Synopsis: Domenii:

#Liver-like device via 3-D printer (Phys. org) Nanoengineers at the University of California San diego have developed a 3-D-printed device inspired by the liver to remove dangerous toxins

from the blood. The device which is designed to be used outside the body much like dialysis uses nanoparticles to trap pore-forming toxins that can damage cellular membranes

and are a key factor in illnesses that result from animal bites and stings and bacterial infections.

Their findings were published May 8 in the journal Nature Communications. Nanoparticles have already been shown to be effective at neutralizing pore-forming toxins in the blood

but if those nanoparticles cannot be digested effectively they can accumulate in the liver creating a risk of secondary poisoning especially among patients who are already at risk of liver failure.

To solve this problem a research team led by nanoengineering professor Shaochen Chen created a 3-D-printed hydrogel matrix to house nanoparticles forming a device that mimics the function of the liver by sensing attracting

and capturing toxins routed from the blood. The device which is in the proof-of-concept stage mimics the structure of the liver

but has a larger surface area designed to efficiently attract and trap toxins within the device.

In an in vitro study the device completely neutralized pore-forming toxins. One unique feature of this device is that it turns red

The concept of using 3-D printing to encapsulate functional nanoparticles in a biocompatible hydrogel is said novel Chen.

This will inspire many new designs for detoxification techniques since 3d printing allows user-specific or site-specific manufacturing of highly functional products Chen said.

Chen's lab has demonstrated already the ability to print complex 3-D microstructures such as blood vessels in mere seconds out of soft biocompatible hydrogels that contain living cells.

Chen's biofabrication technology called dynamic optical projection stereolithography (DOPSL) can produce the micro -and nanoscale resolution required to print tissues that mimic nature's fine-grained details including blood vessels

which are essential for distributing nutrients and oxygen throughout the body. The biofabrication technique uses a computer projection system

and precisely controlled micromirrors to shine light on a selected area of a solution containing photosensitive biopolymers and cells.

This photoinduced solidification process forms one layer of solid structure at a time but in a continuous fashion.

Explore further: Video: Nanosponge decoy fights superbug infections More information: Paper: Bio-inspired detoxification using 3d printed hydrogel nanocomposites www. nature. com/ncomms/2014/140full/ncomms4774. htm h

#Flexible supercapacitor raises bar for volumetric energy density Scientists have taken a large step toward making a fiber-like energy storage device that can be woven into clothing

and power wearable medical monitors communications equipment or other small electronics. The device is a supercapacitor cousin to the battery.

This one packs an interconnected network of graphene and carbon nanotubes so tightly that it stores energy comparable to some thin-film lithium batteriesn area where batteries have held traditionally a large advantage.

The product's developers engineers and scientists at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore Tsinghua University in China and Case Western Reserve University in the United states believe the storage capacity by volume

(called volumetric energy density) is reported the highest for carbon-based microscale supercapacitors to date: 6. 3 microwatt hours per cubic millimeter.

The device also maintains the advantage of charging and releasing energy much faster than a battery.

The fiber-structured hybrid materials offer huge accessible surface areas and are highly conductive. The researchers have developed a way to continuously produce the flexible fiber enabling them to scale up production for a variety of uses.

To date they've made 50-meter long fibers and see no limits on length. They envision the fiber supercapacitor could be woven into clothing to power medical devices for people at home or communications devices for soldiers in the field.

Or they say the fiber could be a space-saving power source and serve as energy-carrying wires in medical implants.

Yuan Chen a professor of chemical engineering at NTU led the new study working with Dingshan Yu Kunli Goh Hong Wang Li Wei and Wenchao Jiang at NTU;

Qiang Zhang at Tsinghua; and Liming Dai at Case Western Reserve. The scientists report their research in Nature Nanotechnology.

Dai a professor of macromolecular science and engineering at Case Western Reserve and a co-author of the paper explained that most supercapacitors have high power density but low energy density

which means they can charge quickly and give a boost of power but don't last long.

Conversely batteries have high energy density and low power density which means they can last a long time

but don't deliver a large amount of energy quickly. Microelectronics to electric vehicles can benefit from energy storage devices that offer high power and high energy density.

That's why researchers are working to develop a device that offers both. To continue to miniaturize electronics industry needs tiny energy storage devices with large volumetric energy densities.

