Probiotics have been developed to treat conditions of the gut, such as irritable bowel disease, and some early studies have shown that bacteria can be used to target and destroy cancer cells. The idea of using bacteria as medicine is not new. The lead author is Raymond Bourdeau, a former postdoctoral scholar in Shapiro's lab. The results will be published in the January 4 issue of the journal Nature. "We want to be able to ask the bacteria, 'Where are you and how are you doing?' The first step is to learn to visualize and locate the cells, and the next step is to communicate with them." "We are engineering the bacterial cells so they can bounce sound waves back to us and let us know their location the way a ship or submarine scatters sonar when another ship is looking for it," says Mikhail Shapiro, assistant professor of chemical engineering, Schlinger Scholar, and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator. The pictures would let doctors know if the treatments made it to the right place in the body and were working properly. The ultimate goal is to be able to inject therapeutic bacteria into a patient's body-for example, as probiotics to help treat diseases of the gut or as targeted tumor treatments-and then use ultrasound machines to hit the engineered bacteria with sound waves to generate images that reveal the locations of the microbes. While the movie may be still be fiction, researchers at Caltech are making strides in this direction: they have, for the first time, created bacterial cells with the ability to reflect sound waves from inside bodies, reminiscent of how submarines reflect sonar to reveal their locations. In the 1966 science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, a submarine is shrunken down and injected into a scientist's body to repair a blood clot in his brain. I couldn't see any situation where one would want to expend more energy than sound creates just to create less energy.Technology Transfer & Corporate Partnerships Here's another example, to shatter a window in an enclosed vehicle with low frequency sound waves, it would take at least 5,000-10,000 watts of electricity. The amount of energy produced form sound is much less than the amount required to make the sound. The point being that there are much more efficient ways to produce energy. I once read an article in the Guardian about using sound to generate heat waves, and it would take almost 10 years of continuous yelling to produce enough heat to make a cup of coffee. Ultimately, this would increase the efficiency of the nuclear power plant.ĭecember 4, Lokithebeak- I don't think that generating electricity would be very practical using sound energy. Instead of using the electricity to produce the ultra high pitch sounds, you would use the sounds to produce electricity. Think of it like reversing one of those acoustic pest repellents. An acoustic engine could be used to turn this waste heat into electricity by creating a voltage out of the sound waves emitted from high frequencies (frequencies beyond our range of hearing). If you were able to use all of the waste heat generated by nuclear cooling towers, you could then turn this into usable energy. Light and heat are some of the waste forms of energy created by the transfer of another form of energy into sound waves. It is essentially using the laws of thermodynamics to create usable chaos. High frequency sound wave technology could be used to transform waste heat from nuclear power plants into usable energy. Could it be done, do you think?-Ĭan the vibration caused by the element causing the noise be used to provide electricity?ĭecember 7, GlassHouse- I could think of one application that would make this worthwhile. It doesn't seem to exist - only solid insulation. It's strange, but picture a restaurant with noisy service area, which is a pain for some tables. I 'm trying to find out if there is a system or the technology, to create like a wall of air, or waves to isolate two rooms, soundwise. I m asking for help as I see knowledgeable posts on the subject.
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