microbes on-demand that can be used as biofuels, break down oil slicks, eat up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and even create vaccines fortreating diseases. This is the first step in that process, however, which just consisted of the creation of a near-clone of another bacterium.

Previously, the scientists had managed to create a synthetic genome, and had been able to transplant one bacteria's genome into another, but this is the first time that the two processes have been combined for the creation of a cell with an entirely synthetic genome inside. The cell reproduced over a billion times, making copies that were controlled by the synthetic DNA. It's the first time that synthetic DNA has been in complete control of a cell.

The research was reported in the journal Science, which Venter told: "This is an important step both scientifically and philosophically, it has certainly changed my views of definitions of life and how life works." However, some have raised concern that synthetic organisms could escape and cause unforeseen environmental problems, or be reverse-engineered into a chemical weapon. Religious groups complained that Venter was playing god.

Venter says that's not the case: "That's a term that comes up every time there's a new medical or scientific breakthrough associated with biology. It's been a goal of humanity from the earliest ages to try and control nature -- that's how we got agriculture, that's how we got domesticated animals. This is the next stage in our understanding of how life fundamentally works."

He added: "There is a slight increase in the potential for harm, but there is an exponential increase in the potential benefit to society."

The organism has watermarks written into its DNA that will be able to identify it as synthetic if it escapes the lab and starts breeding in the wild. 

The next step for Venter and his team is to break down the organism, taking out different parts to establish what the minimum number of genes is for life to exist. From there, more specialised cells could be created and the simpler the creation, the less risk there is of unintended consequences. That's a situation that nobody -- particularly Venter -- wants to happen.

www.wired.co.uk   

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