By mass supercapacitors might have comparable energy storage or energy density to batteries. But because they require large amounts of accessible surface area to store energy they have lagged always badly in energy density by volume.

To improve the energy density by volume the researchers designed a hybrid fiber. A solution containing acid-oxidized single-wall nanotubes graphene oxide and ethylenediamine

which promotes synthesis and dopes graphene with nitrogen is pumped through a flexible narrow reinforced tube called a capillary column and heated in an oven for six hours.

Sheets of graphene one to a few atoms thick and aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes self-assemble into an interconnected prorous network that run the length of the fiber.

The arrangement provides huge amounts of accessible surface area96 square meters per gram of hybrid fiberor the transport and storage of charges.

But the materials are packed tightly in the capillary column and remain so as they're pumped out resulting in the high volumetric energy density.

The process using multiple capillary columns will enable the engineers to make fibers continuously and maintain consistent quality Chen said.

The researchers have made fibers as long as 50 meters and found they remain flexible with high capacity of 300 Farad per cubic centimeter.

In testing they found that three pairs of fibers arranged in series tripled the voltage

while keeping the charging/discharging time the same. Three pairs of fibers in parallel tripled the output current

and tripled the charging/discharging time compared to a single fiber operated at the same current density.

When they integrate multiple pairs of fibers between two electrodes the ability to store electricity called capacitance increased linearly according to the number of fibers used.

Using a polyvinyl alcohol/phosphoric acid gel as an electrolyte a solid-state micro-supercapacitor made from a pair of fibers offered a volumetric density of 6. 3 microwatt hours per cubic millimeter

which is comparable to that of a 4-volt-500-microampere-hour thin film lithium battery. The fiber supercapacitor demonstrated ultrahigh energy density value

while maintaining the high power density and cycle stability. We have tested the fiber device for 10000 charge/discharge cycles

and the device retains about 93 percent of its original performance Yu said while conventional rechargeable batteries have a lifetime of less than 1000 cycles.

The team also tested the device for flexible energy storage. The device was subjected to constant mechanical stress

and its performance was evaluated. The fiber supercapacitor continues to work without performance loss even after bending hundreds of times Yu said.

Because they remain flexible and structurally consistent over their length the fibers can also be woven into a crossing pattern into clothing for wearable devices in smart textiles.

Chen said. Such clothing could power biomedical monitoring devices a patient wears at home providing information to a doctor at a hospital Dai said.

Woven into uniforms the battery-like supercapacitors could power displays or transistors used for communication.

The researchers are now expanding their efforts. They plan to scale up the technology for low-cost mass production of the fibers aimed at commercializing high-performance micro-supercapacitors.

In addition The team is interested also in testing these fibers for multifunctional applications including batteries solar cells biofuel cells

and sensors for flexible and wearable optoelectronic systems Dai said. Thus we have opened up many possibilities

and still have a lot to do. Explore further: High-performance low-cost ultracapacitors built with graphene and carbon nanotubes More information:

Paper: Scalable synthesis of hierarchically structured carbon nanotuberaphene fibres for capacitive energy storage dx. doi. org/10.1038/nnano. 2014.9 n

#Graphene photonics breakthrough promises fast-speed low-cost communications Swinburne researchers have developed a high-quality continuous graphene oxide thin film that shows potential for ultrafast telecommunications.

Associate professor Baohua Jia led a team of researchers from Swinburne's Centre for Microphotonics to create a micrometre thin film with record-breaking optical nonlinearity suitable for high performance integrated photonic devices used in all-optical communications, biomedicine

and photonic computing.""Such a laser patternable highly nonlinear thin film, about one hundredth of a human hair, has not been achieved by any other material,

"Professor Jia said. Graphene is derived from carbon, the fourth most abundant element on earth. It has many useful properties,

including light transparency and electrical conductivity, and can be recycled completely. To create the thin film the researchers spin coated graphene oxide solution to a glass surface.

Using a laser as a pen they created microstructures on the graphene oxide film to tune the nonlinearity of the material."

"We have developed a new platform in which we can fabricate each optical component with desired nonlinearity,

"Phd student Xiaorui Zheng said.""Currently with telecommunications or all optical communications you have to fabricate each component individually

and try to integrate them together.""Now we can provide a film, on which everything can be fabricated with laser

and then it is automatically integratable.""Current manufacturing methods in semiconductor labs require expensive cleanrooms to fabricate photonic chips.

