NANOCOMPUTER

Flying Motorcycle

November 14, 2019 Uncategorized

Flying cars are fine — but why use a car when you can have a motorcycle instead? YC-backed startup JetPack Aviation wants to answer that question with the world’s first flying motorcycle, a personal aircraft dubbed “The Speeder,” a name that Star Wars fans will surely appreciate. Now, JetPack has raised a seed round of $2 million from investors indulging Draper Associates, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, YC, Cathexis Ventures and a group of angels that it says will fund the development of the Speeder’s first functional prototype.

Back in March, JetPack revealed its plans for the Speeder, which it says will provide a fully stabilized ride that’s either pilot-controlled or fully autonomous. It can take off and land vertically, and reach top speeds of potentially over 400 MPH (640 km/h). There are no exposed rotors systems, which make it a lot safer and easier to operate than a lot of other VTOL designs and helicopters, and the company says it can also be refueled in less than 5 minutes, which is a dramatically shorter turnaround time for powering up versus an electric vehicle.

This isn’t JetPack’s first aerial rodeo: The company, led by CEO and founder David Mayman, has already created an actual jet pack. Mayman himself has demonstrated the personal aerial jet pack numerous times, and it has been certified by the FAA, plus it landed a CARADA agreement with the U.S. Navy Special Forces for use in short-distance troop transportation. The jet pack also boasts a lot of features that sound, on paper, like science fiction: Over 100 mph top seed, and suitcase-sized portability, for instance.

That track record is why when Mayman tells me this $2 million round “should fully fund the first full-scale flying prototype, including all modeling designs and build,” I tend to believe him more than I would just about anyone else in the world making a similar claim.

Part of the reason the Speeder is more viable near-term than other VTOL designs is that it will rely on turbine propulsion, rather than battery-based flight systems. This is because, in Mayman’s opinion, “current battery energy density is just too low for most electrically powered VTOLs to be truly practical,” and that timelines optimistically for that to change are in the five to 10-year range. The Speeder, by comparison, should feasibly be able to provide quick cargo transportation for emergency services and military (its first planned uses before moving on to the consumer market) in a much shorter period.*

Source: https://jetpackaviation.com/
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https://techcrunch.com/

How To Print Crowns And Bridges, Surgical Guides For Dental Implant

November 13, 2019 Uncategorized

Back at CES this year, we talked with 3D-printer maker Formlabs about its early experimentation in using its printers to make dentures faster and more affordably than existing alternatives. A few months later, the company is going deep on the concept. They’re releasing a 3D printer meant specifically for dental use, opening up a whole new wing called “Formlabs Dental” and acquiring their main resin supplier in order to better make materials for the dental industry.

Unfamiliar with Formlabs? The main thing to know is that their printers use Stereolithography (SLA) rather than the Fused Deposition Modeling (or FDM) that most people probably think of when it comes to 3D printing; in other words, they use carefully aimed UV lasers to precisely harden an otherwise goopy resin into whatever you want to print, whereas FDM printers heat up a solid material until it’s malleable and then push it through a hot glue gun-style nozzle to build a model layer by layer. SLA tends to offer higher accuracy and resolution, whereas FDM tends to be cheaper and offer a wider variety of colors and material properties.

Formlabs calls its new dentistry-centric printer the “Form 3b” — which, as the name suggests, is a slight variation on the Form 3 printer the company introduced earlier this year. The base package costs about a thousand bucks more per unit over the non-dental Form 3, but comes with software meant to tie into a dental team’s existing workflow, along with a year of Formlab’s “Dental Service Plan,” which includes training, support and the ability to request a new printer if something needs repairing (rather than waiting for yours to get shipped back and forth). The company also says the 3b has been optimized to work with its dental resins, but doesn’t say much about how.

Speaking of resins: Formlabs is acquiring Spectra, which has been its primary supplier of resins since Formlabs started back in 2012. While the company isn’t disclosing any of the terms of the deal, it does say it has put over a million dollars into building an FDA-registered clean room to make medical-grade resins. Formlabs says that anyone who already buys materials and resin from Spectra can continue to do so.

The company’s new “Formlabs Dental” division, meanwhile, will focus on figuring out new dental materials and ways to better tie in to existing dentist office workflows. Right now, the company says, the Form 3b can be used to print crowns and bridges, clear retainers, surgical guides to help during dental implant procedures, custom mouth guards (or “occlusal splints”) and dentures.

Source: https://formlabs.com/
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https://techcrunch.com/

Safe Stem Cells Therapies To Fight Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s Diseases

November 12, 2019 Uncategorized

A Rutgers-led team has created better biosensor technology that may help lead to safe stem cell therapies for treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases and other neurological disorders.

The technology, which features a unique graphene and gold-based platform and high-tech imaging, monitors the fate of stem cells by detecting genetic material (RNA) involved in turning such cells into brain cells (neurons), according to a study in the journal Nano Letters.

Stem cells can become many different types of cells. As a result, stem cell therapy shows promise for regenerative treatment of neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stroke and spinal cord injury, with diseased cells needing replacement or repair. But characterizing stem cells and controlling their fate must be resolved before they could be used in treatments. The formation of tumors and uncontrolled transformation of stem cells remain key barriers.

This unique biosensing platform consists of an array of ultrathin graphene layers and gold nanostructures. The platform, combined with high-tech imaging (Raman spectroscopy), detects genetic material (RNA) and characterizes different kinds of stem cells with greater reliability, selectivity and sensitivity than today’s biosensors.

“A critical challenge is ensuring high sensitivity and accuracy in detecting biomarkers – indicators such as modified genes or proteins – within the complex stem cell microenvironment,” said senior author KiBum Lee, a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “Our technology, which took four years to develop, has demonstrated great potential for analyzing a variety of interactions in stem cells.”

Source: https://news.rutgers.edu/

Virtually Indestructible Mini Cheetah Robots

November 11, 2019 Uncategorized

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) put on a spectacular show with a pack of mini cheetah robots the campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Researchers behind the small quadrupedal robots shared a video online of these mechanical animals running, jumping and even kicking around a soccer ball. Steered manually with a remote control, each one weighs about 20 pounds and can reach speeds of around six miles per hour. The mini cheetah was designed to be ‘virtually indestructible,’ recovering with little damage, even if a backflip ends in a spill, MIT News explained earlier this year. Sangbae Kim, director of MIT‘s biomimetics lab, noted that the robots area designed to absorb the impact of jumping and landing – and the video highlights this capability. The cheetahs are shown frolicking through an area of the college campus, while being controlled by a human. The machines perform a synchronized dance, where they show their gymnastic abilities and then they all join in a game of soccer.

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‘Eventually, I’m hoping we could have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms, and we can see which strategy is more effective,‘ Kim said. ‘That’s how you accelerate research.’

Each of its legs is powered by three identical, specially designed low-cost electric motors. It was created with a modular design, which means each of its motors and other components can be swapped out if they fail or sustain damage. Benjamin Katz, a technical associate at MIT‘s department of mechanical engineering and lead developer said, ‘If you wanted to add another arm, you could just add three or four more of these modular motors.’ ‘The rate at which it can change forces on the ground is really fast.’

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/

How To Starve Cancer Tumors and Beef Up The Immune Cells

November 8, 2019 Uncategorized

Tumors are hogs, gobbling nutrients to fuel their runaway growth, and for decades researchers have tried to develop drugs that cut off their food supply. A study out today shows that an updated version of a failed cancer drug can not only prevent tumor cells from using an essential nutrient, but also spur immune cells to attack the growths.

T lymphocyte cells attacking a cancer cell, computer illustration. T lymphocytes are a type of white blood cell that recognise a specific site (antigen) on the surface of cancer cells or pathogens and bind to it. Some T lymphocytes then signal for other immune system cells to eliminate the cell. The genetic changes that cause a cell to become cancerous lead to the presentation of tumour antigens on the cell’s surface.

“It’s a pretty striking paper,” says cancer biologist Ralph DeBerardinis of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, who wasn’t connected to the study. “With a single drug, you can in effect starve the tumor and beef up the immune cells.”

Cancer cells eat to obtain molecules vital for survival and replication, but their gluttony also turns their surroundings into an acidic, oxygen-deprived moat that stymies immune cells trying to eliminate them. One of the nutrients many tumors need in abundance is the amino acid glutamine, which provides the building blocks for fabricating molecules such as DNA, proteins, and lipids. “Glutamine is incredibly important for cellular metabolism,” says immunologist Jonathan Powell of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Starting in the 1950s, researchers tried to turn tumors’ glutamine dependence against them, developing drugs to block its metabolism. A bacteria-derived compound called DON, for instance, kills tumors by inhibiting several enzymes that allow cancer cells to use glutamine. In clinical trials, however, the drug provoked severe nausea and vomiting, and it was never approved.

Now, Powell and colleagues have crafted a new version of DON that may be easier to stomach. It carries two chemical groups that keep it inert until it reaches the tumor’s neighborhood. There, enzymes that normally loiter around tumors remove these molecular handcuffs, unleashing the drug on the cancerous cells. With this approach, “the vast majority of the active drug is where we want,” Powell says.

To test their new compound, he and colleagues injected four types of cancer cells into mice, inducing tumors. They then dosed some of the animals with their next-generation DON. The drug worked against all four kinds of tumors, the scientists report today in Science. In untreated mice, for example, colon cancer tumors had grown more than five times larger after about 3 weeks. But in rodents that received DON, the tumors shrank and almost disappeared. The researchers found that the drug wasn’t just throttling glutamine metabolism. It was also disrupting other aspects of the cells’ biochemistry, such as their ability to use the sugar glucose.

Source: https://www.sciencemag.org/

Rare genetic mutation holds clues to preventing Alzheimer’s

November 7, 2019 Uncategorized

Could one woman’s rare genetic mutation one day have a global impact on dementia risk? It’s possible, say investigators who report on a potentially groundbreaking case of a woman whose genetic mutation staved off dementia for decades, even though her brain had already been damaged by Alzheimer’s disease. While most Alzheimer’s cases are not driven by genetic predisposition, one woman in Colombia is among about 1,200 in her country who do face a genetically higher risk for early-onset Alzheimer’s. Why? They all carry the E280A mutation of a gene called Presenilin 1 (PSEN1), which is known to increase the chances for Alzheimer’s at a far younger age than usual.

“We identified an individual that was predisposed to develop Alzheimer’s in her 40s,” noted study author Dr. Joseph Arboleda-Velasquez. He’s an assistant professor of ophthalmology with the Schepens Eye Research Institute of Mass Eye and Ear at Harvard Medical School, in Boston.

But, strangely, the woman “remained unimpaired until her 70s,” Arboleda-Velasquez added. The twist: the woman had, in fact, developed clear telltale signs of Alzheimer’s in her brain. She just hadn’t developed dementia. For example, while she had fewer neural “tangles” in her brain than is typical for Alzheimer’s patients, by the time she hit her 40s she did have the same unusually high level of brain amyloid-beta deposits as her E280A peers. Such deposits are a key signature of Alzheimer’s. So why didn’t she develop middle-aged dementia like her peers?

To unravel the mystery, Arboleda-Velasquez and his colleagues ran an in-depth genetic analysis on the woman. And what they found is that she had not just one mutation, but two. In addition to the E280A mutation, she also carried the so-called “Christchurch” mutation in the APOE3 gene. But there’s more. Not only did she carry the Christchurch mutation, but she had two of them. Some of her E280A peers (about 6%) also carried a single copy of Christchurch. But she was the only one who carried two, the investigators found. “It is ultra-rare, with an approximate prevalence of less than one in every 200,000 individuals,” Arboleda-Velasquez said.

And having one such rare mutation did not appear to be enough. No protection against dementia was linked to only one Christchurch mutation. But as this woman’s case suggests, having two such mutations did seem to throw up a shield against Alzheimer’s, preserving her ability to remember things and think clearly for a few decades, long after her E280A peers had started experiencing cognitive decline.

Source: https://www.cbsnews.com/

Electric 3D-Printed Plastics

November 6, 2019 Uncategorized

Rutgers engineers have embedded high performance electrical circuits inside 3D-printed plastics, which could lead to smaller and versatile drones and better-performing small satellites, biomedical implants and smart structures.

They used pulses of high-energy light to fuse tiny silver wires, resulting in circuits that conduct 10 times more electricity than the state of the art, according to a study in the journal Additive Manufacturing. By increasing conductivity 10-fold, the engineers can reduce energy use, extend the life of devices and increase their performance.

“Our innovation shows considerable promise for developing an integrated unit – using 3D printing and intense pulses of light to fuse silver nanoparticles – for electronics,” said senior author Rajiv Malhotra, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the School of Engineering at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

Embedding electrical interconnections inside 3D-printed structures made of polymers, or plastics, can create new paradigms for devices that are smaller and more energy-efficient. Such devices could include CubeSats (small satellites), drones, transmitters, light and motion sensors and Global Positioning Systems. Such interconnections are also often used in antennas, pressure sensors, electrical coils and electrical grids for electromagnetic shielding.

Source: https://news.rutgers.edu/

Gene Therapy Combats Efficiently Age-related Diseases

November 5, 2019 Uncategorized

As we age, our bodies tend to develop diseases like heart failure, kidney failure, diabetes, and obesity, and the presence of any one disease increases the risk of developing others. In traditional drug development, a drug usually only targets one condition, largely ignoring the interconnectedness of age-related diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart failure, and requiring patients to take multiple drugs, which increases the risk of negative side effects.

A new study from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School (HMS) reports that a single administration of an adeno-associated virus (AAV)-based gene therapy delivering combinations of three longevity-associated genes to mice dramatically improved or completely reversed multiple age-related diseases, suggesting that a systems-level approach to treating such diseases could improve overall health and lifespan. The research is reported in PNAS.

The AAV-based gene therapy improved the function of the heart and other organs in mice with various age-related diseases, suggesting that such an approach could help maintain health during aging.

“The results we saw were stunning, and suggest that holistically addressing aging via gene therapy could be more effective than the piecemeal approach that currently exists,” said first author Noah Davidsohn, Ph.D., a former Research Scientist at the Wyss Institute and HMS who is now the Chief Technology Officer of Rejuvenate Bio. “Everyone wants to stay as healthy as possible for as long as possible, and this study is a first step toward reducing the suffering caused by debilitating diseases.”

The study was conducted in the lab of Wyss Core Faculty member George Church, Ph.D. as part of Davidsohn’s postdoctoral research into the genetics of aging. Davidsohn, Church, and their co-authors honed in on three genes that had previously been shown to confer increased health and lifespan benefits when their expression was modified in genetically engineered mice: FGF21, sTGFβR2, and αKlotho. They hypothesized that providing extra copies of those genes to non-engineered mice via gene therapy would similarly combat age-related diseases and confer health benefits.

The team created separate gene therapy constructs for each gene using the AAV8 serotype as a delivery vehicle, and injected them into mouse models of obesity, type II diabetes, heart failure, and renal failure both individually and in combination with the other genes to see if there was a synergistic beneficial effect.

Source; https://wyss.harvard.edu/

Measles Virus Resets Immune System To ‘Baby-like’ State

November 4, 2019 Uncategorized

Two newly published studies have found that measles is a bigger deal than many people realize: it leaves them more susceptible to a variety of other health conditions. The issue is caused by eliminating many of the protective antibodies one develops over time, opening the door for illnesses caused by bacteria and viruses to which the patient was previously immune.

Measles vaccination rates have decreased, particularly among select populations motivated by skepticism of the science behind vaccinations in general or by ideologies that forbid their use. There’s a general belief among many that measles, a highly contagious disease most commonly acquired in childhood, is “no big deal” for most people. That’s not true, however.

Researchers with multiple institutions, including the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Harvard Medical School, found that the measles virus can essentially wipe the patient’s immune system record, eliminating the protective antibodies that make them immune to various viruses and other pathogens. This effect was observed in both humans and ferrets.

According to the study, the immune system of someone who was infected with measles is partially reset to ‘an immature baby-like state,’ one that is able to respond to viruses and bacteria in a limited fashion. As a result of this, kids who contract measles are more likely to contract other illnesses they were previously immune to, such as the flu.

The measles is highly preventable with the administration of a vaccine that led to the elimination of the disease in the US and, until recently, the UK. The condition itself causes a red rash and fever; there’s the potential for severe complications leading to death. Despite this, vaccination rates have decreased, particularly among certain religious collectives and anti-vaxers.

Source: https://www.slashgear.com/

The Top-Selling Car In Norway Last Month is Electric

November 1, 2019 Uncategorized

German auto maker Audi’s fully–electric e-tron sports utility vehicle was the top-selling car in Norway last month with an 8.3% market share, registration data showed on Friday.

Audi delivered 873 electric SUVs in October, ahead of Volkswagen Golf (VOWG_p.DE) in second place with 748 cars, according to the Norwegian Road Federation.

In total, 35.7% of all cars sold in Norway last month were electric. Seeking to end the sale of combusion-engine cars by the middle of the next decade, Norway exempts battery-powered vehicles from taxes imposed on petrol and diesel engines.

Tesla’s Model 3 sales fell to a market share of just 1.2% in October, but the car still remains the country’s top-selling car year-to-date.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Swarms Of NanoRobots Quickly Clean-up Radioactive Waste

October 31, 2019 Uncategorized

According to some experts, nuclear power holds great promise for meeting the world’s growing energy demands without generating greenhouse gases. But scientists need to find a way to remove radioactive isotopes, both from wastewater generated by nuclear power plants and from the environment in case of a spill. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Chemistry and Technology and the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry in Prague, Czech Republic, reporting in ACS Nano have developed tiny, self-propelled robots that remove radioactive uranium from simulated wastewater.

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The accidental release of radioactive waste, such as what occurred in the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear plant disasters, poses large threats to the environment, humans, and wildlife. Scientists have developed materials to capture, separate, remove and recover radioactive uranium from water, but the materials have limitations. One of the most promising recent approaches is the use of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — compounds that can trap specific substances, including radioactive uranium, within their porous structures. Martin Pumera and colleagues wanted to add a micromotor to a rod-shaped MOF called ZIF-8 to see if it could quickly clean up radioactive waste.

To make their self-propelled microrobots, the researchers designed ZIF-8 rods with diameters about 1/15 that of a human hair. The researchers added iron atoms and iron oxide nanoparticles to stabilize the structures and make them magnetic, respectively. Catalytic platinum nanoparticles placed at one end of each rod converted hydrogen peroxide “fuel” in the water into oxygen bubbles, which propelled the microrobots at a speed of about 60 times their own length per second. In simulated radioactive wastewater, the microrobots removed 96% of the uranium in an hour. The team collected the uranium-loaded rods with a magnet and stripped off the uranium, allowing the tiny robots to be recycled. The self-propelled microrobots could someday help in the management and remediation of radioactive waste, the researchers say.

Source: https://pubs.acs.org/
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https://scitechdaily.com/

Worlds Like Earth Common In The Cosmos

October 30, 2019 Uncategorized

A new way of studying planets in other solar systems – by doing sort of an autopsy on planetary wreckage devoured by a type of star called a white dwarf – is showing that rocky worlds with geochemistry similar to Earth may be quite common in the cosmos. Researchers studied six white dwarfs whose strong gravitational pull had sucked in shredded remnants of planets and other rocky bodies that had been in orbit. This material, they found, was very much like that present in rocky planets such as Earth and Mars in our solar system. Given that Earth harbors an abundance of life, the findings offer the latest tantalizing evidence that planets similarly capable of hosting life exist in large numbers beyond our solar system.

“The more we find commonalities between planets made in our solar system and those around other stars, the more the odds are enhanced that the Earth is not unusual,” said Edward Young, a geochemistry and cosmochemistry professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), who helped lead the study published in the journal Science. “The more Earth-like planets, the greater the odds for life as we understand it.”

The first planets beyond our solar system, called exoplanets, were spotted in the 1990s, but it has been tough for scientists to determine their composition. Studying white dwarfs offered a new avenue.

A white dwarf is the burned-out core of a sun-like star. In its death exoplanets, the star blows off its outer layer and the rest collapses, forming an extremely dense and relatively small entity that represents one of the universe’s densest forms of matter, exceeded only by neutron stars and black holes. Planets and other objects that once orbited it can be ejected into interstellar space. But if they stray near its immense gravitation field, they “will be shredded into dust, and that dust will begin to fall onto the star and sink out of sight,” said study lead author Alexandra Doyle, a UCLA graduate student in geochemistry and astrochemistry.

“This is where that ‘autopsy’ idea comes from,” Doyle added, noting that by observing the elements from the massacred planets and other objects inside the white dwarf scientists can understand their composition.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

New Crispr Fixes 89% Of The Mutations That Cause Heritable Diseases

October 29, 2019 Uncategorized

Andrew Anzalone was restless. It was late autumn of 2017. The year was winding down, and so was his MD/PhD program at Columbia. Trying to figure out what was next in his life, he’d taken to long walks in New York’s leaf-strewn West Village. One night as he paced up Hudson Street, his stomach filled with La Colombe coffee and his mind with Crispr gene editing papers, an idea began to bubble through the caffeine brume inside his brain. Crispr, for all its DNA-snipping precision, has always been best at breaking things. But if you want to replace a faulty gene with a healthy one, things get more complicated. In addition to programming a piece of guide RNA to tell Crispr where to cut, you have to provide a copy of the new DNA and then hope the cell’s repair machinery installs it correctly. Which, spoiler alert, it often doesn’t. Anzalone wondered if instead there was a way to combine those two pieces, so that one molecule told Crispr both where to make its changes and what edits to make. Inspired, he cinched his coat tighter and hurried home to his apartment in Chelsea, sketching and Googling late into the night to see how it might be done. A few months later, his idea found a home in the lab of David Liu, the Broad Institute chemist who’d recently developed a host of more surgical Crispr systems, known as base editors. Anzalone joined Liu’s lab in 2018, and together they began to engineer the Crispr creation glimpsed in the young post-doc’s imagination. After much trial and error, they wound up with something even more powerful. The system, which Liu’s lab has dubbed “prime editing,” can for the first time make virtually any alteration—additions, deletions, swapping any single letter for any other—without severing the DNA double helix.

“If Crispr-Cas9 is like scissors and base editors are like pencils, then you can think of prime editors to be like word processors,” Liu told reporters in a press briefing. Why is that a big deal? Because with such fine-tuned command of the genetic code, prime editing could, according to Liu’s calculations, correct around 89 per cent of the mutations that cause heritable human diseases. Working in human cell cultures, his lab has already used prime editors to fix the genetic glitches that cause sickle cell anemia, cystic fibrosis, and Tay-Sachs disease. Those are just three of more than 175 edits the group unveiled in a scientific article published in the journal Nature.

The work “has a strong potential to change the way we edit cells and be transformative,” says Gaétan Burgio, a geneticist at the Australian National University who was not involved in the work, in an email. He was especially impressed at the range of changes prime editing makes possible, including adding up to 44 DNA letters and deleting up to 80. “Overall, the editing efficiency and the versatility shown in this paper are remarkable.”

Source: https://www.broadinstitute.org/
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https://www.wired.co.uk/

Tiny Robots Build Huge Structures

October 28, 2019 Uncategorized

Today’s commercial aircraft are typically manufactured in sections, often in different locations — wings at one factory, fuselage sections at another, tail components somewhere else — and then flown to a central plant in huge cargo planes for final assembly. But what if the final assembly was the only assembly, with the whole plane built out of a large array of tiny identical pieces, all put together by an army of tiny robots? That’s the vision that graduate student Benjamin Jenett, working with Professor Neil Gershenfeld in MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), has been pursuing as his doctoral thesis work. It’s now reached the point that prototype versions of such robots can assemble small structures and even work together as a team to build up a larger assemblies. The new work appears in the October issue of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, in a paper by Jenett, Gershenfeld, fellow graduate student Amira Abdel-Rahman, and CBA alumnus Kenneth Cheung SM ’07, PhD ’12, who is now at NASA’s Ames Research Center, where he leads the ARMADAS project to design a lunar base that could be built with robotic assembly.

“This paper is a treat,” says Aaron Becker, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Houston, who was not associated with this work. “It combines top-notch mechanical design with jaw-dropping demonstrations, new robotic hardware, and a simulation suite with over 100,000 elements,” he says. “What’s at the heart of this is a new kind of robotics, that we call relative robots,” Gershenfeld says. Historically, he explains, there have been two broad categories of robotics — ones made out of expensive custom components that are carefully optimized for particular applications such as factory assembly, and ones made from inexpensive mass-produced modules with much lower performance. The new robots, however, are an alternative to both. They’re much simpler than the former, while much more capable than the latter, and they have the potential to revolutionize the production of large-scale systems, from airplanes to bridges to entire buildings.

Source: http://news.mit.edu/
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https://www.popularmechanics.com/

Quantum Supremacy

October 25, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers in UC Santa Barbara/Google scientist John Martinis’ group have made good on their claim to quantum supremacy. Using 53 entangled quantum bits (“qubits”), their Sycamore computer has taken on — and solved — a problem considered intractable for classical computers.

Google’s quantum supreme cryostat with Sycamore inside

“A computation that would take 10,000 years on a classical supercomputer took 200 seconds on our quantum computer,” said Brooks Foxen, a graduate student researcher in the Martinis Group. “It is likely that the classical simulation time, currently estimated at 10,000 years, will be reduced by improved classical hardware and algorithms, but, since we are currently 1.5 billion times faster, we feel comfortable laying claim to this achievement.”

The feat is outlined in a paper in the journal Nature.

The milestone comes after roughly two decades of quantum computing research conducted by Martinis and his group, from the development of a single superconducting qubit to systems including architectures of 72 and, with Sycamore, 54 qubits (one didn’t perform) that take advantage of the both awe-inspiring and bizarre properties of quantum mechanics.

“The algorithm was chosen to emphasize the strengths of the quantum computer by leveraging the natural dynamics of the device,” said Ben Chiaro, another graduate student researcher in the Martinis Group. That is, the researchers wanted to test the computer’s ability to hold and rapidly manipulate a vast amount of complex, unstructured data.

“We basically wanted to produce an entangled state involving all of our qubits as quickly as we can,” Foxen said, “and so we settled on a sequence of operations that produced a complicated superposition state that, when measured, returned output (“bitstring”) with a probability determined by the specific sequence of operations used to prepare that particular superposition.” The exercise, which was to verify that the circuit’s output correspond to the sequence used to prepare the state, sampled the quantum circuit a million times in just a few minutes, exploring all possibilities — before the system could lose its quantum coherence. “We performed a fixed set of operations that entangles 53 qubits into a complex superposition state,” Chiaro explained. “This superposition state encodes the probability distribution. For the quantum computer, preparing this superposition state is accomplished by applying a sequence of tens of control pulses to each qubit in a matter of microseconds. We can prepare and then sample from this distribution by measuring the qubits a million times in 200 seconds.” “For classical computers, it is much more difficult to compute the outcome of these operations because it requires computing the probability of being in any one of the 2^53 possible states, where the 53 comes from the number of qubits — the exponential scaling is why people are interested in quantum computing to begin with,” Foxen said. “This is done by matrix multiplication, which is expensive for classical computers as the matrices become large.”

According to the new paper, the researchers used a method called cross-entropy benchmarking to compare the quantum circuit’s bitstring to its “corresponding ideal probability computed via simulation on a classical computer” to ascertain that the quantum computer was working correctly. “We made a lot of design choices in the development of our processor that are really advantageous,” said Chiaro. Among these advantages, he said, are the ability to experimentally tune the parameters of the individual qubits as well as their interactions.

Source: https://www.news.ucsb.edu/
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https://www.nature.com/

Breakthrough In The Fight Against Alzheimer’s

October 24, 2019 Uncategorized

In a shocking reversal, Biogen (BIIB) said that it would resurrect an Alzheimer’s drug that the company previously said had failed and will ask the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve it. The company said a “new analysis of a larger dataset” showed that the drug, aducanumab, reduced clinical decline in patients with early Alzheimer’s disease on multiple measures of the drug’s effectiveness. That directly contradicts a decision in March to halt studies of the therapy based on the recommendations of an independent monitoring board that was charged with protecting patients in the study. Aducanumab’s failure sent shock waves far beyond Biogen. It was thought to be the last of a series of drugs—the previous ones, from many different drug companies, all failed—that targeted a protein in the brain called beta amyloid. After Biogen’s announcement in March, most researchers and biotechnology executives saw little hope for a drug that would help patients with Alzheimer’s disease even as cases mount.

Biogen said that it conducted a new analysis in consultation with the FDA of a larger data set from the discontinued studies. The new analysis includes additional data that became available after the previous analysis showed the studies were “futile”—that it had no chance of succeeding. Biogen said that the new data show aducanumab is “pharmacologically and clinically active” and that it reduced patients’ clinical decline based on the results of a survey called Clinical Dementia Rating-Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB), which was the main goal of both studies.

“With such a devastating disease that affects tens of millions worldwide, today’s announcement is truly heartening in the fight against Alzheimer’s. This is the result of groundbreaking research and is a testament to Biogen’s steadfast determination to follow the science and do the right thing for patients,” Michel Vounatsos, Biogen’s chief executive, said in a statement. “We are hopeful about the prospect of offering patients the first therapy to reduce the clinical decline of Alzheimer’s disease and the potential implication of these results for similar approaches targeting amyloid beta.”

Al Sandrock, Biogen’s head of research and development and chief medical officer, said in his first interview about the new results that his team could only find one previous instance where a trial was stopped for futility and then it turned out to be positive. “I have to pinch myself because I almost don’t believe it yet,” Sandrock said. “It’s so amazing to have this change from March. But I’m also very, very happy because… I know people with mild cognitive impairment and I felt like I had let them all down.”

By June, as Biogen analyzed the full data set, researchers started to realize that a different picture was emerging of aducanumab, Sandrock said. The reason was because of changes that Biogen had made to the study late in the game. Initially, the company worried about a potential side effect—brain swelling—and limited the dosage of the drug. But later patients were allowed to receive higher doses of the medicine.

Source: https://www.biogen.com/
AND
https://www.scientificamerican.com/

3D-Printed Home Constructed In One Day For Under $4,000

October 23, 2019 Uncategorized

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A home like this can be built in less than 24 hours at a cost of only $4,000. The secret? 3D printing. And they could help families living in poverty and unsafe conditions. New Story, a housing charity organization, and ICON, a construction tech company, have partnered together. Their goal is to end global homelessness.

Alexandria Lafci (Icon) comments: “So having strong, sturdy walls, having a door that we can close at night — it’s something that we take for granted. Being able to lock our door and be safe. For many of these families, for years, sometimes even a lifetime, they don’t have that opportunity to have a safe shelter. So when they move into a New Story community, when they move into a safe home, families lives are transformed. An entire community of these 3D printed homes will be constructed in El Salvador. The ultimate goal is to get costs down to $4,000 per house with a build time of fewer than 24 hours. “

This prototype house was built in Austin, TX. The home measures 650 square feet. Mortar was printed layer by layer. Human workers installed windows, doors, plumbing, and electrical systems. Here’s what’s inside: A living room. Small office space. One bedroom. One bathroom. ICON staff will use the home as an office to test the durability.

“Our first product is a 3D printer that can print a house in 24 hours for half the cost. Phase one for News Story and for ICON is a proof of concept house and the good news is we’ve done it. We printed the first home in the United States that’s going to be permitted and for us, this is just the beginning”, explains Evan Loomis from Icon. “The real kind of home run for us is to be able to do what we’ve done here in Austin, Texas in the developing world and we’re doing that in what we call phase two which is in El Salvador. We are going to be printing an entire village for people that don’t have homes“.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/

Air Pollution Triggers 500,000 Premature Deaths In Europe Every Year

October 22, 2019 Uncategorized

A team at King’s College London looked at data from London, Birmingham, Bristol, Derby, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford and Southampton. They calculated days with above average pollution levels would see an extra 124 cardiac arrests over the year. NHS England boss Simon Stevens said it was evidence of “a health emergency“. The figure is based on ambulance call data and does not count heart attacks suffered by patients already in hospital. It points to significant short-term health risks caused by air pollution, on top of contributing to almost 500,000 premature deaths in Europe every year.

On days with high pollution levels, across the nine cities in total, they calculated that there would be a total of 231 additional hospital admissions for stroke, with an extra 193 children and adults taken to hospital for asthma treatment. Dr Heather Walton, of King’s College London’s Environmental Research Group, said air pollution reduction policies concentrated in the main on effects connected to life expectancy. “However, health studies show clear links with a much wider range of health effects,” she added.

In London, high-pollution days would see an extra 87 cardiac arrests per year, an extra 144 strokes, and 74 children and 33 adults ending up in hospital with asthma-related issues. In Birmingham the figure would be 12 more out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, 27 additional admissions for stroke and 26 more for asthma. Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham, Oxford and Southampton would see between two and six more out-of-hospital heart attacks and up to 14 extra hospital admissions for both stroke and asthma. Only in Derby would there be no apparent increase.

Among the long-term risks associated with high pollution levels are stunted lung growth and low birth weight. The King’s College research also suggests cutting air pollution by a fifth would decrease incidents of lung cancer by between 5% and 7% across the nine cities surveyed. Mr Stevens said: “It’s clear that the climate emergency is in fact also a health emergency. “Since these avoidable deaths are happening now – not in 2025 or 2050 – together we need to act now.”

The figures were published ahead of Wednesday’s International Clean Air Summit hosted by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan and the UK100 network of local government leaders.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/

Machine Gun That Turns Anyone Into A Marksman

October 21, 2019 Uncategorized

A carbine that can call in an airstrike. A computer-aided scope on a machine gun that can turn just about anyone into a marksman.Even firearms that measure and record every movement, from the angle of the barrel to the precise moment of each shot fired, which could provide law enforcement with a digital record of police shootings. The application of information technology to firearms has long been resisted in the United States by gun owners and law-enforcement officials who worry they could be hacked, fail at the wrong moment, or invite government control.

But with the U.S. Army soliciting bids for high-tech battlefield solutions to create the soldier’s rifle of the future, those concerns may quickly become irrelevant. The Army is moving forward regardless. One company seeking an Army contract is working on an operating system that could be embedded into the gun, which could have law-enforcement and civilian applications that may reshape the U.S. debate about gun safety.

“You could accomplish some of the functionality by duct-taping an iPhone to your gun. However what we offer is the world’s first truly embedded operating system,” said Melvic Smith, 41, principal owner of Dimensional Weapons Systems, which bills itself as the first patented blockchain-based firearms company.

That system could eventually add any number of applications, Smith said, including “smart gun” technology that would only allow the weapon to be fired by a designated shooter’s hand. Smart guns in theory could prevent children from accidentally firing guns at home, or render stolen guns useless.

“Our team is composed of veterans, law enforcement officers, people that are pro-Second Amendment to begin with,” Smith said, referring to the amendment in the U.S. constitution that grants American citizens the right to bear arms. “But we also have engaged with people in the weapons manufacturing industry. They actually love the technology. They’re worried about political backlash.”

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Eye Drops Reverse Vision Loss

October 18, 2019 Uncategorized

Eye drops that can reverse poor vision? It may sound like science fiction, but one Israeli company is aiming to bring this product to market. The drops passed their Phase 2b clinical trial earlier this month, meaning they’ve proven to improve farsightedness, the inability to see or read nearby objects, and are highly tolerable.

Although results have yet to be released, Israel-based Orasis, Pharmaceuticals, revealed details last week about the latest results of the Phase 2b study for their CSF-1 eye drops. The drops offer temporary relief reversal of farsightedness. Their effects can be felt quickly, although they only last for a few hours.

The study was based on results from 166 participants across several research centers in the U.S. and designed to test both the efficacy and safety of the product. According to Elad Kedar, CEO of Orasis, results are extremely positive.

“We are very encouraged by the results,” said Kedar. “The results were great not only on the efficacy endpoints, but also on the safety and tolerability, so we are moving as quickly as possible into Phase 3.”

According to Kedar, the drops are made from chemicals already existing in eye medication for other treatments. In addition, the concentrations used in the eye drops are far lower than those already used for current eye treatment. In trials, patients improved their eyesight by three eye chart lines, which is the FDA requirement for eyesight studies, according to Kedar.

Source: https://www.orasis-pharma.com/

Brexit Hits UK Science Funding, Deters International Researchers

October 17, 2019 Uncategorized

Uncertainty surrounding Britain’s exit from the European Union has hit science funding to the tune of almost half a billion euros and is putting off international researchers from coming to Britain, a leading institution said on Wednesday. An analysis conducted by the Royal Society scientific academy found that the UK’s annual share of EU research funding has fallen by some 460 million euros ($509.40 million) since 2015, making it a less attractive destination for international science talent. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has vowed to take Britain out of the EU with or without a deal by the end of October.

Venki Ramakrishnan, the Royal Society’s president, said the potential paralysis of a no-deal Brexit and the current state of chaos had already lead to a dramatic drop in the number of leading researchers who want to come to the UK.

“People do not want to gamble with their careers when they have no sense of whether the UK will be willing and able to maintain its global scientific leadership,” he said in a statement as the analysis was published.

On funding, the Royal Society report found that in 2015 prior to the UK’s referendum on Brexit, Britain secured 1.49 billion euros, or 16% of total grants awarded, under Horizon 2020 – the EU’s research and innovation programme which has around 77 billion euros of funding between 2014 and 2020. By 2018, that had fallen to just over 11% of grants, or 1.06 billion euros.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

How To Restore Sight To The Blind

October 16, 2019 Uncategorized

For more than a decade, researchers have been working to create artificial digital retinas that can be implanted in the eye to allow the blind to see again. Many challenges stand in the way, but researchers at Stanford University may have found the key to solving one of the most vexing: heat. The artificial retina requires a very small computer chip (nanocoputer) with many metal electrodes poking out. The electrodes first record the activity of the neurons around them to create a map of cell types. This information is then used to transmit visual data from a camera to the brain. Unfortunately, the eye produces so much data during recording that the electronics get too darn hot.

“The chips required to build a high-quality artificial retina would essentially fry the human tissue they are trying to interface with,” says E.J. Chichilnisky, a professor in the Neurosurgery and Ophthalmology departments, who is on Stanford’s artificial retina team.

Members of the team, including Chichilnisky and his collaborators in Stanford’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science departments, recently announced they have devised a way to solve that problem by significantly compressing the massive amounts of visual data that all those neurons in the eye create. They discuss their advance in a study published in the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems.

To convey visual information, neurons in the retina send electrical impulses, known as spikes, to the brain. The problem is that the digital retina needs to record and decode those spikes to understand the properties of the neurons, but that generates a lot of heat in the digitization process, even with only a few hundred electrodes used in today’s prototypes. The first true digital retina will need to have tens of thousands of such electrodes, complicating the issue further. Boris Murmann, a professor of electrical engineering on the retina project, says the team found a way to extract the same level of visual understanding using less data. By better understanding which signal samples matter and which can be ignored, the team was able to reduce the amount of data that has to be processed. It’s a bit like being at a party trying to extract a single coherent conversation amid the din of a crowded room — a few voices matter a lot, but most are noise and can be ignored.

“We compress the data by being more selective, ignoring the noise and baseline samples and digitizing only the unique spikes,” Murmann says. Previously, digitization and compression were done separately, leading to a lot of extra data storage and data transfer. “Our innovation inserts compression techniques into the digitization process,” says team member Subhasish Mitra, a professor of electrical engineering and of computer science. This approach retains the most useful information and is easier to implement in hardware.

Source: https://engineering.stanford.edu/

Cotton As Human Food

October 15, 2019 Uncategorized

U.S. regulators gave the green light for genetically modified cotton to be used for human consumption, paving the way for a protein-packed new food source – edible cottonseed that tastes a bit like chickpeas – that its developers said could help tackle global malnutrition.

The Food and Drug Administration’s decision on the cotton plant developed by Texas A&M University scientists means it is allowed as food for people and all types of animals.

Texas A&M AgriLife Research plant biotechnologist Keerti Rathore said the scientists are holding discussions with companies and hope to have the plant commercially available within about five years. Rathore said the team also will explore seeking regulatory approval in other countries starting with Mexico.

Genetically modified cotton plants with an edible cottonseed trait are seen growing near Belvidere, North Carolina, U.S.
“Yes, we are fully aware of the resistance to GMOs in many countries, but I remain hopeful that counties who are desperate for food will adopt this technology,” Rathore added.

Cotton is grown in more than 80 countries, with its fiber used to make textiles and cottonseed currently used among other purposes to feed animals such as cattle and sheep that have multiple stomach chambers. Ordinary cottonseed is unfit for humans and many animals to eat because it contains high levels of gossypol, a toxic chemical.

Rathore’s team used so-called RNAi, or RNA interference, technology to “silence” a gene, virtually eliminating gossypol from the cottonseed. Gossypol was left at natural levels in the rest of the plant because it guards against insects and disease.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Walking Again With Robot Exoskeleton Steered By The Brain

October 14, 2019 Uncategorized

The French tetraplegic man who has been able to walk again using a pioneering four-limb robotic system, or exoskeleton, said walking was a major feat for him after being immobile for years. The French scientists behind the system, which was publicly unveiled last week, use a system of sensors implanted near the brain which send signals to the robotic system, moving the patient’s legs and arms. Speaking to media in the French city of Grenoble, the 30-year-old patient, who was identified only by his first name, Thibault, said he had to re-educate to use his brain when he started to try the whole-body exoskeleton.

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“As I hadn’t moved for two years I had to re-learn to use my brain,” he said. “At the beginning, walking was very difficult. Now I can stand up for two hours in the exoskeleton and I can do walking cycles for a very long time”, he also said. “This is a feat for me.”

In a two-year-long trial, two recording devices were implanted, one either side of Thibault’s head between the brain and the skin, spanning the region of the brain that controls sensation and motor function. Each recorder contained 64 electrodes which collected brain signals and transmitted them to a decoding algorithm. The system translated the brain signals into the movements the patient thought about, and sent his commands to the exoskeleton. Over 24 months, the patient carried out various mental tasks to train the algorithm to understand his thoughts and to progressively increase the number of movements he could make. For now the exoskeleton is purely an experimental prototype.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Bacteria Becomes Resistant When Exposed To Li-Ion Nanoparticles

October 11, 2019 Uncategorized

Over the last two decades, nanotechnology has improved many of the products we use every day from microelectronics to sunscreens. Nanoparticles (particles that are just a few hundred atoms in size) are ending up in the environment by the ton, but scientists are still unclear about the long-term effects of these super-small nanoparticles. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have shown that nanoparticles may have a bigger impact on the environment than previously thought.

Researchers from the National Science Foundation Center for Sustainable Nanotechnology, led by scientists at the University of Minnesota, found that a common, non-disease-causing bacteria found in the environment, called Shewanella oneidensis MR-1, developed rapid resistance when repeatedly exposed to nanoparticles used in making lithium ion batteries, the rechargeable batteries used in portable electronics and electric vehicles. Resistance is when the bacteria can survive at higher and higher quantities of the materials, which means that the fundamental biochemistry and biology of the bacteria is changing.

“At many times throughout history, materials and chemicals like asbestos or DDT have not been tested thoroughly and have caused big problems in our environment,” said Erin Carlson, a University of Minnesota chemistry associate professor in the University’s College of Science and Engineering and the lead author of the study. “We don’t know that these results are that dire, but this study is a warning sign that we need to be careful with all of these new materials, and that they could dramatically change what’s happening in our environment.”

Carlson said the results of this study are unusual because typically when we talk about bacterial resistance it is because we’ve been treating the bacteria with antibiotics. The bacteria become resistant because we are trying to kill them, she said. In this case, the nanoparticles used in lithium ion batteries were never made to kill bacteria.

