Heightened security concerns have raised customer interest for cargo-scanning X-ray equipment designed by Lincolnshire’s Bio-Imaging Research Inc., said the firm’s business development manager, Barry Smith.
“We’re in discussions with a lot of potential customers whose main focus is security,” said Smith. “It’s too early to say whether that will translate into more orders, but the interest is definitely there.”
BIR develops software and hardware used in advanced medical scanners and has been applying that technology for use in systems used in industry to examine automotive casings and aerospace parts for reverse engineering and non-destructive testing.
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Scanning cargo containers, trucks and other vehicles for smuggled contraband has also been an application for BIR’s imagining technology. Most buyers are primarily interested in spotting efforts to avoid tariffs.
“Now homeland security is a much higher priority with governments,” said Smith, “although they’re still interested in generating revenue by spotting smuggled items.”
BIR’s software enables operators to localize areas of interest and enhance the images to produce greater detail.
A few months ago, two systems engineered by BIR working with a Japanese partner, Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries of Tokyo, were activated at customhouses in Kobe and Osaka.
The Japanese Ministry of Finance was sufficiently impressed with the performance of those systems to order three more, said Smith.
“IHI builds the infrastructure and we provide the radiology,” he said.
Northwestern dips its pen: A new technology that could increase the density of gene chips 100,000 times has been demonstrated by researchers at Northwestern University.
Writing in the journal Science, the researchers describe using an atomic force microscope to lay down DNA molecules in a line much like ink flowing out of a pen.
“With this new tool, we can take a normal chip that’s made and sold today for studying a problem in genomics and miniaturize it to one one-hundred-thousandth of its size,” said Chad Mirkin, director of Northwestern’s nanotechnology institute.
“In a normal chip with 100,000 different spots of DNA, each spot is 20 to 40 micrometers in diameter. Using state-of-the-art dip-pen nanolithography, we can prepare 100,000 DNA spots in the area occupied by a single spot in a conventional chip.”
If the technology can be commercialized it would drastically reduce the cost and speed of gene chips that can be used to diagnose disease and tailor individualized therapies for patients. A Chicago-based start-up company, NanoInk Inc., is working to develop commercially viable dip-pen products.
Instead of using a single pen to lay down one strand of DNA at a time, the goal is to have multiple pens working in parallel to establish a high-speed process. Mirkin said that researchers at Northwestern and at NanoInk have demonstrated 32 pens working together in a process, and their goal is to create a system with 1,000 pens.
Besides increasing the density of gene chips, dip-pen technology enables scientists to build a variety of structures from the ground up, one molecule at a time.
“We want to build materials in a fundamentally new way by taking advantage of the ability of DNA to self-assemble into a pre-programmable structure,” Mirkin said. “If one uses the analogy of building a house, the deposited DNA is not only an architectural blueprint for a structure, but also the construction worker which directs where each brick goes.”
Air travel: Consumers looking for the lowest available airfares may find that searching online is the way to go, a new study by the Consumer Reports Travel Letter suggests.
The study looked at six online travel Web sites and compared them to the largest computer reservation system used by travel agents. It found that up to 78 percent of the time, each of the six sites offered prices equal to or lower than those on the system used by travel agents. In a similar study two years ago, that was true only about 22 percent of the time.
But using the Web to scope out low cost fares isn’t easy.
“To get the best fares, you have to comparison shop,” said Bill McGee, editor of the travel letter. “None of the independent travel Web sites we examined outshone the others in all aspects of booking. And the nation’s leading low-fare carrier, Southwest Airlines, refuses to display its flight times and prices on any of the independent travel sites.”
Argonne promotion: Thomas Rosenbaum, a University of Chicago physics professor, next month will become the university’s vice president for research and the Argonne National Laboratory.
Rosenbaum will succeed Robert Zimmer, who recently was named provost of Brown University.
Argonne, which has its major site near suburban Lemont and another site in Idaho, was the country’s first national laboratory, chartered in 1946. It has about 4,200 employees and an annual operating budget of about $475 million.
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