The fabrication and laser writing of this photonic material is simple and low cost.""Using this new method,

we have demonstrated the possibility of manufacturing a scalable and cheap material, "Professor Jia said. The research is published in Advanced Materials.

The researchers are now working to fabricate a functional device e

#Remote Bomb Detector Uses Sound waves To Distinguish Between Types Of Explosives#A new type of bomb detection can sniff out how powerful an explosive#is from afar.

Devised by researchers at Vanderbilt University Purdue University and the Colorado School Of mines it uses a laser vibrometer

and a sonic beam to identify how the bomb's casing vibrates. From the patterns of the vibrations the researchers can tell

whether the homemade explosives inside are high-yield or low-yield. Bomb-sniffing dogs and many of their mechanical equivalents need to be close enough to smell

(or detect molecules of)# an explosive. That requires getting a teensy bit closer to a potentially ticking bomb than most people really want.

Acoustic detection has a greater range allowing explosives to be identified from a safer distance. In testing this system could distinguish between high-yield

and low-yield type materials (they used an inert crystal and polymer material to simulate a live explosive in the lab)

and identical plastic containers filled with air water or a clay material.##The technique developed as part of a grant from the Office of Naval Research was presented yesterday at the American Society of Mechanical engineers Dynamic Systems and Control Conference o

#Language-Translating Glasses For The Confused Tourist#For all the promise of mobile technology there's still not a whole lot an intrepid adventurer can do to break the language barrier besides well learning the language.

A team from Japanese#mobile carrier#NTT Docomo created augmented reality glasses that scan for text in Japanese translate the text through an online database

and display the translated version. It's not the first gadget to tinker with the idea

but it's at least one of the first wearable versions. The demonstration in the video here is just a look at a simple menu

#'3-D Painting'Sprays Metal To Repair Or Rebuild Machines Video#GE is showing off a new machine that sprays high-velocity metal powders at broken machines repairing damage in a few

or 3-D painting#(you know like printing) could also be used to make entirely new parts.

Folks who maybe drank some milk right out of the jug one time and spilled it all over themselves

The shirts are woven with a hydrophobic silica also known as silicon dioxide. Self Cleaning Clothing With Hydrophobic Nanotechnology as the Kickstarter says might be a vague enough claim to cause some concern

but we've definitely seen similarly cool stuff with aerosol sprays so it's not too much of a stretch to think this could work with clothing.

How the shirt actually feels along with how long it retains its properties (the team says 80 washes) might require a closer look.

#Google Has added Quantum physics To'Minecraft'Video#Minecraft the Lego-style build-your-own-game game has been the canvas for some awesome projects.

Now Google's Quantum A i. Lab is taking it in an even weirder direction: quantum physics.

From a post on#Google+#announcing the game: We talked to our friends at Minecraftedu

and Google admits as much:##Of course qcraft isn t a perfect scientific simulation but it s a fun way for players to experience a few parts of quantum mechanics outside of thought experiments or dense textbook examples.#

Google via Polygon

#Check This Out: A 3-D Printer Made From E waste#The circle of electronic life:

useless printer scraps become a way to print scraps of other things! Resourceful 33-year-old inventor Kodjo Afate Gnikou of the West african country Togo has created a cheap DIY 3-D printer out of electronic waste scavenged from junk yards.

Gnikou is part of Woelab a hackerspace in the city of Lomã as well as a geographer and an occasional maintenance technician according to a crowd funding page for his project.

He gets most of his material from a junk yard in#Lomã though he did have to buy a few parts.

All together the printer ended up costing him about $100 a far cry from the hundreds or thousands of dollars you'd shell out to buy one.

Even the minimalist#Printrbot Simple retails at $299.##He told euronews My dream is to give young people hope

He and his printer system are#part of this year's NASA International Space Apps Challenge in Paris proposing to use e waste to make 3-D printers that would print tools to colonize Mars. euronews

With that data the machine paints a fairly distinct portrait of the liquid and a simple computer interface shows the most important information about#the liquids in#a giant colored circle:

red for unsafe green for safe and more details presented alongside. The research is supported by the Department of Homeland security

#Watch A 3-D Printer Make A Pizza#This summer we heard about a 3-D printer for food developed with NASA funding

Now#lo and behold the printer has shown up at SXSW Eco and we caught a short demonstration from the makers a group from#Systems and Materials Research Corporation.