The research is published in Chemical Science, a peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Source: https://twin-cities.umn.edu/

How To Make Robots More Effective On The Future Battlefield

October 10, 2019 Uncategorized

In an effort to make robots more effective and versatile teammates for Soldiers in combat, Army researchers are on a mission to understand the value of the molecular living functionality of muscle, and the fundamental mechanics that would need to be replicated in order to artificially achieve the capabilities arising from the proteins responsible for muscle contraction.

Bionanomotors, like myosins that move along actin networks, are responsible for most methods of motion in all life forms. Thus, the development of artificial nanomotors could be game-changing in the field of robotics research.

Researchers from the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command‘s Army Research Laboratory ‘(CCDC ARL) have been looking to identify a design that would allow the artificial nanomotor to take advantage of Brownian motion, the property of particles to agitatedly move simply because they are warm.

The CCDC ARL researchers believe understanding and developing these fundamental mechanics are a necessary foundational step toward making informed decisions on the viability of new directions in robotics involving the blending of synthetic biology, robotics, and dynamics and controls engineering.

Army researchers are on a mission to understand the value of the molecular ‘living’ functionality of muscle, and the fundamental mechanics that would need to be replicated in order to artificially achieve the capabilities arising from the proteins responsible for muscle contraction

“By controlling the stiffness of different geometrical features of a simple lever-arm design, we found that we could use Brownian motion to make the nanomotor more capable of reaching desirable positions for creating linear motion,” said Dean Culver, a researcher in CCDC ARL’s Vehicle Technology Directorate. “This nano-scale feature translates to more energetically efficient actuation at a macro scale, meaning robots that can do more for the warfighter over a longer amount of time.”

“These widely accepted muscle contraction models are akin to a black-box understanding of a car engine,” Culver explained. “More gas, more power. It weighs this much and takes up this much space. Combustion is involved. But, you can’t design a car engine with that kind of surface-level information. You need to understand how the pistons work, and how finely injection needs to be tuned. That’s a component-level understanding of the engine. We dive into the component-level mechanics of the built-up protein system and show the design and control value of living functionality as well as a clearer understanding of design parameters that would be key to synthetically reproducing such living functionality.”

Culver stated that the capacity for Brownian motion to kick a tethered particle from a disadvantageous elastic position to an advantageous one, in terms of energy production for a molecular motor, has been illustrated by ARL at a component level, a crucial step in the design of artificial nanomotors that offer the same performance capabilities as biological ones.

“This research adds a key piece of the puzzle for fast, versatile robots that can perform autonomous tactical maneuver and reconnaissance functions,” Culver said. “These models will be integral to the design of distributed actuators that are silent, low thermal signature and efficient – features that will make these robots more impactful in the field.”

Culver noted that they are silent because the muscles don’t make a lot of noise when they actuate, especially compared to motors or servos, cold because the amount of heat generation in a muscle is far less than a comparable motor, and efficient because of the advantages of the distributed chemical energy model and potential escape via Brownian motion.

According to Culver, the breadth of applications for actuators inspired by the biomolecular machines in animal muscles is still unknown, but many of the existing application spaces have clear Army applications such as bio-inspired robotics, nanomachines and energy harvesting.

The Journal of Biomechanical Engineering recently featured their research.

Source: https://www.arl.army.mil/

First Russian Lab-grown Meat

October 9, 2019 Uncategorized

Earlier this week, the Ochakov Food Ingredients Plant (OKPI), a Russian food innovation lab, announced it has produced the country’s first sample of cultivated meat. “Cultivated meat” is one of the terms used to indicate meat produced by in vitro cultivation of animal cells, without the need to slaughter any animal. In this case, the 40-gram sample was grown using the muscle tissue of an Aberdeen Angus calf. The project was carried out over a 2-year period and the sample cost 900,000 rubles (around $14,000) to produce, stated the lab in its press release.

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“In vitro meat, also known as cultivated meat, is a very promising direction for the meat industry […] From our point of view, laboratory meat production has the most significant ethical significance for modern society, since we can refuse the slaughter of living creatures to obtain meat,” said Nikolai Shimanovsky, a molecular pharmacologist and the project’s head.

Barring legal impediments, the lab predicted that locally-produced cultivated meat may appear in Russian supermarkets by 2023 at a retail price of 800 rubles per kilo ($12). Meat supply per person in Russia grew from 39.86 kg in 2000 to 74.82 kg in 2013 and OECD-FAO projections estimate that it will grow steadily over the next 10 years.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/

Bacteria trapped — and terminated — by graphene filter

October 8, 2019 Uncategorized

Airborne bacteria may see what looks like a comfy shag carpet on which to settle. But it’s a trap. Rice University scientists have transformed their laser-induced graphene (LIG) into self-sterilizing filters that grab pathogens out of the air and kill them with small pulses of electricity. The flexible filter developed by the Rice lab of chemist James Tour may be of special interest to hospitals. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, patients have a 1-in-31 chance of acquiring a potentially antibiotic-resistant infection during hospitalization. The device described in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano captures bacteria, fungi, fungi, prions, endotoxins and other biological contaminants carried by droplets, aerosols and particulate matter. The filter then prevents the microbes and other contaminants from proliferating by periodically heating up to 350 degrees Celsius (662 degrees Fahrenheit), enough to obliterate pathogens and their toxic byproducts. The filter requires little power, and heats and cools within seconds.

LIG is a conductive foam of pure, atomically thin carbon sheets synthesized through heating the surface of a common polyimide sheet with an industrial laser cutter. The process discovered by Tour’s lab in 2014 has led to a range of applications for electronics, triboelectric nanogenerators, composites, electrocatalysis and even art. Like all pure graphene, the foam conducts electricity. When electrified, Joule heating raises the filter’s temperature above 300 C, enough to not only kill trapped pathogens but also to decompose toxic byproducts that can feed new microorganisms and activate the human immune system. The researchers suggested a single, custom-fit LIG filter could be efficient enough to replace the two filter beds currently required by federal standards for hospital ventilation systems.

Seen in an electron microscope image, micron-scale sheets of graphene created at Rice University form a two-layer air filter that traps pathogens and then kills them with a modest burst of electricity

“So many patients become infected by bacteria and their metabolic products, which for example can result in sepsis while in the hospital,” Tour said. “We need more methods to combat the airborne transfer of not just bacteria but also their downstream products, which can cause severe reactions among patients.

“Some of these products, like endotoxins, need to be exposed to temperatures of 300 degrees Celsius in order to deactivate them,” a purpose served by the LIG filter, he added. “This could significantly lessen the transfer of bacteria-generated molecules between patients, and thereby lower the ultimate costs of patient stays and lessen sickness and death from these pathogens.”

The lab tested LIG filters with a commercial vacuum filtration system, pulling air through at a rate of 10 liters per minute for 90 hours, and found that Joule heating successfully sanitized the filters of all pathogens and byproducts. Incubating used filters for an additional 130 hours revealed no subsequent bacterial growth on the heated units, unlike control LIG filters that had not been heated.

“Bacteria culturing experiments performed on a membrane downstream from the LIG filter indicated that bacteria are unable to permeate the LIG filter,” said Rice sophomore John Li, co-lead author of the paper with postdoctoral researcher Michael Stanford. Stanford noted the sterilization feature “may reduce the frequency with which LIG filters would need to be replaced in comparison to traditional filters.” Tour suggested LIG air filters could also find their way into commercial aircraft.

Source: https://news.rice.edu/

Edible Sensor To Check Whether Drugs Have Been Taken

October 7, 2019 Uncategorized

An ingestible sensor that enables health workers to check that patients have taken their medication could revolutionise tuberculosis treatment, particularly in developing countries, researchers believe. New ways to ensure TB patients comply with their treatment are desperately needed. Patients with the most straightforward form of the deadly infectious disease have to take a cocktail of drugs over a six-month period – and if they fail to stick to the regime, they risk the disease returning in a drug-resistant form.

In the study, published in in the journal Plos Medicine, patients in California were given a standard TB drug alongside an “edible” sensor, coated with minerals. When ingested, the sensor communicates with a patch attached to the patient’s torso that in turn sends a message to a mobile phone. The data is then automatically uploaded to a secure, centralised computer for a health worker to check.

To avoid high treatment drop-out rates it is recommended that patients take their medication under the supervision of a health worker in a procedure called directly observed therapy (DOT). But this is time consuming – requiring a health worker to visit the patient at work or home or vice versa – as well as costly and inconvenient. But this new “wireless observed therapy” (WOT) avoids the need for daily visits and enables the patient to take the drugs in private and at a time that suits them.

Some 77 patients, who were no longer infectious but still needed to finish their course of treatment, took part in the study, carried out by researchers at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). A third followed the standard DOT model of care and two thirds followed the novel treatment. The study showed that WOT had a 99.3 per cent accuracy rate in recording adherence to treatment and all those patients on the wireless therapy wanted to continue with it after the trial had ended. All finished treatment and were cured of TB.

Sara Browne, lead author of the study and associate professor of infectious diseases at the UCSD, said the ingestible sensor gave patients more autonomy.

“The system allows patients to determine how they want to take their pills with minimum interference. It preserves the highest standards of privacy but it also enables the health system to focus on people who need the most support,” she said.

Source: http://grantome.com/
AND
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Electrified Tattoos and Personalized Biosensors

October 4, 2019 Uncategorized

Electrical engineers at Duke University have devised a fully print-in-place technique for electronics that is gentle enough to work on delicate surfaces including paper and human skin. The advance could enable technologies such as high-adhesion, embedded electronic tattoos and bandages tricked out with patient-specific biosensors.

Two electronically active leads directly printed along the underside of Duke graduate student Nick Williams’s pinky successfully light up an LED when a voltage is applied

“When people hear the term ‘printed electronics,’ the expectation is that a person loads a substrate and the designs for an electronic circuit into a printer and, some reasonable time later, removes a fully functional electronic circuit,” said Aaron Franklin, Associate Professor at Duke.

“Over the years there have been a slew of research papers promising these kinds of ‘fully printed electronics,’ but the reality is that the process actually involves taking the sample out multiple times to bake it, wash it or spin-coat materials onto it,” Franklin said. “Ours is the first where the reality matches the public perception.”

The concept of so-called electronic tattoos were first developed in the late 2000s at the University of Illinois by John A. Rogers, who is now Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University. Rather than a true tattoo that is injected permanently into the skin, Rogers’s electronic tattoos are thin, flexible patches of rubber that contain equally flexible electrical components.

The thin film sticks to skin much like a temporary tattoo, and early versions of the flexible electronics were made to contain heart and brain activity monitors and muscle stimulators. While these types of devices are on their way to commercialization and large-scale manufacturing, there are some arenas in which they’re not well suited, such as when direct modification of a surface by adding custom electronics is needed. “For direct or additive printing to ever really be useful, you’re going to need to be able to print the entirety of whatever you’re printing in one step,” said Franklin. “Some of the more exotic applications include intimately connected electronic tattoos that could be used for biological tagging or unique detection mechanisms, rapid prototyping for on-the-fly custom electronics, and paper-based diagnostics that could be integrated readily into customized bandages.”

The techniques are described in a series of papers published in the journal Nanoscale and in the journal ACS Nano.

Source: https://pratt.duke.edu/

Gym Robot

October 3, 2019 Uncategorized

N many robotics companies can boast legions of fans online, but not many robotics companies make robots quite like Boston Dynamics.

Boston Dynamics is a world leader in mobile robots, tackling some of the toughest robotics challenges. We combine the principles of dynamic control and balance with sophisticated mechanical designs, cutting-edge electronics, and next-generation software for high-performance robots equipped with perception, navigation, and intelligence. Boston Dynamics has an extraordinary and fast-growing technical team of engineers and scientists who seamlessly combine advanced analytical thinking with bold engineering and boots-in-the-mud practicality.

Each time the firm shares new footage of its machines, they cause a sensation. Whether it’s a pack of robot dogs towing a truck or a human-like bot leaping nimbly up a set of boxes, Boston Dynamics’ bots are uniquely thrilling.

They’re also something of a Rorschach test for our feelings about the future, with viewers either basking in the high-tech splendor or bemoaning the coming robo-apocalypse. And when a parody video circulated last month showing a CGI “Bosstown Dynamics” robot turning on its creators, many mistook it for the real thing — a testament to how far the company has pushed what seems technologically possible.

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“We’ve been an R&D company for a long time, working on pushing the envelope [and] making robots that try to live up to people’s idea of what a robot should be,” says Raibert. “And it’s natural … that as we do that R&D it makes robots more and more useful, and it makes it obvious to us that, ‘Oh, this thing could be used and commercialized,’ said Boston Dynamics CEO Marc Raibert.”

The world’s most dynamic humanoid robot ! Atlas is a research platform designed to push the limits of whole-body mobility. Atlas’s advanced control system and state-of-the-art hardware give the robot the power and balance to demonstrate human-level agility. Atlas has one of the world’s most compact mobile hydraulic systems. Custom motors, valves, and a compact hydraulic power unit enable Atlas to deliver high power to any of its 28 hydraulic joints for impressive feats of mobility. Atlas’s advanced control system enables highly diverse and agile locomotion, while algorithms reason through complex dynamic interactions involving the whole body and environment to plan movements. Atlas uses 3D printed parts to give it the strength-to-weight ratio necessary for leaps and somersaults.

Source: https://www.bostondynamics.com/
AND
https://www.theverge.com/

Cut emissions to avert catastrophic sea-level rise

October 2, 2019 Uncategorized

Scientists behind a landmark study of the links between oceans, glaciers, ice caps and the climate delivered a stark warning to the world: slash emissions or watch cities vanish under rising seas, rivers run dry and marine life collapse. Days after millions of young people demanded an end to the fossil-fuel era in protests around the globe, a new report by a U.N.-backed panel of experts found that radical action may yet avert some of the worst possible outcomes of global warming. But the study was clear that allowing carbon emissions to continue rising would upset the balance of the geophysical systems governing oceans and the frozen regions of the Earth so profoundly that nobody would escape untouched.

“We are in a race between two factors, one is the capacity of humans and ecosystems to adapt, the other is the speed of impact of climate change. This report…indicates we may be losing in this race. We need to take immediate and drastic action to cut emissions right now,” IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said at the presentation of the report in Monaco.

Finalised in a marathon 27-hour session of talks in Monaco between authors and representatives of governments, the report was the culmination of two years’ efforts by the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Compiled by more than 100 authors who crunched 7,000 academic papers, the study documents the implications of warm, fast-melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica and shrinking glaciers for more than 1.3 billion people living in low-lying or high-mountain regions.

The report projects that sea levels could rise by one meter (3.3 feet) by 2100 — ten times the rate in the 20th century — if emissions keep climbing. The rise could exceed five meters by 2300. In the Himalayas, glaciers feeding ten rivers, including the Ganges and Yangtze, could shrink dramatically if emissions do not fall, hitting water supplies across a swathe of Asia. Thawing permafrost in places like Alaska and Siberia could release vast quantities of greenhouse gases, potentially unleashing feedback loops driving faster warming.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing could ‘turn off’ HIV virus

October 1, 2019 Uncategorized

HIV treatment has come a long way over the years, due in large part to antiretroviral drugs that stop the HIV virus from replicating in the body. This gives the immune system a chance to repair itself and stop further damage. Thanks to these amazing advances, HIV is no longer the death sentence that it was in previous decades. However, antiretrovirals only keep HIV at bay for as long as they’re taken. Defaulting on the drugs means that the HIV virus comes back. Even worse, it can cause patients to build up resistance to the antiretrovirals so that they do not work so effectively in the future. In other words, there’s still room for improvement when it comes to treatment. Fortunately, researchers from the University of California — San Diego School of Medicine are poised to provide help, courtesy of a new genetic-sequencing approach that could possibly provide a “kill switch” to clear out dormant HIV reservoirs inside cells.

“The most exciting part of this discovery has not been seen before,” Tariq Rana, professor of pediatrics and genetics at UC San Diego School of Medicine, said in a statement. “By genetically modifying a long non-coding RNA, we prevent HIV recurrence in T cells and microglia upon cessation of antiretroviral treatment, suggesting that we have a potential therapeutic target to eradicate HIV and AIDS.”

The work is based on the discovery of a recently emerged gene that appears to regulate HIV replication in immune cells, including macrophages, microglia, and T cells. The team refers to this as HIV-1 Enchanced LncRNA (HEAL), and it is elevated in people with HIV. By using CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing, their work suggests that it could stop HIV from recurring in the event that antiretroviral treatment is stopped.

“This has the potential for [being a] cure but, [we’ll] have to wait for animal studies,” Rana told Digital Trends. As for the next steps, Rana said that future studies “will determine if turning this regulator HEAL off can remove viral reservoirs, which are the key source for viral rebound when therapies are discontinued.” A paper describing the work was recently published in the journal mBio.

Source: https://mbio.asm.org/
AND
https://www.digitaltrends.com/

Converting CO2 To Valuable Resources

September 30, 2019 Uncategorized

Enzymes use cascade reactions to produce complex molecules from comparatively simple raw materials. Researchers have now copied this principle.

An international research team has used nanoparticles to convert carbon dioxide into valuable raw materials. Scientists at RUB in Germany and the University of New South Wales in Australia have adopted the principle from enzymes that produce complex molecules in multi-step reactions. The team transferred this mechanism to metallic nanoparticles, also known as nanozymes. The chemists used carbon dioxide to produce ethanol and propanol, which are common raw materials for the chemical industry.

The team led by Professor Wolfgang Schuhmann from the Center for Electrochemistry in Bochum and Professor Corina Andronescu from the University of Duisburg-Essen, together with the Australian team led by Professor Justin Gooding and Professor Richard Tilley, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on 25 August 2019.

“Transferring the cascade reactions of the enzymes to catalytically active nanoparticles could be a decisive step in the design of catalysts,” says Wolfgang Schuhmann.

Source: https://news.rub.de/

Mimicking Mosquito Eyes To Create Artificial Lens

September 27, 2019 Uncategorized

Anyone who’s tried to swat a pesky mosquito knows how quickly the insects can evade a hand or fly swatter. The pests’ compound eyes, which provide a wide field of view, are largely responsible for these lightning-fast actions. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces have developed compound lenses inspired by the mosquito eye that could someday find applications in autonomous vehicles, robots or medical devices.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENJOY THE VIDEO

Compound eyes, found in most arthropods, consist of many microscopic lenses organized on a curved array. Each tiny lens captures an individual image, and the mosquito’s brain integrates all of the images to achieve peripheral vision without head or eye movement. The simplicity and multifunctionality of compound eyes make them good candidates for miniaturized vision systems, which could be used by drones or robots to rapidly image their surroundings. Joelle Frechette and colleagues from Johns Hopkins University wanted to develop a liquid manufacturing process to make compound lenses with most of the features of the mosquito eye.

To make each microlens, the researchers used a capillary microfluidic device to produce oil droplets surrounded by silica nanoparticles. Then, they organized many of these microlenses into a closely packed array around a larger oil droplet. They polymerized the structure with ultraviolet light to yield a compound lens with a viewing angle of 149 degrees, similar to that of the mosquito eye. The silica nanoparticles coating each microlens had antifogging properties, reminiscent of nanostructures on mosquito eyes that allow the insect organs to function in humid environments. The researchers could move, deform and relocate the fluid lenses, allowing them to create arrays of compound lenses with even greater viewing capabilities.

Source: https://www.acs.org/

How To Improve Your Body Movement

September 26, 2019 Uncategorized

Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineer Nan-Wei Gong went from designing sensors to search the universe for dark matter, to designing sensors to track the movement of the human body.

“It’s a particle that’s really hard to find, and I didn’t find it,” Gong said of dark matter.

She’s had better luck with the human body, attracting $7.5 million to launch Figur8 at the end of August 2019. Figur8 is a startup that boasts of having the world’s most cost-effective and portable system for “accurately assessing quality of movement.”

That’s exciting news for trainers, physical therapists and physicians, all of whom have an interest in being able to quantify and assess the quality of human movement. Previously that took expensive equipment, including cumbersome cameras, to do it accurately.

But with Gong’s sensors strapped to the body, feeding data to a cloud-based mobile app, movement measurements and analytics can be taken anywhere, quickly and easily.

Gong developed Figur8 in conjunction with Massachusetts General Hospital as well as MIT’s Media Lab. The strap-on sensors produced by Figur8 do the job of much more expensive systems that were generally unavailable to anyone other than elite athletes.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/

How To Reverse Baldness Using Nanogenerators

September 25, 2019 Uncategorized

Few things on earth strike fear into the hearts of men more profoundly than hair loss. But reversing baldness could someday be as easy as wearing a hat, thanks to a noninvasive, low-cost hair-growth-stimulating technology developed by engineers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW Madison).

“I think this will be a very practical solution to hair regeneration,” says Xudong Wang, a professor of materials science and engineering at UW–Madison.

Based on devices that gather energy from a body’s day-to-day motion, the hair-growth technology stimulates the skin with gentle, low-frequency electric pulses, which coax dormant follicles to reactivate hair production. The devices don’t cause hair follicles to sprout anew in smooth skin. Instead they reactivate hair-producing structures that have gone dormant. That means they could be used as an intervention for people in the early stages of pattern baldness, but they wouldn’t bestow cascading tresses to someone who has been as bald as a billiard ball for several years.

Because the devices are powered by the movement of the wearer, they don’t require a bulky battery pack or complicated electronics. In fact, they’re so low-profile that they could be discreetly worn underneath the crown of an everyday baseball cap. Wang is a world expert in the design and creation of energy-harvesting devices. He has pioneered electric bandages that stimulate wound-healing and a weight-loss implant that uses gentle electricity to trick the stomach into feeling full.

The hair-growth technology is based on a similar premise: Small devices called nanogenerators passively gather energy from day-to-day movements and then transmit low-frequency pulses of electricity to the skin. That gentle electric stimulation causes dormant follicles to “wake up.” “Electric stimulations can help many different body functions,” says Wang. “But before our work there was no really good solution for low-profile devices that provide gentle but effective stimulations.”

Wang and colleagues published a description of the technology in the journal ACS Nano.

Source: https://news.wisc.edu/

Drinking Tea May Improve Brain Health

September 24, 2019 Uncategorized

In a recent study, Assistant Professor Feng Lei from the NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine in Singapore shares that drinking tea regularly may improve brain efficiency. It is revealed that regular tea drinkers have better organised brain regions, which is associated with healthy cognitive function, as compared to non-tea drinkers.

By looking at brain imaging data of older adults, individuals who consumed either green tea, oolong tea, or black tea at least four times a week for about 25 years had brain regions that were interconnected in a more efficient way.

“Take the analogy of road traffic as an example – consider brain regions as destinations, while the connections between brain regions are roads. When a road system is better organised, the movement of vehicles and passengers is more efficient and uses less resources. Similarly, when the connections between brain regions are more structured, information processing can be performed more efficiently,” explained Asst Prof Feng.

The results suggests that drinking tea regularly has a protective effect against age-related decline in brain organisation.

Previous studies have also shown that tea intake is beneficial to human health, and the positive effects include mood improvement and cardiovascular disease prevention. Another study led by Asst Prof Feng in 2017 showed that daily consumption of tea can reduce the risk of cognitive decline in older people by 50 per cent.

Asst Prof Feng and his team plan to examine how tea and its bioactive compounds can affect cognitive decline next.

Source: http://nusmedicine.nus.edu.sg

Walking Patterns Identify Specific Dementia Type

September 23, 2019 Uncategorized

Walking may be a key clinical tool in helping medics accurately identify the specific type of dementia a patient has, pioneering research has revealed.

For the first time, scientists at Newcastle University have shown that people with Alzheimer’s disease or Lewy body dementia have unique walking patterns that signal subtle differences between the two conditions. The research, published today in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: The Journal of the Alzheimer’s Association, shows that people with Lewy body dementia change their walking steps more – varying step time and length – and are asymmetric when they move, in comparison to those with Alzheimer’s disease. It is a first significant step towards establishing gait as a clinical biomarker for various subtypes of the disease and could lead to improved treatment plans for patients.

“The way we walk can reflect changes in thinking and memory that highlight problems in our brain, such as dementia. “Correctly identifying what type of dementia someone has is important for clinicians and researchers as it allows patients to be given the most appropriate treatment for their needs as soon as possible”, says Dr Ríona McArdle, Post-Doctoral Researcher at Newcastle University’s Faculty of Medical Sciences, who led the Alzheimer’s Society-funded research. The results from this study are exciting as they suggest that walking could be a useful tool to add to the diagnostic toolbox for dementia. “It is a key development as a more accurate diagnosis means that we know that people are getting the right treatment, care and management for the dementia they have.”

Current diagnosis of the two types of dementia is made through identifying different symptoms and, when required, a brain scan. For the study, researchers analysed the walk of 110 people, including 29 older adults whose cognition was intact, 36 with Alzheimer’s disease and 45 with Lewy body dementia. The participants took part in a simple walking test at the Gait Lab of the Clinical Ageing Research Unit, an NIHR-funded research initiative jointly run by Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and Newcastle University. Participants moved along a walkway – a mat with thousands of sensors inside – which captured their footsteps as they walked across it at their normal speed and this revealed their walking patterns.

Source: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/

Little Algae Bioreactor Removes As Much Carbon Dioxide as 4000m2 of Trees

September 20, 2019 Uncategorized

Algae could play a surprising role in the fight against climate change. A.I.-focused technology firm Hypergiant Industries announced a machine that uses the aquatic organisms to sequester carbon dioxide. Algae, the company claims, is “one of nature’s most efficient machines.” By pairing it with a machine learning system, its developers hope to make these talents even more effective. That’s not all. The team claims the device, which measures three feet (90 centimeters) on each side and seven feet (2,1 meters) tall, can sequester as much carbon as a whole acre (4000 square meters) of trees — estimated somewhere around two tons.

“We’ve been thinking about climate change solutions in only a very narrow scope,” Ben Lamm, CEO of the Austin-based firm, said. “Trees are part of the solution but there are so many other biological solutions that are useful. Algae is much more effective than trees at reducing carbon in the atmosphere, and can be used to create carbon negative fuels, plastics, textiles, food, fertilizer and much more.”
It’s not the only ambitious idea in the works at the six-division Hypergiant Industries. Its Galactic division is aiming to build a multi-planetary internet by using satellites as relays. Last month, it took the wraps off a prototype Iron Man-like helmet that could aid search and rescue teams. The company, founded last year, counts Bill Nye and astronaut Andy Allen among its advisory board members.

Hypergiant’s algae-powered bioreactor is the sort of idea that could be needed now more than ever. Despite a push to greener technologies, global annual carbon emissions rose in 2018 to hit an all-time high of 37.1 billion tonnes. That’s after two years of a relative plateau between 2014 and 2016. This has resulted in a global climate shift, where 2018 was the fourth-hottest year on record. Several countries, including the United Kingdom, have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Research has shown that restoring forests by an area the size of the United States could cut carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a staggering 25 percent, reaching levels not seen for a century. While planting trees could play an important role in the pushback, alternative solutions like carbon capture and storage and new sequestering technologies could also help remove carbon from the atmosphere.

Algae, Hypergiant Industries explains, needs three elements for growth: light, water, and carbon dioxide. The machine monitors factors like light, available carbon dioxide, temperature and more to maximize the amount sequestered by the algae.

“One Eos Bioreactor sequesters the same amount of carbon from the atmosphere as an entire acre of trees,” Lamm says. “With enough Eos devices, we could make whole cities carbon-neutral or even negative, and at a rate that is so much faster than that of trees. That’s the dream: breathable, livable cities for everyone and right now.”

When the algae consumes carbon dioxide, it produces biomass. The company has suggested that this biomass could be used in a number of applications, like making oils or cosmetics. A smart city could take the biomass and use it for fuels. The machine is small enough to fit inside office buildings, and Lamm tells FastCompany that the initial prototype it’s currently operating can attach to a building’s HVAC system to clean the air inside.

Source: https://www.inverse.com/

Eye Test Reveals How Likely Is A Person To Develop Alzheimer’s

September 19, 2019 Uncategorized

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) begins to alter and damage the brain years — even decades — before symptoms appear, making early identification of AD risk paramount to slowing its progression.

In a new study published online in the September 9, 2019 issue of the Neurobiology of Aging , scientists at University of California San Diego School of Medicine say that, with further developments, measuring how quickly a person’s pupil dilates while they are taking cognitive tests may be a low-cost, low-invasive method to aid in screening individuals at increased genetic risk for AD before cognitive decline begins.

In recent years, researchers investigating the pathology of AD have primarily directed their attention at two causative or contributory factors: the accumulation of protein plaques in the brain called amyloid-beta and tangles of a protein called tau. Both have been linked to damaging and killing neurons, resulting in progressive cognitive dysfunction.

The new study focuses on pupillary responses which are driven by the locus coeruleus (LC), a cluster of neurons in the brainstem involved in regulating arousal and also modulating cognitive function. Tau is the earliest occurring known biomarker for AD; it first appears in the LC; and it is more strongly associated with cognition than amyloid-beta. The study was led by first author William S. Kremen, PhD, and senior author Carol E. Franz, PhD, both professors of psychiatry and co-directors of the Center for Behavior Genetics of Aging at UC San Diego School of Medicine.

The LC drives pupillary response — the changing diameter of the eyes’ pupils — during cognitive tasks. (Pupils get bigger the more difficult the brain task.) In previously published work, the researchers had reported that adults with mild cognitive impairment, often a precursor to AD, displayed greater pupil dilation and cognitive effort than cognitively normal individuals, even if both groups produced equivalent results. Critically, in the latest paper, the scientists link pupillary dilation responses with identified AD risk genes.

face of an elderly man

How quickly a person’s pupils dilate while doing mental tasks may be an indicator of increased genetic risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

“Given the evidence linking pupillary responses, LC and tau and the association between pupillary response and AD polygenic risk scores (an aggregate accounting of factors to determine an individual’s inherited AD risk), these results are proof-of-concept that measuring pupillary response during cognitive tasks could be another screening tool to detect Alzheimer’s before symptom appear,” said Kremen.

Source: https://health.ucsd.edu/

Biomimetic Nanoparticles Used As Carriers Improve AntiCancer Drugs

September 18, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers at the University of Helsinki in collaboration with researchers from Åbo Akademi University (Finland) and Huazhong University of Science and Technology (China) have developed a new anti-cancer nanomedicine for targeted cancer chemotherapy. This new nano-tool provides a new approach to use cell-based nanomedicines for efﬁcient cancer chemotherapy.

Exosomes contain various molecular constituents of their cell of origin, including proteins and RNA. Now the researchers have harnessed them together with synthetic nanomaterial as carriers of anticancer drugs. The new exosome-based nanomedicines enhanced tumor accumulation, extravasation from blood vessels and penetration into deep tumor parenchyma after intravenous administration.

Exosomes

The new exosome-based nanomedicines enhanced tumor accumulation, extravasation from blood vessels and penetration into deep tumor parenchyma after intravenous administration.

“This study highlights the importance of cell-based nanomedicines”, says the principal investigator and one of the corresponding authors of this study, Hélder A. Santos, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Helsinki.

Nanoparticles-based drug delivery systems have shown promising therapeutic efﬁcacy in cancer. To increase their targetability to tumors, nanoparticles are usually functionalized with targeted antibodies, peptides or other biomolecules. However, such targeting ligands may sometimes have a negative inﬂuence on the nanoparticle delivery owing to the enhanced immune-responses.

Biomimetic nanoparticles on the other hand combine the unique functionalities of natural biomaterials, such as cells or cell membranes, and bioengineering versatility of synthetic nanoparticles, that can be used as an efficient drug delivery platform. The developed biocompatible exosome-sheathed porous silicon-based nanomedicines for targeted cancer chemotherapy resulted in augmented in vivo anticancer drug enrichment in tumor cells. “This demonstrates the potential of the exosome-biomimetic nanoparticles to act as drug carriers to improve the anticancer drug efﬁcacy”, Santos concludes.

Source: https://www.helsinki.fi/

RoboTaxis transported 6,299 passengers in one month

September 17, 2019 Uncategorized

Waymo transported 6,299 passengers in self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in its first month participating in a robotaxi pilot program in California, according to a quarterly report the company filed with the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

In all, the company completed 4,678 passenger trips in July — plus another 12 trips for educational purposes. It’s a noteworthy figure for an inaugural effort that pencils out to an average of 156 trips every day that month. And it demonstrates that Waymo has the resources, staff and vehicles to operate a self-driving vehicle pilot while continuing to test its technology in multiple cities and ramp up its Waymo One ride-hailing service in Arizona. But Waymo’s data — along with quarterly reports from three other companies that hold permits with the CPUC — provides just a hint at what demand could be for commercial autonomous vehicles and how these services might reshape cities.

Waymo’s pilot program, for instance, isn’t open to the public. Waymo or Alphabet employees and their guests can take rides within its geofenced South Bay territory, which currently includes Mountain View, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale, Cupertino, Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. This is only a few of the cities where Waymo is currently testing in California. And because companies in this pilot program cannot charge for rides, it’s difficult to determine what the demand will be for self-driving passenger services, Dr. Susan Shaheen, co-director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at the University of California, noted in a recent interview.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/

How To Make A Car Run Forever

September 16, 2019 Uncategorized

Put together the best solar panels money can buy, super-efficient batteries and decades of car-making know-how and, theoretically, a vehicle might run forever. That’s the audacious motivation behind a project by Toyota Motor Corp., Sharp Corp. and New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization of Japan, or NEDO, to test a Prius that could revolutionize transportation.

“The solar car’s advantage is that — while it can’t drive for a long range — it’s really independent of charging facilities,” said Koji Makino, a project manager at Toyota.

Even if fully electric cars overtake petroleum-powered vehicles in sales, they still need to be plugged in, which means building a network of charging stations across the globe. The sun, on the other hand, shines everywhere for free, and when that energy is paired with enough battery capacity to propel automobiles at night, solar-powered cars could leapfrog all the new-energy technologies being developed, from plug-in hybrids to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles, in one fell swoop. But the current forecast is only partly sunny because there’s still some work left to reach that level of efficiency.

“This is not a technology we are going to see widely used in the next decades,” said Takeshi Miyao, an auto analyst at consultancy Carnorama. “It’s going to take a long time.”

Not for lack of trying. Toyota and Hyundai Motor Co. already introduced commercial models with solar panels on the roof, but they were too underpowered and could barely juice the sound system. A Prius plug-in hybrid that sells for more than 3 million yen offers solar panels as an option, but they only charge the battery when parked. The maximum amount of power for driving only lasts about 6 kilometers (about 4 miles), said Mitsuhiro Yamazaki, director at the solar energy systems division of NEDO. Toyota has been testing a new solar-powered Prius since July, though it acknowledges that cars running nonstop without connecting to a hose or plug are still far away. Even so, the Toyota City-based company said the research will pay off in other ways.

Indeed, there have been some breakthroughs, mainly due to advancements by Sharp. The prototype’s solar panel converts sunlight at an efficiency level of more than 34%, compared with about 20% for current panels on the market. Because the solar cell being used by Toyota, Sharp and NEDO is only about 0.03 mm thick, it can be placed on more surfaces, including the curvy parts of the roof, hood and hatchback. The electrical system can charge the vehicle even when it’s on the move.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/

Reverse biological aging

September 13, 2019 Uncategorized

In a small clinical trial, scientists were looking for a means to restore the thymus — the gland that forms and releases key immune cells. By doing so, they actually managed to reverse various aspects of biological aging. The thymus gland, located between the lungs, is the organ within which T cells — a critical population of immune cells — mature. This gland also has a peculiarity. After a person reaches puberty, it begins a process of involution, which means that it becomes less and less active and starts to shrink in size gradually. Studies have shown that thymic involution affects the size of immune cell populations related to it, possibly causing changes to biological mechanisms when people reach their 60s.

Prof. Steve Horvath from the University of California Los Angeles School of Public Health and colleagues initially set out to see if they could restore function in the aging thymus.

“Thymic involution leads to the depletion of critical immune cell populations, […] and is linked to age‐related increases in cancer incidence, infectious disease, autoimmune conditions, generalized inflammation, atherosclerosis, and all‐cause mortalit,” he explains In the study paper recently published in the journal Aging Cell.

For the reasons outlined above, the researchers organized and conducted what they believe is a first-of-its-kind clinical trial: TRIIM (Thymus Regeneration, Immunorestoration, and Insulin Mitigation). The study took place between 2015–2017, and the researchers were pleased with the results they achieved. They found that it was possible to restore thymic function and reduce the risk of age-related conditions and diseases linked to poor immune system reaction.

They also had a pleasant surprise. At the end of the trial, the researchers found that the mix of drugs they used to restore the thymus gland had also reversed other aspects of biological aging. A person’s biological age refers not to how old they are in conventional years, but to how much their biological mechanisms have aged, according to their epigenetic clocks — markers that indicate how changes in various cellular mechanisms have affected gene expression.

For their trial, Prof. Horvath and team recruited 10 healthy adult males aged 51–65. The researchers were able to use and analyze data collected from nine of these individuals. In the first week of the clinical trial, the researchers gave the participants recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH). In its natural state, rhGH supports many different aspects of cellular health, such as cell growth and regeneration. Previous studies — some conducted in animals, and others with the participation of individuals with HIV — have uncovered evidence that rhGH could help restore thymus function, as well as immune system effectiveness.

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/
AND
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/

Water Found On A Potentially Life-friendly Alien Planet

September 12, 2019 Uncategorized

In a first for astronomers studying worlds beyond our solar system, data from the Hubble Space Telescope have revealed water vapor in the atmosphere of an Earth-size planet. Although this exoplanet orbits a star that is smaller than our sun, it falls within what’s known as the star’s habitable zone, the range of orbital distances where it would be warm enough for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface. The discovery, announced this week in two independent studies, comes from years of observations of the exoplanet K2-18b, a super-Earth that’s about 111 light-years from our solar system. Discovered in 2015 by NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, K2-18b is very unlike our home world: It’s more than eight times the mass of Earth, which means it’s either an icy giant like Neptune or a rocky world with a thick, hydrogen-rich atmosphere.

K2-18b’s orbit also takes it seven times closer to its star than Earth gets to the sun. But because it circles a type of dim red star known as an M dwarf, that orbit places it in the star’s potentially life-friendly zone. Crude models predict that K2-18b’s effective temperature falls somewhere between -100 and 116 degrees Fahrenheit, and if it is about as reflective as Earth, its equilibrium temperature would be roughly the same as our home planet’s.

“This is the only planet right now that we know outside the solar system that has the correct temperature to support water, it has an atmosphere, and it has water in it—making this planet the best candidate for habitability that we know right now,” University College London astronomer Angelos Tsiaras, a coauthor of one of the two studies, said during a press conference.

Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/

How To Detect Heart Failure From A Single Heartbeat

September 11, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers have developed a neural network approach that can accurately identify congestive heart failure with 100% accuracy through analysis of just one raw electrocardiogram (ECG) heartbeat, a new study reports.

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a chronic progressive condition that affects the pumping power of the heart muscles. Associated with high prevalence, significant mortality rates and sustained healthcare costs, clinical practitioners and health systems urgently require efficient detection processes.

Dr Sebastiano Massaro, Associate Professor of Organisational Neuroscience at the University of Surrey, has worked with colleagues Mihaela Porumb and Dr Leandro Pecchia at the University of Warwick and Ernesto Iadanza at the University of Florence, to tackle these important concerns by using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) – hierarchical neural networks highly effective in recognising patterns and structures in data.

Published in Biomedical Signal Processing and Control Journal, their research drastically improves existing CHF detection methods typically focused on heart rate variability that, whilst effective, are time-consuming and prone to errors. Conversely, their new model uses a combination of advanced signal processing and machine learning tools on raw ECG signals, delivering 100% accuracy.

“We trained and tested the CNN model on large publicly available ECG datasets featuring subjects with CHF as well as healthy, non-arrhythmic hearts. Our model delivered 100% accuracy: by checking just one heartbeat we are able detect whether or not a person has heart failure. Our model is also one of the first known to be able to identify the ECG’ s morphological features specifically associated to the severity of the condition,” explains Dr Massaro. Dr Pecchia, President at European Alliance for Medical and Biological Engineering, explains the implications of these findings: “With approximately 26 million people worldwide affected by a form of heart failure, our research presents a major advancement on the current methodology. Enabling clinical practitioners to access an accurate CHF detection tool can make a significant societal impact, with patients benefitting from early and more efficient diagnosis and easing pressures on NHS resources.”

Source: https://www.surrey.ac.uk/

The Science Of BioPrinting a Human Heart

September 10, 2019 Uncategorized

A company called Biolife4D has developed the technology to print human cardiac tissue by collecting blood cells from a patient and converting these cells to a type of stem cell called Induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells. The technology could eventually be used to create thousands of much-needed hearts for transplantation.

“What we’re working on is literally bioprinting a human heart viable for transplantation out of a patient’s own cells, so that we’re not only addressing the problem with the lack of [organ] supply, but by bioengineering the heart out of their own cells, we’re eliminating the rejection,” Biolife4D CEO Steven Morris said during an appearance on Digital Trends Live, referring to the body’s impulse to reject a transplanted organ.

It starts with a patient’s own cells and ends with a 3D bioprinted heart that’s a precise fit and genetic match. The BIOLIFE4D bioprinted organ replacement process begins with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) procedure used to create a detailed three-dimensional image of a patient’s heart. Using this image, a computer software program will construct a digital model of a new heart for the patient, matching the shape and size of the original.

A “bio-ink” is created using the specialized heart cells combined with nutrients and other materials that will help the cells survive the bioprinting process. Hearts created through the BIOLIFE4D bioprinting process start with a patient’s own cells. Doctors safely take cells from the patient via a blood sample, and leveraging recent stem cell research breakthroughs, BIOLIFE4D plans to reprogram those blood cells and convert them to create specialized heart cells.

Bioprinting is done with a 3D bioprinter that is fed the dimensions obtained from the MRI. After printing, the heart is then matured in a bioreactor, conditioned to make it stronger and readied for patient transplant.

Source: https://biolife4d.com/

Loch Ness Monster Might Just Be A Giant Eel

September 9, 2019 Uncategorized

Scotland’s fabled Loch Ness monster could possibly be a giant eel, scientists said after an intensive analysis of traces of DNA in the Loch’s icy waters. The results ruled out the presence of large animals such as dinosaurs, they said. But there was a lot of eel DNA in the Loch, Professor Neil Gemmell, a geneticist from New Zealand’s University of Otago, told reporters.

“Eels are very plentiful in the loch system – every single sampling site that we went to pretty much had eels and the sheer volume of it was a bit of a surprise,” Gemmell said. “We can’t exclude the possibility that there’s a giant eel in Loch Ness but we don’t know whether these samples we’ve collected are from a giant beast or just an ordinary one – so there’s still this element of ‘we just don’t know.’”

Gemmell noted however that despite the idea of a giant eel having been around for decades, nobody had ever caught a giant one in the Loch. The international team of scientists took their samples of so-called environmental DNA (eDNA) in June last year.

The use of eDNA sampling is already well established as a tool for monitoring marine life like whales and sharks.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Cancer Tops Heart Disease As The No. 1 Cause Of Death

September 6, 2019 Uncategorized

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the major cause of death among middle-aged adults around the world; however, in high-income countries deaths from cancer have become twice as frequent as those from CVD.

The findings come from the first large prospective international study documenting the frequency of common diseases and death rates in high-, middle– and low-income countries using a standardized approach. The research, published in The Lancet presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress, is from the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) study led by the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences in Hamilton, Canada.

For this paper, the research involved more than 162,500 adults aged 35 to 70 from 21 countries who were followed for a median of 9.5 years.

“The fact that cancer deaths are now twice as frequent as CVD deaths in high-income countries indicates a transition in the predominant causes of death in middle age,” said Salim Yusuf, principal investigator of the study, executive director of PHRI and a professor of medicine at McMaster.

“As CVD declines in many countries because of prevention and treatment, cancer mortality will likely become the leading cause of death globally in the future.

