Electric balancing act. Age and disability can literally throw people off balance -- with serious consequences. Falls that are trivial for healthy children and adults can be devastating for the frail elderly or for people suffering from diseases such as Parkinson's or cerebral palsy.

A new approach to preventing falls is being developed by ENG Biomedical Engineering and University Professor James Collins, director of the Center for BioDynamics, and Anthony Scinicariello (ENG'04), a doctoral student in biomedical engineering. Called galvanic vestibular stimulation, their system involves controlled stimulation of the nerves to organs in the inner ear that control balance.

The researchers attached electrodes on the surface of the skin above the mastoid bones, the small bony protuberances behind the ear. They had previously established that people could be made to lean in different directions depending upon the polarity of the electrical stimulation applied at these points. In recent experiments, they sent a small electrical current through the electrodes to the inner ear at the same time they shifted the platform participants were standing on, throwing them off balance. The researchers found that by controlling the electrical stimulation, participants' ability to maintain balance was significantly enhanced.

Collins and his colleagues believe that further work will someday lead to a prosthetic device that people can wear to help prevent falls. Further development of a balance control system will require sensors that monitor the individuals' movements in real time and space, providing continual feedback and calculating the precise stimulation needed to keep in balance.

The research of Collins and his colleagues is described in the June issue of Biological Cybernetics.

Synthetic photosynthesis. If we could more fully harness the power of the sun, energy crises, like the present one, would become a problem of the past. However, thus far the inability to store energy efficiently has greatly limited the potential of solar energy. CAS Chemistry Professor Guilford Jones, a Photonics Center faculty member, is studying the basic science that may provide the key, in an extensive investigation that has been funded by the Department of Energy since 1988. His research into the mechanism that powers photosynthesis has the potential to lead to a chemically based technology that efficiently transforms light into stored energy that can be tapped for a multitude of uses. Jones and his colleagues have recently made significant headway in replicating in the laboratory critical steps that mimic the natural light-driven process of photosynthesis. They re-create, in a rudimentary way, the chemical reaction that makes life on Earth possible.

Plants and photosynthetic bacteria use sunlight to transform carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and sugar in a multistep process that relies on a highly complex protein scaffold. The scaffold efficiently transfers electrons, in a series of "hops," to precise chemical sites along the scaffold. Jones and his colleagues have created an artificial scaffold -- a proteinlike polypeptide assembly -- and demonstrated for the first time that a charge can be transported through the protein, in multiple steps, as in nature. The system performs similarly to bacteriochlorophyll molecules, but is based on a completely synthetic array of "designer" proteins created in the lab. Since the system has charge transport characteristics similar to those of rhodopsin, the light-sensitive pigment in the retina of the eye, the research may also have potential relevance for vision research.

Jones' work was reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.