The printer#served up a pie made with dough#ketchup and cream cheese(?.The printer is still in its earliest stages so the creators haven't quite perfected the process.

Instead of making a classic slice they're showing off the proper levels of pizza viscosity with similar ingredients:

the printer lays down a layer of dough from a stock of simple non-perishable ingredients then layers the sauce (ketchup) and cheese (cream cheese) on top.

send up a printer instead of boxes of food and you save space plus you give the astronauts a home-cooked meal.

Here you can see the printer laying down the cheese layer and one of the printer technicians being directed to add more pressure.

Yum p

#An Open-source Hive To Save The Bees#You may have heard by now: bees are dropping like flies continuing to die at unprecedented rates

#So to give them a leg up the group Open Tech Forever has developed a beehive that can track the health of#bees

From the project site: The Open source Beehives project is a collaborative response to the threat faced by bee populations in industrialised nations around the world.

The project proposes to design hives that can support bee colonies in a sustainable way to monitor

and track the health and behaviour of a colony as it develops. Each hive contains an open source sensory kit The Smart Citizen Kit (SCK)

which can transmit to an open data platform: Smartcitizen. methese sensor enhanced hive designs are open

and freely available online the data collected from each hive is published together with geolocations allowing for a further comparison and analysis of the hives.

If you're a professional beekeeper or hobbyist and handy with electronics you get a double-whammy:

a free design for a high-tech beehive that can monitor your bees'environment and#a chance to contribute to citizen science.#

#This isn't the first attempt to enlist new technology to solve the bee crisis

but it might be the first to bring the idea to the masses. Which is good

and you can find the source code for the hives at the project site.##Boing Boing t

#Somebody Modded A Piano To Play The Game'Doom'Video For better or worse the 1993 demon-blasting video game Doom is one of the most influential games ever.

a piano rigged to act like a keyboard for the game. A team of game developers got together and wired keys in the piano to a PC running the game.

When players hit certain notes it's the equivalent of hitting certain keyboard commands. Each white key corresponds to an action like moving while each black key fires.

C-sharp to shoot frantically at the hell-beasts. A screen in the front of the piano shows the action.

Gamasutra LOL Knee deep on piano o

#Hook Me Up to This Impractical Virtual reality Suit Right Now The Oculus Rift is one of the most immersive gadgets we've ever seen--just strap the glasses onto your face

and you're transported to a virtual world. But if that's somehow not enough you can help fund Priovr a set of sensors that monitor your movements

and translate them into a game with help from the Rift. Bend your knee and your on-screen (or on-Oculus Rift) avatar bends along with you.

Swing a sword and so does she. The developers of the sensors YEI Technology think people are willing to drop $225000 on Kickstarter

and so far they've raised more than $21000 with 42 days to go. If you want to get on the early adopter train though it'll cost you:

Still the sensors look crazy-accurate at least if the videos from YEI are any indication.

me to setup my boundries else this thing might have me walk into a wall when visually

This keeps you from walking into the wall in your room. I wonder if the author of this article realizes that games are not real.

Mix it w/laser tag in a pre-built arena. Paint the environment however you want it to look to match the geometry of the playing field in reality.

Add it to your local bowling ally/mini-golf place/paintball place. I agree with Bagpipes

Further integrate with Multi-point Ultrasonic Haptic feedback (youtube. com/watch? v=-e8tsg4uit0) and we've finally got ourselves a holo-deck!

Sweet! Amazing! I can't wait to see where the future takes this. I can see it being a little buggy at first but if this catches on and theres a market for this

I am sure it will keep getting better and better. -Just trying to keep my girlish asymptote!