“The high mortality in poorer countries is not due to a higher burden of risk factors, but likely other factors including lower quality and less health care.”

The high-income countries (HIC) in the study were Canada, Saudi Arabia, Sweden and United Arab Emirates. The middle-income countries (MIC) were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Columbia, Iran, Malaysia, Palestine, Philippines, Poland, Turkey and South Africa. The lower-income
countries (LIC) were Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

Source: https://brighterworld.mcmaster.ca

Artificial Tongue Tastes Whisky

September 5, 2019 Uncategorized

An artificial ‘tongue’ which can taste subtle differences between drams of whisky could help cut down on the trade in counterfeit alcohol, scientists say. In a new paper published today in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal Nanoscale, Scottish engineers describe how they built the tiny taster, which exploits the optical properties of gold and aluminium to test the tipples.

Sub-microscopic slices of the two metals, arranged in a checkerboard pattern, act as the ‘tastebuds’ in the team’s artificial tongue. The researchers poured samples of whisky over the tastebuds – which are about 500 times smaller than their human equivalents – and measured how they absorb light while submerged. Statistical analysis of the very subtle differences in how the metals in the artificial tongue absorb light – what scientists call their plasmonic resonance – allowed the team to identify different types of whiskies.

The team used the tongue to sample a selection of whiskies from Glenfiddich, Glen Marnoch and Laphroaig. The tongue was able to taste the differences between the drinks with greater than 99% accuracy. It was capable of picking up on the subtler distinctions between the same whisky aged in different barrels, and tell the difference between the same whisky aged for 12, 15 and 18 years.

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“We’re not the first researchers to make an artificial tongue, but we’re the first to make a single artificial tongue that uses two different types of nanoscale metal ‘tastebuds’, which provides more information about the ‘taste’ of each sample and allows a faster and more accurate response,” explains Dr Alasdair Clark, of the University of Glasgow’s School of Engineering, the paper’s lead author. “While we’ve focused on whisky in this experiment, the artificial tongue could easily be used to ‘taste’ virtually any liquid, which means it could be used for a wide variety of applications. In addition to its obvious potential for use in identifying counterfeit alcohols, it could be used in food safety testing, quality control, security – really any area where a portable, reusable method of tasting would be useful.”

Source: https://www.gla.ac.uk/

Virtual Reality Is Life-Changing For People With Dementia

September 4, 2019 Uncategorized

Virtual reality, smart clothes and reminiscence therapy are offering respite to patients and carers. One of millions of people who die each year from the neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer’s, for which a cure is not possible. The condition, one of a number of forms of dementia, is caused by rogue proteins that lodge and tangle in the neural networks of the brain, causing irreparable damage to the billions of neurons which transmit the electrical signals that build memories. These cells gradually die, causing memory loss and personality change, eventually halting the brain’s basic functions.

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Despite decades of medical research into treatments to slow the disease’s progressive course or prevent it entirely – the field from which Pfizer notably withdrew in January, after years of setbacks – it is not yet known what causes these proteins to gather, and therefore how to remove or block them. And despite Alzheimer’s being the world’s fifth biggest killer, funding levels for research have lagged shockingly behind those for both cancer and the next biggest area of medical research, cardiovascular disease.

In the meantime, the greatest cost is in providing care and therapy for those suffering from the disease – a global total currently estimated at $818 billion; the equivalent to over one per cent of global GDP. If no effective treatment and preventive solution is found this sum will only increase, as ten million new cases of dementia are diagnosed each year.

UK healthcare start-up, Virtue, applies the latest immersive technologies to the process of ‘reminiscence therapy’. While the traditional approach draws on physical visual stimulus such as photo books, or even involves substantial investment in constructing full-scale sets that recreate nostalgic scenes, Virtue has developed a new type of memory portal using virtual reality.

“It’s only now that the phone in your pocket is advanced enough and VR headsets are reducing in price that we can really democratise access to this type of impactful therapy,” Virtue‘s co-founder and CTO Scott Gorman says. Virtue’s app, LookBack VR, offers a wide variety of 360 VR content and filmic experiences which chime with the memories of the target age group of the patient – arranged by destination, theme, activity or decade. Viewers can choose from experiences ranging from spending time on Brighton beach in the 1970s, to finding themselves in a 1950s tearoom, and can create a personalised playlist or ‘itinerary for time travel’ with the help of their family or carer. Their companion can see their VR headset view on a companion app via tablet, along with a series of suggested questions to help stimulate relevant conversation about that era.

“Our vision is for LookBack VR to become a global platform that can help people with dementia anywhere,” co-founder and CEO Arfa Rehman shares. “We are starting to seek partnerships with organisations and individuals to gather content from around the world.”

Source: https://www.wired.co.uk/

NK cells give our immune system long-term memory

September 3, 2019 Uncategorized

“I’ll be honest, when I first started working on this I didn’t fully accept it.”
That’s Dr. Andrew Makrigiannis, head of the Department of Microbiology & Immunology at the Dalhousie University., discussing his groundbreaking research on natural killer cells that was published in the leading journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.“I’m a traditionally trained immunologist; I was skeptical”.
NK cells were originally discovered due to their novel ability to recognize and kill tumour cells without having previously encountered these aberrant cells, unlike other lymphocytes such as T and B cells.

One of the receptor families on NK cells which have been shown to play an important role in tumour recognition are the Ly49 receptor family.
Class I major histocompatibility complex (MHC-I) molecules are expressed on all nucleated cells and function as a marker of a “healthy” cell for NK cells. Ly49 receptor family recognition and binding to the host’s MHC-I molecule will signal to the NK cell not to kill this cell since it is healthy.

Alternatively, in transformed cells, such as those which are virally-infected or cancerous, MHC-I expression is reduced on the cell surface, and so, the NK cell now recognizes this cell as being an unhealthy cell. These cells are killed by the NK cell through various means such as direct cytotoxicity or indirectly through cytokine secretion and recruitment of other.

We observed that NK cells from mice with knocked-down expression of the Ly49 receptor family have defective killing of traditional tumour target cells which lack MHC-I expression in both in vitro [51Cr]-release cytotoxicity assays and in vivo rejection assays. Using different carcinoma models such as oncogene-driven lymphoma and carcinogen-induced sarcoma, we observed that mice with knocked-down expression of the Ly49 receptor family show defective tumour control. Specifically they are prone to earlier cancer development as well as metastatic formation. As well, through the use of antibodies and flow cytometry analysis of tumours isolated from Ly49-knock-down and wildtype mice, it was seen that there is differential expression of MHC-I. This observation suggests that tumours which grow in the knock-down mice are phenotypically different from those in the WT mice due to their altered immune environments which directly affect how these tumours develop.

Source: https://www.pnas.org/
AND
http://maklab.ca/

Artificial Skin Recreates The Human Sense Of Pain

September 2, 2019 Uncategorized

Prosthetic technology has taken huge strides in the last decade, but accurately simulating human-like sensation is a difficult task. New “electronic skin” technology developed at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) in Korea could help replicate advanced “pain” sensations in prosthetics, and enable robots to understand tactile feedback, like the feeling of being pricked, or that of heat on skin.

Trying to recreate the human senses has been a driver of technologies throughout the 20^thcentury, like TV or audio playback. Mimicry of tactile sensing has been a focus of several different research groups in the last few years, but advances have mainly improved the feeling of pressure and strength in prosthetics. Human sensation, however, can detect much more subtle cues. The DGIST researchers, led by Department of Information and Communication Engineering Professor Jae Eun Jang, needed to bring together expertise from several different fields to begin the arduous task of replicating these more complex sensations in their electronic skin, working with colleagues in DGIST’s Robotics and Brain Sciences departments.

“We have developed a core base technology that can effectively detect pain, which is necessary for developing future-type tactile sensor. As an achievement of convergence research by experts in nano engineering, electronic engineering, robotics engineering, and brain sciences, it will be widely applied on electronic skin that feels various senses as well as new human-machine interactions.” Jang explained.

The DGIST team effort has created a more efficient sensor technology, able to simultaneously detect pressure and heat. They also developed a signal processing system that adjusted pain responses depending on pressure, area, and temperature.

Source: https://www.dgist.ac.kr/
AND
https://www.technologynetworks.com/

CRISPR Halts Growth of Breast Cancer

August 30, 2019 Uncategorized

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), lacking estrogen, progesterone and HER2 receptors, has the highest mortality rate of all breast cancers. It more frequently strikes women under age 50, African American women, and women carrying a BRCA1 gene mutation. The highly aggressive, frequently metastatic cancer is in urgent need of more effective targeted therapeutics.

A new tumor-targeted CRISPR gene editing system, encapsulated in a nanogel and injected into the body, could offer a genetic treatment, suggest researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital. In a proof-of-principle study, conducted in human tumor cells and live, tumor-bearing mice, the CRISPR system effectively halted the growth of TNBC while sparing normal cells. Peng Guo, PhD,Marsha Moses, PhD and their colleagues have reported the findings in the journal PNAS.

To date, a lack of effective delivery systems has limited the translation of CRISPR gene editing into therapies. One method uses a virus to deliver CRISPR, but the virus cannot carry large payloads and potentially can cause side effects if it “infects” cells other than those targeted. Another method packages the CRISPR tools inside a cationic polymer or lipid nanoparticles. But these elements can be toxic to cells, and the body often traps or breaks down the nanoparticles before they reach their destination.

The new approach encapsulates the CRISPR editing system inside a soft “nanolipogel” made up of a nontoxic double layer of fatty molecules and a hydrogel. Antibodies attached to the gel’s surface then guide the CRISPR nanoparticles to the tumor site. (The antibodies are designed to recognize and target ICAM-1, a therapeutic target for TNBC discovered by the Moses Lab in 2014.)

Because the particles are soft and flexible, they can enter cells more efficiently than their stiffer counterparts. Stiffer nanoparticles tend to get trapped by the cell’s ingestion machinery, while the soft particles fused with the tumor cell membrane and delivered their CRISPR payloads directly inside the cell, the researchers found.

“Using a soft particle allows us to penetrate the tumor better, without side effects, and with bigger cargo,” says Guo, the study’s first author. “Our system can substantially increase tumor delivery of CRISPR.”

Source: http://discoveries.childrenshospital.org

Artificial Muscle

August 29, 2019 Uncategorized

Wearing a flower brooch that blooms before your eyes sounds like magic. KAIST researchers have made it real with robotic muscles. Researchers have developed an ultrathin, artificial muscle for soft robotics. The advancement, recently reported in the journal Science Robotics, was demonstrated with a robotic blooming flower brooch, dancing robotic butterflies and fluttering tree leaves on a kinetic art piece.

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The robotic equivalent of a muscle that can move is called an actuator. The actuator expands, contracts or rotates like muscle fibers using a stimulus such as electricity. Engineers around the world are striving to develop more dynamic actuators that respond quickly, can bend without breaking, and are very durable. Soft, robotic muscles could have a wide variety of applications, from wearable electronics to advanced prosthetics.

The team from KAIST’s Creative Research Initiative Center for Functionally Antagonistic Nano-Engineering developed a very thin, responsive, flexible and durable artificial muscle. The actuator looks like a skinny strip of paper about an inch long. They used a particular type of material called MXene, which is class of compounds that have layers only a few atoms thick.

Their chosen MXene material (T3C2Tx) is made of thin layers of titanium and carbon compounds. It was not flexible by itself; sheets of material would flake off the actuator when bent in a loop. That changed when the MXene was “ionically cross-linked” — connected through an ionic bond — to a synthetic polymer. The combination of materials made the actuator flexible, while still maintaining strength and conductivity, which is critical for movements driven by electricity.

Their particular combination performed better than others reported. Their actuator responded very quickly to low voltage, and lasted for more than five hours moving continuously. To prove the tiny robotic muscle works actuator into wearable art: an origami-inspired brooch mimics how a narcissus, the team incorporated the flower unfolds its petals when a small amount of electricity is applied. They also designed robotic butterflies that move their wings up and down, and made the leaves of a tree sculpture flutter.

“Wearable robotics and kinetic art demonstrate how robotic muscles can have fun and beautiful applications,” said Il-Kwon Oh, lead paper author and professor of mechanical engineering. “It also shows the enormous potential for small, artificial muscles for a variety of uses, such as haptic feedback systems and active biomedical devices.”

Source: https://www.kaist.ac.kr/

How To Strengthen Your Immune System

August 28, 2019 Uncategorized

There’s another reason to celebrate the gut microbiome—a healthy gut might actually be able to save lives. According to scientists at the Lawson Health Research Institute, all it takes to strengthen your immune system is to improve your gut health, a process that we know is as easy as increasing your ingestion of probiotics and dietary fiber. How’s that for functional food?

These Lawson Health Research Institute scientists are implementing a preliminary study that would discover whether a fecal transplant of a healthy microbiome can help patients with melanoma become more receptive to immunotherapy treatments. During immunotherapy treatments, patients take certain drugs to stimulate their immune systems in order to attack tumors in their bodies. A fecal transplant, according to these researchers, would make their immune systems more receptive to the drugs and, in turn, could help more people successfully fight their cancer.

“We know that some people’s immune systems don’t respond well, and it seems to be associated with the microbes within your gut,” Michael Silverman, M.D., a Lawson associate scientist, said in a video filmed by the research institute. “The goal is to give people healthy microbes to replenish the microbes in their gut so that their immune system responds optimally, and they’re able to control the tumor.”

Source: https://www.mindbodygreen.com/

Breakthroughs In Anti-Aging Research In Near Future

August 27, 2019 Uncategorized

People 50 and older have a lot to look forward to, according to Juvenescence’s Greg Bailey—mainly that we won’t be aging as fast or poorly as our parents. “Science fiction has become science,” said the UK-based anti-aging biotech’s CEO about the company’s completing its $100 million Series B round of financing last week. “I think the world is going to be shocked,” he said in an interview. In total, Juvenescence has now raised $165 million in just 18 months to fund longevity projects with the lofty goal of extending human lifespans to 150 years. Bailey said the money will allow the company “to progress all of our products.” And there’s quite a list of potential therapies.

“We have 12 programs based on hard, rigorous science, to try to modify aging. From stem cell research to senolytics to modifying or preventing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases,” he said. It’s no secret that anti-aging is big business. According to Endpoints News, “Bank of America has forecast the market will balloon to $610 billion by 2025, from an estimated $110 billion currently.” “I think there’s a huge amount of skepticism. There’s an enormous number of charlatans…I understand why they would be thinking you know, is this real?” Bailey told Endpoints. “Walk into your local drugstore, you’re going to see about 50 products that claim to be anti-aging, and I can assure you that none of them are.”

Bailey said creams that claim everything and do nothing and vitamins that basically give users “expensive urine” are the reason for that skepticism. And investors are not as quick to step up as he would like. Bailey told Endpoints: “We’re dramatically being underserved…it’s not getting the exposure that tech gets, considering the size of the market.” He said he believes there is “a disconnect” on how investors and institutions are viewing anti-aging technology. “I don’t think they quite grasp how fast this is going to happen, and how big it’s going to be.”

Source: https://www.forbes.com/

One Pill A Day Reduces Heart Attack Risk By One Third

August 26, 2019 Uncategorized

A cheap, single pill taken once a day that combines four common drugs is safe and reduces the risk of events such as heart attacks, strokes and sudden death in people over the age of 50, research has found. The study, the first large-scale trial to date, looked at the effectiveness of a so-called polypill – a four-in-one therapy containing drugs to lower cholesterol and blood pressure that was first proposed more than 15 years ago. The researchers found those taking the polypill had a more than 30% lower risk of serious heart problems than those just offered advice.

While different formulations have been studied, previous trials have only been conducted in small groups of people and over short periods of time. These studies have primarily looked at the impacts of cholesterol on blood pressure, relying on models to predict the impact on cardiovascular events such as strokes – meaning the full potential of the polypill has remained unclear. The latest study tackled both of these problems.

“There has been a lot of talk about using this simple, fixed-dose combination drug for prevention of cardiovascular disease and I think we have shown that as a strategy it can work,” said Prof Tom Marshall, a co-author of the study from the University of Birmingham, adding that the pills might cost as little as a few pence per day. The new study involved more than 6,800 participants aged 50-75 from rural Iran – an area where almost 34% of premature deaths are down to coronary heart disease, and 14% are caused by strokes.

Writing in the Lancet, researchers from the UK, US and Iran reported that 3,417 people were given only minimum care, such as help with controlling blood pressure or cholesterol if needed, as well as lifestyle advice on topics such as diet, exercise and smoking. A similar number of people were, in addition to this, also given the polypill. More than 90% of those involved in the study did not have cardiovascular disease at the outset. Participants were followed up for five years. Over that time, 202 people taking the polypill had a major cardiovascular event, such as heart attack, heart failure, or stroke, compared with 301 in the “advice” group.

The authors say that translated as a 34% lower risk of having such an event, compared with the “advice” group, once factors including age, sex, diabetes and high blood pressure were taken into account.

There were also signs that, at least early on, the polypill reduced some aspects of high blood pressure, while it also led to a small fall in “bad” cholesterol. Both groups showed similar low levels of problematic events including internal bleeding and peptic ulcers. Overall, the results suggested that two major cardiovascular events would be avoided for every 69 people taking the tablet for 5 years. The polypill includes aspirin, which the team acknowledge is controversial as it can increase the risk of bleeding: the latest trial did not include people who were at high risk of such problems.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/

Super-powered Immune Cells Kill Cancer

August 23, 2019 Uncategorized

Ground-breaking immune therapy promises to deliver vital evidence in the fight against cancer as researchers from the Centre for Cancer Biology in Australia open a new clinical trial using genetically engineered immune cells to treat solid cancers. The phase 1 clinical trial will test the feasibility and safety of CAR-T cells – genetically modified white blood cells harvested from a patient’s own blood with the unique ability to directly attack and kill cancers – to treat advanced solid tumours including small cell lung cancer, sarcomas and triple negative breast cancer.

The new clinical trial will allow researchers to learn more about how CAR-T cells interact with solid tumours in the hope that this form of immune-based therapy may one day treat a wide range of different cancers. Led by the Centre for Cancer Biology – an alliance between University of South Australia (UniSA), the Central Adelaide Local Health Network (CALHN) and the Royal Adelaide Hospital, the trial is funded by Cancer Council’s Beat Cancer Project and sponsored by CALHN.

The research scientist in charge of manufacturing the CAR-T cell product and following the patients’ responses to treatment is UniSA’s Dr Tessa Gargett, a Cancer Council Beat Cancer Project Early Career Fellow from the Centre for Cancer Biology .She says the CAR-T immune therapy shows great potential for developing cancer treatments.

“Chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cells are a promising new technology in the field of cancer immunotherapy,” Dr Gargett says. “Essentially, CAR-T cells are super-powered immune cells which work by enlisting and strengthening the power of a patient’s immune system to attack tumours. “They’ve had astounding results in treating some forms of chemotherapy-resistant blood cancers, but similar breakthroughs are yet to be achieved for solid cancers – that’s where this study comes in.”

Source: https://www.unisa.edu.au/

CRISPR Can Now Edit Multiple Genes At Once

August 22, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers at ETH Zurich have refined the famous CRISPR-Cas method. Now, for the very first time, it is possible to modify dozens, if not hundreds, of genes in a cell simultaneously.

Everyone’s talking about CRISPR-Cas. This biotechnological method offers a relatively quick and easy way to manipulate single genes in cells, meaning they can be precisely deleted, replaced or modified. Furthermore, in recent years, researchers have also been using technologies based on CRISPR-Cas to systematically increase or decrease the activity of individual genes. The corresponding methods have become the worldwide standard within a very short time, both in basic biological research and in applied fields such as plant breeding.

To date, for the most part, researchers could modify only one gene at a time using the method. On occasion, they managed two or three in one go; in one particular case, they were able to edit seven genes simultaneously. Now, Professor Randall Platt and his team at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering at ETH Zurich in Basel have developed a process that – as they demonstrated in experiments – can modify 25 target sites within genes in a cell at once. As if that were not enough, this number can be increased still further, to dozens or even hundreds of genes, as Platt points out. At any rate, the method offers enormous potential for biomedical research and biotechnology. “Thanks to this new tool, we and other scientists can now achieve what we could only dream of doing in the past.”

Genes and proteins in cells interact in many different ways. The resulting networks comprising dozens of genes ensure an organism’s cellular diversity. For example, they are responsible for differentiating progenitor cells to neuronal cells and immune cells. “Our method enables us, for the first time, to systematically modify entire gene networks in a single step,” Platt says.

Moreover, it paves the way for complex, large-scale cell programming. It can be used to increase the activity of certain genes, while reducing that of others. The timing of this change in activity can also be precisely controlled.

This is of interest for basic research, for example in investigating why various types of cells behave differently or for the study of complex genetic disorders. It will also prove useful for cell replacement therapy, which involves replacing damaged with healthy cells. In this case, researchers can use the method to convert stem cells into differentiated cells, such as neuronal cells or insulin-producing beta cells, or vice versa, to produce stem cells from differentiated skin cells.

Source: https://www.ethz.ch

How To 3D Print New Organs Using Stem Cells In Space

August 21, 2019 Uncategorized

William Wagner, the director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, a 250-strong team focused on organ and tissue failure, is at the center of possibly one of the most exciting projects in biomedical research today: can you use 3D printers to create new organs for people in space?

The ability to create new organs using stem cells is an exciting area of research that could help save lives, ending the scourge of donor shortages. Studying the concept further in microgravity could teach the team more about how these cells act, while enabling them to build more complex organs that could inform research on Earth. Early findings also suggest that these studies could reveal more about certain diseases. This vision came a bit closer to reality this week, when Wagner’s institute announced a multi-year research alliance with the International Space Station’s United States National Laboratory to explore the area further. The institute will develop facilities on Earth while working with the lab on flight opportunities to study experiments in the orbiting lab.

“There’s been a lot of neat discovery science done on the space station,” Wagner says. “Let’s see what happens when we put stem cells in space. Oh, gosh, they stay more stem-like and they divide better! Okay, well, now what?”

Slowly but surely, organ printing is developing. At a 2016 conference, CELLINK detailed a future where organ shortages were a thing of the past. A team in May 2017 succesfully implanted artificial ovaries in mice. A Rutgers University group of researchers created a 3D-printable water gel that could one day help researchers print organs.

SpaceX’s CRS-18 resupply mission, which launched July 21 carrying Nickelodeon slime, also carried a Techshot biofabrication utility designed for exploring this area further: Wagner’s team is focused on using stem cells to fabricate new organs. These cells, which can further split into specialized cells, are also being used in the nascent area of lab-grown meat. Wagner explains that both areas involve similar problems of growing cells in a certain manner and rate. But while lab-based burgers could hit plates as early as 2021, printed livers and the like are nowhere near ready. “I can tell you from my perspective, organ printing’s got a long, long, long way to go,” Wagner says. “There’s a lot of barriers. At the same time, it’s exciting. There’s a lot of hope there if we can overcome any of these barriers.”

Source: https://www.inverse.com/

How To Make Solar Panels More Sustainable And Cheaper

August 20, 2019 Uncategorized

An innovative way to pattern metals has been discovered by scientists in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick in UK, which could make the next generation of solar panels more sustainable and cheaper. Silver and copper are the most widely used electrical conductors in modern electronics and solar cells. However, conventional methods of patterning these metals to make the desired pattern of conducting lines are based on selectively removing metal from a film by etching using harmful chemicals or printing from costly metal inks.

Scientists from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick, have developed a way of patterning these metals that is likely to prove much more sustainable and cheaper for large scale production, because there is no metal waste or use of toxic chemicals, and the fabrication method is compatible with continuous roll-to-roll processing. Dr Ross Hatton and Dr Silvia Varagnolo have discovered that silver and copper do not condense onto extremely thin films of certain highly fluorinated organic compounds when the metal is deposited by simple thermal evaporation.

Thermal evaporation is already widely used on a large scale to make the thin metal film on the inside of crisp packets, and organofluorine compounds are already common place as the basis of non-stick cooking pans. The researchers have shown that the organofluorine layer need only be 10 billionths of a metre thick to be effective, and so only tiny amounts are needed. This unconventional approach also leaves the metal surface uncontaminated, which Hatton believes will be particularly important for the next generation sensors, which often require uncontaminated patterned films of these metals as platforms onto which sensing molecules can be attached.

To help address the challenges posed by climate change, there is a need for colour tuneable, flexible and light weight solar cells that can be produced at low cost, particularly for applications where conventional rigid silicon solar cells are unsuitable such as in electric cars and semi-transparent solar cells for buildings. Solar cells based on thin films of organic, perovskite or nano-crystal semiconductors all have potential to meet this need, although they all require a low cost, flexible transparent electrode. Hatton and his team have used their method to fabricate semi-transparent organic solar cells in which the top silver electrode is patterned with millions of tiny apertures per square centimetre, which cannot be achieved by any other scalable means directly on top of an organic electronic device.

“This innovation enables us to realise the dream of truly flexible, transparent electrodes matched to needs of the emerging generation of thin film solar cells, as well as having numerous other potential applications ranging from sensors to low-emissivity glass” explains Dr Hatton from the Department of Chemistry at the University of Warwick.

The work is published in the journal Materials Horizons.

Source: https://warwick.ac.uk/

Long-term memory forming mechanism discovered

August 19, 2019 Uncategorized

Your brain has its own box of memories. If you were to hold it in your hand, brush off the dust and open it up, you’d be able to pull out Polaroid snaps of your most treasured memories. Your graduation ceremony perhaps, your wedding day, your daughter’s first words – all things you wouldn’t want to forget. But how does your brain keep these memories in their crystal-clear clarity? The strength of a memory lies in its formation and upkeep. When we create a memory, thin connections, called axons, form between nerve cells in our brain. The point at which two axons connect is called a synapse, and it is the strength of the synapse that determines if the memory is kept or allowed to fade away.

Now, a study in mice carried out by Nobel Prize-winning researchers at Columbia University has shown that a protein called CPEB3 plays an important role in the formation of memories. The team discovered how this protein is stored and used in the brain and hope it could lead to new methods of slowing memory loss in humans.

“The science of how synapses form and are strengthened over time is important for deciphering any disorder in which synapses – and the memories associated with them – degrade and die, such as Alzheimer’s disease,” said Dr Luana Fioriti. CPEB3 is created by the brain’s memory centre, the Hyppocampus. Once produced, it is stored in chamber-like structures called P bodies that protect it from other parts of the cell. It then travels to the synapse between nerve cells where required and is gradually released to help create a specific memory.

The findings suggest that the more CPEB3 released at a synapse, the stronger the connection and thus, the more concrete the resulting memory is. When the protein was removed, the mice could create new memories but were unable to keep them.

Source: https://www.sciencefocus.com/

Nano Glass Bottles Attack Malignant Cells

August 16, 2019 Uncategorized

Tiny silica bottles filled with medicine and a special temperature-sensitive material could be used for drug delivery to kill malignant cells only in certain parts of the body, according to a study published recently by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The research team devised a way to create silica-based hollow spheres around 200 nanometers in size, each with one small hole in the surface that could enable the spheres to encapsulate a wide range of payloads to be released later at certain temperatures only.

In the study, which was published on June 4 in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, the researchers describe packing the spheres with a mixture of fatty acids, a near-infrared dye, and an anticancer drug. The fatty acids remain solid at human body temperature but melt a few degrees above. When an infrared laser is absorbed by the dye, the fatty acids will be quickly melted to release the therapeutic drug.

“This new method could allow infusion therapies to target specific parts of the body and potentially negating certain side effects because the medicine is released only where there’s an elevated temperature,” said Younan Xia, professor and Brock Family Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “The rest of the drug remains encapsulated by the solid fatty acids inside the bottles, which are biocompatible and biodegradable.”

The researchers also showed that the size of the hole could be changed, enabling nanocapsules that release their payloads at different rates. “This approach holds great promise for medical applications that require drugs to be released in a controlled fashion and has advantages over other methods of controlled drug release,” Xia said.

Source: http://www.rh.gatech.edu/

New Theory To Prevent Alzheimer’s

August 15, 2019 Uncategorized

Alzheimer’s disease, the most common cause of dementia among the elderly, is characterized by plaques and tangles in the brain, with most efforts at finding a cure focused on these abnormal structures. But a University of California, Riverside, research team has identified alternate chemistry that could account for the various pathologies associated with the disease. Plaques and tangles have so far been the focus of attention in this progressive disease that currently afflicts more than 5.5 million people in the United States. Plaques, deposits of a protein fragment called beta-amyloid, look like clumps in the spaces between neurons. Tangles, twisted fibers of tau, another protein, look like bundles of fibers that build up inside cells.

“The dominant theory based on beta-amyloid buildup has been around for decades, and dozens of clinical trials based on that theory have been attempted, but all have failed,” said Ryan R. Julian, a professor of chemistry who led the research team. “In addition to plaques, lysosomal storage is observed in brains of people who have Alzheimer’s disease. Neurons — fragile cells that do not undergo cell division — are susceptible to lysosomal problems, specifically, lysosomal storage, which we report is a likely cause of Alzheimer’s disease.”

An organelle within the cell, the lysosome serves as the cell’s trashcan. Old proteins and lipids get sent to the lysosome to be broken down to their building blocks, which are then shipped back out to the cell to be built into new proteins and lipids. To maintain functionality, the synthesis of proteins is balanced by the degradation of proteins.

The lysosome, however, has a weakness: If what enters does not get broken down into little pieces, then those pieces also can’t leave the lysosome. The cell decides the lysosome is not working and “stores” it, meaning the cell pushes the lysosome to the side and proceeds to make a new one. If the new lysosome also fails, the process is repeated, resulting in lysosome storage.

“The brains of people who have lysosomal storage disorder, another well-studied disease, and the brains of people who have Alzheimer’s disease are similar in terms of lysosomal storage,” Julian said. “But lysosomal storage disorder symptoms show up within a few weeks after birth and are often fatal within a couple of years. Alzheimer’s disease occurs much later in life. The time frames are, therefore, very different.”

Julian’s collaborative team of researchers in the Department of Chemistry and the Division of Biomedical Sciences at UC Riverside posits that long-lived proteins, including beta-amyloid and tau, can undergo spontaneous modifications that can make them undigestible by the lysosomes. “Long-lived proteins become more problematic as we age and could account for the lysosomal storage seen in Alzheimer’s, an age-related disease,” Julian said. “If we are correct, it would open up new avenues for treatment and prevention of this disease.”

Study results appear in ACS Central Science, a journal of the American Chemical Society.

Source: https://news.ucr.edu/

VR Gives 3D Depiction Inside Blood Vessels

August 14, 2019 Uncategorized

UW Medicine interventional radiologist Wayne Monsky first saw virtual reality’s vivid, 3D depiction of the inside of a phantom patient’s blood vessels, his jaw dropped in childlike wonder.

A virtual-reality depiction of a catheter navigating blood vessel. With a VR headset, this would be 3D (click on the image to enjoy video)

“When you put the (VR) headset on … you have a giddy laugh that you can’t control – just sheer happiness and enthusiasm. (I’m) moving up to the mesenteric artery and I can’t believe what I’m seeing,” he recalled.

The experience reminds him of “Fantastic Voyage,” the ’60s-era sci-fi film about a submarine and crew that are miniaturized and injected into a scientist’s body to repair a blood clot.

“As a child, and today, I’ve been amazed at the premise that one day you can swim around inside someone’s body. And really, that’s the sensation: You’re in it,” he said. Interventional radiologists use catheters, thin flexible tubes that are inserted into arteries and veins and steered to any organ in the body, guided by X-ray visuals. With this approach, they (and cardiologists, vascular surgeons, and neuro-interventionalists) treat an array of conditions: liver tumors, narrowed and bleeding arteries, uterine fibroids, and more.

Monsky and two collaborators have pioneered VR technology that puts the operator inside 3D blood vessels. By following an anatomically correct, dynamic, 3D map of a phantom patient’s vessels, Monsky navigates the catheter through junctions and angles. The catheter‘s tip is equipped with sensors that visually represent its exact location to the VR headset. It’s a sizable leap forward from the 2D, black-and-white X-ray perspective that has guided Monsky’s catheters through vessels for most of his career.

He recently presented study findings that underscore VR’s value: In tests of a phantom patient, VR guidance got him to the destination faster – about 40 seconds faster, on average, over 18 simulations – than was the case with X-ray guidance.

Source: https://newsroom.uw.edu/

Brain Tumour Treatment Is Set To Be Revolutionised By A Cheap Drug

August 13, 2019 Uncategorized

A trio of medical experts from Manchester have made a potentially revolutionary breakthrough for the treatment of brain tumours. Innovate Pharmaceuticals – led by Dr James Stuart, Simon Cohen and Jan Cohen – was part of the development team for a new drug, known as IP1867B. The pioneering medication could transform the future treatment of brain tumours. The major cause of treatment failure in patients is resistance to targeted therapies and pre-clinical trials of the new drug have demonstrated its ability to sensitise tumours to the latest generation of treatments. Trials have even demonstrated a capacity for the drug to prevent tumours from acquiring resistance at all, which would dramatically improve the success of treatment for this particular cancer.

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”Our work on multiple disease areas in the cancer field has shown that hitting a number of targets with IP1867B allows us to not only shrink tumours but unmask them allowing other therapies to attack them, said Dr James Stuart, medical director at Eccles based Innovate Pharmaceuticals. “This action of ‘turning cold tumours hot’ alongside the reversal of acquired resistance, boosting combination efficacy and a possible lowering of side effect burden makes IP1867B a true breakthrough in cancer treatment. The next step is to take IP1867B into ‘first in human’ trial. We actively driving this next stage of development and look forward to seeing the results,” he explained.

Alongside Innovate Pharmaceuticals, trials were led by the research team at the Brain Tumour Research Centre at University of Portsmouth, working with the University of Liverpool and the University of Algarve in Portugal. The success rate for cancer therapies has been limited due to a combination of factors, such as the tumour’s ability to hide from and develop resistance to the treatment; excessive side effects; the treatment not being clinically effective; and the lack of penetration through the blood brain barrier – IP1867B was shown to be effective at targeting all of these limiting factors. The research team worked with existing cancer treatments and combination studies with traditional chemotherapy, targeted therapies and immunotherapies are now underway.

Source: https://researchportal.port.ac.uk
AND
https://aboutmanchester.co.uk/

How To Turn Breast Cancer Cells Into Fat to Stop Them From Spreading

August 12, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers have been able to coax human breast cancer cells to turn into fat cells in a new proof-of-concept study in mice. To achieve this feat, the team exploited a weird pathway that metastasising cancer cells have; their results are just a first step, but it’s a truly promising approach. When you cut your finger, or when a foetus grows organs, the epithelium cells begin to look less like themselves, and more ‘fluid’ – changing into a type of stem cell called a mesenchyme and then reforming into whatever cells the body needs.

This process is called epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) and it’s been known for a while that cancer can use both this one and the opposite pathway called MET (mesenchymal‐to‐epithelial transition), to spread throughout the body and metastasise. The researchers took mice implanted with an aggressive form of human breast cancer, and treated them with both a diabetic drug called rosiglitazone and a cancer treatment called trametinib. Thanks to these drugs, when cancer cells used one of the above-mentioned transition pathways, instead of spreading they changed from cancer into fat cells – a process called adipogenesis.

The image shows this process, with the cancer cells tagged with a green fluorescent protein and normal red fat cell on the left. The cancer-turned-fat cells display as brown (on the right) because the red of the fat cells combines with the green of the protein cancer cell tag.

“The models used in this study have allowed the evaluation of disseminating cancer cell adipogenesis in the immediate tumour surroundings,” the team wrote in their paper, published in January 2019. “The results indicate that in a patient-relevant setting combined therapy with rosiglitazone and trametinib specifically targets cancer cells with increased plasticity and induces their adipogenesis.”

Although not every cancer cell changed into a fat cell, the ones that underwent adipogenesis didn’t change back. “The breast cancer cells that underwent an EMT not only differentiated into fat cells, but also completely stopped proliferating,” said senior author Gerhard Christofori, a biochemist at the University of Basel, in Switzerland. “As far as we can tell from long-term culture experiments, the cancer cells-turned-fat cells remain fat cells and do not revert back to breast cancer cells.”

So how does this work? Well, as a drug trametinib both increases the transition process of cells – such as cancer cells turning into stem cells – and then increases the conversion of those stem cells into fat cells. Rosiglitazone was less important, but in combination with trametinib, it also helped the stem cells convert into fat cells. “Adipogenic differentiation therapy with a combination of rosiglitazone and [trametinib] efficiently inhibits cancer cell invasion, dissemination, and metastasis formation in various preclinical mouse models of breast cancer,” wrote the team.

Source: https://www.cell.com/
AND
https://www.sciencealert.com/

I-Phone Apps Could Identify Alzheimer’s

August 9, 2019 Uncategorized

Drugmaker Eli Lilly said early results from a study suggest that Apple Inc devices, including the iPhone, in combination with digital apps could differentiate people with mild Alzheimer’s disease dementia and those without symptoms. The study, tested in 113 participants over the age of 60, was conducted by Apple along with Eli Lilly and Evidation Health. The Apple devices were used along with the Beddit sleep monitoring device and digital apps in the study.

The researchers looked at device usage data and app history of the study participants over 12 weeks. People with symptoms tended to have slower typing than health volunteers, and received fewer text messages in total.

The participants were also asked to answer two one-question surveys daily as well as perform simple activities every two weeks, such as dragging one shape to the other and tapping a circle as fast as possible on an app. The study also aimed to differentiate people with mild cognitive impairment, the pre-dementia stage of Alzheimer’s disease.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Geno-Economics

August 8, 2019 Uncategorized

Biologists don’t understand the link between genes and behavior, so why should economists? Many outside critics of economics complain that it’s not a science. In response, most economists have steadily improved the quality of their empirical methods. But a few economists are taking a different tack by borrowing from natural science. Neuroeconomists, for example, have put experimental subjects in MRI machines to measure how their brains behave when they’re making economic decisions, in order to search for clues to the mechanisms behind everyday behavior. Recently, a few economists have sought to use genetics to augment their understanding of economic outcomes. This has become possible thanks to the advent of cheap genome sequencing and widely available databases of human genetic information. But there are a number of reasons this line of research is likely to do more harm than good, at least until biologists better understand the ways that genes affect human development.

One major foray into the field of geno-economics came from Quamrul Ashraf of Williams College and Oded Galor of Brown University. In a 2013 paper published in the American Economic Review — arguably the most prestigious journal in economics — Ashraf and Galor argue that genetic diversity exerts a big influence on economic development. Too much diversity, they argue, and people don’t trust each other. Too little diversity, and original ideas are hard to come by. Thus, the optional amount of diversity is a happy medium — a population homogeneous enough to cooperate, but diverse enough to have originality. Looking at genetic data, they found that Europe and East Asia tend to have a medium range of genetic diversity, with Africa on the high end and the indigenous populations of the Americas and Oceania on the low end. Since Europe and East Asia contain the most industrialized nations, Ashraf and Galor concluded that the data supported their hypothesis. Another geno-economics paper was recently published in the Journal of Public Economics — also a top journal — by economists Daniel Barth, Nicholas Papageorge and Kevin Thom. Rather than tackling the broad sweep of international development as Ashraf and Galor did, Barth et al. tried to use genetics to explain differences in individual wealth, using the Health and Retirement Study, which measures wealth and various other financial information. For each individual, they obtained a polygenic score — a number that represents statistical differences in a large set of genes — that tends to be correlated with educational attainment. Restricting their analysis only to people of European descent, Barth et al. then showed that this genetic statistic is correlated with more success in investing, even after controlling for things like income and education. They concluded that genetic endowments help some people invest more successfully, leading them to build up wealth over time.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/

One Injection Reduces Obesity In 4 Weeks

August 7, 2019 Uncategorized

An injection has helped reduce body weight and glucose levels in patients with diabetes and obesity in four weeks. The findings came from a small study in which patients lost on average 4.4kg and the treatment led to substantial improvements to their blood glucose, with some patients’ reducing to near-normal levels.Obesity is a common problem in the UK and it is estimated that one in four adults are obese. One of the most common types of weight loss surgery is a procedure known as gastric bypass surgery, which can be very effective in keeping excess weight off and improving blood sugar levels in diabetics. However, some patients decide against surgery and the procedure can cause complications such as abdominal pain, chronic nausea, vomiting and debilitating low blood sugar levels.

Previous research by Imperial College London suggested that one of the reasons why gastric bypass surgery works so well is because three specific hormones originating from the bowels are released in higher levels. This hormone combination, called ‘GOP’ for short, reduces appetite, causes weight loss and improves the body’s ability to use the sugar absorbed from eating. Researchers wanted to see if infusing patients with the GOP hormones glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1), oxyntomodulin and peptide YY, to mimic the high levels seen after surgery, could aid weight loss and reduce high glucose levels. Fifteen patients were given the GOP treatment for four weeks using a pump that slowly injects the GOP mixture under the skin for 12 hours a day, beginning one hour before breakfast and disconnecting after their last meal of the day. Patients also received dietetic advice on healthy eating and weight loss from a dietician.

“Obesity and type 2 diabetes can lead to very serious and potentially life-threatening conditions such as cancer, stroke and heart disease. There is a real need to find new medicines so we can improve and save the lives of many patients, said Tricia Tan, Professor of Practice (Metabolic Medicine & Endocrinology) at Imperial College London and lead author of the study. “Although this is a small study our new combination hormone treatment is promising and has shown significant improvements in patients’ health in only four weeks. Compared to other methods the treatment is non-invasive and reduced glucose levels to near-normal levels in our patients”, she adds.

Source: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/

Injection Of Nanoparticle Effective Against Melanoma

August 6, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a novel nano-vaccine for melanoma, the most aggressive type of skin cancer. Their innovative approach has so far proven effective in preventing the development of melanoma in mouse models and in treating primary tumors and metastases that result from melanoma. The focus of the research is on a nanoparticle that serves as the basis for the new vaccine. The study was led by Prof. Ronit Satchi-Fainaro, chair of the Department of Physiology and Pharmacology and head of the Laboratory for Cancer Research and Nanomedicine at TAU‘s Sackler Faculty of Medicine, and Prof. Helena Florindo of the University of Lisbon while on sabbatical at the Satchi-Fainaro lab at TAU. Melanoma develops in the skin cells that produce melanin or skin pigment.

“The war against cancer in general, and melanoma in particular, has advanced over the years through a variety of treatment modalities, such as chemotherapy, radiation therapy and immunotherapy; but the vaccine approach, which has proven so effective against various viral diseases, has not materialized yet against cancer,” says Prof. Satchi-Fainaro. “In our study, we have shown for the first time that it is possible to produce an effective nano-vaccine against melanoma and to sensitize the immune system to immunotherapies.”

The researchers harnessed tiny particles, about 170 nanometers in size, made of a biodegradable polymer. Within each particle, they “packed“ two peptides — short chains of amino acids, which are expressed in melanoma cells. They then injected the nanoparticles (or “nano-vaccines“) into a mouse model bearing melanoma. “The nanoparticles acted just like known vaccines for viral-borne diseases,” Prof. Satchi-Fainaro explains. “They stimulated the immune system of the mice, and the immune cells learned to identify and attack cells containing the two peptides — that is, the melanoma cells. This meant that, from now on, the immune system of the immunized mice will attack melanoma cells if and when they appear in the body.”

The results were published recently in Nature Nanotechnology.

Source: https://english.tau.ac.il/

Open Bionics Releases Affordable 3D Printed Bionic Arm

August 5, 2019 Uncategorized

Back in January 2019, the UK-company Open Bionics announced it had raised about £5 million from investors to continue developing not just simple 3D printed prosthetics but bionic devices. Last year, the company actually released its first 3D printed bionic arm that was officially medically approved. The prosthetic devices cost about £10,000 ($13,060), which is a third of the cost of traditionally manufactured equivalents. The company has been capable of using 3D technologies to reduce its costs and offer customisable 3D printed bionic devices to clinics.

