#Miniature Plastic Digital Fluorescence Microscope for use in Rural areas For a project funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative,
a research team from Rice university has developed a plastic, miniature digital fluorescence microscope that can be used in rural areas to quantify white blood cell levels in patients.
Doctors can learn a lot about the state of a patient immune system just by examining their blood under the microscope.
An abnormally high or low white blood count, for instance, might indicate a bone marrow pathology or AIDS.
The rupturing of white blood cells might be the sign of an underlying microbial or viral infection.
Strangely shaped cells often indicate cancer. While this old simple technique may seem a quaint throwback in the age of high-tech health care tools like genetic sequencing,
flow cytometry and fluorescent tagging, the high cost and infrastructure requirements of these techniques largely limit them to laboratory settings something point-of-care diagnostics aims to fix.
The plastic microscope developed by Rice researchers is intended for use in parts of the world far removed from the modern laboratory. ne of the driving aspects of the project is the cost of the sample
or sample preparation, said Tomasz Tkaczyk, associate professor of bioengineering. any systems which work for point-of-care applications have quite expensive cartridges.
The goal of this research is to make it possible for those in impoverished areas to be able to get the testing they need at a manageable price point.
One of Tkaczyk co-authors on the research was Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rice Malcolm Gillis University Professor, director of the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering and of Rice 360°:
°Institute for Global Health Technologies and a fellow at The Optical Society. How the microscope works The researchersdevice identifies
and quantifies three types of white blood cells ymphocytes, monocytes and granulocytes in a drop of blood mixed with a staining compound.
The compound is repelled by water at neutral ph, which allows it to easily diffuse through cellular and nuclear membranes,
or red when encountering DNA or RNA, respectively, with emission maximums at 525 nanometers and 650 nanometers.
The researchers used a single-point diamond-turning lathe to fabricate the part of the microscope called the objective
which consists of one polystyrene lens and two polymethyl methacrylate aspheric lenses. The lenses were enclosed then in an all-plastic, 3-D-printed microscope housing and objective.
Once constructed, the microscope provided a field of view of 1. 2 millimeters, allowing for at least 130 cells to be present for statistical significance
which also includes an LED light source, power supply, control unit, optical system and image sensor, cost less than $3, 000 to construct.
000 units, the researchers estimate that this price would fall to around $600 for each unit, with a per-test cost of a few cents.
Future work for Tkaczyk and his colleagues includes developing an automated algorithm for identifying white blood cells,
The use of low-cost components such as LEDS, reflectors and USB detectors, combined with the all-plastic housing and lenses, will allow future versions of the prototype to be mass-produced h
#Graphene Shows Potential for Energy-efficient Data storage Technologies Graphene can be used to produce energy-efficient, high-density memory chips.
Researchers at Stanford used graphene in three different ways to create data storage technology that has the best features of both volatile and nonvolatile silicon chips.
Phones, laptops and other electronic devices all use memory chips to function. To be desireable they must be fast,
Engineers are presently trying to develop nanomaterial-based memory chips that perform better than their silicon counterparts to be used in low energy data centers and gadgets with a longer battery life.
despite its extremely high conductivity, graphene has been used in few practical electronic devices. Three graphene-centric memory technologies have been described in different articles published in Nature Communications, Applied Physics Letters and Nano Letters journals.
These studies were performed by an international group of collaborators led by Professor H.-S. Philip Wong and Pop.
Data is stored by memory chips in the form of ones and zeroes. Silicon-based memory chips are classified as either volatile and nonvolatile.
Volatile memory can store data only when power is available. Random access memory (RAM) is an example of volatile memory.
Nonvolatile memory is slow but stable and it continues to store the data even when power is not available.
The flash memory used in cell phones is an example of nonvolatile memory. Engineers led by Stanford have demonstrated a way to create memory that combines the stability of flash memory with the speed of RAM.
They used new technologies and materials to create memory that consumed comparatively less energy than silicon.
In the RRAM chips metal oxides are changed between conductive and resistive states by the application of a small joly of electricity. in these RRAM chips.
A zero is created when the electron flow is resisted by the metal oxides, and a one is created
when electrons are conducted by the material. Like flash memory, RRAM has the ability to store data without power,
and it is also fast like volatile silicon memory. The researchers used graphene to carrying the small jolts of electricity.
Graphene is conductive even at very thin dimensions which differentiates it from conventional metals. This enables fabrication of smaller RRAM cells that have the capacity to store more data than conventional metal-based conductors.
The other two study papers were published in Nano Letters and Applied Physics Letters. In these studies, the teams led by Pop
and Wong used graphene to advance the phase-change memory concept. Phase-change memory involves an alloy of germanium
antimony and tellurium. Applying a small jolt of electricity to the alloy results in a change in its structure.
The first jolt induces the atoms to form a normal, crystalline structure that facilitates a flow of electrons.
This is considered as equivalent to a digital one. The second jolt induces the structure to become amorphous with an irregular structure.
This is equivalent to a zero. The phase-change material toggles from one to zero with each jolt.
This material has the ability to store data even when power is not available. Pop and Wong state that graphene unique
thermal, electrical and atomically thin properties could help create data storage with better energy efficiency, and transform the manner in
which digital data is stored and accessed in the future e
#Nanofiber Hydrogel Infused with Snake Venom May Quickly Stop Bleeding A nanofiber hydrogel infused with snake venom may be the best material to stop bleeding quickly, according to Rice university scientists.
