Pitt bull mutt bites off housekeeper's toe in Brooklyn apartment.

A pit bull mutt being dog-sat in a Brooklyn luxury apartment gnawed off a housekeeper’s toe moments after she arrived to start her shift, police said. The 62-year-old woman had just walked into the 20 Bayard St. apartment in Williamsburg around 1:30 p.m. Wednesday to start cleaning when the nervous dog attacked her. The pooch, which belongs to a friend of the homeowner, chomped down on the woman's left pinky toe, ripping it clean off her foot, cops said. EMS personnel were called to the apartment and immediately put the severed toe on ice. The woman was taken to Bellevue Hospital, but it was not certain if doctors were able to reattach the toe, cops said.The NYPD's Emergency Service Unit was also called to the apartment and coaxed the dog into a portable cage before bringing it to an Animal Care and Control Center facility. An ACC spokeswoman said the female canine is being held on a 10-day rabies screening pending a Department of Health investigation. More

Solar Cells converts Co2 into hydrocarbon fuel.

A new finding reported in the July issue of Science and was funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. A provisional patent application has been filed. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy. The conventional solar cells, convert sunlight into electricity that must be stored in heavy batteries, but this new device essentially does the work of plants, converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into fuel, solving two crucial problems at once. A solar farm of such “artificial leaves” could remove significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and produce energy-dense fuel efficiently. Amin Salehi-Khojin, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC and senior author on the study explained that the new solar cell is not photovoltaic but rather it’s photosynthetic. He remarked that instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight. While plants produce fuel in the form of sugar, the artificial leaf delivers syngas, or synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide. Syngas can be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels. The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete. Chemical reactions that convert CO2 into burnable forms of carbon are called reduction reactions, the opposite of oxidation or combustion. Salehi-Khojin explained that engineers have been exploring different catalysts to drive CO2 reduction, but so far such reactions have been inefficient and rely on expensive precious metals such as silver. Salehi-Khojin and his coworkers focused on a family of nano-structured compounds called transition metal dichalcogenides — or TMDCs — as catalysts, pairing them with an unconventional ionic liquid as the electrolyte inside a two-compartment, three-electrode electrochemical cell. The best of several catalysts they studied turned out to be nanoflake tungsten diselenide.“The new catalyst is more active; more able to break carbon dioxide’s chemical bonds,” said UIC postdoctoral researcher Mohammad Asadi, first author on the Science paper. continue

Arizona Man Gets First Dissolvable Stent in US.

An Arizona man on Wednesday became the first in the nation to have a dissolvable stent inserted into his artery. Abbott Laboratories' Absorb stent was approved this week by the FDA for use in the U.S. on patients with coronary artery disease Video

Innovative device allows 3-D imaging of the breast with less radiation.

Preliminary tests have demonstrated that a new device may enable existing breast cancer imagers to provide up to six times better contrast of tumors in the breast, while maintaining the same or better image quality and halving the radiation dose to patients. The advance is made possible by a new device developed for 3D imaging of the breast by researchers at the Department of Energy's Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, Dilon Technologies and the University of Florida Department of Biomedical Engineering. In breast cancer screening, mammography is the gold standard. But about half of all women who follow standard screening protocol for 10 years will receive a false-positive result that will require additional screening, particularly women who have dense breast tissue. Used in conjunction with mammography, imaging based on nuclear medicine is currently being used as a successful secondary screening alongside mammography to reduce the number of false positive results in women with dense breasts and at higher risk for developing breast cancer. Now, researchers are hoping to improve this imaging technique, known as molecular breast imaging or breast specific gamma imaging, with better image quality and precise location (depth information) within the breast, while reducing the amount of radiation dose to the patient for these procedures.While a mammogram uses X-rays to show the structure of breast tissue, molecular breast imagers show tissue function.Continue

Massive anthrax outbreak wounds Russia’s venison sector

Massive anthrax outbreak wounds Russia’s venison sector: An outbreak of anthrax has killed 1,500 northern deer in Russia and, with the figure set to rise, fears over exports of venison have begun to surface. Read

AGRIBUSINESS: How to use pig manure to make roads.

AGRIBUSINESS: How to use pig manure to make roads. A team of US researchers has been studying ways to convert elements of pig manure for making new roads. A statement from North Carolina A&T State University, in Greensboro, NC, United States, shows that Prof Elle Fini and a team of researchers has found a way to extract the rich oil that is found in pig waste, and mix it with rocks to form a new type of asphalt durable enough for highway traffic, which they call ‘Bio-Adhesive’. AGRIBUSINESS: How to use pig manure to make roads. The extensive research, which has included putting samples of the new material through rigorous vehicle simulators and tests to determine its durability, has proven to be a success according to the press release. Fini and a group of partners have set up a company called Bio-Adhesive Alliance. The team carried out tests to see if it will rock or sag too much because it shouldn’t do that. Also it shouldn’t crack at low temperatures. The vision of the alliance is to help the farmer and the construction industry by providing a cost effective solution.. The team believe its a win/win solution as all parties benefit and nothing is wasted. In the course of processing, the foul, aroma is filtered out, and the by-products of the bio-adhesive can be used by farmers as fertilizer.

Silicon Valley’s ‘bloody’ veggie burger enters New York.

Silicon Valley’s ‘bloody’ veggie burger enters New York .Impossible Foods has launched a plant-based burger that bleeds, begging the question as to whether the Silicon Valley firm has fired the starting gun on an era of meat-free meat? The