Worms turn metal into semiconductors

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Jesse Emspak, LiveScience Contributor

Worms are useful in the garden and great for fish bait, but one of their talents has remained hidden ? until now. Scientists have discovered that worms can manufacture tiny semiconductors. ?

At King's College in London, researchers fed an ordinary red worm, Lumbricus rubellus, soil laced with metals. The worm produced quantum dots, nano-sized semiconductors that are used in imaging, LED technologies and solar cells. The experiment was published in the Dec. 23 issue of the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The worms created these electronic components because of their ability to detoxify their body tissue. When worms ingest the metals, proteins in their body shuttle these "toxins" to tissues called chloragogen cells that are similar to a liver in mammals. In the case of?cadmium, a molecule called?metallothionein attaches to it to take it away.?Through several chemical steps the worm separates the metals from the organic molecules they are attached to and stores them in tiny cavities its body, but not forever: eventually whatever toxic metals the worm eats are excreted.?

Squirmy semiconductor factories
In the experiment the scientists spiked soil with cadmium chloride and sodium tellurite (sodium, telluride and oxygen). The ability of worms to process cadmium is well known, but it wasn't clear what they would do with the tellurium in the sodium tellurite.

The worms ended up making tiny particles of cadmium telluride, a crystalline compound that is also a semiconductor. Those tiny particles ? called quantum dots ? were then taken out of the worms' tissue. The dots themselves are only nanometers across. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Bending Findings]

In biological imaging, quantum dots are used in place of dyes because they can be "tuned" to glow at specific wavelengths. Cadmium telluride dots, for example, glow green when hit with blue light. The researchers tested the dots on animal cells and found they worked as well as the ones created in laboratories.

The success doesn't mean that thousands of worms are to be sacrificed for dot-making, said co-author Mark Green, a reader in nanotechnology at King's College.

"The interesting bit is that semiconductor quantum dots, which emit light, were made in a living animal," he told Livescience via email. "The aim of the work wasn?t to come up with a new synthetic process of making dots that are better than bench-synthesized materials, it was just to see if we could do solid-state chemistry in a living animal ? and it appears we can!"

A dotty idea
Green said the idea occurred to him several years back when he was an Oxford University post-doctoral researcher. He heard a lecturer note that animals use certain proteins to get rid of toxic metals such as cadmium. Green realized he was doing something similar to make cadmium telluride quantum dots in the lab, sans worms.

He wondered if some extra chemical might spur worms to make their own cadmium telluride quantum dots.

"The big problem," he said, "was that I didn't know enough biology, and I could see immediately that trying to get the dots out of an animal would be a problem."

So Green shelved the idea for a few years, until he met Stephen St?rzenbaum, the lead author of the paper. St?rzenbaum told Green that he knew exactly where cadmium given to worms went: to the detoxifying chloragogen cells. Since the cadmium ? and thus the nanoscale dots ? would end up there, it would be relatively easy to get them out of the worm.

So they tried it. It worked.

"We were very surprised, didn't really expect it to work that easily," Green said.

The quantum dots Green and his team made aren't quite the quality of the lab-bench versions. That may change, though. "We'd like to think we can play around with some of the chemistry and make them better," Green said.

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Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/futureoftech/worms-turn-metal-semiconductors-1C7753891

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Move Your iTunes Library to Another Hard Drive in Three Simple Steps

If your iTunes library has gotten a bit too big for your regular hard drive, it may be time to move it. If you don't want to lose your playlists, play counts, ratings, and other stuff that iTunes keeps in its databases, here's the easiest way to move it to a new home.

We've shared other ways to do this in the past, but these days it's much simpler. All it takes is a few simple steps, whether you're looking to move your library to a new folder, a new drive, or even a NAS. Ars Technica runs down the process with a lot of detail, but here's the gist of it:

1. Open up iTunes' Preferences and go to Advanced. Make sure the "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized" box is checked.
2. Click the Change button under "iTunes Media Folder Location" and choose your new folder where you want iTunes to reside. Click OK (and if iTunes asks you if you want to continue matching the "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized" preference, choose Yes).
3. Go to File > Library > Organize Library, check the "Consolidate Files" box, and click OK. This will copy all of your files over to the new location, keeping your library structure completely intact.

When you're done, you can delete the files in your original iTunes Media folder, but don't delete the other .itl and itdb files?iTunes will still use those in their original location. Hit the link to see the full process, as well as a few troubleshooting tips if you have any problems.

How to offload your iTunes library to a NAS | Ars Technica

Title image remixed from Madlen (Shutterstock).

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~3/pd1hTrElu6I/move-your-itunes-library-to-another-hard-drive-in-three-simple-steps

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Marsha Temlock: Back To The Nest after Divorce

Today it is estimated that about a third of homeowners are currently putting out the welcome mat for boomerang children or aging parents. Oddly enough, the family domicile tends to be expanding rather than shrinking. That includes making space for an unexpected guest: the son or daughter seeking a safe harbor when his or her marriage is in trouble.

It is not uncommon for parents to find themselves opening the sleeper couch for what they hope will be a temporary stay. While most want to do whatever they can to help their children get back on their feet, but they do not necessarily want to be "Mom" or "Dad" all over again. Grown men and women who have been on their own would likely only seek their parents out as a last resort, however, in tough economic times, more and more sons and daughters (with or without grandchildren) do not have the luxury of maintaining two households and are landing on their parents' doorsteps.

Parents are expected to provide unconditional support and, when appropriate, financial relief until the divorce settlement is hammered out. What most children do not realize is that their parents are struggling with their own recovery issues after the split and having a son or daughter living with them makes it that much more difficult, especially if a parent is having trouble accepting the divorce decision.

The road to recovery from a child's divorce is bumpy for everyone involved. Therefore, the best advice is not to extend the journey any longer than is absolutely necessary. It is a good idea to set a flexible timeline how long the child is planning to stay from the get-go. (Note I said flexible.) If your adult child is fragile, a plan can be misinterpreted as your pulling the welcome rug out from under. Also, if you know your child is only going to be with you for a few weeks, I would let things ride.

Another suggestion is to be up front about divvying household duties and expenses for food, gasoline, etc. This is, after all, Mom and Dad's place. The returning child is not a house guest with bed, board and maid service included.

Typically, an adult child will seek the security of home temporarily because he or she needs the anchor of family right after a marriage crashes. A son may need a place to hang out until he finds another arrangement. Newly separated husbands often run bases on their friends' sofa beds until they finally strike out. Daughters tend to stay longer, especially if there are children, consuming lots of hot tea while they cry on Mom's shoulder. In rarer cases, it's the in-law who needs a place to stay. I know of one case where a son-in-law practically had to be pried off his mother-in-law's sofa. The in-law was his replacement parent and the two were very close during the marriage. The daughter wanted him out but he had no place to go. The mother-in-law, after first checking it out with her daughter, agreed to let him stay, but when Al became a fixture, it was time to have him leave.

There is a lot of retrofitting that has to take place when an adult child's marriage ends. The newly separated or divorced mother is redefining her role primarily as wife and mother when she is no longer married; the son who was once husband and father is no longer a husband, and often spending fewer hours with his children than when he was married. He may devote more hours to work or going out with his buddies.

Understandably, this is a dizzying time for parents who watch from the sidelines while their child is coping with all the changes. Parents are trying to bind wounds and build a new family structure to replace the old one. It is natural to feel ambivalent about a child's homecoming, but there are things you can do to make it less stressful. I offer lots of tips in my book, "Your Child's Divorce: What to Expect ... What You Can Do."

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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marsha-temlock/back-to-the-nest-after-di_b_2235771.html

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