Researchers Engineer Cell To Emit Laser.

The Wired (6/13, Brown) "Wired Science" blog reports, "Medical researchers from Harvard University have created the first 'living laser'; a biological cell that's been genetically engineered to produce a visible laser beam." Researchers Seok-Hyun Yun and Malte Gather "genetically engineered human embryonic kidney cells to produce" green fluorescent protein (GFP). The protein, which makes jellyfish bioluminescent, produces green light when it is exposed to blue light. The researchers "placed a single cell between two mirrors" and exposed it to blue light. The cell responded by emitting a visible laser beam that "lasted for a few nanoseconds."

        Popular Science (6/13, Boyle) explains, "The mirrors served as the optical cavity, allowing light to bounce through the cell many times, amplifying it into a coherent green beam that was visible to the naked eye." Gather said living lasers "could have a wide range of medical uses," such as activating medications "or for new forms of imaging."

        PC Mag (6/14 Pachal) reports that "Yun suggests to Nature that his discovery could be used to build microscopic laser guns, which could be deployed in a patient to seek and destroy invaders or diseased cells. He says that cells that "self lase" could even be in the picture." He added that "such applications would face the problem of power and light generation as well as the development of practical nano-scale optical cavities...so they're likely a long way off."

Scholarship To Help UK Student Commercialize Renewable Energy Idea.

The Daily Telegraph (UK) (6/6, Tyler) reports Alistair Shepherd, a graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Southampton in the UK, won a scholarship in which "he will spend six months with an elite group of international students in the US learning how to turn his renewable energy idea into a commercial reality." Shepherd designed a device that "uses the motion of ships to generate electricity in a device that is inside the ship itself." With the funding from the SETsquared partnership, "Shepherd will be tutored in the US by experts from Harvard Business School, MIT and the University of North Carolina and spend up to three months on an internship at an emerging company in the same field."