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Until now the devices were exclusively available in the UK and France. However, the company announced a new partnership with Hanger Clinic to bring its products to the US. One of its key products is the 3D printed Hero Arm: showcasing multi-grip functionality but also empowering aesthetics for below elbow amputee adults and children (aged 8 and above). The Hero Arm, as its name implies can be personalised to resemble a superhero’s arm. Variations include designs inspired by Frozen, Marvel Comics or even Star Wars. The prosthetic device can perform a wide-range of actions like gripping, giving an OK sign, high fiving, fist bumping, or even picking up a small object. The company stated, “Special sensors within the Hero Arm detect muscle movements, meaning you can effortlessly control your bionic hand with intuitive life-like precision. Also, haptic vibrations, beepers, buttons and lights provide you with intuitive notifications.”

The first US recipients of the Hero Arm includes 14-year-old Hanger Clinic patient Meredith Gross, a high school freshman. She was born missing part of her lower left arm. She is a competitive golfer and volleyball player and previously had to use sports-specific prostheses. For the first time, she is considering using the 3D printed device for everyday tasks as well. Her mom said, “The Hero Arm has opened up a whole new world for Meredith. She found success from the moment she put It on, and has been able to do things for the first time in her life. This device allows people like Meredith to own their differences with more confidence”.

Source: https://openbionics.com/
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https://www.3dnatives.com/

Solar-driven Water Splitting Catalyst Produces Hydrogen

August 2, 2019 Uncategorized

Engineers from Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania) are the first to utilize a single enzyme biomineralization process to create a catalyst that uses the energy of captured sunlight to split water molecules to produce hydrogen. The synthesis process is performed at room temperature and under ambient pressure, overcoming the sustainability and scalability challenges of previously reported methods.

Solar-driven water splitting is a promising route towards a renewable energy-based economy. The generated hydrogen could serve as both a transportation fuel and a critical chemical feedstock for fertilizer and chemical production. Both of these sectors currently contribute a large fraction of total greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the challenges to realizing the promise of solar-driven energy production is that, while the required water is an abundant resource, previously-explored methods utilize complex routes that require environmentally-damaging solvents and massive amounts of energy to produce at large scale. The expense and harm to the environment have made these methods unworkable as a long-term solution.

Now a team of engineers at Lehigh have harnessed a biomineralization approach to synthesizing both quantum confined nanoparticle metal sulfide particles and the supporting reduced graphene oxide material to create a photocatalyst that splits water to form hydrogen. The team reported their results in an article entitled: “Enzymatic synthesis of supported CdS quantum dot/reduced graphene oxide photocatalysts” featured on the cover of the August 7 issue of Green Chemistry, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry. “Our water-based process represents a scalable green route for the production of this promising photocatalyst technology,” says Professor Steven McIntosh, who is also associate director of Lehigh’s Institute for Functional Materials and Devices.

Source: https://engineering.lehigh.edu/

Neural Text-to-Speech Machine

August 1, 2019 Uncategorized

Thanks to modern machine learning techniques, text-to-speech engines have made massive strides over the last few years. It used to be incredibly easy to know that it was a computer that was reading a text and not a human being. But that’s changing quickly. Amazon’s AWS cloud computing arm today launched a number of new neural text-to-speech models, as well as a new newscaster style that is meant to mimic the way… you guessed it… newscasters sound.

Man sitting in news studio with breaking news sign behind her. Ready to go live. Afro-american descent.

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“Speech quality is certainly important, but more can be done to make a synthetic voice sound even more realistic and engaging,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “What about style? For sure, human ears can tell the difference between a newscast, a sportscast, a university class and so on; indeed, most humans adopt the right style of speech for the right context, and this certainly helps in getting their message across.”

The new newscaster style is now available in two U.S. voices (Joanna and Matthew) and Amazon is already working with USA Today and Canada’s The Globe and Mail, among a number of other companies, to help them. Amazon Polly Newscaster, as the new service is officially called, is the result of years of research on text-to-speech, which AWS is also now making available through its Neural Text-to-Speech engine. This new engine, which isn’t unlike similar neural engines like Google’s WaveNet and others, currently features 11 voices, three for U.K. English and eight for U.S. English.

Source: https://aws.amazon.com/

The Mind Controls Remotely Videogames

July 31, 2019 Uncategorized

Scientists in Switzerland have developed a system which allows people with severely-impaired motor functions, such as quadriplegia, to use video games using only the power of their brain.

Samuel Kunz, who was paralysed after an accident, uses the brain-computer interface to control an avatar through a race course in a specially-designed computer game called ‘Brain Driver’. The ultimate aim of the research is to develop technology to control devices such as wheelchairs for those with a limited ability to move. Kunz, who is taking part in the trial, is able to ‘pilot’ the digital race-car using only his brain signals transmitted to a computer via electrodes placed on his head.

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“These electrodes are connected to an amplifier and then to the computer and to our algorithms in the end. The algorithms are then calculating the brain signal and sending commands to the game that our pilot can actually control,” Dr. Rea Lehner, a neuroscientist at ETH Zurich explained. Lehner added Kunz is training his mind by imagining certain actions which are then translated into signals to control the race car. Thinking about moving his left hand makes the car turn left, thinking about moving his right hand turns the car right, and moving both together makes the car go straight. A fourth command – fully relaxing and clearing his mind – slows the car down. Kunz said it has taken a lot of practise to train his mind to control the game; which will be made even more difficult in a stadium full of people. He will be among those taking part in a special championship next year called Cybathlon in which people with physical disabilities compete against each other using state-of-the-art technology.

“I have to be very concentrated. The connection between my fingers and my brain is not there anymore. I still try to move my fingers just in my head and so that needs a lot of concentration to do it exactly the same way every time,” Kunz told Reuters during a training session in Zurich.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Amputee Feels In Real-Time With Bionic Hand

July 30, 2019 Uncategorized

Nine years after an accident caused the loss of his left hand, Dennis Aabo Sørensen from Denmark became the first amputee in the world to feel – in real-time – with a sensory-enhanced prosthetic hand that was surgically wired to nerves in his upper arm. Silvestro Micera and his team at EPFL Center for Neuroprosthetics (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland) and SSSA (Italy) developed the revolutionary sensory feedback that allowed Sørensen to feel again while handling objects. A prototype of this bionic technology was tested in February 2013 during a clinical trial in Rome under the supervision of Paolo Maria Rossini at Gemelli Hospital (Italy). The study is published in the February 5, 2014 edition of Science Translational Medicine, and represents a collaboration called Lifehand 2 between several European universities and hospitals.
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“The sensory feedback was incredible,” reports the 36 year-old amputee from Denmark. “I could feel things that I hadn’t been able to feel in over nine years.” In a laboratory setting wearing a blindfold and earplugs, Sørensen was able to detect how strongly he was grasping, as well as the shape and consistency of different objects he picked up with his prosthetic. “When I held an object, I could feel if it was soft or hard, round or square.”

Micera and his team enhanced the artificial hand with sensors that detect information about touch. This was done by measuring the tension in artificial tendons that control finger movement and turning this measurement into an electrical current. But this electrical signal is too coarse to be understood by the nervous system. Using computer algorithms, the scientists transformed the electrical signal into an impulse that sensory nerves can interpret. The sense of touch was achieved by sending the digitally refined signal through wires into four electrodes that were surgically implanted into what remains of Sørensen’s upper arm nerves.

“This is the first time in neuroprosthetics that sensory feedback has been restored and used by an amputee in real-time to control an artificial limb,” says Micera. “We were worried about reduced sensitivity in Dennis’ nerves since they hadn’t been used in over nine years,” says Stanisa Raspopovic, first author and scientist at EPFL and SSSA. These concerns faded away as the scientists successfully reactivated Sørensen’s sense of touch.

Source: https://actu.epfl.ch/

Contact Lens Zooms On Your Command

July 29, 2019 Uncategorized

It is absolutely the stuff of science fiction: a contact lens that zooms on your command. But scientists at the University of California San Diego have gone ahead and made it a reality. They’ve created a contact lens, controlled by eye movements, that can zoom in if you blink twice.

How is this possible? In the simplest of terms, the scientists measured the electrooculographic signals generated when eyes make specific movements (up, down, left, right, blink, double blink) and created a soft biomimetic lens that responds directly to those electric impulses. The lens created was able to change its focal length depending on the signals generated.

Therefore the lens could literally zoom in the blink of an eye. Incredibly, the lens works regardless of whether the user can see or not. It’s not about the sight, it’s about the electricity produced by specific movements.

Why create this? Why the hell not. The researchers believe this innovation could be used in “visual prostheses, adjustable glasses, and remotely operated robotics in the future,” but I’m waiting for them to turn up on CSI Miami. Could you imagine the crimes Ice-T could solve wearing these things?

Source: https://www.cnet.com/

New Cause Of Cell Aging Discovered: Findings Have Huge Implications

July 26, 2019 Uncategorized

New research from the USC Viterbi School of Engineering could be key to our understanding of how the aging process works. The findings potentially pave the way for better cancer treatments and revolutionary new drugs that could vastly improve human health in the twilight years. The work, from Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science Nick Graham and his team in collaboration with Scott Fraser, Provost Professor of Biological Sciences and Biomedical Engineering, and Pin Wang, Zohrab A. Kaprielian Fellow in Engineering, was recently published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

LEFT: NON-SENESCENT CELLS WERE SHOWN WITH DIFFERENT COLORS. RIGHT: SENESCENT CELLS APPEARED OFTEN WITH MULTIPLE BLUE NUCLEI AND DID NOT SYNTHESIZE DNA.

“To drink from the fountain of youth, you have to figure out where the fountain of youth is, and understand what the fountain of youth is doing,” Graham said. “We’re doing the opposite; we’re trying to study the reasons cells age, so that we might be able to design treatments for better aging.”

To achieve this, lead author Alireza Delfarah, a graduate student in the Graham lab, focused on senescence, a natural process in which cells permanently stop creating new cells. This process is one of the key causes of age-related decline, manifesting in diseases such as arthritis, osteoporosis and heart disease.

“Senescent cells are effectively the opposite of stem cells, which have an unlimited potential for self-renewal or division,” Delfarah said. “Senescent cells can never divide again. It’s an irreversible state of cell cycle arrest.”

The research team discovered that the aging, senescent cells stopped producing a class of chemicals called nucleotides, which are the building blocks of DNA. When they took young cells and forced them to stop producing nucleotides, they became senescent, or aged. “This means that the production of nucleotides is essential to keep cells young,” Delfarah said. “It also means that if we could prevent cells from losing nucleotide synthesis, the cells might age more slowly.”

Graham’s team examined young cells that were proliferating robustly and fed them molecules labeled with stable isotopes of carbon, in order to trace how the nutrients consumed by a cell were processed into different biochemical pathways.

Scott Fraser and his lab worked with the research team to develop 3D imagery of the results. The images unexpectedly revealed that senescent cells often have two nuclei, and that they do not synthesize DNA. Before now, senescence has primarily been studied in cells known as fibroblasts, the most common cells that comprised the connective tissue in animals. Graham’s team is instead focusing on how senescence occurs in epithelial cells, the cells that line the surfaces of the organs and structures in the body and the type of cells in which most cancers arise. Graham said that senescence is most widely known as the body’s protective barrier against cancer: When cells sustain damage that could be at risk of developing into cancer, they enter into senescence and stop proliferating so that the cancer does not develop and spread.

“Sometimes people talk about senescence as a double-edged sword, that it protects against cancer, and that’s a good thing,” Graham said. “But then it also promotes aging and diseases like diabetes, cardiac dysfunction or atherosclerosis and general tissue dysfunction,” he said. Graham said the goal was not to completely prevent senescence, because that might unleash cancer cells. “But then on the other hand, we would like to find a way to remove senescent cells to promote healthy aging and better function,” he explained.

Graham underscores that the team’s research has applications in the emerging field of senolytics, the development of drugs that may be able to eliminate aging cells. He said that human clinical trials are still in early stages, but studies with mice have shown that by eliminating senescent cells, mice age better, with a more productive life span. “They can take a mouse that’s aging and diminishing in function, treat it with senolytic drugs to eliminate the senescent cells, and the mouse is rejuvenated. If anything, it’s these senolytic drugs that are the fountain of youth,” Graham said. He added that in order for successful senolytic drugs to be designed, it was important to identify what is unique about senescent cells, so that drugs won’t affect the normal, non-senescent cells.

“That’s where we’re coming in–studying senescent cell metabolism and trying to figure out how the senescent cells are unique, so that you could design targeted therapeutics around these metabolic pathways,” Graham added.

Source: https://viterbischool.usc.edu/
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https://eurekalert.org/

Stem Cells Restore Damaged Teeth

July 25, 2019 Uncategorized

A new study demonstrates that stem cells from baby teeth can be used to repair damaged permanent teeth in young children. The findings suggest a new treatment for childhood dental issues may be around the corner. The treatment’s potential applications go much further than just dental health. Half of all children suffer some kind of dental injury while young. Sometimes the damage isn’t to the baby teeth they will lose anyway, but to the permanent adult teeth lying below the gums that they will need for the rest of their lives. In some cases, trauma can cut off the blood supply to a tooth and rot out the living pulp inside it; a condition called “pulp necrosis.” This condition often leads to the loss of the tooth. While treatment exists, it is often unsatisfactory.

A new clinical trial by Yan Jin, Kun Xuan, and Bei Li of the Fourth Military Medicine University in Xi’an, China and Songtao Shi of the University of Pennsylvania‘s School of Dental Medicine demonstrates how to repair teeth suffering from pulp necrosis by taking stem cells from the patient’s baby teeth.

The study, carried out in China on 40 children who had both damaged adult teeth and baby teeth that had yet to fall out, was published in the journal Science Translational Medicine. The test subjects were selected to either receive the new treatment or an older treatment called apexification, which attempts to address the issue by encouraging root development. This was considered the control group.

The patients who received the stem cell treatment, called human deciduous pulp stem cell (hDPSC) treatment, had pulp tissue taken out of one of their healthy baby teeth. This pulp is rich in stem cells. The cells were grown in a lab and then placed into the injured adult tooth. The hope was that the stem cells would encourage the growth of new pulp inside the tooth.

Follow-ups were carried out for up to three years. The patients who had received the hDPSC treatment showed better blood flow in their teeth, better root systems, and thicker dentin than the patents who underwent the traditional procedure. They also had recovered sensation in their teeth, while the control group had not. The use of a patient’s own cells in the treatment also reduced the risk of their body rejecting the therapy, making the concept even more attractive. “This treatment gives patients sensation back in their teeth. If you give them a warm or cold stimulation, they can feel it; they have living teeth again,” Dr. Shi told Penn Today. “For me, the results are very exciting. To see something we discovered take a step forward to potentially become a routine therapy in the clinic is gratifying.”

Source: https://penntoday.upenn.edu/

Deciphering Breast Cancer

July 24, 2019 Uncategorized

Breast cancer is one of the most common cancers, and one of the leading causes of death in women globally. Breast cancer is a disease where cells located in the breast grow out of control. Although a majority of breast cancers are discovered in women at the age of 50 years or older, the disease can affect anyone, including men and younger women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Last year there were 9.6 million deaths and 18.1 million new cases of breast cancer diagnosed globally according to the latest report from the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) released in September 2018.

In 2019 alone, the U.S. National Cancer Institute estimates that there will be 268,600 new female breast cancer cases and 41,760 fatalities. Earlier this month, researchers based in Switzerland published in Cell their study in using applied artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning to create a comprehensive tumor and immune atlas of breast cancer ecosystems that lays the foundation for innovative precision medicine and immunotherapy.

The study was led by professor Bernd Bodenmiller, Ph.D. at the Institute of Molecular Life Sciences at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Bodenmiller is a recipient of the 2019 Friedrich Miescher Award, Switzerland’s highest distinction for outstanding achievements in biochemistry. His team worked in collaboration with the Systems Biology Group at IBM Research in Zurich led by María Rodríguez Martínez, Ph.D. with the shared goal to produce a foundation for more targeted breast cancer treatment through precision medicine.

Source: https://www.ibm.com/

AI Beats Professionals In Poker

July 23, 2019 Uncategorized

An artificial intelligence bot, created by researchers at Facebook and Carnegie Mellon, can beat human poker professionals in a six-player, no-limit Hold’em game, Facebook announced. Pluribus, as the AI bot is called, has “decisively” won against a number of pros, including two World Series of Poker Main Event winners.

Pluribus has been built on the shoulders of Libratus, an AI that bested human pro players in two-player poker in 2017. It learned to play by competing against itself, without any data of prior human or AI play. Since poker is incredibly complex, having Pluribus look too far into the future wasn’t viable; instead, the bot used a new search algorithm that helps it make good decisions by looking at just the few next moves (instead of trying to figure out all the moves until the end of the game). It also used new and faster self-play algorithms that helped it cope with all the hidden information present in poker.

“Combined, these advances made it possible to train Pluribus using very little processing power and memory — the equivalent of less than $150 worth of cloud computing resources,” wrote Facebook AI research scientist Noam Brown.

During one experiment, Pluribus played 10,000 hands of poker over 12 days, against a dozen professionals (who were playing for a total prize for $50,000, giving them a reason to win).

In money terms, Pluribus was so much better than people, that if the game were played with $1 chips, it would have made about $1,000 per hour competing against five human players.

The details on how the researchers have managed to make Pluribus so good at multiplayer poker — a notoriously hard problem in AI — are in a new paper published in Science.

Source: https://science.sciencemag.org/
AND
https://mashable.com/

Russia’s Secret Intelligence Agency Hacked: ‘Largest Data Breach In Its History’

July 22, 2019 Uncategorized

Red faces in Moscow this weekend, with the news that hackers have successfully targeted FSB—Russia‘s Federal Security Service. The hackers managed to steal 7.5 terabytes of data from a major contractor, exposing secret FSB projects to de-anonymize Tor browsing, scrape social media, and help the state split its internet off from the rest of the world. The data was passed to mainstream media outlets for publishing.

FSB is Russia’s primary security agency with parallels with the FBI and MI5, but its remit stretches beyond domestic intelligence to include electronic surveillance overseas and significant intelligence-gathering oversight. It is the primary successor agency to the infamous KGB, reporting directly to Russia’s president.

A week ago, on July 13, a hacking group under the name 0v1ru$ that had reportedly breached SyTech, a major FSB contractor working on a range of live and exploratory internet projects, left a smiling Yoba Face on SyTech’s homepage alongside pictures purporting to showcase the breach. 0v1ru$ had passed the data itself to the larger hacking group “Digital Revolution” , which shared the files with various media outlets and the headlines with Twitter—taunting FSB that the agency should maybe rename one of its breached activities “Project Collander”.

BBC Russia broke the news that 0v1ru$ had breached SyTech‘s servers and shared details of contentious cyber projects, projects that included social media scraping (including Facebook and LinkedIn), targeted collection and the “de-anonymization of users of the Tor browser.” The BBC described the breach as possibly “the largest data leak in the history of Russian intelligence services.”

As well as defacing SyTech‘s homepage with the Yoba Face, 0v1ru$ also detailed the project names exposed: “Arion“, “Relation“, “Hryvnia,” alongside the names of the SyTech project managers. The BBC report claims that no actual state secrets were exposed.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/

Manipulating The “Boss Gene” For Reprogramming Humans

July 19, 2019 Uncategorized

It seems like everything is going wireless these days. That now includes efforts to reprogram the human genome. A new University at Buffalo-led study describes how researchers wirelessly controlled FGFR1 — a gene that plays a key role in how humans grow from embryos to adults — in lab-grown brain tissue. The ability to manipulate the gene, the study’s authors say, could lead to new cancer treatments, and ways to prevent and treat mental disorders such as schizophrenia.

It represents a step forward toward genetic manipulation technology that could upend the treatment of cancer, as well as the prevention and treatment of schizophrenia and other neurological illnesses. It centers on the creation of a new subfield of research the study’s authors are calling “optogenomics,” or controlling the human genome through laser light and nanotechnology.

The left image shows the gene FGFR1 in its natural state. The right image shows the gene when exposed to laser light, which causes the gene to activiate and deactivate.

“The potential of optogenomic interfaces is enormous,” says co-author Josep M. Jornet, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. “It could drastically reduce the need for medicinal drugs and other therapies for certain illnesses. It could also change how humans interact with machines.”

For the past 20 years, scientists have been combining optics and genetics — the field of optogenetics — with a goal of employing light to control how cells interact with each other. By doing this, one could potentially develop new treatments for diseases by correcting the miscommunications that occur between cells. While promising, this research does not directly address malfunctions in genetic blueprints that guide human growth and underlie many diseases. The new research begins to tackle this issue because FGFR1 — it stands for Fibroblast Growth Factor Receptor 1 — holds sway over roughly 4,500 other genes, about one-fifth of the human genome, as estimated by the Human Genome Project, says study co-author Michal K. Stachowiak.

“In some respects, it’s like a boss gene,” says Stachowiak, PhD, professor in the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB. “By controlling FGFR1, one can theoretically prevent widespread gene dysregulations in schizophrenia or in breast cancer and other types of cancer.”

The work — spearheaded by UB researchers Josep M. Jornet, Michal K. Stachowiak, Yongho Bae and Ewa K. Stachowiak — was reported in the June edition of the Proceedings of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Source: http://www.buffalo.edu/

How To Merge Your Brain With A.I.

July 18, 2019 Uncategorized

Elon Musk said startup Neuralink, which aims to build a scalable implant to connect human brains with computers, has already implanted chips in rats and plans to test its brain-machine interface in humans within two years, with a long-term goal of people “merging with AI.” Brain-machine interfaces have been around for awhile. Some of the earliest success with the technology include Brown University’s BrainGate, which first enabled a paralyzed person to control a computer cursor in 2006. Since then a variety of research groups and companies, including the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and DARPA-backed Synchron, have been working on similar devices. There are two basic approaches: You can do it invasively, creating an interface with an implant that directly touches the brain, or you can do it non-invasively, usually by electrodes placed near the skin. (The latter is the approach used by startup CTRL-Labs, for example.)

Neuralink, says Musk, is going to go the invasive route. It’s developed a chip containing an array of up to 96 small, polymer threads, each with up to 32 electrodes that can be implanted into the brain via robot and a 2 millimeter incision. The threads are small — less than 6 micrometers — because, as Musk noted in remarks delivered Tuesday night and webcast, Once implanted, according to Musk, the chip would connect wirelessly to devices. “It basically Bluetooths to your phone,” he said. “We’ll have to watch the App Store updates to that one,” he added (the audience laughed).

Musk cofounded Neuralink in 2017 and serves as the company’s CEO, though it’s unclear how much involvement he has given that he’s also serving as CEO for SpaceX and Tesla. Company cofounder and president, Max Hodak, has a biomedical engineering degree from Duke and has cofounded two other companies, MyFit and Transcriptic. Neuralink has raised $66.27 million in venture funding so far, according to Pitchbook, which estimates the startup’s valuation at $509.3 million. Both Musk and Hodak spoke about the potential for its company’s neural implants to improve the lives of people with brain damage and other brain disabilities. Its first goal, based on its discussions with such patients, is the ability to control a mobile device.

The company’s long-term goal is a bit more fantastical, and relates to Musk’s oft-repeated concerns over the dangers of advanced artificial intelligence. That goal is to use the company’s chips to create a “tertiary level” of the brain that would be linked to artificial intelligence. “We can effectively have the option of merging with AI,” he said. “After solving a bunch of brain related diseases there is the mitigation of the existential threat of AI,” he continued.

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Chip implanted in a rat — *This pair of images from Neuralink shows its electrodes on the surface of a rat cortex (left) and one of its chips as implanted in a rat (right).*

“*If you stick something in your brain, don’t want it to be giant, you want it to be tiny,*” says Musk.

In terms of progress, the company says that it has built a chip and a robot to implant it, which it has implanted into rats. According to the whitepaper the company has published (which has not yet undergone any peer review), it was able to record rat brain activity from its chips, and with many more channels than exist on current systems in use with humans. The first human clinical trials are expected for next year, though Hodak mentioned that the company has not yet begun to the FDA processes needed to conduct those tests.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/

Air Taxi Will Offer 15-Minute Rides In 25 Cities Next Year

July 17, 2019 Uncategorized

We were promised jetpacks, but let’s be honest, they’re just plain unsafe. So a nice drone ride is probably all we should reasonably expect. Lift Aircraft is the latest to make a play for the passenger multirotor market, theoretical as it is, and its craft is a sleek little thing with some interesting design choices to make it suitable for laypeople to “pilot.”

The Austin-based company just took the wraps off the Hexa, the 18-rotor craft it intends to make available for short recreational flights. It just flew for the first time last month, and could be taking passengers aloft as early as next year.

The Hexa is considerably more lightweight than the aircraft that seemed to be getting announced every month or two earlier this year. Lift’s focus isn’t on transport, which is a phenomenally complicated problem both in terms of regulation and engineering. Instead, it wants to simply make the experience of flying in a giant drone available for thrill-seekers with a bit of pocket money.

This reduced scope means the craft can get away with being just 432 pounds and capable of 10-15 minutes of sustained flight with a single passenger. Compared with Lilium’s VTOL engines or Volocopter’s 36-foot wingspan, this thing looks like a toy. And that’s essentially what it is, for now. But there’s something to be said for proving your design in a comparatively easily accessed market and moving up, rather than trying to invent an air taxi business from scratch.

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“Multi-seat eVTOL air taxis, especially those that are designed to transition to wing-borne flight, are probably 10 years away and will require new regulations and significant advances in battery technology to be practical and safe. We didn’t want to wait for major technology or regulatory breakthroughs to start flying,” said CEO Matt Chasen in a news release. “We’ll be flying years before anyone else.”

The Hexa is flown with a single joystick and an iPad; direct movements and attitude control are done with the former, while destination-based movement, take-off and landing take place on the latter. This way people can go from walking in the front door to flying one of these things — or rather riding in one and suggesting some directions to go — in an hour or so.

It’s small enough that it doesn’t even count as a “real” aircraft; it’s a “powered ultralight,” which is a plus and a minus: no pilot’s license necessary, but you can’t go past a few hundred feet of altitude or fly over populated areas. No doubt there’s still a good deal of fun you can have flying around a sort of drone theme park, though. The whole area will have been 3D mapped prior to flight, of course.

Source: https://www.liftaircraft.com/
AND
https://techcrunch.com/

Price Of Lab-grown Meat To Plummet From $280,000 To $10 Per Patty By 2021

July 16, 2019 Uncategorized

The price of producing a burger patty made from lab-grown meat is expected to drop to $10 by 2021, according to Dutch food technology company Mosa Meat and Spain-based Biotech Foods. Mosa Meats co-founder Mark Post created the first lab-grown beef burger (using a small amount of animal cells grown in a lab setting) in 2013 at a cost of €250,000 ($280,400)—funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin—but Mosa Meat and Biotech Foods say production costs have fallen dramatically since then. The average cost of producing a kilogram of lab-grown meat (also known as cultured meat) is now about €100 ($112) which is significantly lower than the $800 cited a year ago by Israeli biotech company Future Meat Technologies.

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“The burger was this expensive in 2013 because back then it was novel science and we were producing at a very small scale,” a Mosa Meat spokeswoman told media outlet Reuters. “Once production is scaled up, we project the cost of producing a hamburger will be around €9 ($10).” And they could ultimately become even cheaper than a conventional burger, the spokesperson said. A number of companies have invested in research and development of lab-grown meat in recent years. Biotech Foods hopes to reach production scale of its meat and have regulatory approval by 2021, when it expects to begin generating revenue. Earlier this year, animal agriculture feed supplier Cargill announced its investment in lab-grown meat company Aleph Foods to help the startup brings its slaughter-free steak to market.

Source: https://vegnews.com/

U.S. Proposes Barring Big Tech Companies From Offering Financial Services, Digital Currencies

July 15, 2019 Uncategorized

A proposal to prevent big technology companies from functioning as financial institutions or issuing digital currencies has been circulated for discussion by the Democratic majority that leads the House Financial Services Committee, according to a copy of the draft legislation seen by Reuters.

In a sign of widening scrutiny after Facebook Inc’s (FB.O) proposed Libra digital coin aroused widespread objection, the bill proposes afine of $1 million per day for violation of such rules.

Such a sweeping proposal would likely spark opposition from Republican members of the house who are keen on innovation, and would likely struggle to gather enough votes to passthe lower chamber. Even if it were to pass the full house, it would still have to pass the senate which would also likely be an uphill struggle. Nevertheless, the draft proposal sends a strong message to large tech firms increasingly eyeing the financial services space.

The draft legislation, “Keep Big Tech Out Of Finance Act”, describes a large technology firm as a company mainly offering an online platform servicewith at least $25 billion in annual revenue.

“A large platform utility may not establish, maintain, or operate a digital asset that is intended to be widely used as medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, or any other similar function, as defined by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System,” it proposes.

Facebook, which would qualify to be such an entity, said last month it wouldlaunch its global cryptocurrency in 2020.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

3D-printed Guns Are Back

July 12, 2019 Uncategorized

A new network of 3D-printed gun advocates is growing in America – and this time things are different. Unlike previous attempts to popularise 3D-printed guns, this operation is entirely decentralised. There’s no headquarters, no trademarks, and no real leader. The people behind it reckon that this means they can’t be stopped by governments.

3D-polymer-Glock

“If they [the government] were to come after me, they’d first have to find my identity,” says Ivan the Troll, a member of the group. “I’m one of many, many like-minded individuals who’re doing this sort of work.”

Known only by his online moniker, Ivan the Troll is the de facto spokesman of an underground wave of 3D-printing gunsmiths. Ivan says he knows of at least 100 people who are actively developing 3D-printed gun technology, and he claims there are thousands taking part in the network. This loose-knit community spans across the whole world. They communicate across several digital platforms, including Signal, Twitter, IRC, and Discord. They critique each other’s work, exchange 3D gun CAD files, offer advice, talk theory, and collaborate on future blueprints. These 3D-printed gun enthusiasts – who share similar ideas and political viewpoints on gun control – mostly found each other online via gun control subreddits and forums.

Ivan is just one small part of this network. He says he is from Illinois, and is of “college age”, but otherwise he remains mostly anonymous, to lie low. At the same time though, he’s launched bombastic PR videos demonstrating the new 3D-printed gun parts he’s created in his garage, including a Glock 17 handgun frame.

One of his most recent videos shows the polymer Glock 17 frame in various stages of production in his workshop. The footage is set to fast-paced synthwave music and is run through a trendy VHS filter – the aesthetics are important. Toward the end, Ivan fires several rounds with the fully built handgun, as text flashes up saying “ANYONE CAN MAKE IT”, “LIVE FREE OR DIE”, and “GO AHEAD TRY TO STOP THIS YOU FILTHY STATISTS”. He’s also uploaded the complete CAD reference model designs for a 3D-printed AR-15 assault rifle to his file-sharing space online. In February of this year, Ivan and his group decided to name themselves “Deterrence Dispensed”, which is a tongue-in-cheek nod to the notorious Defence Distributed – a 3D-printing gun company formerly run by Texan crypto-anarchist Cody Wilson. The community members are uploading these files individually on services such as Spee.ch, a media-hosting site underpinned by the LBRY blockchain, and they aren’t waiting for anyone to give them permission. They’ve made their own 3D-printed gun designs, modified old ones, and are keeping all the Defence Distributed ones available for free too.

Source: https://www.wired.co.uk/

Blood Test Predicts Breast Cancer Relapse

July 11, 2019 Uncategorized

Using data from a person’s immune response, researchers have devised a blood test that may accurately predict the risk of breast cancer recurrence. Despite scientific advancements in breast cancer research, this type continues to be the leading cancer among women in the United States and the second deadliest after lung cancer. Many breast cancer survivors live with a continual worry that the condition will reemerge, while researchers are hard at work, trying to discern patterns of breast cancer recurrence. For instance, studies of breast cancer receptors show that estrogen receptor (ER)-negative breast cancers are more likely to recur in the first 5 years after diagnosis, while ER-positive breast cancers are associated with a higher risk of recurrence in the following 10 years.

New research looks at the body’s antitumor inflammatory response to devise a blood test that may soon predict a person’s chances of experiencing breast cancer recurrence. Dr. Peter P. Lee, chair of the Department of Immuno-Oncology at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center, in Duarte, CA, is the senior author of the new study, which appears in the journal Nature Immunology. The balance between the immune system’s pro- and anti-inflammatory signaling in response to cytokines can determine a person’s antitumor immune reaction, explain Dr. Lee and colleagues in their paper.

For the study, the researchers recruited 40 breast cancer survivors and clinically followed them for a median period of 4 years. The researchers also used an additional sample of 38 breast cancer survivors to attempt to replicate their findings from the previous group. A person with cancer tends to have peripheral blood regulatory T cells (T-reg cells, for short) with less active pro-inflammatory cytokine signaling pathways and more active immune suppressive cytokine signaling pathways, explain the researchers.

Using this signaling data, the scientists created an index. The hope is that, eventually, healthcare professionals will be able to run data of a blood sample from a breast cancer survivor through an algorithm based on Lee and the team’s cytokine signaling index. The goal is for physicians and breast cancer patients to know the risk of the disease recurring within the next 3–5 years.

“Knowing the chance of cancer relapse will inform doctors how aggressive a particular patient’s cancer treatment should be,” Dr. Lee explains. “The [cytokine signaling index] is an overall reflection of a patient’s immune system at diagnosis, which we now know is a major determinant of future relapse.”

Source: https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/

How To Detect Autism

July 10, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers have developed a new technique to help doctors more quickly and accurately detect autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children. In a study led by the University of Waterloo in Canada, researchers characterized how children with ASD scan a person’s face differently than a neuro-typical child. Based on the findings, the researchers were able to develop a technique that considers how a child with ASD gaze transitions from one part of a person’s face to another.

According to the developers, the use of this technology makes the diagnostic process less stressful for the children and if combined with existing manual methods could help doctors better avoid a false positive autism diagnosis.

“Many people have autism, and we need early diagnosis especially in children,” said Mehrshad Sadria, a master’s student in Waterloo’s Department of Applied Mathematics. “The current approaches to determining if someone has autism are not really child-friendly. Our method allows for the diagnosis to be made more easily and with less possibility of mistakes.

“The new technique can be used in all ASD diagnosis, but we believe it’s particularly effective for children.”

In developing the new technique, the researchers evaluated 17 children with ASD and 23 neuro-typical children. The mean chronological ages of the ASD and neuro-typical groups were 5.5 and 4.8, respectively. Each participant was shown 44 photographs of faces on a 19-inch screen, integrated into an eye-tracking system. The infrared device interpreted and identified the locations on the stimuli at which each child was looking via emission and reflection of wave from the iris.

The images were separated into seven key areas interest (AOIs) in which participants focussed their gaze: under the right eye, right eye, under the left eye, left eye, nose, mouth and other parts of the screen. The researchers wanted to know more than how much time the participants spent looking at each AOI, but also how they moved their eyes and scan the faces. To get that information, the researchers used four different concepts from network analysis to evaluate the varying degree of importance the children placed on the seven AOIs when exploring the facial features.

Source: https://uwaterloo.ca/

Wooden Skyscrapers

July 9, 2019 Uncategorized

Recent innovations in engineered timber have laid the foundations for the world’s first wooden skyscrapers to appear within a decade, a feat that is not only achievable—according to the Centre for Natural Material Innovation—but one they hope will beckon in an era of sustainable wooden cities, helping reverse historic emissions from the construction industry.

The research team based at the Faculty of Architecture of Cambridge University (UK), is interdisciplinary, composed of architects, biochemists, chemists, mathematicians and engineers, who specialise in plant-based material, including cross-laminated timber, arguably the first major structural innovation since the advent of reinforced concrete, 150 years ago.

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“Until cross-laminated timber, there was simply no building material to challenge steel or reinforced concrete. To construct cities and indeed skyscrapers, we just had to accept the good and the bad of existing materials“, said Principal Investigator Dr Michael Ramage.

“Concrete is about five times heavier than timber, which means more expense for foundations and transport; it’s resource-intensive, and contributes to tremendous carbon dioxide emissions. After water, concrete is the most consumed material by humanity. But now we have an alternative, and it’s plant-based,” he added.

The team envisage trees supplanting concrete as the predominant building material for cities, with buildings sown like seeds and cities harvested as crops, a way of simultaneously addressing climate change and global housing shortages.

Dr Ramage explained: “In England alone, we need to build 340,000 new homes each year over the next 12 years to accommodate our population. Concrete is unsustainable. Timber, however, is the only building material we can grow, and that actually reduces carbon dioxide. Every tonne of timber expunges 1.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Doing the calculations, if all new English homes were constructed from timber, we could capture and offset the carbon footprints of around 850,000 people for 10 years.

“The sustainable forests of Europe take just 7 seconds to grow the volume of timber required for a 3 bedroom apartment, and 4 hours to grow a 300 metre supertall skyscraper. Canada’s sustainable forests alone yield enough timber to house a billion people in perpetuity, with forested trees replenishing faster than their eventual occupants.”

Various teams around the world are hoping to produce the tallest wooden skyscraper, however the team from Cambridge is confident they’ll be the first, having done holistic work on three proposals for timber skyscrapers in London, Chicago, and the Hague, all of which are set to be showcased to the public at the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition 2019, freely open to the public from July 1–7.

Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/

Trees Will Save The Climate

July 8, 2019 Uncategorized

Around 0.9 billion hectares of land worldwide would be suitable for reforestation, which could ultimately capture two thirds of human-made carbon emissions. The Crowther Lab of ETH Zurich has published a study in the journal Science that shows this would be the most effective method to combat climate change. The Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich investigates nature-based solutions to climate change. In their latest study the researchers showed for the first time where in the world new trees could grow and how much carbon they would store.

Reforestation would be the most effective method to combat climate change

“One aspect was of particular importance to us as we did the calculations: we excluded cities or agricultural areas from the total restoration potential as these areas are needed for human life,” explains study lead author and postdoc at the Crowther Lab Jean-François Bastin.

The researchers calculated that under the current climate conditions, Earth’s land could support 4.4 billion hectares of continuous tree cover. That is 1.6 billion more than the currently existing 2.8 billion hectares. Of these 1.6 billion hectares, 0.9 billion hectares fulfill the criterion of not being used by humans. This means that there is currently an area of the size of the US available for tree restoration. Once mature, these new forests could store 205 billion tonnes of carbon: about two thirds of the 300 billion tonnes of carbon that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of human activity since the Industrial Revolution.

According to Prof. Thomas Crowther, co-author of the study and founder of the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich: “We all knew that restoring forests could play a part in tackling climate change, but we didn’t really know how big the impact would be. Our study shows clearly that forest restoration is the best climate change solution available today. But we must act quickly, as new forests will take decades to mature and achieve their full potential as a source of natural carbon storage.”

The study also shows which parts of the world are most suited to forest restoration. The greatest potential can be found in just six countries: Russia (151 million hectares); the US (103 million hectares); Canada (78.4 million hectares); Australia (58 million hectares); Brazil (49.7 million hectares); and China (40.2 million hectares).

Many current climate models are wrong in expecting climate change to increase global tree cover, the study warns. It finds that there is likely to be an increase in the area of northern boreal forests in regions such as Siberia, but tree cover there averages only 30 to 40 percent. These gains would be outweighed by the losses suffered in dense tropical forests, which typically have 90 to 100 percent tree cover.

A tool on the Crowther Lab website< enables users to look at any point on the globe, and find out how many trees could grow there and how much carbon they would store. It also offers lists of forest restoration organisations. The Crowther Lab will also be present at this year’s Scientifica to show the new tool to visitors.

The Crowther Lab uses nature as a solution to:

1) better allocate resources – identifying those regions which, if restored appropriately, could have the biggest climate impact;

2) set realistic goals – with measurable targets to maximise the impact of restoration projects;

3) monitor progress – to evaluate whether targets are being achieved over time, and take corrective action if necessary.

Source: https://ethz.ch/

How To Trap CO2 Molecules

July 5, 2019 Uncategorized

Scientists from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have taken the first images of carbon dioxide molecules within a molecular cage – part of a highly porous nanoparticle known as a MOF, or metal-organic framework, with great potential for separating and storing gases and liquids.

The images, made at the Stanford-SLAC Cryo-EM Facilities, show two configurations of the CO₂molecule in its cage, in what scientists call a guest-host relationship; reveal that the cage expands slightly as the CO₂ enters; and zoom in on jagged edges where MOF particles may grow by adding more cages.

“This is a groundbreaking achievement that is sure to bring unprecedented insights into how these highly porous structures carry out their exceptional functions, and it demonstrates the power of cryo-EM for solving a particularly difficult problem in MOF chemistry,” said Omar Yaghi, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a pioneer in this area of chemistry, who was not involved in the study.

The team, led by SLAC/Stanford professors Yi Cui and Wah Chiu, described the study in the journal Matter.

Source: https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/

Vodafone Launches 5G In Britain With Unlimited Data Plans

July 4, 2019 Uncategorized

Vodafone switched on its 5G network in seven British cities on Wednesday, aiming to set itself apart in its home market from rival EE by offering unlimited data plans that include the high-speed service at no premium. The move by the world’s No.2 mobile operator came as Deutsche Telekom announced a limited rollout of 5G services in its German home market, stealing a march on competitors. Nick Jeffery, chief executive of Vodafone UK, said offering unlimited data plans to both consumer and business customers would revolutionize the mobile market.

“We will give customers all the data they need, when and where they want it,” he said. “We thought it was the right role for Vodafone to get back to its roots as a great British tech innovator,” he told reporters.

Jeffery said Vodafone had examined how consumers used their devices and how it managed its network, including the efficiencies offered by 5G technology, before deciding to switch to unlimited data plans.

EE, which is owned by BT, launched the first British 5G commercial service on May 30. It is offering a range of contract and sim-only deals for the ultrafast service.Vodafone is taking a different approach by offering unlimited downloads tiered according to speed, starting from 23 pounds ($28.90) a month for up to 2 Mbps, 26 pounds for up to 10 Mbps and 30 pounds for speeds as fast as the device and network will allow.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Replacement Meats Within 20 Years

July 3, 2019 Uncategorized

Meat is big business. According to analysis by A.T. Kearney, the global meat market was worth $1,000 billion in 2018, and this is set to grow. The World Economic Forum’s Alternative Proteins report says demand for meat will double before 2050 as our global population increases, becomes wealthier on average, and adopts food choices that are currently restricted to high-income countries.

At the same time, concerns about how to feed this expanded populace, along with the impact meat has on factors including our health, the environment and animal welfare have been steadily rising. Vegetarianism, veganism and flexitarianism are regularly in the news, with more and more people becoming advocates of plant-based eating. A study conducted by the UK research company YouGov found that one in five believes the future is meat-free.

Correspondingly, in recent years we have witnessed a sharp upsurge in the attempt to find viable alternatives. Classic vegan and vegetarian meat replacements have been a standard feature on our supermarket shelves for several years of course, while insect-based meat replacements, while available, occupy a relatively niche position.

More recently, the search has found its way into our laboratories, and start-ups like Impossible Foods, Just and Beyond Meat have brought novel vegan meat replacement, a plant-based product category that imitates the sensory profile of meat, to the table. Looking further ahead, other companies are now using advances in biotechnology to prototype and test cultured meat, which is created using cells extracted from living animals, slaughter-free.