Guys this articles is great news. Now we can combine this gadget with the virtual reality treadmill game controller by OMNI.

and drive virtual vehicles too using virtual pedals and steering wheels. The options are unlimited with this combo. very exciting times for the human race.

virtusphere google it this is what you need to make it workmy mum in-law got a fantastic white Cadillac CTS-V Sedan by working part time off of a home computer...

i thought about this Pow6. co o

#Waggling Phallic Scanner 3-D-Maps The Tower Of Pisa In 20 Minutes The Zebedee created by Australia's national space agency is a 3-D scanner

but it's not quite like any 3-D scanner we've ever seen before. But that might work in its favor:

one person holding the Zebedee was able to accurately 3-D map the entire Leaning Tower of Pisa in only 20 minutes!

The Zebedee is a laser scanner not an infrared scanner like the Kinect or most of the other 3-D scanners we come across.

The heavy lifting of the Zebedee is done in software as all that conflicting laser data is converted to a 3-D map.

--but that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as the software is capable of sorting out the redundant data in a reasonable time-frame which it sounds like this data is.

For a look at how this oddball works check out the video above or read more over at the Australian space agency's site.

I am sure a great many Popsci readers are thinking this at the same time I'm typing it Attachã this to a drone for remote scouting in 3d!

And to keep the weight down for processing this data the data could just be beam back to the drone remote site to be processed there.

This reminds me of the science fiction red ball electronic mapping scouting devices (Pups) from the movie Prometheus will come true very soon!

one person holding the Zebedee was able to accurately 3-D map the entire Leaning Tower of Pisa in only 20 minutes!..

is incorrect. From the video they note that it took them a little under an hour...

#This Insanely Complex 3-D Printed Room Will Make Your Jaw Drop This room conceived

computer algorithms designed the 3. 2-meter-tall 16-square-meter room which has a whopping 260 million(!)

And instead of being made of plastic (3-D printing's go-to material) it's printed from sand.

Plus it looks incredible--much more like a real-life human-built room than any other 3-D printed structure albeit one that's half Roman temple half H r. Giger nightmare.

We think it's the world's first 3-D printed room Hansmeyer tells us in an email in the sense that it's fully structural

The duo used algorithms to let computers randomly design the room which was printed in Zurich. The team designed an overarching model

but many of the details are the work of algorithms.)With a digital version of the room in hand they used sand as the material along with a binding agent to print large chunks of the room--up to 4 meters tall by 1 meter wide by 2 meters deep.

After that they assembled the room piece by piece from the sandstone material. The entire process took one year to design one month to print and one day to assemble.

No nobody will be living in it--the structure's more art project than studio apartment. If you don't mind some art-speak this is the architects'explanation:

In the Digital Grotesque project we use these algorithms to create a form that appears at once synthetic and organic.

The design process thus strikes a delicate balance between the expected and the unexpected between control and relinquishment.

But hey maybe we can look forward to our own robot-designed sand castles one day.

if they were to line all walls and the ceiling within an enclosed room. Regardless of my curiosity I would imagine that this creation is quite a spectacle in person.

but hardly a room...it's a wall panel or at most a pair of wall panels. But a room it is not.

Playing Devil's advocate since 1978the only constant in the universe is change-Heraclitus of Ephesus 535 BC-475 BCREALLY neat

Printing buildings our of unreinforced concrete is a dangerous idea. Our interface is like a 3d printer

but we make steel space frames the size of city blocks. We're doing a live build at a festival in Phoenix on October 4th and an installation at a local art museum soon.

Give it a shot. my friend's half-sister makes $72 an hour on the internet.

but last month her pay check was $15553 just working on the internet for a few hours. link www. jobs35. comomg

You could print a MASSIVE heat exchanger to reclaim heat from waste water power plants your house...You like fresh air

#7. 1-Magnitude Earthquake Hit Off The Coast Of Japan A 7. 1-magnitude earthquake hit off the coast of Japan earlier today about 200 miles east of the town of Namie

and the Japan Meteorological Agency put out a tsunami advisory for several coastal regions asking people to leave the coast immediately.

However by 4: 05 a m. local time (3: 05 p m. Eastern time in the U s.)the agency cancelled the tsunami warning as the first waves driven by the quake didn't go over the 3-foot mark.

In March 2011 the M9 0 earthquake that struck about 59 miles north of this event#displaced huge amounts of ocean water as the Pacific tectonic plate slipped under the Okhotsk#plate#triggering#a massive tsunami that killed thousands and knocked out

the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Since then multiple earthquakes have struck this region including a M7. 3 quake in December of last year

though none have resulted in such devastating waves. USA Today U

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