The Cutting Edge: Computing / Technology / Innovation : The Genetically Altered Potato

A gene found in tobacco is being used to develop a potato resistant to late blight disease, the same plant affliction that caused the devastating Irish potato famine of 1845, reports a team of Purdue University researchers.

While the breakthrough is 150 years too late to help the Irish, many of whom came to this country as a result of the famine, blight disease is still the No. 1 pest of potato plants worldwide. While chemicals have been used against it in the United States, new varieties of the fungus have become resistant to current fungicides. To develop a naturally resistant potato, the researchers first identified a gene in tobacco that codes for a protein called osmotin, which is produced by many plants under stress. Then the gene was combined with another gene sequence to increase the amount of protein produced and moved into potato plants. (Osmotin has no known human health effects and occurs naturally in all plants.)

The additional osmotin enables the genetically engineered potato plants to fight off late blight infestations for one or two days, a delay that may seem small but is sufficient to substantially reduce the toll taken by the disease.

Smarter Than a Speeding Bullet: In the old Westerns, the flash of sunlight off a rifle barrel was often enough to give away where shots were coming from. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have come up with a more high-tech approach. The key components for the Livermore device, called Lifeguard, are a sensor that identifies a speeding bullet via its unique signals, and a sophisticated computer that processes the signals into an image. When a bullet is fired, Lifeguard’s sensor picks up the location of the bullet and instantly re-creates its flight path, showing on a video screen the path all the way back to its source. A red rectangle outlines the area where the gunman is standing.

While Lifeguard has obvious military applications, the Lawrence Livermore team actually came up with the idea for the device after hearing reports of a schoolyard shooting. Potential law enforcement applications include attaching the device to a police helicopter, VIP protection, and security at large gatherings or in open spaces, such as schoolyards. Lifeguard could also be married to a still or movie camera with a telephoto lens, which could snap legally admissible pictures of the shooter.

Ashes to Alloys: Coal-burning electric utility companies produce approximately 75 million tons of fly ash annually. While a quarter of that tonnage is used in construction or other applications, the remainder is disposed of in landfills, at a cost of nearly $1 billion per year.

For the last 10 years, the Electric Power Research Institute has been trying to come up with alternatives. One involves using the ash in new composite materials called ashalloys. Ashalloys, a class of metal matrix composites, which are engineered combinations of a metal and other materials, are composites of aluminum alloy and fly ash. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, working with ashalloys have found that these composites offer a number of advantages over plain aluminum: energy savings, lower disposal costs of the ash and improved material properties at a reduced cost.

Ashalloys could make their biggest impact on the auto industry by helping to reduce the weight of vehicles. Engine blocks, pistons, cylinder heads and drive shafts are all considered candidates for ashalloy technology.

Cyberspace Shopping: While interactivity promises many things, one thing everyone seems to agree on is that drivers on the information superhighway will surely head for the cybermalls to shop. On-line shopping services and CD-ROM catalogues are only the beginning. According to the cable industry gurus, shopping ranks right up there with video on demand as a “killer application” for interactive services.

Now along comes virtual reality technology to make these cybermalls even more realistic. UC San Diego and the San Diego Supercomputer Center have come up with a virtual reality system called In the Bag that is designed to make shopping from your living room a more familiar experience. Using a Silicon Graphics computer and the company’s RealityEngine graphics, along with virtual reality gear (cyberglove, space ball and liquid crystal display glasses), shoppers can wander through various 3D mall stores, select merchandise and drop the selected merchandise into a depicted shopping bag. But the system makes no provision for many other aspects of the mall experience, including searching for parking, hanging out with friends or scarfing down fast food.

Side by Side: The increasing use of interactive and multimedia production in corporations has created a problem familiar to writers of scripts, TV commercials, corporate videos and the like: the need to write in two columns, one for dialogue, the other for directing camera and actors. And these elements must stay next to each other no matter how many rewrites the script goes through. Current word-processing software offers this capability but requires a user to plow through hundreds of pages of documentation to learn the necessary skills.

To the rescue comes William Simon, himself a writer and producer of films, documentaries and corporate videos. Simon’s Rancho Santa Fe company, Simon Skill Systems, is best known for teaching computer skills by audiocassette. Now he has developed software called SideBySide, designed to be used with Microsoft Word. Users simply choose one of the pre-designed two-column or multi-column formats and start writing. If a paragraph with new directions has to be inserted later, the software will make sure that camera directions still appear opposite the dialogue for which they were intended.