Source: https://www.weforum.org/

Universal Computer Memory

July 2, 2019 Uncategorized

A new type of computer memory which could solve the digital technology energy crisis has been invented and patented by Lancaster scientists. The electronic memory device – described in research published in Scientific Reports – promises to transform daily life with its ultra-low energyconsumption. In the home, energy savings from efficient lighting and appliances have been completely wiped out by increased use of computers and gadgets, and by 2025 a ‘tsunami of data’ is expected to consume a fifth of global electricity. But this new device would immediately reduce peak power consumption in data centres by a fifth. It would also allow, for example, computers which do not need to boot up and couldinstantaneously and imperceptibly go into an energy-saving sleep mode – even between key stokes.“Universal Memory” which has preoccupied scientists and engineers for decades.

The device is the realisation of the search for a “Universal Memory, which hasrobustly stored data that is easily changed, is widely considered to be unfeasible, or even impossible, but this device demonstrates its contradictory properties,” explains Physics Professor Manus Hayne of Lancaster University.

US patent has been awarded for the electronic memory device with another patent pending, while several companies have expressed an interest or are actively involved in the research. The inventors of the device used quantum mechanics to solve the dilemma of choosing between stable, long-term data storage and low-energy writing and erasing. The device couldreplace the $100bn market for Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM), which is the ‘working memory’ of computers, as well as the long-term memory in flash drives. While writing data to DRAM is fast and low-energy, the data is volatile and must be continuously ‘refreshed’ to avoidit being lost: this is clearly inconvenient and inefficient. Flash stores data robustly, but writing and erasing is slow, energy intensive and deteriorates it, making it unsuitable for working memory.
“The ideal is to combine the advantages of both without their drawbacks, and this is what we have demonstrated. Our device has an intrinsic data storage time that is predicted to exceed the age of the Universe, yet it can record or delete data using 100 times less energy than DRAM,” said Professor Hayne.

Source: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/

Magnetic Nanoclusters Kill Hard-To-Reach Tumors

July 1, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers at Oregon State University have developed an improved technique for using magnetic nanoclusters to kill hard-to-reach tumors. Magnetic nanoparticles – tiny pieces of matter as small as one-billionth of a meter – have shown anti-cancer promise for tumors easily accessible by syringe, allowing the particles to be injected directly into the cancerous growth. Once injected into the tumor, the nanoparticles are exposed to an alternating magnetic field, or AMF. This field causes the nanoparticles to reach temperatures in excess of 100 degrees Fahrenheit, which causes the cancer cells to die. But for some cancer types such as prostate cancer, or the ovarian cancer used in the Oregon State study, direct injection is difficult. In those types of cases, a “systemic” delivery method – intravenous injection, or injection into the abdominal cavity – would be easier and more effective.

The challenge for researchers has been finding the right kind of nanoparticles – ones that, when administered systemically in clinically appropriate doses, accumulate in the tumor well enough to allow the AMF to heat cancer cells to death.

Olena Taratula and Oleh Taratula of the OSU College of Pharmacy tackled the problem by developing nanoclusters, multiatom collections of nanoparticles, with enhanced heating efficiency. The nanoclusters are hexagon-shaped iron oxide nanoparticles doped with cobalt and manganese and loaded into biodegradable nanocarriers.

“There had been many attempts to develop nanoparticles that could be administered systemically in safe doses and still allow for hot enough temperatures inside the tumor,” said Olena Taratula, associate professor of pharmaceutical sciences. “Our new nanoplatform is a milestone for treating difficult-to-access tumors with magnetic hyperthermia. This is a proof of concept, and the nanoclusters could potentially be optimized for even greater heating efficiency.”

Findings were published in ACS Nano.

Source: https://today.oregonstate.edu/

Electric Ice Cream Van

June 28, 2019 Uncategorized

Nissan has partnered with the famous Mackies of Scotland to create a rather sweet concept vehicle. The electric vehicle pioneers and the ice cream brand have collaborated to create an all-electric ice cream van for “Clean Air Day” in the U.K. on June 20^th, which demonstrates how a “Sky to Scoop” approach can remove carbon dependence at every stage of “the ice cream journey.”

Going green is nothing new for Mackies, which powers its family-owned dairy farm by renewable wind and solar energy, but most ice cream vans across Britain are powered by diesel engines which stay running even when the van is stopped to power the fridges and freezers onboard. In fact, some U.K. towns and cities are even looking to ban ice cream vans – which is a preposterous thought, even for someone like me who can’t eat ice cream. Nissan‘s new concept provides something of a solution to the impending doom of the good old ice cream van, reducing its carbon footprint while keeping kids happy and parents predictably out of pocket.

The ice cream van concept is based on Nissan‘s all-electric e-NV200 light commercial vehicle, which combines a zero-emission drivetrain, second-life battery storage and renewable solar energy generation for the home as well.

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“Ice cream is enjoyed the world over, but consumers are increasingly mindful of the environmental impact of how we produce such treats, and the ‘last mile’ of how they reach us,” said Kalyana Sivagnanam, managing director, Nissan Motor (GB) Ltd.

“This project is a perfect demonstration of Nissan’s Intelligent Mobility strategy, applying more than a decade of EV experience and progress in battery technology to create cleaner solutions for power on the go – in ways customers might not expect. “By eliminating harmful tailpipe emissions, and increasing our use of renewable energy, we can help make this a better world for everyone.”

Source: https://www.motor1.com/

Robot Farmer Operates 20 Hours A Day, Harvesting Tens Of Thousands Of Raspberries

June 27, 2019 Uncategorized

Fieldwork Robotics, a University of Plymouth spin-off company, is developing an autonomous harvesting robot platform. A number of flexible robot arms attached to the platform will be able to pick raspberries, tomatoes, and other crops without crushing them or destroying the plant.

Fieldwork Robotics has completed initial field trials of its robot raspberry harvesting system. The tests took place at a West Sussex farm owned by Fieldwork’s industry partner, leading UK soft-fruit grower Hall Hunter Partnership, which supplies Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Waitrose. Data from the trials will be used to refine and improve the prototype system before further field trials are held later this year. If they are successful, manufacturing of a commercial system is expected to begin in 2020.

Fieldwork Robotics was incorporated to develop and commercialise the work of Dr Martin Stoelen, Lecturer in Robotics at the University’s School of Computing, Electronics and Mathematics.

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“Starting the field testing at Hall Hunter Partnership is a major milestone for us, and will give us invaluable feedback to keep developing the system towards commercialisation, as part of our Innovate UK funding. I am very proud of the achievements of the team, at Fieldwork Robotics Ltd and across my different research projects on robotic harvesting here at the University of Plymouth, says Dr Martin Stoelen,

Farmers around the world are increasingly interested in robot technology to address the long-term structural decline in labour. Fieldwork is focusing initially on raspberries because they are hard to pick, are more delicate and easily damaged than other soft fruits, and grow on bushes with complex foliage and berry distribution. Once the system is proved to work with raspberries, it can be adapted readily for other soft fruits and vegetables, with the same researchers also developing proof-of-concept robots for other crops following interest from leading agribusinesses.

Source: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/

Remote-Controlled Drug Delivery Implant

June 26, 2019 Uncategorized

People with chronic diseases like arthritis, diabetes and heart disease may one day forego the daily regimen of pills and, instead, receive a scheduled dosage of medication through a grape-sized implant that is remotely controlled.

Researchers from Houston Methodist successfully delivered continuous, predetermined dosages of two chronic disease medications using a nanochannel delivery system (nDS) that they remotely controlled using Bluetooth technology. The nDS device provides controlled release of drugs without the use of pumps, valves or a power supply for possibly up to year without a refill for some patients. This technology will be tested in space next year.

A proof-of-concept paper recently published in Lab on a Chip (online June 25) explains how the Houston Methodist nanomedicine researchers accomplished long-term delivery of drugs for rheumatoid arthritis and high blood pressure, medications that are often administered at specific times of the day or at varying dosages based on patient needs.

Nanomedicine scientists at Houston Methodist Research Institute created a remote-controlled implantable nanochannel drug delivery system (nDS) the size of a grape

“We see this universal drug implant as part of the future of health care innovation. Some chronic disease drugs have the greatest benefit of delivery during overnight hours when it’s inconvenient for patients to take oral medication. This device could vastly improve their disease management and prevent them from missing doses, simply with a medical professional overseeing their treatment remotely,” said Alessandro Grattoni, Ph.D., corresponding author and chair of the department of nanomedicine at Houston Methodist Research Institute.

Grattoni and the Houston Methodist researchers have worked on implantable nanochannel delivery systems to regulate the delivery of a variety of therapies for medical issues ranging from HIV-prevention to cancer. As basic research progresses with the remote-controlled device, the Houston Methodist technology is planned for extreme remote communication testing on the International Space Station in 2020. The team hopes that one day the system will be widely available to clinicians to treat patients remotely via telemedicine. This could provide both an improvement in the patients’ quality of life and a reduction of cost to the health care system.

Source: https://www.houstonmethodist.org/

How To Provoke Bacterial Suicide to Fight Antibiotic Resistance

June 25, 2019 Uncategorized

Overuse of antibiotics has escalated the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Unfortunately, the growth of resistance has outpaced the development and discovery of new antibiotics and limited the treatment of bacterial infections.

Now, scientists are turning to a uniquely human advantage, the ability to think and reason, to solve the issue. Now, we’re tricking pathogenic microbes into killing themselves.

In April, a team of French scientists published a new kind of molecular trickery that selectively kills harmful and antibiotic-resistant bacteria without traditional antibiotics. The research, led by genomicist Rocío López-Igual and colleagues at the Pasteur Institute capitalized on mechanisms of gene regulation to trick Vibrio cholerae into producing self-destructive toxins. This approach could be adapted to target other microbes and reduce the need for antibiotics.

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are a major threat to human health

V. cholerae, which causes cholera, encodes multiple toxins in its genome. Bacterial toxins inhibit vital processes like DNA replication or cell division. Typically, anti-toxins – that the bacteria also produce themselves –protect bacteria from poisoning themselves. Stress activates the toxins, often leading to cell death. Although exactly why bacteria maintain deadly toxin genes is still puzzling, we know that artificially activating the toxins provides a route to kill bacteria. The star of López-Igual and her colleagues’ method is a toxin that inhibits, an important bacterial enzyme. Normally, DNA gyrase relieves stress from twisted DNA strands, so preventing DNA gyrase activity causes breaks in DNA. And like in human cells, such severe DNA damage is also fatal to bacterial cells.The researchers manipulated the DNA sequences of V. cholerae to create a code for production of the toxin in specific kinds of bacteria. The specificity of bacterial gene regulation ensures that only certain bacteria can interpret this code. Bad news for the ones that can: they end up triggering their own death.

Source: https://massivesci.com/

Graphene Boosts Life Time Of Implantable Devices

June 24, 2019 Uncategorized

The United States is seeing an increase in the number of neurological diseases. Stroke is ranked as the fifth leading cause of death, with Alzheimer’s being ranked sixth. Another neurological disease – Parkinson’s – affects nearly 1 million people in the U.S. each year. Implantable neurostimulation devices are a common way to treat some of these diseases. One of the most commonly used elements in these devices is platinum microelectrodes – but it is prone to corrosion, which can reduce the functional lifetime of the devices. Purdue University researchers have come up with a solution to help – they are adding a graphene monolayer to the devices to protect the microelectrodes.

“I know from my industry experience that the reliability of implantable devices is a critical issue for translating technology into clinics,” said Hyowon “Hugh” Lee, an assistant professor in Purdue’s College of Engineering and a researcher at the Birck Nanotechnology Center, who led the research team. “This is part of our research focusing on augmenting and improving implantable devices using nano and microscale technologies for more reliable and advanced treatments. We are the first ones that I know of to address the platinum corrosion issue in neurostimulation microelectrodes.”

Lee said he learned about the advantage of using graphene from his colleague at Birck Nanotechnology Center, Zhihong Chen, who is an expert in graphene technology. The team has shown the graphene monolayer to be an effective diffusion barrier and electrical conductor.

“If you attempt to deliver more charge than the electrode can handle, it can corrode the electrode and damage the surrounding tissues,” Lee said. He also thinks that microscale electrodes are going to play a key role in the future with more demand for precise and targeted neurostimulation therapy. “We think neurosurgeons, neurologists, and other scientists in neuroengineering field will be able to use this electrode technology to better help patients with implantable devices for restoring eyesight, movement, and other lost functionalities.”

Lee and his team are working with the Purdue Research Foundation Office of Technology Commercialization on patenting and licensing the technology. They are looking for partners interested in licensing it.

The research has been published in the journal 2D Materials.

Source: https://www.purdue.edu/

Most Metastatic Colorectal Cancers Have Spread Before Diagnosis

June 21, 2019 Uncategorized

Colorectal cancers often spread before the initial tumor is detected, according to a new Stanford study. Identifying patients in whom early metastasis is likely could better guide treatment decisions. Up to 80% of metastatic colorectal cancers are likely to have spread to distant locations in the body before the original tumor has exceeded the size of a poppy seed, according to a study of nearly 3,000 patients by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. Identifying patients with early-stage colorectal tumors that are born to be bad may help doctors determine who should receive early treatments, such as systemic chemotherapy, to kill cancer cells lurking far from the tumor’s original location.

“This finding was quite surprising,” said Christina Curtis, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and of genetics at Stanford. “In the majority of metastatic colorectal cancer patients analyzed in this study, the cancer cells had already spread and begun to grow long before the primary tumor was clinically detectable. This indicates that metastatic competence was attained very early after the birth of the cancer. This runs counter to the prevailing assumption that metastasis occurs late in advanced primary tumors and has implications for patient stratification, therapeutic targeting and earlier detection.”

Researchers and clinicians have assumed that cancers acquire the ability to metastasize through the gradual accumulation of molecular changes over time. These changes, the thinking goes, confer specific traits that eventually allow cancer cells to escape the surrounding tissue, enter the bloodstream and take up residence in new locations. In this scenario, metastasis, if it occurs, would be a relatively late event in the evolution of the primary cancer.

Curtis, who co-directs the molecular tumor board at the Stanford Cancer Institute, is the senior author of the study, which was published online June 17 in Nature Genetics. Postdoctoral scholar Zheng Hu, PhD, is the lead author.

Source: http://med.stanford.edu/

The Roots Of Parkinson’s In The Brain Discovered

June 20, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers from King’s College London have uncovered the earliest signs of Parkinson’s disease in the brain, many years before patients show any symptoms. Parkinson’s disease could be spotted in the brain more than a decade before symptoms emerge, scientists have discovered, raising hopes that early treatment could prevent the condition ever taking hold.

Researchers from King’s College London studied the brains of people living in the northern Peloponnese of Greece who suffer from a rare genetic mutation that makes Parkinson’s almost inevitable. Most will develop the disease in their 40s but scientists found that by their 20s and 30s they had already lost of up to 34 per cent of the brain cells that process the hormone serotonin. The damage had occurred even before symptoms developed, offering an early warning sign of the approaching disease. The results, published in The Lancet Neurology, challenge the traditional view of the disease and could potentially lead to screening tools for identifying people at greatest risk.

Parkinson’s disease is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder, after Alzheimer’s disease. The disease is characterised by movement and cognitive problems but is known to become established in the brain a long time before patients are diagnosed. Studying the crucial early stages of the disease, when treatment could potentially slow its progress, is a huge challenge.

The new study, funded by the Lily Safra Foundation, provides the first evidence of a central role for the brain chemical serotonin in the very earliest stages of Parkinson’s. The results suggest changes to the serotonin system could act as a key early warning signal for the disease. Chief investigator Professor Marios Politis, Lily Safra Professor of Neurology & Neuroimaging at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), says: ‘Parkinson’s disease has traditionally been thought of as occurring due to damage in the dopamine system, but we show that changes to the serotonin system come first, occurring many years before patients begin to show symptoms. Our results suggest that early detection of changes in the serotonin system could open doors to the development of new therapies to slow, and ultimately prevent, progression of Parkinson’s disease.’

Source: https://www.kcl.ac.uk/

The Rise Of The Hydrogen Electric Car

June 19, 2019 Uncategorized

China‘s State Council has announced last month a proposal to promote the development and construction of fueling stations for hydrogen fuel-cell cars. It was a Friday, and too late to trade on the news. On Monday, Chinese punters were ready: In the first few minutes of trading, fuel cell-related stocks gained more than $4 billion in market value, with several hitting their daily limits. The bullishness lasted all week. It’s likely to run for much longer. In less than a decade, the Chinese government has used subsidies and other policies to create the world’s largest market for battery-powered electric vehicles. That market isn’t without problems and limits, so the government is looking to diversify its bets on carbon-free transportation. Fuel cells, a technology that’s being hotly pursued in other East Asian countries (as well as the U.S.), is their favored means of doing it. Chinese investors, having seen the opportunities created by the support for battery-electric vehicles, are right to get in early.

Fuel cells, like batteries, generate electricity that can drive a motor and vehicle. The similarities mostly stop there. Batteries are large, heavy and require charging by electricity that may or may not be generated from renewable resources. By contrast, fuel cells generate electricity (and, as a byproduct, heat and water) when hydrogen interacts with oxygen. They don’t need charging; instead, they require onboard hydrogen tanks, which are both lighter and capable of holding far more energy than a battery (allowing them to travel further). And unlike batteries, which can require hours to charge, vehicles powered in this way can be refueled in minutes, similar to traditional internal combustion engines.

Of course, if it were so easy, hydrogen vehicles would already dominate battery-powered cars (and internal combustion engines, too). Several crucial bottlenecks have inhibited their growth. First, fuel cells are the most expensive components in the car, and for years they’ve made the technology uncompetitive with battery electrics. For example, the Toyota Mirai – the Japanese company’s signature fuel-cell vehicle – sells for around $70,000 (unsubsidized). Meanwhile, Chinese battery-electric vehicles can sell for less than $10,000. Second, fuel cells might be clean-burning but hydrogen is often generated from fossil fuels, including coal. That’s problematic if the goal is carbon reduction. And third, hydrogen infrastructure – everything from pipelines to fueling stations – is both expensive and rare. In China, the cost of a hydrogen station is around $1.5 million. That’s a tough investment to make, especially when there are fewer than 5,000 fuel-cell vehicles operating in the country.

Ultimately, success will require overcoming significant technical and market hurdles. China‘s success in building a battery-electric industry guarantees that it’ll be in the race, if not the eventual leader, in this next stage in decarbonizing transport. For Chinese investors, that’s a bet worth making.

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/

Supercomputer Finds Oil 10 Times Faster

June 18, 2019 Uncategorized

Energy major Total said its new supercomputer – which has propelled it to a world ranking as the most powerful computer in the sector – will enable its geologists to find oil faster, cheaper and with a better success rate. The Pangea III computer build by IBM will help process complex seismic data in the search for hydrocarbons 10 times faster that before, Total said on Tuesday. The computing power of the Pangea III has been increased to 31.7 so-called ‘petaflops’ from 6.7 petaflops in 2016, and from 2.3 petaflops in 2013, Total said, adding that it was the equivalent of around 170,000 laptops combined. The computer ranks as number 1 among supercomputers in the oil and gas sector, and number 11 globally, according to the TOP500 table (www.top500.org) which ranks supercomputers twice a year. Total’s European peer Eni’s HPC4 supercomputer is ranked number 17 in the global top 500 list.

Oil and gas companies, along with other industrial groups, are increasingly relying on powerful computers to process complex data faster. This enables them to cut costs while boosting productivity and the success rate of projects. Total did not say how much it had invested in the new supercomputer. The company’s senior vice president for exploration, Kevin McLachlan, told Reuters that 80% of the Pangea III’s time would be dedicated to seismic imaging.

“We can do things much faster,” he said. “We are developing advanced imaging algorithms to give us much better images of the sub-surface in these complex domains and Pangea III will let us do it 10 times faster than we could before.” Total said the new algorithms can process huge amounts of data more accurately, and at a higher resolution. It would also help to locate more reliably hydrocarbons below ground, which is useful in complex environments where it is exploring for oil trapped under salt, such as Brazil, the Gulf of Mexico, Angola and the Eastern Mediterranean. McLachlan expected the increased computer power to affect Total’s success rate in exploration, because of the better imaging, and in oil well appraisals, development and drilling.

“What used to take a week, now takes us a day to process,” he said, adding that tens of millions of dollars of savings would be made on the oil wells as a direct result of obtaining better images.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Smart Materials Built With The Power Of Sound

June 17, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers have used sound waves to precisely manipulate atoms and molecules, accelerating the sustainable production of breakthrough smart materials. Metal Organic Frameworks, or MOFs, are incredibly versatile and super porous nanomaterials that can be used to store, separate, release or protect almost anything. Predicted to be the defining material of the 21st century, MOFs are ideal for sensing and trapping substances at minute concentrations, to purify water or air, and can also hold large amounts of energy, for making better batteries and energy storage devices. Scientists have designed more than 88,000 precisely-customised MOFs – with applications ranging from agriculture to pharmaceuticals – but the traditional process for creating them is environmentally unsustainable and can take several hours or even days.

Now researchers from RMIT in Australia have demonstrated a clean, green technique that can produce a customised MOF in minutes. Dr Heba Ahmed, lead author of the study published in Nature Communications, said the efficient and scaleable method harnessed the precision power of high-frequency sound waves.

Dr Heba Ahmed holding a MOF created with high-frequency sound waves

“MOFs have boundless potential, but we need cleaner and faster synthesis techniques to take full advantage of all their possible benefits,” Ahmed, a postdoctoral researcher in RMIT’s Micro/Nanophysics Research Laboratory, said. “Our acoustically-driven approach avoids the environmental harms of traditional methods and produces ready-to-use MOFs quickly and sustainably. “The technique not only eliminates one of the most time-consuming steps in making MOFs, it leaves no trace and can be easily scaled up for efficient mass production.”

Metal-organic frameworks are crystalline powders full of tiny, molecular-sized holes. They have a unique structure – metals joined to each other by organic linkers – and are so porous that if you took a gram of a MOF and spread out its internal surface area, you would cover an area larger than a football pitch. Some have predicted MOFs could be as important to the 21st century as plastics were to the 20th.

During the standard production process, solvents and other contaminants become trapped in the MOF’s holes. To flush them out, scientists use a combination of vacuum and high temperatures or harmful chemical solvents in a process called “activation”. In their novel technique, RMIT researchers used a microchip to produce high-frequency sound waves. Co-author and acoustic expert Dr Amgad Rezk said these sound waves, which are not audible to humans, can be used for precision micro- and nano-manufacturing.

“At the nano-scale, sound waves are powerful tools for the meticulous ordering and manoeuvring of atoms and molecules,” Rezk said.

Source: https://www.rmit.edu.au/

Huawei is launching “Hongmeng” to replace Android

June 14, 2019 Uncategorized

China’s Huawei is in the process of potentially launching its “Hongmeng” operating system (OS) to replace the U.S. Android OS, an executive said on Thursday, after Reuters reported that the company has applied to trademark the OS in various countries.

Huawei, the world’s biggest maker of telecoms network gear, has filed for a Hongmeng trademark in countries such as Cambodia, Canada, South Korea and New Zealand, data from the U.N. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) shows. It also filed an application in Peru on May 27, according to the country’s anti-trust agency Indecopi. Data from a U.N. body showed that Huawei Technologies Co Ltd is aiming to trademark the OS in at least nine countries and Europe, in a sign it may be deploying a back-up plan in key markets as U.S. sanctions threaten its business model.

President Donald Trump’s administration last month put Huawei on a blacklist that barred it from doing business with U.S. tech companies such as Alphabet Inc, whose Android OS is used in Huawei’s phones. Andrew Williamson, vice president of Huawei’s public affairs and communications, said Hongmeng was moving forward.

“Huawei is in the process of potentially launching a replacement,” Williamson said in an interview in Mexico City. “Presumably we’ll be trying to put trademarks.”

Huawei has a back-up OS in case it is cut off from U.S.-made software, Richard Yu, chief executive of the company’s consumer division, told German newspaper Die Welt in an interview earlier this year. The U.S. official, meeting with officials in Europe to warn against buying Huawei equipment for next-generation mobile networks, said only time would tell if Huawei could diversify.

“It is a fair question to ask if one decides to go with Huawei and Huawei continues to be on our entity list, will Huawei be able to actually deliver what it promises any particular client,” Jonathan Fritz, the U.S. State Department’s director for international communications policy, told reporters in Brussels.

The company, also the world’s second-largest maker of smartphones, has not yet revealed details about its OS.The applications to trademark the OS show that Huawei wants to use Hongmeng for gadgets ranging from smartphones and portable computers to robots and car televisions.

Source: http://www.reuters.com

Electric Aircraft Powered By Hydrogen Fuel Cells

June 13, 2019 Uncategorized

Developers unveiled a hover craft billed as the first flying vehicle to be powered by hydrogen fuel cells on Wednesday in Southern California, in a show-and-tell that raised some eyebrows but never left the ground. Massachusetts aerospace company Alaka’i Technologies has thrown its hat into the urban air mobility ring, announcing development of an electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft powered by hydrogen fuel cells.

The power system differentiates the company’s conceptual five-passenger aircraft, called Skai, from other high-profile battery– and hybrid-powered designs unveiled in recent months. Alaka’i‘s concept is unique because many concepts for eVTOL aircraft would be fully or partially powered by lithium ion batteries, a market-proven but imperfect battery chemistry.

Designed by Alaka’i in partnership with BMW Group’s Designworks division, Skai will eventually be capable of carrying up to five passengers and performing missions such as disaster recovery and medical flights, says Alaka’i, which takes its name from the Hawaiian word for “leader“.

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“We are moving swiftly and have developed applications for immediate testing and use this year. Our best estimate is Skai will be in practical use in the year 2021,” says Alaka’i co-founder and chief technology officer Brian Morrison.

Skai likely will first perform non-passenger missions, with full certification from the US Federal Aviation Administration to follow, he says. Skai will initially have one pilot and carry four passengers, but the company envisions the design evolving to a fully autonomous, five-passenger aircraft.

Skai will have 400nm (741km) range, ability to carry payloads of 1,000lb (454kg), flight duration of 4h and be capable of about 100kt (185km/h) speeds. Alaka’i expects an eventual Federal Aviation Administration variant of Skai will have capacity to carry five passengers. The conceptual aircraft’s three fuel cells will generate electricity needed to power six motors, each of which will drive a single lifting prop. The company calls the hydrogen fuel system safe and environmentally friendly. The aircraft’s systems will generate hydrogen by stripped it from water in a process called electrolysis.

Fuel cells use an electrochemical reaction to break hydrogen molecules into protons and electrons. The electronics travel through a circuit, creating electricity, then reunite with the protons and with oxygen to create water and heat, according to the US Department of Energy. Morrison declines to specify the state of Alaka’i’s fuel cell technology, calling that information proprietary.

Skai will carry 200 litres (53 USgal) or 400 litres of “liquid hydrogen” in onboard tanks, and refueling will take less than 10min, it says. The fuel cells will have lifespans of 15,000-20,000h of flight, says Alaka’i.

Source: https://alakai.com/
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https://www.flightglobal.com/

Drug To Replace Chemotherapy

June 12, 2019 Uncategorized

A class of drugs is emerging that can attack cancer cells in the body without damaging surrounding healthy ones. They have the potential to replace chemotherapy and its disruptive side effects, reshaping the future of cancer care. The complex biological medicines, called antibody drug conjugates (ADCs), have been in development for decades, and are now generating renewed excitement because of the success of one ADC in late-stage testing, a breast cancer treatment called DS-8201.

The fervor over ADCs is such that AstraZeneca Plc in March agreed to pay as much as $6.9 billion to jointly develop DS-8201 with Japan’s Daiichi Sankyo Co., the British drugmaker’s biggest deal in more than a decade. The investment was widely seen to be a validation of DS-8201’s potential — and the ADC class of drugs as a whole — as an alternative for chemotherapy, the most widely used treatment, for some types of cancer. DS-8201, which will be filed for U.S. approval by the end of September, is so well-regarded that some analysts already predict it will surpass the $7 billion in annual sales for Roche Holding AG’s breast cancer drug Herceptin, which it aims to replace.

“DS-8201 may become one of the largest cancer biologic drugs,’’ said Caroline Stewart, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, who estimates sales of the drug to eventually approach $12 billion globally, a level attained by only a handful of biologic drugs. “While the field has advanced and there are several companies focusing on ADCs, Daiichi in particular seems to have developed a unique expertise.”

Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/

DNA Nanorobots Target Breast Cancer Cells

June 11, 2019 Uncategorized

According to the Mayo Clinic, about 20% of breast cancers make abnormally high levels of a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2). When displayed on the surface of cancer cells, this signaling protein helps them proliferate uncontrollably and is linked with a poor prognosis. Now, researchers have developed a DNA nanorobot that recognizes HER2 on breast cancer cells, targeting them for destruction.

Current therapies for HER2-positive breast cancer include monoclonal antibodies, such as trastuzumab, that bind to HER2 on cells and direct it to the lysosome — an organelle that degrades biomolecules. Lowering the levels of HER2 slows cancer cell proliferation and triggers cell death. Although monoclonal antibodies can lead to the death of cancer cells, they have severe side effects and are difficult and expensive to produce. In a previous study, Yunfeng Lin and colleagues identified a short sequence of DNA, called an aptamer, that recognizes and binds HER2, targeting it for lysosomal degradation in much the same way that monoclonal antibodies do. But the aptamer wasn’t very stable in serum. So the researchers wanted to see if adding a DNA nanostructure, called a tetrahedral framework nucleic acid (tFNA), could increase the aptamer‘s biostability and anti-cancer activity.

A DNA NANOROBOT CAN TARGET BREAST CANCER CELLS FOR DESTRUCTION

To find out, the team designed DNA nanorobots consisting of the tFNA with an attached HER2 aptamer. When injected into mice, the nanorobots persisted in the bloodstream more than twice as long as the free aptamer. Next, the researchers added nanorobots to three breast cancer cell lines in petri dishes, showing that they killed only the HER2-positive cell line. The addition of the tFNA allowed more of the aptamer to bind to HER2 than without tFNA, leading to reduced HER2 levels on cell surfaces. Although the nanorobot is much easier and less expensive to make than monoclonal antibodies, it likely needs further improvement before it could be used to treat breast cancer in the clinic, the researchers say.

The findings are published in the ACS journal Nano Letters.

Source: https://www.eurekalert.org/

Counterpart

June 10, 2019 Uncategorized

New experiments are revealing hints of a world and a reality that are complete reflections of ours. This mirrorverse may be able to solve the mystery of the universe’s missing dark matter.

At first glance, everything looks familiar. The clock ticks placidly on the wall, cars motor along outside your window, the story you are reading has the same eye-catching pictures. But something is wrong. The clocks are running backwards. Cars are driving on the wrong side of the road. The article you are reading is written back to front. Suddenly, it clicks. You are looking at your own reflection.

Leah Broussard leads a study of neutron decay to understand correlations between electrons and antineutrinos as well as subtle distortions in the electron energy spectrum. The physicist, who hails from Louisiana, influenced the color scheme of the experiment’s newly installed instrument to reflect her home state’s biggest celebration—its spectrometer sports Mardi Gras green on the magnet, purple on the shielding, and gold inside the magnet and on safety bars.

The uncanny world on the other side of the mirror may not seem real to you. But Leah Broussard thinks parallel universes where everything is flipped might be very real indeed. Along with her colleagues at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, she is on the hunt for a universe that is identical to our own, but flipped so that it contains mirror atoms, mirror molecules, mirror stars and planets, and even mirror life. If it exists, it would form a bubble of reality nestling within the fabric of space and time alongside our own familiar universe, with some particles capable of switching between the two.

After decades of tantalising hints about its existence, the first experiments aiming to go through the looking glass are about to get under way. Finding such a mirror universe would not only transform our view of reality, but could also answer questions about our own universe that have puzzled scientists for decades. “The implications would be astounding,” says Broussard.

Source: https://www.ornl.gov/

Mimicking Polar Bear To Design An Heat Insulator

June 7, 2019 Uncategorized

For polar bears, the insulation provided by their fat, skin, and fur is a matter of survival in the frigid Arctic. For engineers, polar bear hair is a dream template for synthetic materials that might lock in heat just as well as the natural version. Now, materials scientists in China have developed such an insulator, reproducing the structure of individual polar bear hairs while scaling toward a material composed of many hairs for real-world applications in the architecture and aerospace sectors.

“Polar bear hair has been evolutionarily optimized to help prevent heat loss in cold and humid conditions, which makes it an excellent model for a synthetic heat insulator,” says co-senior author Shu-Hong Yu, a professor of chemistry at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). “By making tube aerogel out of carbon tubes, we can design an analogous elastic and lightweight material that traps heat without degrading noticeably over its lifetime.”

Unlike the hairs of humans or other mammals, polar bear hairs are hollow. Zoomed in under a microscope, each one has a long, cylindrical core punched straight through its center. The shapes and spacing of these cavities have long been known to be responsible for their distinctive white coats. But they also are the source of remarkable heat-holding capacity, water resistance, and stretchiness, all desirable properties to imitate in a thermal insulator.

“The hollow centers limit the movement of heat and also make the individual hairs lightweight, which is one of the most outstanding advantages in materials science,” says Jian-Wei Liu, an associate professor at USTC. To emulate this structure and scale it to a practical size, the research team—additionally co-led by Yong Ni, a mechanical engineering professor at USTC—manufactured millions of hollowed-out carbon tubes, each equivalent to a single strand of hair, and wound them into a spaghetti-like aerogel block.

The findings appeared in the journal Chem.

Source: https://en.ustc.edu.cn/

US Wants Patients To Try Experimental Drugs Against Cancer

June 6, 2019 Uncategorized

Sally Atwater’s doctor spent two months on calls, messages and paperwork to get her an experimental drug he thinks can fight the lung cancer that has spread to her brain and spine. Nancy Goodman begged eight companies to let her young son try experimental medicines for a brain tumor that ultimately killed him, and “only three of the companies even gave me a reason why they declined,” she said. Thousands of gravely ill cancer patients each year seek “compassionate use” access to treatments that are not yet on the market but have shown some promise in early testing and aren’t available to them through a study.
Now the government wants to make this easier and give more heft to the requests. On Monday at a cancer conference in Chicago, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a project to have the agency become the middleman. Instead of making doctors plead their case first to companies and then to the FDA if the company agrees to provide the drug, the FDA will become the initial step and will assign a staffer to quickly do the paperwork. That way, when a company gets a request, it knows the FDA already considers it appropriate.

“We are here to help. We are not here to make a drug company give a specific drug to a patient. We don’t have that authority,” said Dr. Richard Pazdur, the FDA official leading the effort. But the agency gets little information now on how many requests are turned down and why.

Source: https://apnews.com/

Microwave Stimulated Nanoparticles To Fight Efficiently Cancer

June 5, 2019 Uncategorized

A physicist at The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) has proposed a new concept for treating cancer cells. In a recently published paper in the journal Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine, UTA physics Professor Wei Chen and a team of international collaborators advanced the idea of using titanium dioxide (TiO₂) nanoparticles stimulated by microwaves to trigger the death of cancer cells without damaging the normal cells around them.

The method is called microwave-induced radical therapy, which the team refers to as microdynamic therapy, or MDT. The use of TiO₂ nanoparticles activated by light and ultrasound in cancer treatments has been studied extensively, but this marks the first time researchers have shown that the nanoparticles can be effectively activated by microwaves for cancer cell destruction—potentially opening new doors to treatment for patients fighting the disease. Chen said the new therapy centers on reactive oxygen species, or ROS, which are a natural byproduct of the body’s metabolism of oxygen. ROS help kill toxins in the body, but can also be damaging to cells if they reach a critical level. TiO₂ enters cells and produces ROS, which are able to damage plasma membranes, mitochondria and DNA, causing cell death.

“Cancer cells are characterized by a higher steady-state saturation of ROS than normal, healthy cells,” Chen said. “This new therapy allows us to exploit that by raising the saturation of ROS in cancer cells to a critical level that triggers cell death without pushing the normal cells to that same threshold.”

The pilot study for this new treatment concept builds upon Chen’s expertise in the use of nanoparticles to combat cancer.

Chen’s collaborators hail from the Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences and Beihang University. The team conducted experiments that demonstrate the nanoparticles can significantly suppress the growth of osteosarcomas under microwave irradiation.

While TiO₂ and low-power microwave irradiation alone did not effectively kill cancer cells, the combination of the two proved successful in creating a toxic effect for the tumor cells. Microwave ablation therapy has already proven to be an effective treatment against bone cancer, obtaining better results than MDT. However, MDT has applications for combatting other types of cancer, not just the osteosarcomas used for this pilot case.

Using light to activate ROS—as is seen in photodynamic therapy—can be challenging for the treatment of tumors deeply located within the body; in contrast, microwaves lend the ability to create deeper penetration that propagates through all types of tissues and non-metallic materials.

“This new discovery is exciting because it potentially creates new avenues for treating cancer patients without causing debilitating side effects,” Chen said. “This targeted, localized method allows us to keep healthy cells intact so patients are better equipped to battle the disease.”

Source: https://www.uta.edu/

How To Boost Brain’s Synapses

June 4, 2019 Uncategorized

A team of researchers at Stanford University has found synapse-boosting factors in the blood of young mice. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their study of the rejuvenating impact of blood from young mice when transfused into older mice, and what they learned about it.

Prior research has shown that transfusing blood from young (12 to 15 months old) mice into older mice can reverse some of the signs of aging in the brain and sometimes other parts of the body—a process called parabiosis. While researchers have studied the effect, it is still not clear which factors in young blood provide the rejuvenating effects. In this new effort, the researchers looked deeper into the phenomenon and found two possible answers.

To learn more about parabiosis in mice, the researchers transfused serum from mice between the ages of 12 and 15 months into older mice to study its impact. They also did the same with 15-day-old mice. In so doing, they found that the youngest mouse blood resulted in more pronounced neuronal dendrite branching, a bigger increase in the number of synapses, and a bigger increase in the release of neurotransmitters compared to blood from less young mice. They also found that it provided more improvements in N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor-mediated synaptic function in the older mice. They next found that applying the young blood to neurons cultured in the lab did the same. And finally, they found that doing so also boosted synaptic connectivity. Conversely, they found that applying serum from older mice to younger mouse neurons had the opposite effect.

To isolate the properties in the young serum that were behind the rejuvenating effect, the team looked at samples using tandem mass spectrometry—they isolated two proteins (thrombospondin-4 and SPARC-like protein-1) that appeared richer in the younger serum. When the two proteins were applied to the older serum, some of the same rejuvenating effects took place, suggesting that they were at least two of the factors responsible for the rejuvenating effect. The researchers suggest that the blood of young mice likely holds many kinds of synapse-promoting factors that decline as mice age.

Source: https://www.pnas.org/

Flexible Generators Turn Movement Into Energy

June 3, 2019 Uncategorized

Wearable devices that harvest energy from movement are not a new idea, but a material created at Rice University may make them more practical. The Rice lab of chemist James Tour has adapted laser-induced graphene (LIG) into small, metal-free devices that generate electricity. Like rubbing a balloon on hair, putting LIG composites in contact with other surfaces produces static electricity that can be used to power devices. For that, thank the triboelectric effect, by which materials gather a charge through contact. When they are put together and then pulled apart, surface charges build up that can be m.

In experiments, the researchers connected a folded strip of LIG to a string of light-emitting diodes and found that tapping the strip produced enough energy to make them flash. A larger piece of LIG embedded within a flip-flop let a wearer generate energy with every step, as the graphene composite’s repeated contact with skin produced a current to charge a small capacitor.

An electron microscope image shows a cross-section of a laser-induced graphene and polyimide composite created at Rice University for use as a triboelectric nanogenerator. The devices are able to turn movement into energy that can then be stored for later use

This could be a way to recharge small devices just by using the excess energy of heel strikes during walking, or swinging arm movements against the torso,” Tour said.

LIG is a graphene foam produced when chemicals are heated on the surface of a polymer or other material with a laser, leaving only interconnected flakes of two-dimensional carbon. The lab first made LIG on common polyimide, but extended the technique to plants, food, treated paper and wood.

The project is detailed in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.

Source: http://news.rice.edu/

Sensor-packed Glove Coupled With AI

May 31, 2019 Uncategorized

Wearing a sensor-packed glove while handling a variety of objects, MIT researchers have compiled a massive dataset that enables an AI system to recognize objects through touch alone. The information could be leveraged to help robots identify and manipulate objects, and may aid in prosthetics design.

The researchers developed a low-cost knitted glove, called “scalable tactile glove” (STAG), equipped with about 550 tiny sensors across nearly the entire hand. Each sensor captures pressure signals as humans interact with objects in various ways. A neural network processes the signals to “learn” a dataset of pressure-signal patterns related to specific objects. Then, the system uses that dataset to classify the objects and predict their weights by feel alone, with no visual input needed.

In a paper published today in Nature, the researchers describe a dataset they compiled using STAG for 26 common objects — including a soda can, scissors, tennis ball, spoon, pen, and mug. Using the dataset, the system predicted the objects’ identities with up to 76 percent accuracy. The system can also predict the correct weights of most objects within about 60 grams.

Similar sensor-based gloves used today run thousands of dollars and often contain only around 50 sensors that capture less information. Even though STAG produces very high-resolution data, it’s made from commercially available materials totaling around $10.

The tactile sensing system could be used in combination with traditional computer vision and image-based datasets to give robots a more human-like understanding of interacting with objects.

“Humans can identify and handle objects well because we have tactile feedback. As we touch objects, we feel around and realize what they are. Robots don’t have that rich feedback,” says Subramanian Sundaram PhD ’18, a former graduate student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “We’ve always wanted robots to do what humans can do, like doing the dishes or other chores. If you want robots to do these things, they must be able to manipulate objects really well.”

The researchers also used the dataset to measure the cooperation between regions of the hand during object interactions. For example, when someone uses the middle joint of their index finger, they rarely use their thumb. But the tips of the index and middle fingers always correspond to thumb usage. “We quantifiably show, for the first time, that, if I’m using one part of my hand, how likely I am to use another part of my hand,” he says.

Source: http://news.mit.edu/

Energy Free Superfast Computing

May 30, 2019 Uncategorized

Superfast data processing using light pulses instead of electricity has been created by scientists.The invention uses magnets to record computer data which consume virtually zero energy, solving the dilemma of how to create faster data processing speeds without the accompanying high energy costs. Today’s data centre servers consume between 2 to 5% of global electricity consumption, producing heat which in turn requires more power to cool the servers. The problem is so acute that Microsoft has even submerged hundreds of its data centre services in the ocean in an effort to keep them cool and cut costs. Most data are encoded as binary information (0 or 1 respectively) through the orientation of tiny magnets, called spins, in magnetic hard-drives. The magnetic read/write head is used to set or retrieve information using electrical currents which dissipate huge amounts of energy.

Using ultrashort pulses of light enables extremely economical switching of a magnet from one stable orientation (red arrow) to another (white arrow). This concept enables ultrafast information storage with unprecedented energy efficiency

Now an international team publishing in Nature has solved the problem by replacing electricity with extremely short pulses of light – the duration of one trillionth of a second – concentrated by special antennas on top of a magnet. This new method is superfast but so energy efficient that the temperature of the magnet does not increase at all. The researchers demonstrated this new method by pulsing a magnet with ultrashort light bursts (the duration of a millionth of a millionth of a second) at frequencies in the far infrared, the so called terahertz spectral range. However, even the strongest existing sources of the terahertz light did not provide strong enough pulses to switch the orientation of a magnet to date.

The breakthrough was achieved by utilizing the efficient interaction mechanism of coupling between spins and terahertz electric field, which was discovered by the same team. The scientists then developed and fabricated a very small antenna on top of the magnet to concentrate and thereby enhance the electric field of light. This strongest local electric field was sufficient to navigate the magnetization of the magnet to its new orientation in just one trillionth of a second. The temperature of the magnet did not increase at all as this process requires energy of only one quantum of the terahertz light – a photon – per spin.

