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Scientists have developed a new technique which they claim can grow and harvest gold from crop plants. The technique of finding gold called phytomining uses plants to extract particles of the precious metal from soil.
Some plants have the natural ability to take up through their roots and concentrate metals such as nickel, cadmium and zinc in their leaves and shoots. For years, scientists have explored the use of such plants, dubbed hyperaccumulators, for pollution removal.
However, there are no known gold hyperaccumulators, because gold doesn't easily dissolve in water so plants have no natural way of taking the particles in through their roots, LiveScience reported.
"Under certain chemical conditions, gold solubility can be forced," said Chris Anderson, an environmental geochemist and gold phytomining expert at Massey University in New Zealand.
Fifteen years ago, Anderson first showed it was possible to get mustard plants to suck up gold from chemically treated soil containing gold particles.
The technique includes finding a fast-growing plant with a lot of aboveground leafy mass, such as mustard, sunflowers or tobacco. The next step is to plant the crop on soil that contains gold.
Once the crops reach their full height, treat the soil with a chemical that makes gold soluble. When the plant transpires, water is pulled up and out through tiny pores on
its leaves, it will take up the gold water from the soil and accumulate it in its biomass. It can then be harvested.
Getting the gold into plants is the easy part. Getting the gold out has proved more difficult, Anderson explained. "Gold behaves differently in plant material," Anderson
told the website.
If the plants are burned, some of the gold will stay attached to the ash, but some will disappear. Processing the ash poses difficulties, too, and requires the use of huge amounts of strong acids, which can be dangerous to transport.

In the era when companies are trying to have simple names that are easy to remember, Karbonn has chosen a name, which is quite a mouthful. Specs wise, Karbonn Smart Tab TA Fone A 37 Kommunicate 3G packs in 7-inch capacitive touch screen with WVGA resolution. It is powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor along with 512MB of RAM. The tablet has 4GB of internal storage, which can be expanded by up to 32GB through microSD card.
Karbonn Smart Tab TA Fone A 37 Kommunicate 3G runs on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). It comes with 2-megapixel rear camera and a VGA front camera. It comes with a 3,000mAh battery on-board. It is a dual-SIM (WCDMA+GSM) tablet, which supports 3G and voice calling. Other connectivity options include, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS.
Popular apps such as Google Play, YouTube, Flipboard come pre-installed on this tablet.
Karbonn had recently launched Smart Tab 8 Velox. Priced at Rs. 7,025, the tablet sports an 8-inch display with a 1024x768 pixel resolution and runs on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). The tablet comes with a 3-megapixel rear camera and a VGA front-facing camera and supports HD video playback up to 1080p.
Underneath, the Smart Tab 8 Velox is powered by a 1.5 GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor along with 1GB of RAM. It offers 1.5GB of internal storage, which is expandable by up to 32GB via microSD card. It comes with a 4,500mAh battery. Connectivity options on the tablet include 3G support via USB dongle, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth and HDMI.

Researchers have developed a new laser powered camera system that creates high-resolution 3-D images of objects from up to a kilometre away.

A standard camera takes flat, 2-D pictures. To get 3-D information, such as the distance to a far-away object, scientists can bounce a laser beam off the object and measure how long it takes the light to travel back to a detector.

The technique, called time-of-flight (ToF) navigation systems for autonomous vehicles, and other applications, but many current systems have a relatively short range and struggle to image objects that do not reflect laser light.

Researchers have tackled these limitations and reported their findings in the journal Optics Express.

The research team, led by Gerald Buller, professor at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, describes a ToF imaging system that can gather high-resolution, 3-D information about objects that are typically very difficult to image, from up to a kilometre away.

The new system works by sweeping a low-power infrared laser beam rapidly over an object. It records, pixel-by-pixel, the round-trip flight time of the photons in the beam as they bounce off the object and arrive back at the source.

The system can resolve depth on the millimetre scale over long distances using a detector that can "count" individual photons.

Eye drops designed to lower cholesterol may be able to prevent one of the most common forms of blindness in the aged, a new study led by Indian-origin scientist has found.

Targeting cholesterol metabolism in the eye might help prevent a severe form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), according to indications in a mice study led by Rajendra Apte, a professor of ophthalmology and vision sciences at Washington University in St Louis.

Cholesterol build-up in arteries and veins, or atherosclerosis, occurs as a natural consequence of ageing.

Likewise, in AMD, cholesterol is known to accumulate in the eye, within deposits called drusen.

The study, published in Cell Metabolism, shows that large cells called macrophages appear to play a key role in clearing cholesterol from the eye, and that with ageing, these cells become less efficient at this task.

Eye drops containing a type of drug known to promote cholesterol release from macrophages, called a liver X receptor (LXR) agonist, helped restore macrophage function and prevent AMD progression in a mouse model.

AMD causes damage to the macula, a region of the retina responsible for central, high-resolution vision.

"This study points to a novel strategy for early intervention to prevent the progression of AMD to the severe neovascular form of the disease," said Grace Shen, a programme director at NIH's National Eye Institute.

A protein called ABCA1 is needed for macrophages to release cholesterol into the bloodstream. In these experiments on mice, Apte and his team found that in old macrophages, there is a decrease in the level of ABCA1 protein.