Month: October 2014

WELLINGTON (TIP): An international team of scientists drilling a 1.3-km deep hole into the Alpine Fault in New Zealand’s South Island say they are already gaining valuable insights into the Earth’s crust less than a quarter of the way down. The New Zealand-led team had drilled 240 metres, already the deepest borehole ever attempted in the fault, through gravel-laden sediments north of the Franz Josef Glacier and hit schist bedrock, according to a joint statement.

“We have discovered that temperatures increase quite rapidly with depth,which tells us a lot about how fluids that once fell on the Southern Alps as rain circulate and warm up next to the Alpine Fault,” project co-leader Virginia Toy of the University of Otago, said in the statement. “These measurements are important scientific findings in their own right and also allow us to predict what we will encounter as we drill deeper.” The borehole would provide the scientific data required to improve understanding of the largest seismic hazard in the South Island, another project co-leader, John Townend of Victoria University, said in the statement, according to Xinhua.

“It’s also very important to the international scientific community in terms of understanding how large faults work mechanically, which is why so many scientists from around the world are working with us to extract maximum information from the borehole,” he said. The Alpine Fault, the on-land boundary between the Pacific and Australian tectonic plates, moved about 27 metres horizontally every 1,000 years, in three or four separate large ruptures.

Scientists had evidence that it had ruptured 24 times in the past 8,000 years at an average interval of 330 years, although individual intervals ranged from 140 to 500 years. The fault last ruptured 297 years ago in 1717 and scientists estimated it had a 28 percent probability of rupturing in the next 50 years, which was high by global standards. By comparing rocks retrieved by drilling with the rocks on the surface, the research team hoped to discover how the earth’s crust deformed during earthquakes, and learn about chemical and physical changes occurring at various depths inside the fault zone.

Other major faults around the world had been drilled in this way after a big earthquake, but this was the first time a major fault had been drilled before it ruptured. Scientists and engineers from New Zealand, the US, Britain, Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Japan, Australia and China are working on the project.

LONDON (TIP): Doctors have found a new way to treat epilepsy – through the cheek. For those most severely affected, treating epilepsy means drilling through the skull deep into the brain to destroy the small area where the seizures originate – invasive, dangerous and with a long recovery period. Five years ago, a team of Vanderbilt engineers wondered: Is it possible to address epileptic seizures in a less invasive way? They decided it would be possible. Because the area of the brain involved is the hippocampus, which is located at the bottom of the brain, they could develop a robotic device that pokes through the cheek and enters the brain from underneath which avoids having to drill through the skull and is much closer to the target area.

To do so, however, meant developing a shape-memory alloy needle that can be precisely steered along a curving path and a robotic platform that can operate inside the powerful magnetic field created by an MRI scanner. The engineers have developed a working prototype. The business end of the device is a 1.14 mm nickel-titanium needle that operates like a mechanical pencil, with concentric tubes, some of which are curved, that allow the tip to follow a curved path into the brain.

Unlike many common metals, nickel-titanium is compatible with MRIs. Using compressed air, a robotic platform controllably steers and advances the needle segments a millimeter at a time. The needle is inserted in tiny, millimeter steps so the surgeon can track its position by taking successive MRI scans. According to associate professor of mechanical engineering Eric Barth, who headed the project, the next stage in the surgical robot’s development is testing it with cadavers.

He estimates it could be in operating rooms within the next decade. Associate professor of Mechanical Engineering Robert Webster had developed a system of steerable surgical needles. “The idea for this came about when Eric and I were talking in the hallway one day and we figured that his expertise in pneumatics was perfect for the MRI environment and could be combined with the steerable needles I’d been working on,” said Webster. The engineers identified epilepsy surgery as an ideal, high-impact application.

They learned that currently neuroscientists use the through-the-cheek approach to implant electrodes in the brain to track brain activity and identify the location where the epileptic fits originate. But the straight needles they use can’t reach the source region, so they must drill through the skull and insert the needle used to destroy the misbehaving neurons through the top of the head. “The systems we have now that let us introduce probes into the brain – they deal with straight lines and are only manually guided,” the doctors said.

NEW YORK (TIP): A comet from the outer reaches of the solar system made a rare, close pass by Mars where a fleet of robotic science probes were poised for studies. Comet Siding Spring passed just 87,000 miles (140,000km) from Mars, less than half the distance between Earth and the moon and 10 times closer than any known comet has passed by Earth, Nasa said.

The comet, named for the Australian observatory that discovered it last year, is believed to be a first-time visitor to the inner solar system, having departed the Oort Cloud, located beyond Neptune’s orbit, more than a million years ago. Comets are believed to be frozen remnants left over from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. “This comet is on its way plunging in toward the sun, growing a tail,” astronomer David Grinspoon, with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, said during a live webcast of the comet’s flyby on Slooh.com.

The comet made its closest approach to Mars at 2.27pm EDT/1827 GMT, hurling past at about 203,000kmph (126,000mph). Initially, Nasa was concerned the comet’s dusty tail could pose a threat to orbiting spacecraft as it brushes past Mars. Later assessments somewhat allayed those concerns, but Nasa still opted to tweak its satellites’ orbits so that they would be behind the planet during the most risky part of the flyby. “Mars will be right at the edge of the debris cloud, so it might encounter some of the particles, or it might not,” Nasa Mars scientist Rich Zurek, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement.

Mars’s atmosphere, though much thinner than Earth’s, will shield Nasa’s Opportunity and Curiosity rovers from comet dust, which may trigger meteor showers. Mars also will pass directly through the comet’s coma, which is an envelope of gas and dust surrounding the comet’s nucleus, providing an unprecedented opportunity for study, Grinspoon said. “This is a really rare event.”

WASHINGTON (TIP): Researchers have successfully used an iPhone app for imaging the inside of the eye of immobile and paediatric patients. The team used the iExaminer smartphone system and an iPhone to image 28 paediatric patients with a diverse range of retinal and optic nerve conditions. The system consists of a PanOptic Ophthalmoscope (a lighted instrument to examine the inside of the eye) and an adapter that attaches the ophthalmoscope to an iPhone to enable taking photos and videos.

It can image key structures of the back of the eye in a single view without necessarily requiring dilation drops. The associated app facilitates capture, storage and transfer of data. This also makes it possible for real-time tele-medicine consultation without violating patient identity as no external facial features are revealed. “This system could be useful not only to ophthalmologists but also physicians, hospitals and general practitioners,” said lead researcher Jiaxi Ding from the Ross Eye Institute at University at Buffalo in the US.

Because it can instantly capture photos and videos of the back of the eye through an undilated pupil, “there is potential for prompt tele-medicine consultations with an ophthalmologist and getting preliminary triage answers to the patient more quickly than waiting for standard office referral,” he added. Photography plays a critical role in documenting and tracking the progression of eye diseases. The results were shared at “AAO 2014” – the 118th annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.