Dr Mikhaylovskiy from Lancaster University in UK said: “The record-low energy loss makes this approach scalable. Future storage devices would also exploit the excellent spatial definition of antenna structures enabling practical magnetic memories with simultaneously maximal energy efficiency and speed.” He plans to carry out further research using the new ultrafast laser at Lancaster University together with accelerators at the Cockroft Institute which are able to generate intense pulses of light to allow switching magnets and to determine the practical and fundamental speed and energy limits of magnetic recording.

The team includes Dr Rostislav Mikhaylovskiy, formerly at Radboud University and now Lancaster University, Stefan Schlauderer, Dr Christoph Lange and Professor Rupert Huber from Regensburg University, Professor Alexey Kimel from Radboud University and Professor Anatoly Zvezdin from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Source: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/

How To Kill Antibiotic-Resistant SuperBugs

May 29, 2019 Uncategorized

A new compound which visualises and kills antibiotic-resistant superbugs has been discovered by scientists at the University of Sheffield and Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). The team, led by Professor Jim Thomas, from the University of Sheffield’s Department of Chemistry, is testing new compounds developed by his PhD student Kirsty Smitten on antibiotic resistant gram-negative bacteria, including pathogenic E. coli.

Gram-negative bacteria strains can cause infections including pneumonia, urinary tract infections and bloodstream infections. They are difficult to treat as the cell wall of the bacteria prevents drugs from getting into the microbe. Antimicrobial resistance is already responsible for 25,000 deaths in the EU each year, and unless this rapidly emerging threat is addressed, it’s estimated by 2050 more than 10 million people could die every year due to antibiotic resistant infections. Doctors have not had a new treatment for gram-negative bacteria in the last 50 years, and no potential drugs have entered clinical trials since 2010.

The new drug compound has a range of exciting opportunities. As Professor Jim Thomas explains: “As the compound is luminescent it glows when exposed to light. This means the uptake and effect on bacteria can be followed by the advanced microscope techniques available at RAL.

Gram negative bacteria. Credit: University of Sheffield

“As the compound is luminescent it glows when exposed to light. This means the uptake and effect on bacteria can be followed by the advanced microscope techniques available at RAL“, explains Professor Jim Thomas. “This breakthrough could lead to vital new treatments to life-threatening superbugs and the growing risk posed by antimicrobial resistance.”

The studies at Sheffield and RAL have shown the compound seems to have several modes of action, making it more difficult for resistance to emerge in the bacteria. The next step of the research will be to test it against other multi-resistant bacteria.

Source: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/

Gold Nanoparticles Ship With Efficiency CRISPR Cargo

May 28, 2019 Uncategorized

Forget UPS and FedEx: Tiny golden delivery trucks created at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center can ship CRISPR into human blood stem cells, offering a potential way to treat diseases like HIV and sickle cell anemia. And the researchers behind those trucks have even bigger distribution dreams. Gene therapy — the editing of our DNA to treat disease — is a clinical reality today, but only in a handful of rich countries. Fred Hutch scientists think their new CRISPR courier could help deliver gene therapy to patients around the world.

A new paper published in Nature Materials describes how the scientists loaded CRISPR onto spherical gold nanoparticles. These tiny shuttles then deposited the gene-editing tool into blood stem cells donated by healthy individuals and isolated in test tubes, where CRISPR altered genes related to HIV and certain blood disorders. It is the first time that nanoparticles have successfully ferried CRISPR into blood stem cells to edit DNA, the researchers said. And it’s a promising step toward addressing CRISPR’s critical delivery problems. The first of these problems has vexed the field since the gene-editing technique was discovered. Scientists need to deliver CRISPR into the right spot in a cell. That is proving tricky enough. DNA represents the body’s crown jewels, and CRISPR must sneak past all sorts of security systems to gain access.

And then CRISPR must go global. Gene editing could benefit millions of people worldwide. But as the treatment process stands right now, the vast majority won’t. That process depends almost entirely on highly engineered viruses made in high-tech, multimillion-dollar facilities.
The researchers think their golden nanoparticles can solve both problems. As efficient couriers, they could reduce the need for engineered viruses and specialized research centers. And that could help make these emerging, high-tech treatments accessible and affordable, said senior scientist Dr. Jennifer Adair of Fred Hutch.

“Gene therapy has a lot of potential across many diseases, but the process we have right now is just not feasible in every place in the world,” Adair said. “We want to end up delivering gene therapy in a syringe. This gold nanoparticle represents the first possibility we have to do that for blood stem cells.”

Source: https://www.fredhutch.org/

The Brain In Your Gut

May 27, 2019 Uncategorized

From moods to memory, the brain in our guts has a big impact on the brain in our heads. Pioneering neuroscientist Associate Professor Elisa Hill-Yardin from RMIT in Australia has spent years delving deep into the gut-brain connection, an emerging field in health research. Here she shares the five critical things we should know about our “gut brain”.

The gut has similar types of neurons to the brain. The gut brain is a big nervous system, about the same size as the spinal cord, which controls the contractions of the gut and its secretions. There are very rare gene mutations that affect brain connectivity and we’ve learned that the vast majority of those gene mutations are also found in the gut. If those mutations change the wiring in the brain, they’re also likely to change the wiring and the action of the gut brain – the enteric nervous system. To date, we’ve only ever examined the effect of those mutations in the brain. Now we’re starting to look at them in our second brain, the gut.

We now know that microbes in the gut do change our mood and behaviour, and microbes even change brain activity. There’s a great study that looked at women, doing MRI brain scans and showing that if they ate yoghurt for a certain number of days their resting brain activity was different – which is amazing! But we also know from animal studies that microbes have an impact on mental health. You can breed mice that are germ free and we know that those mice show differences in their anxiety behaviours – in other words, they’re less anxious without the microbes. So you could say we’re being controlled by the microbes in our gut. They’re much more important to our feelings than we ever thought.

What’s come out in research in recent years, though it’s been known for a long time in the autism community, is that the majority of children with autism have serious gut problems. Now we don’t know the cause of autism but we do know that there are hundreds and hundreds of rare gene mutations that alter brain connectivity. And we now know that some of those mutated genes are also found in the gut. We’re also learning that diseases that affect cognition and memory, like dementia, may also have a gut component. Researchers are starting to look at traditional brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis, and finding difference in the microbes in the gut. So they’re starting to think about how we can make changes in our microbes to make changes to our brain health.

The Gut-Brain Axis team that I lead at RMIT is focused on understanding how the enteric nervous system is altered in neurological disorders such as autism. This includes researching how the gut nervous system interacts with microbes in the intestine and changes in inflammatory pathways. We’re trying to identify the basic mechanisms, examining the connections between the gastrointestinal tract and changes in mood and behaviour, including the impact of genetics on microbiota in the gut. The ultimate the aim is to find novel therapies that can improve daily life for people with autism, but our work also has broader application for other neurological disorders, such Parkinson’s disease.

Many of the great enteric physiologist pioneers are in Australia and they were the first to describe different types of neurons based on their activity and neurochemical content. This work has been done on animal models, due to the possibilities of emulating human genetic diseases in these models. So, a lot of basic anatomy and physiology has been studied. But what we need now is to move the field towards using the latest sophisticated techniques and capitalising on the recent interest in the gut-brain axis, which of course involves understanding how the gastrointestinal tract works in concert with the trillions of microbes that live inside it.

Professor Elisa Hill-Yardin has presented her work to the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research

Source: https://www.rmit.edu.au/

Soldiers To Control Machines With Their Minds

May 24, 2019 Uncategorized

The Department of Defense’s research and development wing, DARPA, is working on technology to read and write to the human brain. The focus isn’t on mind control but rather machine control, allowing the human brain to directly send instructions to machines. The goal of the process is to streamline thought control of machines to the point where humans could control them with a simple helmet or head-mounted device, making operating such systems easier.

The brain makes physical events happen by turning thoughts into action, sending instructions through the nervous system to organs, limbs, and other parts of the body. It effortlessly sends out a constant stream of commands to do everything from drive a car to make breakfast. To operate today’s machines, humans being need a middleman of sorts, a physical control system manipulated by hands, fingers, and feet.

What if human beings could cut out the middleman, operating a machine simply by thinking at it? So DARPA is funding the (Next Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) initiative. N3’s goal is to create a control system for machines—including weapons—that can directly interact with the human brain. According to IEEE Spectrum, DARPA is experimenting with “magnetic fields, electric fields, acoustic fields (ultrasound) and light” as a means of controlling machines.

The implications of such a technology are huge. Instead of designing complicated controls and control systems for every machine or weapon devised, engineers could instead just create a thought-operated control system. Wearable technology becomes easier to operate as it doesn’t require a separate control system. This could also apply to notifications and data: as IEEE Spectrum points out, network administrators could feel intrusions into computer networks. DAPRA is, of course, an arm of the Pentagon, and a neurotechnological interface would almost certainly find its way into weapons.

DARPA has awarded development contracts to six groups for amounts of up to $19.48 million each. Each group has one year to prove their ability to read and write to brain tissue with an 18-month animal testing period to follow.

Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/

Timber Cities And Algorithmically Designed Structures

May 23, 2019 Uncategorized

Design Computation Lab is a new research laboratory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (UCL) developing design methods for the utilization of computational technologies in architectural design, fabrication and assembly. Design Computation Lab has cross-faculty partnerships in the The Institute for Digital Innovation in the Built Environment, UCL and The School of Construction + Project Management, UCL.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENJOY THE VIDEO

In a recent installation, Real Virtuality, Gilles Retsin Architecture and the Design Computation Lab proved that timber could indeed become the material of the 21st century by using augmented reality to fabricate algorithmically designed structures with LEGO-like timber blocks.

Construction relies heavily on cement, the production of which is responsible for approximately 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Architect Gilles Retsin suggests that we should look into timber for an alternative.
Sustainable cities can’t rely on concrete. Let’s try algorithmically designed timber buildings.

Source: https://designcomputationlab.org/
AND
https://mashable.com/

World’s First Transatlantic Crossing Without A Crew

May 22, 2019 Uncategorized

Final preparations are underway for a 12-meter-long ship to set sail from Canada and attempt the world’s first transatlantic crossing without a crew. The USV Maxlimer, an unmanned surface vessel, is bound for the south coast of England and will conduct deep sea surveys on the way, guided by a skipper in a control station in Britain. The voyage is expected to take about 35 days.

The ship was built by Sea-Kit International, which develops vessels for the maritime and research industries, for the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, a competition to autonomously survey the sea bed. It can launch and recover autonomous underwater vehicles but has the potential to operate in different roles with different cargo. “(It is) almost like a utility pick-up vehicle of the sea, it’s robust, it’s adaptable, it’s got a huge range,” said SEA-KIT International Managing Director Ben Simpson.

The vessel is operated by a hand-held remote control when in harbor and when at sea it can stream live data to the controller via multiple satellite links.

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO ENJOY THE VIDEO

“What is now available through technology is very, very similar to what you have on the bridge of a ship and in many ways, I would argue, even more comprehensive,” said James Fanshawe, a director of SEA-KIT. “The controller here in this station can actually see all the way round on the horizon near real-time and in many ships it’s quite difficult to actually even see what’s behind you from the bridge of that ship,” explained Fanshawe.

The company said it sees a future for unmanned vessels as they can remove humans from harm’s way. The team said ships that do not need to accommodate people also have significant economic and environmental benefits. “You don’t need a bridge, you don’t need a galley, you don’t need water supplies, you don’t need air conditioning and suddenly the size of that vessel becomes a fraction of the size of vessels currently being used offshore,” Simpson said. The combination of size and hybrid diesel-electric propulsion cuts fuel use by around 95 percent, the company said.

Source: http://www.reuters.com

Plant Viruses Used to Ward Off Pests

May 21, 2019 Uncategorized

Imagine a technology that could target pesticides to treat specific spots deep within the soil, making them more effective at controlling infestations while limiting their toxicity to the environment.

Researchers at the University of California San Diego and Case Western Reserve University have taken a step toward that goal. They discovered that a biological nanoparticle—a plant virus—is capable of delivering pesticide molecules deeper below the ground, to places that are normally beyond their reach.

The work could help farmers better manage difficult pests, like parasitic nematodes that wreak havoc on plant roots deep in the soil, with less pesticide. The work is published May 20 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

“It sounds counterintuitive that we can use a plant virus to treat plant health,” said Nicole Steinmetz, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and senior author of the study. “This is an emerging field of research in nanotechnology showing that we can use plant viruses as pesticide delivery systems. It’s similar to how we’re using nanoparticles in medicine to target drugs towards sites of disease and reduce their side effects in patients.”

Pesticides are very sticky molecules when applied in the field, Steinmetz explained. They bind strongly to organic matter in the soil, making it difficult to get enough to penetrate deep down into the root level where pests like nematodes reside and cause damage. To compensate, farmers end up applying large amounts of pesticides, which cause harmful residues to build up in the soil and leach into groundwater.

Steinmetz and her team are working to address this problem. In a new study, they discovered that a particular plant virus, Tobacco mild green mosaic virus, can transport small amounts of pesticide deep through the soil with ease.

Source: https://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/

How To Make Cells Immune To HIV

May 20, 2019 Uncategorized

Some viruses, no matter how hard we try, remain resistant to vaccines. Now, researchers are using a different method, gene editing, as a way to make cells immune to mankind’s most difficult viruses. Led by Dr. Justin Taylor, a team at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has targeted four infections for which there’s no protective vaccine: HIV, influenza, the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).

The researchers used CRISPR/Cas9 technology to modify B cells, a class of white blood cells that produce antibodies to protect us from diseases. By coding the cells with genes that create specific antibodies, the team was able to make them immune without the use of a vaccine.

The researchers tested the method in both human cells in a test tube and in living mice. On average, about 30 percent of the cells produced the desired antibody. Taylor said that the mice remained protected for 83 days following the procedure, an important benchmark given that patients who receive stem cell transplants can have weakened immune systems for three to six months. To be clear, Taylor doesn’t have anything against traditional vaccination. “Vaccines are great,” he said. “I wish we had more of them.”

Instead, Taylor thinks the gene editing method could work one day for diseases where we don’t have a vaccine. It may help patients who are immuno-compromised, meaning their bodies can no longer fight infections, as well as older patients whose bodies aren’t as receptive to vaccines. Gene-edited immunity might also be used to protect people faster than can be done with traditional vaccines, which could be useful during unexpected outbreaks.

Taylor’s team included Fred Hutch researchers and co-authors Howell Moffett, Carson Harms, Kristin Fitzpatrick, Marti Tooley and Jim Boonyaratanakornkit. The results will be published in the journal Science Immunology.

Source: https://www.fredhutch.org/
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https://www.geekwire.com/

How To Offer Commercially Attractive Carbon-Capturing

May 17, 2019 Uncategorized

Chemical engineers from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL ) in Switzerland have designed an easy method to achieve commercially attractive carbon-capturing with metal-organic frameworks. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are versatile compounds hosting nano-sized pores in their crystal structure. Because of their nanopores, MOFs are now used in a wide range of applications, including separating petrochemicals, mimicking DNA, and removing heavy metals, fluoride anions, hydrogen, and even gold from water. Gas separation in particular is of great interest to a number of industries, such as biogas production, enriching air in metal working, purifying natural gas, and recovering hydrogen from ammonia plants and oil refineries.

“The flexible ‘lattice’ structure of metal-organic frameworks soaks up gas molecules that are even larger than its pore window making it difficult to carry out efficient membrane-based separation,” says Kumar Varoon Agrawal, who holds the GAZNAT Chair for Advanced Separations at EPFL Valais Wallis.

Now, scientists from Agrawal’s lab have greatly improved the gas separation by making the MOF lattice structure rigid. They did this by using a novel “post-synthetic rapid heat treatment” method, which basically involved baking a popular MOF called ZIF-8 (zeolitic imidazolate framework 8) at 360°C for a few seconds. The method drastically improved ZIF-8’s gas-separation performance – specifically in ‘carbon capture’, a process that captures carbon dioxide emissions produced from the use of fossil fuels, preventing it from entering the atmosphere. “For the first time, we have achieved commercially attractive dioxide sieving performance a MOF membrane,” says Agrawal.

Source: https://actu.epfl.ch/

The Rise Of The Electric Driverless Truck

May 16, 2019 Uncategorized

Today, DB Schenker and Einride launched the installation for the first commercial use of a T-pod, at a DB Schenker facility in Jönköping, central Sweden. The T-pod will travel continuously to and from a warehouse, paving the way for a sustainable transition of road freight transportation. The T-Pod Self-Driving Truck can carry up to 15 standard pallets or 20 tons of goods in just a 23-foot body thanks to the removal of the cab. On the highway, the all-electric truck drives itself, while a driver can take control remotely for urban driving. It has a range of 124 miles, and the company says it will be testing a prototype later this year while also building out a network of charging stations.

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“Heavy road transport is responsible for a substantial part of global CO₂ emissions. By substituting electricity for diesel, we reduce CO₂ emissions by 90 percent. We are happy and grateful that DB Schenker has chosen to be part of this revolution, disrupting a huge global market” says Robert Falck, CEO, and founder of Einride.

“We at Schenker are working at full speed on sustainable and innovative logistics. Autonomous driving will become increasingly important for this. Together with Einride, we want to bring the first autonomous, fully electric truck onto public roads in the near future and thus set new standards for tomorrow’s logistics” explains Jochen Thewes, CEO of DB Schenker.

Source: https://www.einride.tech/

How To Boost Batteries Conductivity And Improve Safety

May 15, 2019 Uncategorized

Building a better lithium-ion battery involves addressing a myriad of factors simultaneously, from keeping the battery’s cathode electrically and ionically conductive to making sure that the battery stays safe after many cycles.

In a new discovery, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory have developed a new cathode coating by using an oxidative chemical vapor deposition technique that can help solve these and several other potential issues with lithium-ion batteries all in one stroke.

“The coating we’ve discovered really hits five or six birds with one stone.” Khalil Amine, Argonne distinguished fellow and battery scientist. In the research, Amine and his fellow researchers took particles of Argonne’s pioneering nickel-manganese-cobalt (NMC) cathode material and encapsulated them with a sulfur-containing polymer called PEDOT. This polymer provides the cathode a layer of protection from the battery’s electrolyte as the battery charges and discharges.

Unlike conventional coatings, which only protect the exterior surface of the micron-sized cathode particles and leave the interior vulnerable to cracking, the PEDOT coating had the ability to penetrate to the cathode particle’s interior, adding an additional layer of shielding. In addition, although PEDOT prevents the chemical interaction between the battery and the electrolyte, it does allow for the necessary transport of lithium ions and electrons that the battery requires in order to function.

“This coating is essentially friendly to all of the processes and chemistry that makes the battery work and unfriendly to all of the potential reactions that would cause the battery to degrade or malfunction,” said Argonne chemist Guiliang Xu, the first author of the research.

Source: https://www.anl.gov/

Pixels A Million Times Smaller

May 14, 2019 Uncategorized

The smallest pixels yet created – a million times smaller than those in smartphones, made by trapping particles of light under tiny rocks of gold – could be used for new types of large-scale flexible displays, big enough to cover entire buildings. The colour pixels, developed by a team of scientists led by the University of Cambridge, are compatible with roll-to-roll fabrication on flexible plastic films, dramatically reducing their production cost.
It has been a long-held dream to mimic the colour-changing skin of octopus or squid, allowing people or objects to disappear into the natural background, but making large-area flexible display screens is still prohibitively expensive because they are constructed from highly precise multiple layers. At the centre of the pixels developed by the Cambridge scientists is a tiny particle of gold a few billionths of a metre across. The grain sits on top of a reflective surface, trapping light in the gap in between. Surrounding each grain is a thin sticky coating which changes chemically when electrically switched, causing the pixel to change colour across the spectrum.

The team of scientists, from different disciplines including physics, chemistry and manufacturing, made the pixels by coating vats of golden grains with an active polymer called polyaniline and then spraying them onto flexible mirror-coated plastic, to dramatically drive down production cost. The pixels are the smallest yet created, a million times smaller than typical smartphone pixels. They can be seen in bright sunlight and because they do not need constant power to keep their set colour, have an energy performance that makes large areas feasible and sustainable. “We started by washing them over aluminized food packets, but then found aerosol spraying is faster,” said co-lead author Hyeon-Ho Jeong from Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory.

“These are not the normal tools of nanotechnology, but this sort of radical approach is needed to make sustainable technologies feasible,” said Professor Jeremy J Baumberg of the NanoPhotonics Centre at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory, who led the research. “The strange physics of light on the nanoscale allows it to be switched, even if less than a tenth of the film is coated with our active pixels. That’s because the apparent size of each pixel for light is many times larger than their physical area when using these resonant gold architectures.”

The pixels could enable a host of new application possibilities such as building-sized display screens, architecture which can switch off solar heat load, active camouflage clothing and coatings, as well as tiny indicators for coming internet-of-things devices.

The results are reported in the journal Science Advances.

Source: https://www.cam.ac.uk/

Blocking Protein Curbs Memory Loss

May 13, 2019 Uncategorized

Impeding VCAM1, a protein that tethers circulating immune cells to blood vessel walls, enabled old mice to perform as well on memory and learning tests as young mice, a Stanford study found. Mice aren’t people, but like us they become forgetful in old age. In a study published online May 13 in Nature Medicine, old mice suffered far fewer senior moments during a battery of memory tests when Stanford University School of Medicine investigators disabled a single molecule dotting the mice’s cerebral blood vessels. For example, they breezed through a maze with an ease characteristic of young adult mice.

The molecule appears on the surfaces of a small percentage of endothelial cells, the main building blocks of blood vessels throughout the body. Blocking this molecule’s capacity to do its main job — it selectively latches onto immune cells circulating in the bloodstream — not only improved old mice’s cognitive performance but countered two physiological hallmarks of the aging brain: It restored to a more youthful level the ability of the old mice’s brains to create new nerve cells, and it subdued the inflammatory mood of the brain’s resident immune cells, called microglia.

Scientists have shown that old mice’s blood is bad for young mice’s brains. There’s a strong suspicion in the scientific community that something in older people’s blood similarly induces declines in brain physiology and cognitive skills. Just what that something is remains to be revealed. But, the new study suggests, there might be a practical way to block its path where the rubber meets the road: at the blood-brain barrier, which tightly regulates the passage of most cells and substances through the walls of blood vessels that pervade the human brain.

“We may have found an important mechanism through which the blood communicates deleterious signals to the brain,” said the study’s senior author, Tony Wyss-Coray, PhD, professor of neurology and neurological sciences, co-director of the Stanford Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and a senior research career scientist at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. The lead author of the study is Hanadie Yousef, PhD, a former postdoctoral scholar in the Wyss-Coray lab. The intervention’s success points to possible treatments that could someday slow, stop or perhaps even reverse that decline. Targeting a protein on blood-vessel walls may be easier than trying to get into the brain itself. “We can now try to treat brain degeneration using drugs that typically aren’t very good at getting through the blood-brain barrier — but, in this case, would no longer need to,” Yousef said.

Source: http://med.stanford.edu/

AI Spacefactory Wins Mars 3D Printed Habitat Challenge

May 10, 2019 Uncategorized

The new york-based ‘multi-planetary’ design agency, AI Spacefactory, gives us a closer look of what life on Mars might actually be like as they receive 1st place in the finale of NASA‘s 3D printed habitat challenge. After , the final phase saw structures built head to head over a duration of 30 hours and 3 days. the winning 15-foot tall prototype, called ‘MARSHA’, prevailed due to its level of autonomy and material performance, seeing the team scoop the prize of $500,000.
In addition to being built with nearly no human assistance, AI spacefactory was also awarded the top place for MARSHA’s innovative biopolymer basalt composite – a biodegradable and recyclable material derived from natural materials found on Mars. After withstanding NASA’s pressure, smoke, and impact testing, this material was found to be stronger and more durable than its concrete competitors.

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‘it’s light, and it’s strong, like an airplane. that’s going to be very important for these types of habitats,’ comments Lex Akers, dean of the caterpillar college of engineering and technology at Bradley university.

AI spacefactory autonomously constructed their prototype Mars entire in-situ, lifting an industrial robot 13-feet into the air on a forklift to 3D print the vertical, egg-shape habitat After spending 2 years developing construction technologies for Mars, AI spacefactory plans to bring its space-driven technologies back to earth this year. demonstrating the sustainable nature of their biopolymer composite, they will recycle the materials from MARSHA and re-use them to 3d print TERA – the first-ever space-tech eco habitat on earth.

‘We developed these technologies for space, but they have the potential to transform the way we build on earth,’ said David Malott, CEO and founder of AI spacefactory. ‘By using natural, biodegradable materials grown from crops, we could eliminate the building industry’s massive waste of unrecyclable concrete and restore our planet.’

Source: https://www.aispacefactory.com/

Transparent and Flexible Battery for Power Generation and Storage at Once

May 9, 2019 Uncategorized

DGIST research group in South Korea developed single-layer graphene based multifunctional transparent devices Various use of electronics and skin-attachable devices are expected with the development of transparent battery that can both generate and store power.The scientists in the Smart Textile Research Group developed film-type graphene based multifunctional transparent energy devices.

The team actively used ‘single-layered graphene film’ as electrodes in order to develop transparent devices. Due to its excellent electrical conductivity and light and thin characteristics, single-layered graphene film is perfect for electronics that require batteries. By using high-molecule nano-mat that contains semisolid electrolyte, the research team succeeded in increasing transparency (maximum of 77.4%) to see landscape and letters clearly.

Furthermore, the researchers designed structure for electronic devices to be self-charging and storing by inserting energy storage panel inside the upper layer of power devices and energy conversion panel inside the lower panel. They even succeeded in manufacturing electronics with touch-sensing systems by adding a touch sensor right below the energy storage panel of the upper layer.

“We decided to start this research because we were amazed by transparent smartphones appearing in movies. While there are still long ways to go for commercialization due to high production costs, we will do our best to advance this technology further as we made this success in the transparent energy storage field that has not had any visible research performances”, explains Changsoon Choi from the Smart Textile Research Group, and co-author of the paper published on the online edition of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

The findings were also conducted as a joint research with various organisations such as Yonsei University, Hanyang University, and the Korea Institute of Industrial Technology (KITECH).

Source: https://www.dgist.ac.kr/

How To Collect And Harvest More Solar Energy

May 8, 2019 Uncategorized

In an article published in the SPIE Journal of Nanophotonics (JNP), researchers from a collaboration of three labs in Mexico demonstrate aninnovative nanodevice for harvesting solar energy. The paper,“Thermoelectric efficiency optimization of nanoantennas for solar energy harvesting,“reports that evolutive dipole nanoantennas (EDNs) generate a thermoelectric voltage three times larger than the classic dipole nanoantenna (CDN).

Capturing visible and infrared radiation using nanodevices is anessential aspect of collecting solar energy: solar cells and solar panels are common devices that utilize nanoantennas, which link electromagnetic radiation to specific optical fields. The EDNcan be useful in many areas where high thermoelectric efficiency is needed from energy harvesting to applications across the aerospace industry.

“The paper reports on a novel design and demonstration of a nanoantenna for efficient thermoelectric energy harvesting,” says Professor Ibrahim Abdulhalim, JNP Associate Editor, SPIE Fellow and a professor in the Electrooptics and Photonics Engineering Department at Ben-Gurion Universityof the Negev. “They demonstrated thermoelectric voltage three times larger than a classical antenna. This type of antenna can be useful in many fields from harvesting of energy from waste heat, in sensing and solar thermal energy harvesting.”

The nanoantennas are bimetallic, using nickel and platinum, and were fabricated using e-beam lithography. The nanoantenna design wasoptimized using simulations to determine the distance between the elements. In comparing their thermoelectric voltage to the classic dipole nanoantenna, the EDNs were 1.3 times more efficient. The characterization was done using a solar simulator analyzing the I-V curves. The results indicate that EDN arrays would be good candidates for the harvesting of waste heat energy.

Source: http://spie.org/

Early-Stage Detection Of Alzheimer’s In The Blood

May 7, 2019 Uncategorized

Two major studies with promising antibodies have recently failed – possibly because they have been administered too late. A new very early-detection test gives rise to hope. Using current techniques, Alzheimer’s disease, the most frequent cause of dementia, can only be detected once the typical plaques have formed in the brain. At this point, therapy seems no longer possible. However, the first changes caused by Alzheimer’s take place on the protein level up to 20 years sooner. A two-tier method developed at Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) can help detect the disease at a much earlier stage. The researchers from Bochum published their report in the March 2019 edition of the journal “Alzheimer’s and Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment and Disease Monitoring”.

“This has paved the way for early-stage therapy approaches, where the as yet inefficient drugs on which we had pinned our hopes may prove effective,” says Professor Klaus Gerwert from the Department of Biophysics at RUB.

In Alzheimer’s patients, the amyloid beta protein folds incorrectly due to pathological changes long before the first symptoms occur. A team of researchers headed by Klaus Gerwert successfully diagnosed this misfolding using a simple blood test; as a result, the disease can be detected approximately eight years before the first clinical symptoms occur. The test wasn’t suitable for clinical applications however: it did detect 71 per cent of Alzheimer’s cases in symptomless stages, but at the same time provided false positive diagnoses for nine per cent of the study participants. In order to increase the number of correctly identified Alzheimer’s cases and to reduce the number of false positive diagnoses, the researchers poured a lot of time and effort into optimising the test.

As a result, they have now introduced the two-tier diagnostic method. To this end, they use the original blood test to identify high-risk individuals. Subsequently, they add a dementia-specific biomarker, namely tau protein, to run further tests with those test participants whose Alzheimer’s diagnosis was positive in the first step. If both biomarkers show a positive result, there is a high likelihood of Alzheimer’s disease. “Through the combination of both analyses, 87 of 100 Alzheimer’s patients were correctly identified in our study,” summarises Klaus Gerwert. “And we reduced the number of false positive diagnoses in healthy subjects to 3 of 100. The second analysis is carried out in cerebrospinal fluid that is extracted from the spinal cord.

“Now, new clinical studies with test participants in very early stages of the disease can be launched,” points out Gerwert. He is hoping that the existing therapeutic antibodies will still have an effect. “Recently, two major promising studies have failed, especially Crenezumab and Aducanumab – not least because it had probably already been too late by the time therapy was taken up. The new test opens up a new therapy window.”

Source: https://news.rub.de/

Exoskeletons Assist Individuals With Spinal Cord Injury

May 6, 2019 Uncategorized

(from Inverse.com) Green Lantern’s ring, Wonder Woman’s bracelets, Captain America’s shield, and, of course, Batman’s batsuit: 30 years later, as National Superhero Day approaches, I’d be designing components of my own supersuits.

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I didn’t really notice this until a few months ago. On that day, my childhood dreams were at once destroyed and fulfilled. Standing in a line, I noticed that everyone was focused on their smartphones’ screens. Suddenly it hit me: I already had Sword of Omens superpowers. With my smartphone, I can see video of faraway events and text my friends to meet up. Billions of people now have what used to be considered superpowers.

But what about the physical superpowers? I wanted those, too — like superhuman endurance or strength. Those may not be too far behind. I’m working on them in Vanderbilt’s Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology. Humanity has begun to enter the age of wearable exoskeletons and exosuits thatoffer support and strength to people’s bodies. Over the past five years, wearable exoskeletons that assist and aid movement have begun to shift out of research labs and into public use. They’re still early versions, and the science is still emerging, but they include the first of several FDA-approved exoskeletons to assist individuals with spinal cord injury or after stroke, as well as exoskeletons to help keep workers safe and reduce the fatigue of physically demanding jobs.

Source: https://engineering.vanderbilt.edu/
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https://www.inverse.com/

How To Create See-through Human Organs

May 3, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers in Germany have created transparent human organs using a new technology that could pave the way to print three-dimensional body parts such as kidneys for transplants. The organ is then scanned by lasers in a microscope that allows researchers to capture the entire structure, including the blood vessels and every single cell in its specific location. Using this blueprint, researchers print out the scaffold of the organ. They then load the 3D printer with stem cells which act as “ink” and are injected into the correct position making the organ functional.

The team led by Ali Erturk at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich have developed a technique that uses a solvent to make organs such as the brain and kidneys transparent. While 3D printing is already used widely to produce spare parts for industry, Erturk said the development marks a step forward for 3D printing in the medical field. Until now 3D-printed organs lacked detailed cellular structures because they were based on images from computer tomography or MRI machines, he said.

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3D transparent mouse

“We can see where every single cell is located in transparent human organs. And then we can actually replicate exactly the same, using 3D bioprinting technology to make a real functional organ,” he said. “Therefore, I believe we are much closer to a real human organ for the first time now.”

Erturk’s team plan to start by creating a bioprinted pancreas over the next 2-3 years and also hope to develop a kidney within 5-6 years. The researchers will first test to see whether animals can survive with the bioprinted organs and could start clinical trials within 5-10 years, he said.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

AI Detects Alzheimer’s Six Years In Advance

May 2, 2019 Uncategorized

Using a common type of brain scan, researchers programmed a machine-learning algorithm to diagnose early-stage Alzheimer’s disease about six years before a clinical diagnosis is made – potentially giving doctors a chance to intervene with treatment. No cure exists for Alzheimer’s disease, but promising drugs have emerged in recent years that can help stem the condition’s progression. However, these treatments must be administered early in the course of the disease in order to do any good. This race against the clock has inspired scientists to search for ways to diagnose the condition earlier.

A PET scan of the brain of a person with Alzheimer’s disease

“One of the difficulties with Alzheimer’s disease is that by the time all the clinical symptoms manifest and we can make a definitive diagnosis, too many neurons have died, making it essentially irreversible,” says Jae Ho Sohn, MD, MS, a resident in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at UC San Francisco.

Positron emission tomography (PET) scans, which measure the levels of specific molecules, like glucose, in the brain, have been investigated as one tool to help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease before the symptoms become severe. Glucose is the primary source of fuel for brain cells, and the more active a cell is, the more glucose it uses. As brain cells become diseased and die, they use less and, eventually, no glucose.

Other types of PET scans look for proteins specifically related to Alzheimer’s disease, but glucose PET scans are much more common and cheaper, especially in smaller health care facilities and developing countries, because they’re also used for cancer staging.

Radiologists have used these scans to try to detect Alzheimer’s by looking for reduced glucose levels across the brain, especially in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain. However, because the disease is a slow progressive disorder, the changes in glucose are very subtle and so difficult to spot with the naked eye. To solve this problem, Sohn applied a machine learning algorithm to PET scans to help diagnose early-stage Alzheimer’s disease more reliably.

“This is an ideal application of deep learning because it is particularly strong at finding very subtle but diffuse processes. Human radiologists are really strong at identifying tiny focal finding like a brain tumor, but we struggle at detecting more slow, global changes,” says Sohn. “Given the strength of deep learning in this type of application, especially compared to humans, it seemed like a natural application.”

To train the algorithm, Sohn fed it images from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), a massive public dataset of PET scans from patients who were eventually diagnosed with either Alzheimer’s disease, mild cognitive impairment or no disorder. Eventually, the algorithm began to learn on its own which features are important for predicting the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and which are not.

Once the algorithm was trained on 1,921 scans, the scientists tested it on two novel datasets to evaluate its performance. The first were 188 images that came from the same ADNI database but had not been presented to the algorithm yet. The second was an entirely novel set of scans from 40 patients who had presented to the UCSF Memory and Aging Center with possible cognitive impairment.

The algorithm performed with flying colors. It correctly identified 92 percent of patients who developed Alzheimer’s disease in the first test set and 98 percent in the second test set. What’s more, it made these correct predictions on average 75.8 months – a little more than six years – before the patient received their final diagnosis.

Source: https://www.ucsf.edu/

Hypothalamic Stem Cells May Reverse The Human Ageing Process

May 1, 2019 Uncategorized

A study published in the Nature Journal by Dongsheng Cai, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, talks about how stem cells, that determines how fast aging occurs in the body, can help reverse the human ageing process. Stem cells reside in Hypothalamus, a pea-sized part of the brain that contains a bundle of neurons. It is responsible for a wide array of growth, development, digestion, reproduction, and metabolism related processes in the body. As the human body starts to age, these neural stem cells in the body begins to deteriorate and accelerates the human ageing process. So, if you stop these stem cells from wearing away, you can possibly stop the human body from ageing.

The lab tests were conducted on mice, where it was observed that as the mice grew 10 months or older, the stem cells begin to deplete (earlier than the usual time for stem cells to deteriorate in mice). By the time, these mice turn two years and older, the stem cells start to disappear, causing death. However, to prove their hypothesis that stem cells deterioration truly accelerates the ageing process, scientists ‘artificially disrupted’ the stem cells in middle-aged mice, and observed that it significantly grew their rate of ageing.

Once the hypothesis that stem cells depletion leads to accelerated ageing was proved, scientists further injected the hypothalamic stem cells into the brains of older and middle-aged mice, where a sudden decrease in their ageing process was observed. This happens because the hypothalamic stem cells release molecules called microRNAs (miRNAs) which play an important role in regulation of gene expression. These miRNAs (which are bundled inside tiny particles called exosomes) released by the stem cells were then further injected into the cerebrospinal fluid of mice.

After this experiment, the ageing process significantly slowed down, in terms of tissue analysis and behavioral analysis where different changes in animals’ muscle endurance, coordination, social behavior and cognitive ability also showed signs of anti-ageing. Scientists are now looking into exploring the study further and analyze other factors related to microRNAs that might be responsible for the anti-ageing miracle!

Source: https://www.nature.com/
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https://in.mashable.com/

DNA Folds Into A Smart Nanocapsule For Drug Delivery

April 30, 2019 Uncategorized

AI Closer To The Efficiency Of The Brain

April 29, 2019 Uncategorized

Computers and artificial intelligence continue to usher in major changes in the way people shop. It is relatively easy to train a robot’s brain to create a shopping list, but what about ensuring that the robotic shopper can easily tell the difference between the thousands of products in the store?

Purdue University researchers and experts in brain-inspired computing think part of the answer may be found in magnets. The researchers have developed a process to use magnetics with brain-like networks to program and teach devices such as personal robots, self-driving cars and drones to better generalize about different objects.

“Our stochastic neural networks try to mimic certain activities of the human brain and compute through a connection of neurons and synapses,” said Kaushik Roy, Purdue’s Edward G. Tiedemann Jr. Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This allows the computer brain to not only store information but also to generalize well about objects and then make inferences to perform better at distinguishing between objects.”

The stochastic switching behavior is representative of a sigmoid switching behavior of a neuron. Such magnetic tunnel junctions can be also used to store synaptic weights. Roy presented the technology during the annual German Physical Sciences Conference earlier this month in Germany. The work also appeared in the Frontiers in Neuroscience.

The switching dynamics of a nano-magnet are similar to the electrical dynamics of neurons. Magnetic tunnel junction devices show switching behavior, which is stochastic in nature. The Purdue group proposed a new stochastic training algorithm for synapses using spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP), termed Stochastic-STDP, which has been experimentally observed in the rat’s hippocampus. The inherent stochastic behavior of the magnet was used to switch the magnetization states stochastically based on the proposed algorithm for learning different object representations. “The big advantage with the magnet technology we have developed is that it is very energy-efficient,” said Roy, who leads Purdue’s Center for Brain-inspired Computing Enabling Autonomous Intelligence. “We have created a simpler network that represents the neurons and synapses while compressing the amount of memory and energy needed to perform functions similar to brain computations.”

Source: https://www.purdue.edu/

Nanomachines To Deliver Cancer Drugs to Hard-to-reach Areas

April 26, 2019 Uncategorized

In a recent study in mice, researchers found a way to deliver specific drugs to parts of the body that are exceptionally difficult to access. Their Y-shaped block catiomer (YBC) binds with certain therapeutic materials forming a package 18 nanometers wide. The package is less than one-fifth the size of those produced in previous studies, so can pass through much smaller gaps. This allows YBCs to slip through tight barriers in cancers of the brain or pancreas.

The fight against cancer is fought on many fronts. One promising field is gene therapy, which targets genetic causes of diseases to reduce their effect. The idea is to inject a nucleic acid-based drug into the bloodstream — typically small interfering RNA (siRNA) — which binds to a specific problem-causing gene and deactivates it. However, siRNA is very fragile and needs to be protected within a nanoparticle or it breaks down before reaching its target.

“siRNA can switch off specific gene expressions that may cause harm. They are the next generation of biopharmaceuticals that could treat various intractable diseases, including cancer,” explained Associate Professor Kanjiro Miyata of the University of Tokyo, who jointly supervised the study. “However, siRNA is easily eliminated from the body by enzymatic degradation or excretion. Clearly a new delivery method was called for.”

Presently, nanoparticles are about 100 nanometers wide, one-thousandth the thickness of paper. This is small enough to grant them access to the liver through the leaky blood vessel wall. However some cancers are harder to reach. Pancreatic cancer is surrounded by fibrous tissues and cancers in the brain by tightly connected vascular cells. In both cases the gaps available are much smaller than 100 nanometers. Miyata and colleagues created an siRNA carrier small enough to slip through these gaps in the tissues.

“We used polymers to fabricate a small and stable nanomachine for the delivery of siRNA drugs to cancer tissues with a tight access barrier,” said Miyata. “The shape and length of component polymers is precisely adjusted to bind to specific siRNAs, so it is configurable.”

Source: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/

How To Create Speech From Brain Signals

April 25, 2019 Uncategorized

“In my head, I churn over every sentence ten times, delete a word, add an adjective, and learn my text by heart, paragraph by paragraph,” wrote Jean-Dominique Bauby in his memoir, “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” In the book, Mr. Bauby, a journalist and editor, recalled his life before and after a paralyzing stroke that left him virtually unable to move a muscle; he tapped out the book letter by letter, by blinking an eyelid.

Thousands of people are reduced to similarly painstaking means of communication as a result of injuries suffered in accidents or combat, of strokes, or of neurodegenerative disorders such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., that disable the ability to speak.

Now, scientists are reporting that they have developed a virtual prosthetic voice, a system that decodes the brain’s vocal intentions and translates them into mostly understandable speech, with no need to move a muscle, even those in the mouth. (The physicist and author Stephen Hawking used a muscle in his cheek to type keyboardcharacters, which a computer synthesized into speech.)

“It’s formidable work, and it moves us up another level toward restoring speech” by decoding brain signals, said Dr. Anthony Ritaccio, a neurologist and neuroscientist at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla., who was not a member of the research group.

The new system, described on Wednesday in the journal Nature,deciphers the brain’s motor commands guiding vocal movement during speech — the tap of the tongue, the narrowing of the lips — and generates intelligible sentences that approximate a speaker’s natural cadence. Experts said the new work represented a “proof of principle,” a preview of what may be possible after further experimentation and refinement. The system was tested on people who speak normally; it has not been tested in people whose neurological conditions or injuries, such as common strokes, could make the decoding difficult or impossible. For the new trial, scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, and U.C. Berkeley recruited five people who were in the hospital being evaluated for epilepsy surgery.

Many people with epilepsy do poorly on medication and opt to undergo brain surgery. Before operating, doctors must first locate the “hot spot” in each person’s brain where the seizures originate; this is done with electrodes that are placed in the brain, or on its surface, and listen for telltale electrical storms. Pinpointing this location can take weeks. In the interim, patients go through their days with electrodes implanted in or near brain regions that are involved in movement and auditory signaling. These patients often consent to additional experiments that piggyback on those implants.

Five such patients at U.C.S.F. agreed to test the virtual voice generator. Each had been implanted with one or two electrode arrays: stamp-size pads, containing hundreds of tiny electrodes, that were placed on the surface of the brain. As each participant recited hundreds of sentences, the electrodes recorded the firing patterns of neurons in the motor cortex. The researchers associated those patterns with the subtle movements of the patient’s lips, tongue, larynx and jaw that occur during natural speech. The team then translated those movements into spoken sentences.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/

Robots Sort Recycling, Detect If An Object Is Paper, Metal Or Plastic.

April 24, 2019 Uncategorized

Every year trash companies sift through an estimated 68 million tons of recycling, which is the weight equivalent of more than 30 million cars. A key step in the process happens on fast-moving conveyor belts, where workers have to sort items into categories like paper, plastic and glass. Such jobs are dull, dirty, and often unsafe, especially in facilities where workers also have to remove normal trash from the mix. With that in mind, a team led by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has developed a robotic system that can detect if an object is paper, metal, or plastic.

The team’s “RoCycle” system includes a soft Teflon hand that uses tactile sensors on its fingertips to detect an object’s size and stiffness. Compatible with any robotic arm, RoCycle was found to be 85 percent accurate at detecting materials when stationary, and 63 percent accurate on an actual simulated conveyer belt. (Its most common error was identifying paper-covered metal tins as paper, which the team says would be improved by adding more sensors along the contact surface.)

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“Our robot’s sensorized skin provides haptic feedback that allows it to differentiate between a wide range of objects, from the rigid to the squishy,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, senior author on a related paper that will be presented in April at the IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft) in Seoul, South Korea. “Computer vision alone will not be able to solve the problem of giving machines human-like perception, so being able to use tactile input is of vital importance.”

A collaboration with Yale University, RoCycle directly demonstrates the limits of sight-based sorting: It can reliably distinguish between two visually similar Starbucks cups, one made of paper and one made of plastic, that would give vision systems trouble.

Source: http://news.mit.edu/

Long-lasting Lithium Batteries

April 23, 2019 Uncategorized

The grand challenge to improve energy storage and increase battery life, while ensuring safe operation, is becoming evermore critical as we become increasingly reliant on this energy source for everything from portable devices to electric vehicles. A Columbia Engineering team led by Yuan Yang, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, announced today that they have developed a new method for safely prolonging battery life by inserting a nano-coating of boron nitride (BN) to stabilize solid electrolytes in lithium metal batteries.

While conventional lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries are currently widely used in daily life, they have low energy density, resulting in shorter battery life, and, because of the highly flammable liquid electrolyte inside them, they can short out and even catch fire. Energy density could be improved by using lithium metal to replace the graphite anode used in Li-ion batteries: lithium metal’s theoretical capacity for the amount of charge it can deliver is almost 10 times higher than that of graphite. But during lithium plating, dendrites often form and, if they penetrate the membrane separator in the middle of the battery, they can create short-circuits, raising concerns about battery safety.

“We decided to focus on solid, ceramic electrolytes. They show great promise in improving both safety and energy density, as compared with conventional, flammable electrolytes in Li-ion batteries,” says Yang. “We are particularly interested in rechargeable solid-state lithium batteries because they are promising candidates for next-generation energy storage.” “Lithium metal is indispensable for enhancing energy density and so it’s critical that we be able to use it as the anode for solid electrolytes,” says Qian Cheng, the paper’s lead author and a postdoctoral research scientist in the department of applied physics and applied mathematics who works in Yang’s group. “To adapt these unstable solid electrolytes for real-life applications, we needed to develop a chemically and mechanically stable interface to protect these solid electrolytes against the lithium anode. It is essential that the interface not only be highly electronically insulating, but also ionically conducting in order to transport lithium ions. Plus, this interface has to be super-thin to avoid lowering the energy density of batteries.”

Th findings are outlined in a new study published by Joule.

Source: https://engineering.columbia.edu/

Quantum Computer Can See 16 Different Futures Simultaneously

April 22, 2019 Uncategorized

When Mile Gu boots up his new computer, he can see the future. At least, 16 possible versions of it — all at the same time. Gu, an assistant professor of physics at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, works in quantum computing. This branch of science uses the weird laws that govern the universe’s smallest particles to help computers calculate more efficiently.

Tiny particles of light can travel in a superposition of many different states at the same time. Researchers used this quantum quirk to design a prototype computer that can predict 16 different futures at once.

Unlike classical computers, which store information as bits (binary digits of either 0 or 1), quantum computers code information into quantum bits, or qubits. These subatomic particles, thanks to the weird laws of quantum mechanics, can exist in a superposition of two different states at the same time.

Just as Schrödinger‘s hypothetical cat was simultaneously dead and alive until someone opened the box, a qubit in a superposition can equal both 0 and 1 until it’s measured. Storing multiple different outcomes into a single qubit could save a ton of memory compared to traditional computers, especially when it comes to making complicated predictions.

In a study published April 9 in the journal Nature Communications, Gu and his colleagues demonstrated this idea using a new quantum simulator that can predict the outcomes of 16 different futures (the equivalent of, say, flipping a coin four times in a row) in a quantum superposition. These possible futures were encoded in a single photon (a quantum particle of light) which moved down multiple paths simultaneously while passing through several sensors. Then, the researchers went one step further, firing two photons side-by-side and tracking how each photon’s potential futures diverged under slightly different conditions.

“It’s sort of like Doctor Strange in the ‘Avengers: Infinity War‘” movie, Gu told Live Science. Before a climactic battle in that film, the clairvoyant doctor looks forward in time to see 14 million different futures, hoping to find the one where the heroes defeat the big baddie. “He does a combined computation of all these possibilities to say, ‘OK, if I changed my decision in this small way, how much will the future change?’ This is the direction our simulation is moving forwards to.”

Source: https://www.livescience.com/

Memory In Older Adults Restored To Young Adult Level

April 19, 2019 Uncategorized

Stimulating a precise location of the brain’s memory center with electromagnetic pulses improved the memory of older adults with age-related memory loss to the level of young adults, reports a new Northwestern Medicine study. The study, published in the journal Neurology, used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to target the hippocampus — the brain region that atrophies as people grow older, which is responsible for memory decline.

“Older people’s memory got better up to the level that we could no longer tell them apart from younger people,” said lead investigator Joel Voss, PhD, associate professor in the Ken and Ruth Davee Department of Neurology. “They got substantially better.” “It’s the part of the brain that links two unrelated things together into a memory, like the place you left your keys or your new neighbor’s name,” said Voss, also an associate professor of Medical Social Sciences and of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. “Older adults often complain about having trouble with this.” This type of memory worsens as we age. Nearly all people experience a decline in their memory ability as they age.

The new study of 16 people — ages 64 to 80 with normal age-related memory problems — shows it’s possible to alter memory ability in older adults using this type of brain stimulation, Voss said. “There is no previous evidence that the specific memory impairments and brain dysfunction seen in older adults can be rescued using brain stimulation or any other method.”

Voss’ team located the hippocampus — which is smaller in older adults — individually for each participant with an fMRI. An fMRI (functional MRI) measures how active a part of the brain is at a given time Then, they located an area of the parietal lobe that communicates with the hippocampus for stimulation delivery. This spot was behind and slightly above a person’s left ear, but everyone had a slightly different spot. It isn’t possible to directly stimulate the hippocampus with TMS, which is noninvasive, because it’s too deep in the brain for the magnetic fields to penetrate. So, Voss and colleagues identified a superficial brain region close to the surface of the skull with high connectivity to the hippocampus.

“We stimulated where brain activity is synchronized to the hippocampus, suggesting that these regions talk to each other,” said first author Aneesha Nilakantan, a neuroscience graduate student working in Voss’ lab. At baseline, younger and older adults were given memory tasks in which they learned arbitrary relations between paired things, such as this object goes on this spot on the computer screen. Younger adults score about 55 percent correct and older adults less than 40 percent correct. The research team then applied high-frequency repetitive magnetic stimulation to the spot for five consecutive days for 20 minutes a d

Then, 24 hours after the final stimulation, the subjects were given a new memory test in which they had to learn new arbitrary relations between paired things. After the brain stimulation, older adults scored at the level of young adults on the memory tasks.

Source: https://news.feinberg.northwestern.edu/

Internet Of Thoughts

April 18, 2019 Uncategorized

Imagine a future technology that would provide instant access to the world’s knowledge and artificial intelligence, simply by thinking about a specific topic or question. Communications, education, work, and the world as we know it would be transformed. Writing in Frontiers in Neuroscience, an international collaboration led by researchers at UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, AI, and computation will lead this century to the development of a “Human Brain/Cloud Interface” (B/CI), that connects neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud-computing networks in real time.

The B/CI concept was initially proposed by futurist-author-inventor Ray Kurzweil, who suggested that neural nanorobots – brainchild of Robert Freitas, Jr., senior author of the research – could be used to connect the neocortex of the human brain to a “synthetic neocortex” in . Our wrinkled neocortex is the newest, smartest, ‘conscious’ part of the brain. Freitas’ proposed neural nanorobots would provide direct, real-time monitoring and control of signals to and from brain cells.

“These devices would navigate the human vasculature, cross the blood-brain barrier, and precisely autoposition themselves among, or even within brain cells,” explains Freitas. “They would then wirelessly transmit encoded information to and from a cloud-based supercomputer network for real-time brain-state monitoring and data extraction.”

This cortex in the cloud would allow “Matrix“-style downloading of information to the brain, the group claims. “A human B/CI system mediated by neuralnanorobotics could empower individuals with instantaneous access to all cumulative human knowledge available in the cloud, while significantly improving human learning capacities and intelligence,” says lead author Dr. Nuno Martins.

B/CI technology might also allow us to create a future “global superbrain” that would connect networks of individual human brains and AIs to enable collective thought. “While not yet particularly sophisticated, an experimental human ‘BrainNet’ system has already been tested, enabling thought-driven information exchange via the cloud between individual brains,” explains Martins. “It used electrical signals recorded through the skull of ‘senders’ and magnetic stimulation through the skull of ‘receivers,’ allowing for performing cooperative tasks. “With the advance of neuralnanorobotics, we envisage the future creation of ‘superbrains’ that can harness the thoughts and thinking power of any number of humans and machines in real time. This shared cognition could revolutionize democracy, enhance empathy, and ultimately unite culturally diverse groups into a truly global society.”

According to the group’s estimates, even existing supercomputers have processing speeds capable of handling the necessary volumes of neural data for B/CI – and they’re getting faster, fast. Rather, transferring neural data to and from supercomputers in the cloud is likely to be the ultimate bottleneck in B/CI development. “This challenge includes not only finding the bandwidth for global data transmission,” cautions Martins, “but also, how to enable data exchange with neurons via tiny devices embedded deep in the brain.”

One solution proposed by the authors is the use of ‘magnetoelectric nanoparticles‘ to effectively amplify communication between neurons and the cloud. “These nanoparticles have been used already in living mice to couple external magnetic fields to neuronal electric fields – that is, to detect and locally amplify these magnetic signals and so allow them to alter the electrical activity of neurons,” explains Martins. “This could work in reverse, too: electrical signals produced by neurons and nanorobots could be amplified via magnetoelectric nanoparticles, to allow their detection outside of the skull.” Getting these nanoparticles – and nanorobots – safely into the brain via the circulation, would be perhaps the greatest challenge of all in B/CI.

“A detailed analysis of the biodistribution and biocompatibility of nanoparticles is required before they can be considered for human development. Nevertheless, with these and other promising technologies for B/CI developing at an ever-increasing rate, an ‘internet of thoughts’ could become a reality before the turn of the century,” Martins concludes.

Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/

First 3D Printed Heart

April 17, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers at Tel Aviv University have managed to 3D print a heart using a patient’s cells and biological materials — a first. Scientists have previously built synthetic hearts and bio-engineered tissues using a patient’s cells. But the latest feat is the first time scientists have created a complex organ with biological materials.

“This is the first time anyone anywhere has successfully engineered and printed an entire heart replete with cells, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers,” lead researcher Tal Dvir, a material scientist and professor of molecular cell biology at TAU, said in a news release.

The proof-of-concept feat could pave the way for a new type of organ transplant. For patients with late stage heart failure, a heart transplant is the only solution. But there is a lack of heart donors.

“This heart is made from human cells and patient-specific biological materials. In our process these materials serve as the bioinks, substances made of sugars and proteins that can be used for 3D printing of complex tissue models,” Dvir said. “Our results demonstrate the potential of our approach for engineering personalized tissue and organ replacement in the future.”

The heart scientists printed couldn’t be used in a human transplant operation. Though completely vascularized, it’s too small at about the size of a rabbit heart. “But larger human hearts require the same technology.” Dvir said.

Researchers detailed their breakthrough this week in the journal Advanced Science.

Source: https://www.upi.com/

How To Create Electricity From Snowfall

April 16, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and colleagues have designed a new device that creates electricity from falling snow. The first of its kind, this device is inexpensive, small, thin and flexible like a sheet of plastic.

“The device can work in remote areas because it provides its own power and does not need batteries,” said senior author Richard Kaner, who holds UCLA’s Dr. Myung Ki Hong Endowed Chair in Materials Innovation. “It’s a very clever device — a weather station that can tell you how much snow is falling, the direction the snow is falling, and the direction and speed of the wind.”

The researchers call it a snow-based triboelectric nanogenerator, or snow TENG. A triboelectric nanogenerator, which generates charge through static electricity, produces energy from the exchange of electrons.

“Static electricity occurs from the interaction of one material that captures electrons and another that gives up electrons,” said Kaner, who is also a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and of materials science and engineering, and a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA. “You separate the charges and create electricity out of essentially nothing.”

Snow is positively charged and gives up electrons. Silicone — a synthetic rubber-like material that is composed of silicon atoms and oxygen atoms, combined with carbon, hydrogen and other elements — is negatively charged. When falling snow contacts the surface of silicone, that produces a charge that the device captures, creating electricity.

“Snow is already charged, so we thought, why not bring another material with the opposite charge and extract the charge to create electricity?” said co-author Maher El-Kady, a UCLA assistant researcher of chemistry and biochemistry.

“While snow likes to give up electrons, the performance of the device depends on the efficiency of the other material at extracting these electrons,” he added. “After testing a large number of materials including aluminum foils and Teflon, we found that silicone produces more charge than any other material.”

Findings about the device are published in the journal Nano Energy.

Source: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/

Paris orders 800 new electric buses to fight smog

April 15, 2019 Uncategorized

Paris’ public transport operator has ordered up to 800 electric buses to take to the streets of the French capital to replace diesel versions and fight smog in the build up to the 2024 Olympics.

Three French engineering firms — Heuliez Bus, Bollore and Alstom — won the tender to supply the buses in deals worth up to 400 million euros ($450 million), the transport operator RATP said. RATP will buy an equal number of buses from each supplier, it added, describing the tender as the biggest such bus purchase in Europe. It will begin by buying 150 buses, with the first deliveries expected between the end of 2020 and 2022, it added.

Local authorities in Paris want the French capital to have 100-percent clean buses by 2025 by using both electricity and biofuels.

“This is a major step for the RATP and a symbol of its ambition to be a key player in the energy transition in the public transport sector,” said RATP chief executive Catherine Guillouard.

“To put them into service, the company is mobilised to meet an industrial challenge within a very short tight deadline,” she added.

Paris already has one line — number 341 — fully operational with electric buses, but it will be a major task to transform its full fleet of just under 4,700 buses. RATP currently has some 950 hybrid-powered buses, 140 bio-fuel buses and 83 electric buses in its fleet.

The use of electric buses is growing all over the world, with China the leader in employing the technology as it seeks to relieve pollution in clogged cities. But they are becoming an increasingly familiar sight in European cities, in particular in Dutch cities Amsterdam and Rotterdam. Paris’ Socialist Mayor Anne Hidalgo has made tackling smog a priority and is planning stricter rules aimed at phasing out diesel cars by 2024, and is also weighing the idea of making public transport free.

Source: https://www.france24.com/

5G Connected Cows

April 12, 2019 Uncategorized

They may look like regular cows, but a herd of Friesian dairy cattle at a British farm are internet pioneers and they are enjoying the benefits of 5G connectivity before you. 5G promises super-fast connections, which evangelists say will transform the way we live our lives, enabling everything from self-driving cars to augmented-reality glasses and downloading a feature-length film to your phone in seconds.

While it is being used in pockets of pilot studies around the world, the first near-nationwide coverage is not expected in countries such as China, Japan or the United States until 2023, according to industry analysts. For the cows, among the 5G-connected gadgets they are wearing is a collar that controls a robotic milking system. When the cow feels ready to be milked it will approach machine gates that will automatically open. The device recognizes the individual to precisely latch on to its teats for milking, while the cow munches on a food reward.

At the government-funded Agricultural Engineering Precision Innovation Centre (Agri-EPI Centre) in Shepton Mallet, in southwest England, around 50 of the 180-strong herd is fitted with the 5G smart collars and health-monitoring ear tags. The gadgets do not harm the cows and the monitoring allows handlers to see any signs of distress.

“We are testing the ability of 5G to transmit the data from our sensors much quicker, and not via the farm’s PC and a slow broadband internet connection,” said Duncan Forbes, Project Manager at the Agri-Epi Centre. “And the significance of that is it means that this sort of technology could be taken up … not just on farms but on rural communities right across the country.”

The working dairy, set up by Agri-EPI with the support of Britain’s innovation agency, uses a range of technology; including automated brushes that rotate when the cow rubs up against them, sensor-operated curtains that open depending on the weather, and a smart feeding system that automatically delivers food in the barn via ceiling-mounted rails.

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

Verizon Turns On its 5G Networks In Chicago And Minneapolis

April 11, 2019 Uncategorized

The world may not have seemed to have changed much between today and yesterday, but rest assured that something earth-shattering has occurred in the world of mobile tech. Verizon has officially flipped the switch and turned on 5G network access in Chicago and Minneapolis a full week ahead of schedule.

Verizon’s 5G network was due to come to life on April 11, alongside the launch of Motorola’s 5G Moto Mod for the Moto Z3. However, for an unknown reason, Verizon has decided to start the 5G revolution a week early, turning on 5G access in selected parts of Chicago and Minneapolis. Verizon has also pushed the release of the 5G Moto Mod forward to match, so users with a Moto Z3 with the mod will be able to access it immediately.

It’s an impressive technical feat. When customers are actually able to access the network, they’ll be rewarded with incredibly fast download speeds from their new mobile connection. According to Verizon, 450 Mbps can be expected as a typical download speed, while peak speeds could rise to as high as 1 Gbps, with latency as low as 30 milliseconds. That’s astoundingly fast, and rivals most, if not all, home internet connections.

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to roam far from the hot spots to use it, as the range is currently extremely limited. In Chicago, you can expect to find 5G signal in the West Loop and South Loop, around landmarks like Union Station, Willis Tower, The Art Institute of Chicago, Millennium Park, and the Chicago Theatre. Unsurprisingly, you’ll also find signal in Verizon stores in The Magnificent Mile and throughout The Gold Coast, Old Town, and River North.

Minneapolis is similarly limited. You’ll find 5G signal in the Downtown area, including Downtown West and Downtown East, as well as inside and around U.S. Bank Stadium. It will also be available around landmarks like the Minneapolis Convention Center, the Minneapolis Central Library, the Mill City Museum, Target Center and First Avenue venues, The Commons, areas of Elliot Park, and in the Verizon store in the Mall of America.

Source: https://www.digitaltrends.com/

Premature Aging, Obesity, Brain Disorders: 3 FrontRunners In The CRISP-R Therapy Race

April 10, 2019 Uncategorized

CRISPR is the ultimate child star in the biomedical universe. Just six years old, the gene editing prodigy is now the subject of multiple clinical trials that aim to push the lab tech into the real world. In 2017, a 44-year-old man received the first-ever dose of gene therapy—in the form of zinc-finger nucleases—that targeted a deficient gene in his liver. This type of gene therapy, called “in vivo” in scientist-speak, is markedly different than the most common type these days.

So far, the only gene therapies on the market are CAR-Ts: a procedure targeting blood cancer that extracts a person’s immune cells, genetically edits them within the lab to boost their cancer-killing power, and then infuses them back into the body.

In vivo gene therapy is far more intimate: rather than extracting a person’s cells, a gene editing mix is directly injected into a person, with the hope of performing molecular surgery with a single shot. CRISPR is now making that possibility very real. With dozens of efforts in the making, from premature aging to obesity and developmental brain disorders, here are the frontrunners beyond CRISPR-based cancer therapy to watch out for.

Source: https://singularityhub.com/

3D Printed Metamaterials With Super Optical Properties

April 9, 2019 Uncategorized

A team of engineers at Tufts University has developed a series of 3D printed metamaterials with unique microwave or optical properties that go beyond what is possible using conventional optical or electronic materials. The fabrication methods developed by the researchers demonstrate the potential, both present and future, of 3D printing to expand the range of geometric designs and material composites that lead to devices with novel optical properties. In one case, the researchers drew inspiration from the compound eye of a moth to create a hemispherical device that can absorb electromagnetic signals from any direction at selected wavelengths.

The geometry of a moth’s eye provides inspiration for a 3D printed antenna that absorbs specific microwave frequencies from any direction

Metamaterials extend the capabilities of conventional materials in devices by making use of geometric features arranged in repeating patterns at scales smaller than the wavelengths of energy being detected or influenced. New developments in 3D printing technology are making it possible to create many more shapes and patterns of metamaterials, and at ever smaller scales. In the study, researchers at the Nano Lab at Tufts describe a hybrid fabrication approach using 3D printing, metal coating and etching to create metamaterials with complex geometries and novel functionalities for wavelengths in the microwave range. For example, they created an array of tiny mushroom shaped structures, each holding a small patterned metal resonator at the top of a stalk. This particular arrangement permits microwaves of specific frequencies to be absorbed, depending on the chosen geometry of the “mushrooms” and their spacing. Use of such metamaterials could be valuable in applications such as sensors in medical diagnosis and as antennas in telecommunications or detectors in imaging applications.

The research has been published in the journal Microsystems & Nanoengineering (Springer Nature).

Source: https://now.tufts.edu/

How The Army Uses Microsoft’s HoloLens On The Battlefield

April 8, 2019 Uncategorized

Microsoft is building the military’s IVAS headset, which is based on HoloLens 2. How is useful IVAS on the battlefield? Microsoft’s technology will be used to better train soldiers and make them more effective in the real world. Soon, The Army recently showed how it will use specially modified Microsoft HoloLens 2 headsets. They’re part of a $480 million defense contract won by the company. The military wouldn’t say how much its version costs, but the consumer one costs $3,500.

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The headset is impressive — better than any augmented reality experience, including Magic Leap, which also tried to win the Army contract. The project is also a showcase for the Army’s plans to work more closely with America’s tech companies to speed innovation in military. The military calls its special version of the HoloLens 2 “IVAS,” which stands for Integrated Visual Augmentation System. It’s an augmented-reality headset, which means it places digital objects, such as maps or video displays, on top of the real world in front of you. Several companies are betting big on AR as the future of computing, since it will allow us to do much of what we can on a computer but while looking through glasses instead of down at a phone or at a computer screen. Apple, Google and Magic Leap are all building AR-capable software and hardware.

Put the headset on and pulled it down so that your eyes are peering through a glass visor. That visor is capable of displaying 3D images, information, my location and more. IVAS isn’t nearly finished.

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/

Artificial Intelligence Revolutionizes Farming

April 5, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers at MIT have used AI to improve the flavor of basil. It’s part of a trend that is seeing artificial intelligence revolutionize farming.
What makes basil so good? In some cases, it’s AI. Machine learning has been used to create basil plants that are extra-delicious. While we sadly cannot report firsthand on the herb’s taste, the effort reflects a broader trend that involves using data science and machine learning to improve agriculture.

The researchers behind the AI-optimized basil used machine learning to determine the growing conditions that would maximize the concentration of the volatile compounds responsible for basil’s flavor. The basil was grown in hydroponic units within modified shipping containers in Middleton, Massachusetts. Temperature, light, humidity, and other environmental factors inside the containers could be controlled automatically. The researchers tested the taste of the plants by looking for certain compounds using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry. And they fed the resulting data into machine-learning algorithms developed at MIT and a company called Cognizant.

The research showed, counterintuitively, that exposing plants to light 24 hours a day generated the best taste. The research group plans to study how the technology might improve the disease-fighting capabilities of plants as well as how different flora may respond to the effects of climate change.

“We’re really interested in building networked tools that can take a plant’s experience, its phenotype, the set of stresses it encounters, and its genetics, and digitize that to allow us to understand the plant-environment interaction,” said Caleb Harper, head of the MIT Media Lab’s OpenAg group, in a press release. His lab worked with colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin on the paper.

The idea of using machine learning to optimize plant yield and properties is rapidly taking off in agriculture. Last year, Wageningen University in the Netherlands organized an “Autonomous Greenhouse” contest, in which different teams competed to develop algorithms that increased the yield of cucumber plants while minimizing the resources required. They worked with greenhouses where a variety of factors are controlled by computer systems.

The study has appeared in the journal PLOS One.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/

Nanobiochip Detects Minute Levels Of Disease

April 4, 2019 Uncategorized

The difficulty in spotting minute amounts of disease circulating in the bloodstream has proven a stumbling block in the detection and treatment of cancers that advance stealthily with few symptoms. With a novel electrochemical biosensing device that identifies the tiniest signals these biomarkers emit, a pair of NJIT inventors are hoping to bridge this gap. Their work in disease detection is an illustration of the power of electrical sensing – and the growing role of engineers – in medical research.

“Ideally, there would be a simple, inexpensive test – performed at a regular patient visit in the absence of specific symptoms – to screen for some of the more silent, deadly cancers,” says Bharath Babu Nunna, a recent Ph.D. graduate who worked with Eon Soo Lee, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, to develop a nanotechnology-enhanced biochip to detect cancers, malaria and viral diseases such as pneumonia early in their progression with a pin prick blood test.

Their device includes a microfluidic channel through which a tiny amount of drawn blood flows past a sensing platform coated with biological agents that bind with targeted biomarkers of disease in body fluids such as blood, tears and urine – thereby triggering an electrical nanocircuit that signals their presence. In research recently published in Nano Covergence, Nunna and his co-authors demonstrated the use of gold nanoparticles to enhance the sensor signal response of their device in cancer detection, among other findings.

One of the device’s core innovations is the ability to separate blood plasma from whole blood in its microfluidic channels. Blood plasma carries the disease biomarkers and it is therefore necessary to separate it to enhance the “signal to noise ratio” in order to achieve a highly accurate test. The standalone device analyzes a blood sample within two minutes with no need for external equipment.

“Our approach detects targeted disease biomolecules at the femto scale concentration, which is smaller than nano and even pico scale, and is akin to searching for a planet in a galaxy cluster. Current sensing technology is limited to concentrations a thousand times larger. Using a nanoscale platform allows us to identify these lower levels of disease,” Nunna says, adding, “And by separating the plasma from the blood, we are able to concentrate the disease biomarkers.”

Source: https://www.eurekalert.org/

Simple Blood Test Will Diagnose Alzheimer’s Next Year

April 3, 2019 Uncategorized

(from Bill Gates blog) How do you stop Alzheimer’s disease without a simple way to diagnose it? It’s a real chicken and egg problem, as I wrote last year on TGN. Discovering a treatment for Alzheimer’s requires lots of clinical trials for new drugs—but it’s difficult to enroll participants without a way to identify people who have the disease early enough for potential treatments to work.

Right now, the best way to diagnose the disease is through a spinal tap or a brain scan. The problem is that the former is invasive and the latter is expensive. Plus, many patients don’t get these tests until they start showing signs of cognitive decline, which means the disease may already be pretty advanced. It’s hard to overstate how important finding a reliable, affordable, and easy-to-use diagnostic is for stopping Alzheimer’s.

The good news is that we’re finally within reach of that goal thanks to significant breakthroughs over the last couple years. Scientists are pushing forward with new diagnostics that range from simple blood tests to voice analysis straight out of a sci-fi novel. We’re close to reaching the point where we can push past the chicken and egg problem.

That’s why I announced last summer that I was investing in a new fund with the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation called Diagnostics Accelerator, which aims to accelerate the progress already underway. I am grateful to be joined in this effort by my friends Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos. They have been tremendous partners who are deeply committed to finding an end to this disease. We’ll continue to work together on finding a new way to diagnose Alzheimer’s, as well as on other efforts, over the coming months. In the meantime, the fund is getting ready to announce the first round of awards.

It wasn’t that long ago that we had no way to test for Alzheimer’s beyond cognitive assessments. The first breakthrough came in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when brain imaging (like a PET scan or MRI) allowed us to see biological changes in the brain of someone with the disease.

Then came the spinal tap in 2006. A team of Swedish scientists—Oskar Hansson, Henrik Zetterberg, and Kaj Blennow—demonstrated that you could predict which patients would develop Alzheimer’s disease by looking at cerebrospinal fluid (the fluid found in the brain and spinal cord). Their discovery gave researchers a more accessible tool to make smarter decisions about who should be in a clinical trial. It wasn’t perfect, though—just ask anyone who’s ever had a spinal tap whether they’re eager to undergo the procedure again.

What does the ideal Alzheimer’s diagnostic look like? It needs to be cheap and easy to administer. It should tell us not only whether you have Alzheimer’s, but how far advanced the disease is. (Your cholesterol test doesn’t just tell you that you have cholesterol, after all—it lets you know how much you have and whether it could be a problem.) Above all, it should be as simple and painless as any of the other routine tests you get during your annual physical. In other words, a blood test would fit the bill.

Enter Randy Bateman, a professor and researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. His team was one of the first to identify changes in the blood of Alzheimer’s patients that remained consistent over many tests. Since he published his research in the summer of 2017, other researchers have released similar findings, and a lot of people are working to perfect the diagnostic (including the Swedish team that discovered the spinal tap test).

There’s a good chance a blood test will start being used to recruit patients into Alzheimer’s drug trials within the next year or two. That’s super exciting, because it means that labs will be able to recruit more patients more quickly, and scientists will be able to figure out whether a drug works in less time. It also means that you’ll one day be able to easily get tested during a routine doctor’s visit.

But what if we could find an even less invasive way to diagnose Alzheimer’s? What if we could use digital technology, not medicine, to identify individuals years before they start to develop mental decline?

Source: https://www.gatesnotes.com/

Cleaning Up Oil Using Magnets

April 2, 2019 Uncategorized

In future, it could be possible to remove oil spills on the surface of the ocean by using magnets. An interdisciplinary group of researchers at the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) in Germany, led by Prof. Dr. Marcus Halik has developed functionalised iron oxide particles that can attract any types of hydrocarbons. The magnetic particles and their shells can then be removed from the water relatively simply and in an environmentally-friendly manner and can even be reused after being cleaned.

The researchers have now published their study in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. In the study, they describe how functionalised iron oxide particles can be modified with a self-assembled monolayer so that they only adsorb hydrocarbons. This group of chemical substances includes light compounds such as alkanes and aromates but also crude oil, petrol and diesel. Such hydrocarbon molecules surround the very fine particles as if they are being sucked in and reach a volume that can grow to 14 times the size of the core of the particle.

Diagram of the process developed by materials scientists at FAU

A video on the researchers’ website shows how iron oxide powder is applied to liquid oil and the instant transformation into a substance that can be removed by a magnet. Iron oxide is a magnetic substance by nature.

In addition to the multiple reusability of the source material, the large surface to volume ratio provided by nanoparticles and the favourable ratio to the quantity of the hydrocarbons to be adsorbed all contribute to the very high efficiency of the process. In addition, it allows water to be completely cleaned of oil and oil products. Conventional methods, on the other hand, create dispersions or mixtures of substances that enable the hydrocarbons to be more easily digested by bacteria, but remain in the seawater until this process is complete.

Source: https://eam.fau.de/

First Woman To Win Mathematics’ Prestigious Abel Prize

April 1, 2019 Uncategorized

This year, another glass ceiling broke when Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win mathematics‘ prestigious Abel Prize. Her achievement no doubt inspired legions of young girls already passionate about STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—and served as a salute to the woman mathematicians who came before.

One such woman is NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson, who once said of her love of math, “I counted everything. I counted the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed … anything that could be counted, I did.”

Here, for National Women’s History Month, we honor some coding pioneers whose careful calculations led to many of the world’s greatest technological advances, from programming the first computers to successfully putting humans on the moon.

Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/

How To Kill Deadly Hospital Bacteria

March 29, 2019 Uncategorized

Scientists at Aston University (UK) have discovered a technique similar to medieval stained glass-making that can completely eradicate the deadliest hospital infections within hours.

Using a so-called bioactive phosphate glass containing small amounts of the metallic element cobalt, the researchers were able to achieve a “complete kill” of the deadly bacterial infections E.coli and Candida albicans (a fungal infection associated with surgery), as well as a near-complete kill of Staphylococcus aureus (the drug-resistant form of which is MRSA).

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Lead researcher, Dr Richard Martin of Aston University in Birmingham, said the findings had significant implications, offering the possibility of cheap, antimicrobial implants and coatings to combat the most common sources of infections associated with medical care. Avoiding the need for antibiotics, it is also thought the bioactive glass could be effective against drug-resistant ‘superbugs’, helping to tackle the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), over four million people in Europe get a healthcare-associated infection (HAI) every year, and around 37,000 die as a direct result of the infection. In its most recent survey of hospital patients, Public Health England found that 6.4% had a healthcare-associated infection.

In the study, published in the journal ACS Biomaterials, the researchers used a centuries-old technique to make glass laced with trace amounts of cobalt in a furnace heated to over 1,000°C, before rapid cooling to prevent crystallisation. These were then ground down into a fine powder and put into contact with bacteria in petri dishes. The glasses contained varying concentrations of cobalt, providing a controlled release of antimicrobial ions as they dissolved. At the highest concentration, the glass completely eradicated E.coli within just six hours, with a “complete kill” also observed for C.albicans within 24 hours. S.aureus levels were reduced by 99% after 24 hours.

Source: https://www2.aston.ac.uk/

How To Detect Genetic Mutations In Minutes

March 28, 2019 Uncategorized

A team of engineers at the UC Berkeley and the Keck Graduate Institute (KGI) of The Claremont Colleges combined CRISPR with electronic transistors made from graphene to create a new hand-held device that can detect specific genetic mutations in a matter of minutes.

The device, dubbed CRISPR-Chip, could be used to rapidly diagnose genetic diseases or to evaluate the accuracy of gene-editing techniques. The team used the device to identify genetic mutations in DNA samples from Duchenne muscular dystrophy patients.

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“We have developed the first transistor that uses CRISPR to search your genome for potential mutations,” said Kiana Aran, an assistant professor at KGI who conceived of the technology while a postdoctoral scholar in UC Berkeley bioengineering professor Irina Conboy’s lab. “You just put your purified DNA sample on the chip, allow CRISPR to do the search and the graphene transistor reports the result of this search in minutes.”

Aran, who developed this technology and brought it to fruition at KGI, is the senior author of a paper describing the device that appears online March 25 in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering.

Doctors and geneticists can now sequence DNA to pinpoint genetic mutations underlying a host of traits and conditions, and companies like 23andMe and AncestryDNA even make these tests available to curious consumers.

Source: https://news.berkeley.edu/

How To Arrange Nanoparticules With a Vinaigrette

March 27, 2019 Uncategorized

Materials scientists at Duke University have theorized a new “oil-and-vinegar” approach to engineering self-assembling materials of unusual architectures made out of spherical nanoparticles. The resulting structures could prove useful to applications in optics, plasmonics, electronics and multi-stage chemical catalysis. Left to their own tendencies, a system of suspended spherical nanoparticles designed to clump together will try to maximize their points of contact by packing themselves as tightly as possible. This results in the formation of either random clusters or a three-dimensional, crystalline structure.

But materials scientists often want to build more open structures of lower dimensions, such as strings or sheets, to take advantage of certain phenomena that can occur in the spaces between different types of particles. In the new study, Gaurav Arya, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at Duke, proposes a method that takes advantage of the layers formed by liquids that, like a bottle of vinaigrette left on the shelf for too long, refuse to mix together.

When spherical nanoparticles are placed into such a system, they tend to form a single layer at the interface of the opposing liquids. But they don’t have to stay there. By attaching “oil” or “vinegar” molecules to the particles’ surfaces, researchers can make them float more on one side of the dividing line than the other.

“The particles want to maximize their number of contacts and form bulk-like structures, but at the same time, the interface of the different liquids is trying to force them into two layers,” said Arya. “So you have a competition of forces, and you can use that to form different kinds of unique and interesting structures.”

Arya’s idea is to precisely control the amount that each spherical nanoparticle is repelled by one liquid or the other. And according to his calculations, by altering this property along with others such as the nanoparticles’ composition and size, materials scientists can make all sorts of interesting shapes, from spindly molecule-like structures to zig-zag structures where only two nanoparticles touch at a time. One could even imagine several different layers working together to arrange a system of nanoparticles.

In the proof-of-concept paper, the nanoparticles could be made out of anything. Gold or semiconductors could be useful for plasmonic and electrical devices, while other metallic elements could catalyze various chemical reactions. The opposing substrates that form the interface, meanwhile, are modeled after various types of polymers that could also be used in such applications.

The novel approach appeared online on March 25 in the journal ACS Nano.

Source: https://pratt.duke.edu/

How To Create Electricity From Heat

March 26, 2019 Uncategorized

A University of Maryland-led team of researchers has created a heat-to-electricity device that runs on ions and which could someday harness the body’s heat to provide energy.

Led by UMD researchers Liangbing Hu, Robert Briber and Tian Li of the department of materials science, and Siddhartha Das of mechanical engineering, the team transformed a piece of wood into a flexible membrane that generates energy from the same type of electric current (ions) that the human body runs on. This energy is generated using charged channel walls and other unique properties of the wood’s natural nanostructures. With this new wood-based technology, they can use a small temperature differential to efficiently generate ionic voltage, as demonstrated in a paper published in the journal Nature Materials.

If you’ve ever been outside during a lightning storm, you’ve seen that generating charge between two very different temperatures is easy. But for small temperature differences, it is more difficult. However, the team says they have succesfully tackled this challenge. Hu said they now have “demonstrated their proof-of-concept device, to harvest low-grade heat using nanoionic behavior of processed wood nanostructures”.

Trees grow channels that move water between the roots and the leaves. These are made up of fractally-smaller channels, and at the level of a single cell, channels just nanometers or less across. The team has harnessed these channels to regulate ions.

The researchers used basswood, which is a fast-growing tree with low environmental impact. They treated the wood and removed two components – lignin, that makes the wood brown and adds strength, and hemicellulose, which winds around the layers of cells binding them together. This gives the remaining cellulose its signature flexibility. This process also converts the structure of the cellulose from type I to type II which is a key to enhancing ion conductivity.

A membrane, made of a thin slice of wood, was bordered by platinum electrodes, with sodium-based electrolyte infiltrated into the cellulose. The regulate the ion flow inside the tiny channels and generate electrical signal. “The charged channel walls can establish an electrical field that appears on the nanofibers and thus help effectively regulate ion movement under a thermal gradient,” said Tian Li, first author of the paper.

Source: https://www.umdrightnow.umd.edu/

How To Produce Entire Homes With A 3D Printer

March 25, 2019 Uncategorized

If you’re looking for a 3D printer that can fit comfortably on the side of your desk and bust out small home-printed objects, then Danish company Cobod International’s new 3D printer definitely isn’t for you. Roughly the size of a small barn, the BOD2 is the world’s largest 3D printer designed for construction purposes. It is capable of printing entire buildings up to 40 feet wide, 90 feet long and 30 feet tall. In other words, if you’re only looking to print out a DIY fidget spinner, you’re going to want to search elsewhere.

“Our second-generation 3D construction printer, BOD2, is special in the way that it has a modular frame which gives the opportunity for our customers to choose the size of printer that fits their specific purpose,” said Asger Dath, communications manager for Cobod, “Furthermore, it is currently the fastest-printing construction printer on the market. With the tangential controlled print head, together with our customizable nozzle system, our customers are able to print different wall surfaces, especially very smooth wall surfaces.”

The printer functions in a very similar way to a standard FDM (fused filament fabrication) printer. It is fed with concrete, which is then extruded using a motor in the print head. This concrete material is fed into the printer as a dry mix, prior to being mixed by a pump and then traveling through a tube to the print head to be expelled.

“We decided to develop the BOD2 after we found a great interest from the construction industry after we 3D printed the first building in Europe,” Dath said. “The many requests we got had all different purposes and therefore the sizes differed a great deal. [This] led to the idea of developing a modular construction printer that could meet the needs of all the requested sizes, instead of developing a printer in one or two sizes.”

The BOD2 printer was recently purchased by the construction company Elite for Construction & Development Co., with the express purpose of creating 3D printed private homes in Saudi Arabia. This is going to be a big job. In all, Saudi Arabia aims to build 1.5 million private houses over the next decade. While not all of those will necessarily be 3D printed, a tool such as this could certainly help save on both time and money.

Source: https://cobod.com/
AND
https://www.digitaltrends.com/

How To Levitate Objects With Light

March 22, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers at Caltech have designed a way to levitate and propel objects using only light, by creating specific nanoscale patterning on the objects’ surfaces. Though still theoretical, the work is a step toward developing a spacecraft that could reach the nearest planet outside of our solar system in 20 years, powered and accelerated only by light. The research was done in the laboratory of Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science in Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science.

Decades ago, the development of so-called optical tweezers enabled scientists to move and manipulate tiny objects, like nanoparticles, using the radiative pressure from a sharply focused beam of laser light. This work formed the basis for the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. However, optical tweezers are only able to manipulate very small objects and only at very short distances. Ognjen Ilic, postdoctoral scholar and the study’s first author, gives an analogy: “One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer. But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on.”

With this new research, objects of many different shapes and sizes—from micrometers to meters—could be manipulated with a light beam. The key is to create specific nanoscale patterns on an object’s surface. This patterning interacts with light in such a way that the object can right itself when perturbed, creating a restoring torque to keep it in the light beam. Thus, rather than requiring highly focused laser beams, the objects’ patterning is designed to “encode” their own stability. The light source can also be millions of miles away.

“We have come up with a method that could levitate macroscopic objects,” says Atwater, who is also the director of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis. “There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft. We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”

In theory, this spacecraft could be patterned with nanoscale structures and accelerated by an Earth-based laser light. Without needing to carry fuel, the spacecraft could reach very high, even relativistic speeds and possibly travel to other stars.

Atwater also envisions that the technology could be used here on Earth to enable rapid manufacturing of ever-smaller objects, like circuit boards.

A paper describing the research appears online in the journal Nature Photonics.

Source: https://www.caltech.edu/

Molecular Nanocomputers

March 21, 2019 Uncategorized

Computer scientists at Caltech have designed DNA molecules that can carry out reprogrammable computations, for the first time creating so-called algorithmic self-assembly in which the same “hardware” can be configured to run different “software.”

A team headed by Caltech‘s Erik Winfree (PhD ’98), professor of computer science, computation and neural systems, and bioengineering, showed how the DNA computations could execute six-bit algorithms that perform simple tasks. The system is analogous to a computer, but instead of using transistors and diodes, it uses molecules to represent a six-bit binary number (for example, 011001) as input, during computation, and as output. One such algorithm determines whether the number of 1-bits in the input is odd or even, (the example above would be odd, since it has three 1-bits); while another determines whether the input is a palindrome; and yet another generates random numbers.

“Think of them as nano apps,” says Damien Woods, professor of computer science at Maynooth University near Dublin, Ireland, and one of two lead authors of the study. “The ability to run any type of software program without having to change the hardware is what allowed computers to become so useful. We are implementing that idea in molecules, essentially embedding an algorithm within chemistry to control chemical processes.”

The system works by self-assembly: small, specially designed DNA strands stick together to build a logic circuit while simultaneously executing the circuit algorithm. Starting with the original six bits that represent the input, the system adds row after row of molecules—progressively running the algorithm. Modern digital electronic computers use electricity flowing through circuits to manipulate information; here, the rows of DNA strands sticking together perform the computation. The end result is a test tube filled with billions of completed algorithms, each one resembling a knitted scarf of DNA, representing a readout of the computation. The pattern on each “scarf” gives you the solution to the algorithm that you were running. The system can be reprogrammed to run a different algorithm by simply selecting a different subset of strands from the roughly 700 that constitute the system.

“We were surprised by the versatility of programs we were able to design, despite being limited to six-bit inputs,” says David Doty, fellow lead author and assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis. “When we began experiments, we had only designed three programs. But once we started using the system, we realized just how much potential it has. It was the same excitement we felt the first time we programmed a computer, and we became intensely curious about what else these strands could do. By the end, we had designed and run a total of 21 circuits.”

The findings have been reported in the journal Nature.

Source: https://www.caltech.edu/

Cost-Effective Method for Hydrogen Fuel Production

March 20, 2019 Uncategorized

Nanoparticles composed of nickel and iron have been found to be more effective and efficient than other, more costly materials when used as catalysts in the production of hydrogen fuel through water electrolysis. The discovery was made by University of Arkansas researchers Jingyi Chen, associate professor of physical chemistry, and Lauren Greenlee, assistant professor of chemical engineering, as well as colleagues from Brookhaven National Lab and Argonne National Lab. The researchers demonstrated that using nanocatalysts composed of nickel and iron increases the efficiency of water electrolysis, the process of breaking water atoms apart to produce hydrogen and oxygen and combining them with electrons to create hydrogen gas.

Chen and her colleagues discovered that when nanoparticles composed of an iron and nickel shell around a nickel core are applied to the process, they interact with the hydrogen and oxygen atoms to weaken the bonds, increasing the efficiency of the reaction by allowing the generation of oxygen more easily. Nickel and iron are also less expensive than other catalysts, which are made from scarce materials.

This marks a step toward making water electrolysis a more practical and affordable method for producing hydrogen fuel. Current methods of water electrolysis are too energy-intensive to be effective.

Chen, Greenlee and their colleagues recently published their results in the journal Nanoscale.

Source: https://news.uark.edu/

Rotating Black Holes Might Serve As Portals For Hyperspace Travel

March 19, 2019 Uncategorized

Black holes skirt the line between science fiction and science fact. On the one hand, scientists have seen real black holes in action, consuming unsuspecting stars that pass too close. But where reality ends and fiction takes over is at the edge of a black hole — a place called the event horizon, where no spacecraft has ever gone.

So, whatever happens beyond that boundary, inside of a black hole, is anyone’s guess. Scientists agree that if you travel far enough into a black hole, gravity will eventually become so strong that it kills anything in its path. But sci-fi films are more optimistic, depicting black holes as portals through space and time or gateways to other dimensions. And it turns out, some scientists now think the sci-fi buffs may be onto something. Black holes might be suitable for hyperspace travel, after all; it just takes the right kind of black hole. At the center of every black hole is a point of infinite density, called a singularity. It’s what gives black holes their strong gravitational pull. And for decades, scientists thought singularities were all the same, so anything that passed the event horizon would be destroyed the same way: by being stretched and pulled like an infinitely long piece of spaghetti.

But that all changed in the early 1990s when different research teams in Canada and the US discovered a second singularity called a “mass inflation singularity.” It still has a strong gravitational pull, but it would only stretch you by a finite amount, and potentially NOT kill you in the process, meaning, you might survive the trip through a black hole. More specifically, through a large, rotating black hole, which is where these types of singularities exist.

Now, astronomers obviously can’t travel through a black hole yet to test this theory. In fact, the best place to test this is at the supermassive black hole in the center of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, which is 27,000 light years away. Not conveniently close to the least.

Therefore, scientists instead run computer simulations to see what would happen if we did manage to reach an isolated, rotating black hole, and now, for the first time, a team of scientists at UMass Dartmouth and Georgia Gwinnett College has done exactly that.

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“You would feel a slight increase in temperature, but it would not be a dramatic increase. It’s just that you don’t have enough time to respond to the very strong forces. It would just go through you too quickly,” said Lior Burko from Georgia Gwinnett College. He added that passing through a weak singularity is like quickly running your finger through a candle flame that’s 1,000 degrees Celsius. If you hold your finger in the flame long enough, you’ll get burned, but pass your finger through quickly, and you’ll barely feel a thing. Similarly, if you pass through a weak singularity with the right speed and momentum, and at the right time, you may not feel much at all.

As for what happens once you get through to the other side, no one really knows, but Burko has his own ideas. He says one possibility is that we’d arrive at some other remote part of our galaxy, potentially light years away from any planets or stars, but a second, and perhaps more intriguing, possibility is that we’d arrive in a different galaxy altogether. That’s if you even make it that far. Scientists say more research is needed before we’re anywhere close to successfully traveling through a black hole. But when we are ready, one of the safest passageways might be the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy called Sagittarius A*, and it might just be our ticket out of the Milky Way.

Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/
AND
https://www.ggc.edu/

Cancer’s ‘Internal Wiring’ Predicts Relapse Risk

March 18, 2019 Uncategorized

The “internal wiring” of breast cancer can predict which women are more likely to survive or relapse, say researchers. The study shows that breast cancer is 11 separate diseases that each has a different risk of coming back. The hope is that the findings, in the journal Nature, could identify people needing closer monitoring and reassure others at low risk of recurrence.

Cancer Research UK said that the work was “incredibly encouraging” but was not yet ready for widespread use. The scientists, at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University, looked in incredible detail at nearly 2,000 women’s breast cancers. They went far beyond considering all breast cancers as a single disease and beyond modern medicine’s way of classifying the tumours.

Doctors currently classify breast cancers based on whether they respond to the hormone oestrogen or targeted therapies like Herceptin. The research team analysed the genetic mutations inside the tumour to create a new way of classifying them.

By following women for 20 years, they are now able to show which types of breast cancer are more likely to come back. “This is really biology-driven, it’s the molecular wiring of your tumour, said Prof Carlos Caldas. “Once and for all we need to stop talking about breast cancer as one disease, it’s a constellation of 11 diseases. “This is a very significant step to more precision-type medicine.”

Source: https://www.bbc.com/

How To Reverse Vascular Disease In Kidney Failure

March 15, 2019 Uncategorized

By loading a chelation drug into a nano-sized homing device, researchers at Clemson University have reversed in an animal model the deadliest effects of chronic kidney disease, which kills more people in the United States each year than breast or prostate cancer. When kidneys stop working properly, calcium builds up in artery tissue, leading to heart disease. Although nearly half a million Americans receive kidney dialysis, heart disease is the leading cause of death for people with chronic kidney disease.

Human kidney cross section on scientific background

“The findings are very exciting scientifically, but also for the thousands of patients who could potentially benefit from this technology one day,” said Naren Vyavahare, professor of bioengineering at Clemson and the principal investigator of the research.

Chelation, a method of removing metals such as iron and lead from the body, has been used experimentally for some people with heart disease. The therapy is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, but the National Institutes of Health has sponsored two large-scale, multi-center studies using ethylene diamine tetra-acetic acid, or EDTA, as chelation therapy for people with heart disease.

In clinical studies, EDTA is included in an infusion that circulates through the body; it’s systemic and non-specific. This method of chelation has shown good results in improving heart function, especially in diabetic patients, Vyavahare said. But EDTA infusion therapy is arduous (it requires 40 infusions over a period of a year), and it can cause side effects, including a depletion of calcium from the blood and from bone.

Now, in a paper published in Scientific Reports, a Nature publication, Vyavahare’s team describes how they developed an animal model that mimics a human’s chronic kidney disease. Animals were treated either with EDTA infusions, like in the NIH human trials, or with EDTA enclosed in a nanoparticle coupled with an antibody that seeks out damaged elastin. In animals that received the targeted therapy, calcium buildup was destroyed, without causing side effects, better than with EDTA infusions alone. Moreover, the calcification did not come back up to four weeks after the last injection, even though other signs of chronic kidney disease were present.

Source: http://newsstand.clemson.edu/

Nanorobots Probe Into Cells

March 14, 2019 Uncategorized

U of T Engineering researchers have built a set of magnetic ‘tweezers’ that can position a nano-scale bead inside a human cell in three dimensions with unprecedented precision. The nano-bot has already been used to study the properties of cancer cells, and could point the way toward enhanced diagnosis and treatment.

Professor Yu Sun (MIE, IBBME, ECE) and his team have been building robots that can manipulate individual cells for two decades. Their creations have the ability to manipulate and measure single cells — useful in procedures such as in vitro fertilization and personalized medicine. Their latest study, published today in Science Robotics, takes the technology one step further.

The magnetic bead introduced into the cell and controlled to be navigated onto the nuclear envelope.

“So far, our robot has been exploring outside a building, touching the brick wall, and trying to figure out what’s going on inside,” says Sun. “We wanted to deploy a robot in the building and probe all the rooms and structures.” The team has created robotic systems that can manipulate sub-cellular structures inside electron microscopes, but that requires freeze-drying the cells and cutting them into tiny slices. To probe live cells, other teams have used techniques such as lasers or acoustics.

“Optical tweezers — using lasers to probe cells — is a popular approach,” says Xian Wang (MIE), the PhD candidate who conducted the research. The technology was honoured with 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics, but Wang says the force that it can generate is not large enough for mechanical manipulation and measurement he wanted to do. “You can try to increase the power to generate higher force, but you run the risk of damaging the sub-cellular components you’re trying to measure,” says Wang.

The system Wang designed uses six magnetic coils placed in different planes around a microscope coverslip seeded with live cancer cells. A magnetic iron bead about 700 nanometres in diameter — about 100 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair — is placed on the coverslip, where the cancer cells easily take it up inside their membranes. Once the bead is inside, Wang controls its position using real-time feedback from confocal microscopy imaging. He uses a computer-controlled algorithm to vary the electrical current through each of the coils, shaping the magnetic field in three dimensions and coaxing the bead into any desired position within the cell.

“We can control the position to within a couple of hundred nanometers down the Brownian motion limit,” says Wang. “We can exert forces an order of magnitude higher than would be possible with lasers.”

In collaboration with Dr. Helen McNeil and Yonit Tsatskis at Mount Sinai Hospital and Dr. Sevan Hopyan at The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids), the team used their robotic system to study early-stage and later-stage bladder cancer cells. Previous studies on cell nuclei required their extraction of from cells. Wang and Sun measured cell nuclei in intact cells without the need to break apart the cell membrane or cytoskeleton. They were able to show that the nucleus is not equally stiff in all directions. “It’s a bit like a football in shape — mechanically, it’s stiffer along one axis than the other,” says Sun. “We wouldn’t have known that without this new technique.”

They were also able to measure exactly how much stiffer the nucleus got when prodded repeatedly, and determine which cell protein or proteins may play a role in controlling this response. This knowledge could point the way toward new methods of diagnosing cancer. “We know that in the later-stage cells, the stiffening response is not as strong,” says Wang. “In situations where early-stage cancer cells and later-stage cells don’t look very different morphologically, this provides another way of telling them apart.”

According to Sun, the research could go even further. “You could imagine bringing in whole swarms of these nano-bots, and using them to either starve a tumour by blocking the blood vessels into the tumor, or destroy it directly via mechanical ablation,” says Sun. “This would offer a way to treat cancers that are resistant to chemotherapy, radiotherapy and immunotherapy.”

Source: https://news.engineering.utoronto.ca/

Conflicting Realities

March 13, 2019 Uncategorized

Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it. Back in 1961, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Eugene Wigner outlined a thought experiment that demonstrated one of the lesser-known paradoxes of quantum mechanics. The experiment shows how the strange nature of the universe allows two observers—say, Wigner and Wigner’s friend—to experience different realities.

Since then, physicists have used the “Wigner’s Friend” thought experiment to explore the nature of measurement and to argue over whether objective facts can exist. That’s important because scientists carry out experiments to establish objective facts. But if they experience different realities, the argument goes, how can they agree on what these facts might be?
That’s provided some entertaining fodder for after-dinner conversation, but Wigner’s thought experiment has never been more than that—just a thought experiment. Last year, however, physicists noticed that recent advances in quantum technologies have made it possible to reproduce the Wigner’s Friend test in a real experiment. In other words, it ought to be possible to create different realities and compare them in the lab to find out whether they can be reconciled.

And today, Massimiliano Proietti at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and a few colleagues say they have performed this experiment for the first time: they have created different realities and compared them. Their conclusion is that Wigner was correct—these realities can be made irreconcilable so that it is impossible to agree on objective facts about an experiment.Wigner’s original thought experiment is straightforward in principle. It begins with a single polarized photon that, when measured, can have either a horizontal polarization or a vertical polarization. But before the measurement, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, the photon exists in both polarization states at the same time—a so-called superposition.

Wigner imagined a friend in a different lab measuring the state of this photon and storing the result, while Wigner observed from afar. Wigner has no information about his friend’s measurement and so is forced to assume that the photon and the measurement of it are in a superposition of all possible outcomes of the experiment.

But this is in stark contrast to the point of view of the friend, who has indeed measured the photon’s polarization and recorded it. The friend can even call Wigner and say the measurement has been done (provided the outcome is not revealed). So the two realities are at odds with each other. “This calls into question the objective status of the facts established by the two observers,” say Proietti and co. That’s the theory, but last year Caslav Brukner, at the University of Vienna in Austria, came up with a way to re-create the Wigner’s Friend experiment in the lab by means of techniques involving the entanglement of many particles at the same time.

The breakthrough that Proietti and co have made is to carry this out. “In a state-of-the-art 6-photon experiment, we realize this extended Wigner’s friend scenario,” they say. They use these six entangled photons to create two alternate realities—one representing Wigner and one representing Wigner’s friend. Wigner’s friend measures the polarization of a photon and stores the result. Wigner then performs an interference measurement to determine if the measurement and the photon are in a superposition.

The experiment produces an unambiguous result. It turns out that both realities can coexist even though they produce irreconcilable outcomes, just as Wigner predicted. That raises some fascinating questions that are forcing physicists to reconsider the nature of reality.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/

3D printing becoming a surgical game changer

March 12, 2019 Uncategorized

Imagine 1,000 puzzle pieces without any picture of what it’s ultimately supposed to look like. With few, if any, reference points, the challenge of fitting them together would be daunting. That’s what surgeons often confront when a patient suffering from a traumatic injury or condition has a portion of their body that is dramatically damaged or changed. The “puzzle” can be exponentially harder when the injuries involve a person’s face or skull – areas of the human anatomy that are complex, difficult to surgically navigate, and often require both functional and near-perfect cosmetic repair.

Now, thanks to high-tech equipment that is sometimes not much bigger than a home printer, UC Davis Health physicians are enhancing their capabilities and mapping out surgeries in ways that benefit patients and surgical outcomes.

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“3D printing, which for us means manufacturing that’s accurate, affordable and on-site, can be a game changer in health care,” said David Lubarsky, vice chancellor for Human Health Sciences and CEO of UC Davis Health, who is very encouraged by the university’s newest technology initiatives and promising results.

The new device is a specialized but fairly affordable printer that produces three-dimensional models of an individual’s skull or body part. The 3D models enable a surgeon to visualize, practice and then perform the reconstructive surgery while saving time and increasing precision.

“Facial reconstructive surgery involves intricate anatomy within an extremely narrow operative field in which to maneuver our instruments,” said E. Bradley Strong, a professor of otolaryngology who specializes in facial reconstructive surgery. “Being able to print out a high-resolution 3D model of the injury, allows us to do detailed preoperative planning and preparation that is more efficient and accurate. We can also use these patient specific models in the operating room to improve the accuracy of implant placement.”

The 3D printer used by Strong and his colleagues for the past year is about the size of a mini-refrigerator and costs approximately $4,000. It uses the imaging data from a patient’s computed tomography (CT) scans to provide the modeling output information. Like an inkjet printer, the 3D version spits out layer upon layer of material over a period of hours, sometimes taking nearly a day to complete, depending on the complexity of the model. The finished replica can save time during surgery, which means less time on the operating table for a patient and potentially a better outcome.

By creating a 3D model prior to surgery, Strong is able to bend and customize generic surgical plates into patient-specific shapes that fit perfectly for each individual patient.

Source: https://health.ucdavis.edu/

How To Turn Data Into Ultrasonic Sound Waves

March 11, 2019 Uncategorized

The ultrasonic communication technology company Sonarax in Israel, unveils a new standard in machine-to-machine (m2m) connectivity allowing devices to communicate with one another using sound waves. The protocol is the largest global infrastructure install base and operates on any device that has a built-in speaker or microphone. Sonarax provides a highly reliable alternative for m2m connectivity and it works even when the internet, GPS, and cellular networks are unavailable.

The protocol performs pairing between devices and transfer of data on both encrypted and open channels using sound waves. It provides significantly easier and faster deployments of m2m applications such as sonic QR codes, mobile payments, and ID authentication.

Sonarax‘s protocol requires no special hardware and is easy to deploy and use. This protocol can be integrated with any application across various operating systems, including Windows, Android, and iOS, and is already embedded in leading sonic processors. Sonarax utilizes frequencies beyond the threshold of human hearing and can be intertwined with any audio channel carried by media, including, TV, and others to introduce additional communication data, such as advertising information and more.

Sonarax’s ultrasonic technology was designed to provide initial solutions in three main important areas:

Ultrasonic Payments: Facilitating secure pairing for mobile payments and contactless ATM interaction – already in pilot with major global banks and financial institutions.
Ultrasonic Authentication: Providing a seamless and secure identification solution – a fully developed and off-the-shelf SDK that can be easily integrated and used by any third party application
Ultrasonic Indoor Positioning: Allowing indoor positioning in buildings such as shopping malls and hospitals where GPS stops working. Sonarax is working to implement its technology for novel indoor navigation functionality to be launched at a later date.

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“We’re utilizing the existing element of sound to modernize machine-to-machine connectivity so that it enhances payment authentication and for the first time can also be used for indoor positioning,” explains Benny Saban, CEO of Sonarax. “Sound cannot fail or be compromised and we’re excited to finally reveal our product at MWC and get consumers onboard to the next generation of device communication.”

Source: https://www.sonarax.com/

Tiny 4-Inch Wafer Holds One Million NanoRobots

March 8, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers have harnessed the latest nanofabrication techniques to create bug-shaped robots that are wirelessly powered, able to walk, able to survive harsh environments and tiny enough to be injected through an ordinary hypodermic needle.

“When I was a kid, I remember looking in a microscope, and seeing all this crazy stuff going on. Now we’re building stuff that’s active at that size. We don’t just have to watch this world. You can actually play in it,” said Marc Miskin, who developed the nanofabrication techniques with his colleagues professors Itai Cohen and Paul McEuen and researcher Alejandro Cortese at Cornell University while Miskin was a postdoc in the laboratory for atomic and solid state physics there. In January, he became an assistant professor of electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Miskin will present his microscopic robot research on this week at the American Physical Society March Meeting in Boston. He will also participate in a press conference describing the work. Information for logging on to watch and ask questions remotely is included at the end of this news release.

Over the course of the past several years, Miskin and research colleagues developed a multistep nanofabrication technique that turns a 4-inch specialized silicon wafer into a million microscopic robots in just weeks. Each 70 micron long (about the width of a very thin human hair), the robots’ bodies are formed from a superthin rectangular skeleton of glass topped with a thin layer of silicon into which the researchers etch its electronics control components and either two or four silicon solar cells — the rudimentary equivalent of a brain and organs.

Robots are built massively in parallel using nanofabrication technology: each wafer holds 1 million machines

“The really high-level explanation of how we make them is we’re taking technology developed by the semiconductor industry and using it to make tiny robots,” said Miskin.

Each of a robot’s four legs is formed from a bilayer of platinum and titanium (or alternately, graphene). The platinum is applied using atomic layer deposition. “It’s like painting with atoms,” said Miskin. The platinum-titanium layer is then cut into each robot’s four 100-atom-thick legs. “The legs are super strong,” he said. “Each robot carries a body that’s 1,000 times thicker and weighs roughly 8,000 times more than each leg.”

The researchers shine a laser on one of a robot’s solar cells to power it. This causes the platinum in the leg to expand, while the titanium remains rigid in turn, causing the limb to bend. The robot’s gait is generated because each solar cell causes the alternate contraction or relaxing of the front or back legs. The researchers first saw a robot’s leg move several days before Christmas 2017. “The leg just twitched a bit,” recalled Miskin. “But it was the first proof of concept — this is going to work!”

Teams at Cornell and Pennsylvania are now at work on smart versions of the robots with on-board sensors, clocks and controllers. The current laser power source would limit the robot’s control to a fingernail-width into tissue. So Miskin is thinking about new energy sources, including ultrasound and magnetic fields, that would enable these robots to make incredible journeys in the human body for missions such as drug delivery or mapping the brain.

“We found out you can inject them using a syringe and they survive — they’re still intact and functional — which is pretty cool,” he said.

Source: https://eurekalert.org/

‘Epigenetic’ Gene Tweaks Could Trigger Cancer

March 7, 2019 Uncategorized

You could be forgiven for thinking of cancer as a genetic disease. Sure, we know it can be triggered by things you do – smoking being the classic example – but most of us probably assume that we get cancer because of a genetic mutation – a glitch in our DNA. It turns out that this is not quite the end of the story.

We now have the first direct evidence that switching off certain genes – something that can be caused by our lifestyle or the environment we live in – can trigger tumours, without mutating the DNA itself. The good news is that these changes are, in theory, reversible.

All cells contain the same DNA, but individual genes in any cell can be switched on or off by the addition or subtraction of a methyl group – a process known as epigenetic methylation.

For years, researchers have known that mutations to our DNA – either those passed on at birth or those acquired as a result of exposure to radiation, for example – can cause cancer. But epigenetic changes have also been implicated in cancer because abnormal patterns of gene methylation are seen in virtually all types of human tumours.

For example, a gene called MLH1 produces a protein that repairs DNA damage. It is often mutated in colon cancer tumours, but in some tumour samples the gene is healthy, but appears to have been silenced by methylation. The problem is that it has been difficult to test whether abnormal methylation occurs as a result of a tumour or is a cause of its growth.

“In genetics you can easily delete a gene and see what the consequence is, but it’s much harder to direct methylation to specific regions of the genome,” says Lanlan Shen of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

To get round this problem, Shen and her colleagues used a naturally occurring sequence of DNA, which draws in methyl groups to methylate nearby genes. They call it their “methylation magnet”.

The team inserted this sequence next to the tumour suppressor gene, p16, in mouse embryonic stem cells. These embryos then developed into mice that carry the “methylation magnet” in all of their cells. The team focused on methylating p16 because it is abnormally methylated in numerous cancers.

They monitored the rodents for 18 months – until they reached the mouse equivalent of middle age. Over this time, 30 per cent of the mice developed tumours around their body, including in their liver, colon, lungs and spleen. None of a control group of genetically identical mice developed tumours.

“Some tissues showed faster methylation than others, for example in the liver, colon and spleen, and that’s exactly where we saw the tumours grow,” says Shen. “It seems like methylation predisposed the tissue to tumour development.” She reckons that methylation silences p16, which lifts the break that it normally places on any abnormal cell division.

Source: https://www.newscientist.com/

Self-Sterilizing Microneedles

March 6, 2019 Uncategorized

Vaccinations are the world’s frontline defence against infectious diseases yet despite decades of interventions, unsafe injection practices continue to expose billions of people to serious infection and disease.

Now, new technology from the University of South Australia is revolutionising safe vaccination practices through antibacterial, silver-loaded dissolvable microneedle patches, which not only sterilise the injection site to inhibit the growth of bacteria, but also physically dissolve after administration.

These first generation microneedles have the potential to transform the safe administration of transdermal vaccinations and drug delivery”, explains Lead researcher, Professor Krasimir Vasilev .

“Injections are one of the most common health care procedures used for vaccinations and curative care around the world,” Prof Vasilev adds. “But up to 40 per cent of injections are given with improperly sterilised syringes and needles, placing millions of people at risk of contracting a range of illnesses or diseases. “Our silver-loaded microneedles have inherently potent antibacterial properties which inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria and reduce the chance of infection.”

The UniSA study tested the antibacterial efficacy of silver-loaded microneedles against bacteria associated with common skin infections – Golden staph, staphylococcus epidermis, escherichia coli and pseudomonas aeruginosa – and found that the silver-loaded microneedle patches created a 24-hour bacteria-free zone around the patch administration site, a feature unique to the new technology.

The silver-loaded microneedles comprise an array of 15 x 15 needles each 700 micron in length, which pierce only the top layer of the skin without reaching the underlying nerves, making them 100 per cent painless.

The microneedles are made from a safe, biocompatible and highly water-soluble polymer that completely dissolve within one minute of application, leaving behind no sharp waste.

Source: http://www.unisa.edu.au/

New Quantum Sensor Improves Cancer Treatment

March 5, 2019 Uncategorized

A new quantum sensor developed by researchers at the University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) in Canada, has proven it can outperform existing technologies and promises significant advancements in long-range 3D imaging and monitoring the success of cancer treatments.

The sensors are the first of their kind and are based on semiconductor nanowires that can detect single particles of light with high timing resolution, speed and efficiency over an unparalled wavelength range, from ultraviolet to near-infrared.

The technology also has the ability to significantly improve quantum communication and remote sensing capabilities.

Interaction of single incident photon pulses and a tapered semiconductor nanowire array photodetector

“A sensor needs to be very efficient at detecting light. In applications like quantum radar, surveillance, and nighttime operation, very few particles of light return to the device,” said principal investigator Michael Reimer, an IQC faculty member and assistant professor in the Faculty of Engineering’s electrical and computer engineering department. “In these cases, you want to be able to detect every single photon coming in.”

The next generation quantum sensor designed in Reimer’s lab is so fast and efficient that it can absorb and detect a single particle of light, called a photon, and refresh for the next one within nanoseconds. The researchers created an array of tapered nanowires that turn incoming photons into electric current that can be amplified and detected.

Remote sensing, high-speed imaging from space, acquiring long range high resolution 3D images, quantum communication, and singlet oxygen detection for dose monitoring in cancer treatment are all applications that could benefit from the kind of robust single photon detection that this new quantum sensor provides.

The semiconducting nanowire array achieves its high speed, timing resolution and efficiency thanks to the quality of its materials, the number of nanowires, doping profile and the optimization of the nanowire shape and arrangement. The sensor detects a broad spectrum of light with high efficiency and high timing resolution, all while operating at room temperature. Reimer emphasizes that the spectrum absorption can be broadened even further with different materials.

“This device uses Indium Phosphide (InP) nanowires. Changing the material to Indium Gallium Arsenide (InGaAs), for example, can extend the bandwidth even further towards telecommunications wavelengths while maintaining performance,” Reimer said. “It’s state of the art now, with the potential for further enhancements.”

Once the prototype is packaged with the right electronics and portable cooling, the sensor is ready for testing beyond the lab. “A broad range of industries and research fields will benefit from a quantum sensor with these capabilities,” said Reimer.

Source: https://uwaterloo.ca/

The Vatican’s Swiss Guards Are Now Using 3D Printed Helmets

March 4, 2019 Uncategorized

For hundreds of years, the Swiss Guard have worn a distinctive, brightly-colored dress uniform while protecting the Pope and Vatican City, with only a couple of minor changes over the years. This year, they’re making a big change: the traditional, metal helmet — called a morion — is being replaced with ones that are 3D printed.

The uniforms and equipment of the Swiss Guard are imbued with tradition. The modern uniform was introduced in 1914, inspired by Renaissance-era artwork featuring the soldiers. Over the years, the Vatican has retained the traditional elements of the uniform, employing blacksmiths to provide replacement parts for their armor. Last year, the Swiss Guard announced that it ould replace the iconic helmet with one made out of PA-12, which were lighter and cheaper than their metal predecessors. This isn’t a trivial thing — as the soldiers spend a lot of time outdoors in the sun, the helmets would become uncomfortably hot, to the point where they would get burned.
The first batch of 98 of the new helmets (120 were ordered in all) were delivered to the Vatican on January 22nd, on the 513th anniversary of the founding of the Guard. Those new helmets were designed using scans of helmets from the 16th century, and are printed in just 14 hours using an HP 3D printer, as opposed to the older metal ones, which took nearly 130 hours to manufacture. The new morions also considerably lighter (weighting in at 570 grams; the ones they are replacing weighed 2 kilograms), are UV resistant, and incorporate ventilation slots to keep the soldiers’ heads cooler. There’s also no tradeoff on security for the soldiers, according to Swiss Guard spokesman Sergeant Urs Breitenmoser, because they’re used for ceremonial purposes such as papal masses and state visits.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/

New Perovskite Solar Cells Increase Efficiency By 17%

March 1, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers have layered different mineral forms of titanium oxide on top of one another to improve perovskite-type solar cell efficiency by one-sixth. The layered titanium oxide layer was better able to transport electrons from the center of the cell to its electrodes. This novel approach could be used to fabricate even more efficient perovskite-type solar cells in future. While most solar cells are made of silicon, such cells are difficult to manufacture, requiring vacuum chambers and temperatures above 1000 °C. Research efforts have therefore recently focused on a new type of solar cell, based on metal halide perovskites. Perovskite solutions can be inexpensively printed to create more efficient, inexpensive solar cells.

In solar cells perovskites can turn light into electricity—but they have to be sandwiched between a negative and positive electrode. One of these electrodes has to be transparent, however, to allow the sun’s light to reach the perovskites. Not only that, any other materials used to help charges flow from the perovskites to the electrode must also be transparent. Researchers have previously found that thin layers of titanium oxide are both transparent and able to transport electrons to the electrode.

Now, a Japan-based research team centered at Kanazawa University has carried out a more detailed study into perovskite solar cells using electron transport layers made of anatase and brookite, which are different mineral forms of titanium oxide. They compared the impact of using either pure anatase or brookite or combination layers (anatase on top of brookite or brookite on top of anatase). The anatase layers were fabricated by spraying solutions onto glass coated with a transparent electrode that was heated to 450 °C. Meanwhile, the researchers used water-soluble brookite nanoparticles to create the brookite layers, as water-soluble inks are more environmentally friendly than conventional inks. These nanoparticles have been yielded poor results in the past; however, the team predicted that combination layers would solve the issues previously encountered when using the nanoparticles.

“By layering brookite on top of anatase we were able to improve solar cell efficiency by up to 16.82%,” study coauthor Koji Tomita says.

These results open up a new way to optimize perovskite solar cells, namely via the controlled stacking and manipulation of the different mineral forms of titanium oxide.

The team’s study was recently published in the ACS journal Nano Letters.

Source: https://www.kanazawa-u.ac.jp/

How To Hide Hot Objects From Infrared Detection

February 28, 2019 Uncategorized

Hiding an object from heat-sensing cameras could be useful for military and technology applications as well as for research. Efforts to develop such a method have been underway for decades with varying degrees of success. Now, researchers report in ACS Nano that they have fabricated an inexpensive, easy-to-produce film that makes objects completely invisible to infrared detectors.

Several prior systems have been developed to mask the difference in temperature between an object and its surroundings. But each of these alternatives has weaknesses, such as difficulty in making the devices, the need for a power supply, the use of rigid materials or the addition of thick and heavy thermal blankets that can lead to heat buildup. Xuetong Zhang and colleagues wanted to find a better way.

A new, flexible infrared stealth cloak is made of a porous film of Kevlar nanofibers impregnated with polyethylene glycol.

The researchers fabricated an aerogel film made of DuPont™ Kevlar® fibers. By itself, the aerogel turned out to be a good thermal insulator, but the researchers enhanced its capabilities by coating its fibers with polyethylene glycol (PEG) and a protective waterproof layer. PEG stores heat when it melts and releases heat when it solidifies. In simulated sunlight, the composite film covering an object soaked up heat from the sun while only slowly increasing in temperature, just like the surroundings, making the object invisible to a thermal camera.

When the light was turned off to simulate night, the coating gradually surrendered its stored heat energy to match the surroundings. Without the coating, the object heated up or cooled off much faster than its environment, making it visible. In a second type of application, a combined structure consisting of aerogel films and the PEG composite film could hide hot targets from a thermal camera. The researchers say their film performs comparably to other stealth films but is simpler and cheaper to make.

Source: https://www.eurekalert.org/
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https://cen.acs.org/

Driven by a Desire to Build Smarter Robots

February 27, 2019 Uncategorized

Founded in 2015, CloudMinds’ unique Cloud Robot Service Platform consists of Human Augmented Robotics Intelligence with Extreme Reality (HARIX), Secure virtual backbone network (VBN over 4G/5G), and Robot Control Unit (RCU). HARIX is a highly scalable “cloud brain” that can operate millions of cloud robots of different types and service roles. HARIX features a highly efficient multi-media switching engine, a MMO gaming engine, and a powerful AI Cloud that seamlessly integrates best-of-breed AI technologies developed by CloudMinds and others, such as face and object recognition, voice recognition and NLP, navigation, and motion control (vision controlled robotic grasping and move) as well as third party AI services. With a broad ecosystem of partners,

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CloudMinds’ cloud robotic services are empowering customer engagements in retail, hospitality, real estate, smart city and a wide range of vertical applications.

How to make robots marter? CoudMindsis connecting robots and devices over secure Virtual Backbone Networks (VBN) to Cloud AI. The Human Augmented Robotics Intelligence with Extreme Reality (HARIX) platform is an ever evolving “cloud brain”. It is capable of operating millions of cloud robots performing different tasks. It also empowers robots and devices with Cloud AI capabilities such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), Computer Vision (CV), navigation, and vision-controlled manipulation.

For sure in the vision of CloudMinds initiators, by 2025 helpful humanoid robots will be affordable for the average household.

Source: https://www.en.cloudminds.com/

Have China’s CRISPR Twins Enhanced Brains?

February 26, 2019 Uncategorized

New research suggests that a controversial gene-editing experiment to make children resistant to HIV may also have enhanced their ability to learn and form memories. The twins, called Lulu and Nana, reportedly had their genes modified before birth by a Chinese scientific team using the new editing tool CRISPR. The goal was to make the girls immune to infection by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Now, new research shows that the same alteration introduced into the girls’ DNA, deletion of a gene called CCR5, not only makes mice smarter but also improves human brain recovery after stroke, and could be linked to greater success in school.

“The answer is likely yes, it did affect their brains,” says Alcino J. Silva, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose lab uncovered a major new role for the CCR5 gene in memory and the brain’s ability to form new connections.

“The simplest interpretation is that those mutations will probably have an impact on cognitive function in the twins,” says Silva. He says the exact effect on the girls’ cognition is impossible to predict, and “that is why it should not be done.”

The Chinese team, led by He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, claimed it used CRISPR to delete CCR5 from human embryos, some of which were later used to create pregnancies. HIV requires the CCR5 gene to enter human blood cells.

The experiment has been widely condemned as irresponsible, and He is under investigation in China. News of the first gene-edited babies also inflamed speculation about whether CRISPR technology could one day be used to create super-intelligent humans, perhaps as part of a biotechnology race between the US and China.

There is no evidence that He actually set out to modify the twins’ intelligence. MIT Technology Review contacted scientists studying the effects of CCR5 on cognition, and they say the Chinese scientist never reached out to them, as he did to others from whom he hoped to get scientific advice or support.
“As far as I know, we never heard from him,” says Miou Zhou, a professor at the Western University of Health Sciences in California.

Although He never consulted the brain researchers, the Chinese scientist was certainly aware of the link between CCR5 and cognition. It was first shown in 2016 by Zhou and Silva, who found that removing the gene from mice significantly improved their memory. The team had looked at more than 140 different genetic alterations to find which made mice smarter.

Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/

Sharpen Molecular Scissors And Expand The Gene Editing Toolbox

February 25, 2019 Uncategorized

Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) scientists have figured out a better way to deliver a DNA editing tool to shorten the presence of the editor proteins in the cells in what they describe as a “hit and run” approach.

CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) technology is used to alter DNA sequences and modify gene function. CRISPR/Cas9 is an enzyme that is used like a pair of scissors to cut two strands of DNA at a specific location to add, remove or repair bits of DNA. But CRISPR/Cas9 is not 100 percent accurate and could potentially cut unexpected locations, causing unwanted results.

“One of the major challenges of CRISPR/Cas9 mRNA technologies is the possibility of off-targets which may cause tumors or mutations,” said Baisong Lu, Ph.D, assistant professor of regenerative medicine at WFIRM and one of the lead authors of the paper. Although other types of lentivirus-like bionanoparticles (LVLPs) have been described for delivering proteins or mRNAs, Lu said, “the LVLP we developed has unique features which will make it a useful tool in the expanding genome editing toolbox.”

To address the inaccuracy issue, WFIRM researchers asked the question: Is there a way to efficiently deliver Cas9 activity but achieve transient expression of genome editing proteins? They tested various strategies and then took the best properties of two widely used delivery vehicles – lentivirus vector and nanoparticles – and combined them, creating a system that efficiently packages Cas9 mRNA into LVLPs, enabling transient expression and highly efficient editing.

Lentiviral vector is a widely used gene delivery vehicle in research labs and is already widely used for delivering the CRISPR/Cas9 mRNA technology for efficient genome editing. Nanoparticles are also being used but they are not as efficient in delivery of CRISPR/Cas9.

“By combining the transient expression feature of nanoparticle-delivery strategies while retaining the transduction efficiency of lentiviral vectors, we have created a system that may be used for packaging various editor protein mRNA for genome editing in a ‘hit and run’ manner,” said Anthony Atala, M.D., director of WFIRM and co-lead author of the paper. “This system will not only improve safety but also avoid possible immune response to the editor proteins, which could improve in vivo gene editing efficiency which will be useful in research and clinical applications.”

The WFIRM team published its findings in a paper published recently in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.

Source: https://school.wakehealth.edu/

How To Extend The Charge-to-charge Life of Phones And Electric Cars By 40 %

February 22, 2019 Uncategorized

The need to store energy for portable devices, vehicles and housing is ever increasing.The transformation from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources need to be hastened to decrease greenhouse gases and limit global warming. The utilization of wind and solar power requires effective storage system to ensure continuous energy supply as a part of smart grid. Li-ion batteries are considered to be the best route for many advanced storage applications related to the clean electricity due to their high energy density.

The latest lithium-ion batteries on the market are likely to extend the charge-to-charge life of phones and electric cars by as much as 40 percent. This leap forward, which comes after more than a decade of incremental improvements, is happening because developers replaced the battery’s graphite anode with one made from silicon. Research from Drexel University and Trinity College in Ireland now suggests that an even greater improvement could be in line if the silicon is fortified with a special type of material called MXene.

Regarding the present Li-ion batteries, one of the limiting factors in their performance is the anode material that most commonly is graphite. Silicon is a promising material for Li-ion battery anodes: By using silicon instead of graphite, the energy density of a battery cell ccould be increased by 30 %. To achieve this, several obstacles have to be overcome: First, silicon experiences a volume expansion of 300 % when lithiated. During discharging, the particles tend to fracture and lose contact. Secondly, the volume expansion prevents the formation of a stable electrode-electrolyte interface resulting in a continuous decomposition of the electrolyte. These two reasons are main causes for the limited use of silicon in commercial batteries.

The image shows PSi microparticles connected to each other with CNTs to improve the conductivity of the material

Both of the above mentioned problems with silicon material can be avoided by designing optimal porous structures of mesoporous silicon (PSi). Porosity of PSi needs to be high enough for the material to be able to withstand the volume expansion but also low enough so that the volumetric capacity/energy density is still better than for graphite anodes.

Source: https://www.nature.com/

Battery-free Pacemakers Powered By A Patient’s Heartbeat

February 21, 2019 Uncategorized

A new device powered by the heart could finally solve the pacemaker problem. Some 1.5 million Americans have pacemakers implanted to keep their hearts beating steadily. The devices are life-saving, but they don’t last forever. Currently, most pacemaker batteries have to be replaced every five to 12 years, and doing so means invasive surgery each time. Researchers at the National Key Laboratory for Science and Technology in Shanghai, China have developed a tiny device that piggybacks off the heart itself to generate energy – meaning a pacemaker battery would never have to be replaced.

A healthy heart can keep time for itself, by way of an internal pacemaker called the sinus node in the upper right chamber. It fires off an electrical charge some 60 to 100 times a minute, and that electrical energy sets off a series of contractions of heart muscle which in turn pumps blood throughout the body. But as the heart ages or once it becomes diseased, the sinus node takes a hit, too, and may fail to keep the heart beating in time or at all. Fortunately, since the late 1950s, we’ve been able to substitute a small, implantable, battery-powered device to send these electrical signals once the heart can’t any more. Even 60 years later, however, we haven’t figured out what to do about the device’s power supply, however.

Surgery to place the pacemaker and wires that feed its electrical pulses to the heart is complex, requiring doctors to open the chest cavity. The pacemaker itself is tucked away in a ‘pocket’ much closer to the skin surface. Once the battery runs out, usually only a local anesthetic is required to remove the old device and put a new, fully charged one. Still, the procedure is an unpleasant hassle that comes with a risk of infection, and it’s expensive to have done. Depending on the pacemaker, the device itself may cost anywhere from $19,000 to $96,000, according to Costhelper – and that doesn’t include the expenses for the operation.

But the new Chinese-developed device shows promise to end the procedure. The new pacemaker accessory can actually harness the heart’s beats to power a pacemaker. The key to innovation is its flexible plastic frame, which allows the device to capture more energy from the heart than previous hard cases have done. At the device’s center are layers of piezoelectric material, which generates power whenever it is bent. Many materials acquire an electrical charge when force is applied to them, including natural ones in our bodies. Crystals, DNA and even bone are capable of capturing electrical energy. The trick is to apply enough force to a piezoelectric material, then supercharge it, because, on their own, these materials don’t work up all that much energy.

Scientists have long been looking to piezoelectricity as an elegant solution to recapturing otherwise wasted energy, and some have even applied it to the pacemaker before. But, previously, other researchers have not been able to create a device that bends enough to generate sufficient power. Now, the Chinese scientists have shown their device can fuel a pacemaker and keep a pig’s heart beating. The devices frame allows it to flex significantly with as little movement as is created by a heartbeat. While the pacemaker itself is implanted in its usual place, near the collar bone and just under the skin, the new power device is tucked underneath the heart, where the organ’s contractions bend it rhythmically. In tests in pigs, the new pacemaker generated just as much power as a pacemaker, using a completely renewable energy source.

Source: http://pubs.acs.org/
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2-D nanoparticles boost Cartilage Regeneration

February 20, 2019 Uncategorized

Researchers have developed a new way to deliver treatment for cartilage regeneration. The nanoclay-based platform for sustained and prolonged delivery of protein therapeutics could improve the treatment of osteoarthritis, a degenerative disease that affects nearly 27 million Americans, according to Akhilesh K. Gaharwar, assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the Texas University A&M. Osteoarthritis is caused by breakdown of cartilage that can lead to damage of the underlying bone. As America’s population ages, osteoarthritis incidences are likely to increase. One of the greatest challenges with treating osteoarthritis and subsequent joint damage is repairing the damaged tissue, especially as cartilage tissue is difficult to regenerate.

One method for repair or regeneration of damaged cartilage tissue is to deliver therapeutic growth factors, a special class of proteins that can aid in tissue repair and regeneration. However, current versions of growth factors break down quickly and require a high dose to achieve a therapeutic potential. Recent clinical studies have demonstrated significant adverse effects to this kind of treatment, including uncontrolled tissue formation and inflammation.

In the study, published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, Gaharwar’s lab designed two-dimensional mineral nanoparticles to deliver growth factors for a prolonged duration to overcome this drawback. These nanoparticles provide a high surface area and dual charged characteristics that allow for easy electrostatic attachment of growth factors.

“These nanoparticles could prolong delivery of growth factors to human mesenchymal stem cells, which are commonly utilized in cartilage regeneration,” Gaharwar said. “The sustained delivery of growth factors resulted in enhanced stem cell differentiation towards cartilage lineage and can be used for treatment of osteoarthritis.”

Source: https://research.tamu.edu/