The hydrogel called SB50 incorporates batroxobin, a venom produced by two species of South american pit viper.
and quickly turns into a gel that conforms to the site of a wound, keeping it closed,
Rice chemist Jeffrey Hartgerink, lead author Vivek Kumar and their colleagues reported their discovery in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Biomaterials Science and Engineering.
The hydrogel may be most useful for surgeries particularly for patients who take anticoagulant drugs to thin their blood."
It has been used in various therapies as a way to remove excess fibrin proteins from the blood to treat thrombosis and as a topical hemostat.
"There's a lot of different things that can trigger blood coagulation, but when you're on heparin, most of them don't work,
or they work slowly or poorly. That obviously causes problems if you're bleeding.""Heparin blocks the function of thrombin,
This is important because surgical bleeding in patients taking heparin can be a serious problem. The use of batroxobin allows us to get around this problem
The substance used for medicine is produced by genetically modified bacteria and then purified, avoiding the risk of other contaminant toxins.
The Rice researchers combined batroxobin with their synthetic, self-assembling nanofibers, which can be loaded into a syringe
and injected at the site of a wound, where they reassemble themselves into a gel.
Tests showed the new material stopped a wound from bleeding in as little as six seconds, and further prodding of the wound minutes later did not reopen it.
The researchers also tested several other options: the hydrogel without batroxobin, the batroxobin without the hydrogel, a current clinical hemostat known as Gelfoam and an alternative self-assembling hemostat known as Puramatrix and found that none were as effective, especially in the presence of anticoagulants.
The new work builds upon the Rice lab's extensive development of injectable hydrogel scaffolds that help wounds heal
and grow natural tissue. The synthetic scaffolds are built from the peptide sequences to mimic natural processes."
"We think SB50 has great potential to stop surgical bleeding, particularly in difficult cases in
#Environment Friendly Paper-Based Security Tags to Protect Shipments In collaboration with its EU project partners,
By using a security tag equipped with sensors, the sender and the recipient can ensure, for example,
Previously, printing techniques have been applied to integrate electronics into plastic labels only, but with the VTT methods it is now also possible to produce more environmentally friendly paper-based security tags.
electronic circuits and sensors can be integrated directly into different materials by printing, thus producing novel security tags for sealing shipments
The security tag consists of a paper tag with an embedded battery and two coloured LEDS.
In the ROPAS project, VTT showed that roll-to-roll technology for printing electronics is suited also to the manufacturing of paper-based security tags.
#Prosthetic Hands with Macro-Sieve Peripheral Nerve Interface Can Feel Hot and Cold and Sense of touch Daniel Moran, Phd, professor of biomedical engineering in the School of engineering & Applied science and of neurobiology,
of physical therapy and of neurological surgery at the School of medicine, has received a three-year, nearly $1. 9 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to test a novel device his lab developed that would stimulate the nerves in the upper arm and forearm.
If it works, upper-limb amputees who use motorized prosthetic devices would be able to feel various sensations through the prosthetic
who received a prosthetic after losing his right hand in an epic battle with Darth Vader,
While the advanced prosthetic arm allows users to perform six different grips, such as picking up small objects,
it does not provide users with the senses of touch and orientation of a natural hand.
whose expertise is in motor neurophysiology and brain-computer interfaces, and his team have developed an electrode designed to stimulate sensory nerve cells in the ulnar and median nerves in the arms.
The ulnar nerve, one of three main nerves in the forearm, is the largest nerve in the body unprotected by muscle
when you hit your elbow on something and trigger your unny bone. The median nerve in the upper arm and shoulder is connected to the other fingers on the hand
place the fingers of the prosthesis around it and lift it. They are unable to feel
users will have more control over the prosthesis. Moran and his team, which includes Harold Burton, Phd, professor of neurobiology;
Wilson (Zach) Ray, MD, assistant professor of neurological surgery, both at the School of medicine; and Matthew Macewen, who will graduate with an MD/Phd in May 2015
and worked on this project for his dissertation, have developed a macro-sieve peripheral nerve interface designed to stimulate regeneration of the ulnar and median nerves to transmit information back into the central nervous system.
The electrode which looks like a wagon wheel with open spaces between the pokes, allows the nerve to grow.
Ray also will implant a small cuff electrode, the current standard of care, to compare the performance.
Once implanted, Moran and the team will train the nonhuman primates to play a joystick-controlled video game in
which the team will give them cues as to where to move the joystick by stimulating specific sectors in the ulnar and median nerves
Moran and the team will analyze how many different independent channels they can stimulate on the nerve to determine how many sensors will work on the prosthetic hand.
they can move different amounts of current around the nerve to activate different sectors to connect the touch sensors on the hand to a different sector on the nerve.
His team has had already success with this method in motor neurons in a rat model. f this works to stimulate motor neurons in muscles,
Burton, an expert in sensory neurophysiology, will analyze how the brain processes the feedback from the nerve stimulation. he more real estate the brain uses,
so there should be a lot of bandwidth. We think wel be able to send a lot of information to it. oran
and his team will work with DARPA to determine how many sensors to put on the prosthetic hands. f the nervous system can handle more than eight
he says. e want to find the bandwidth and what the nervous system can interpret with artificial sensation. he School of engineering & Applied science at Washington University in St louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths,
particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 91 tenured/tenure-track and 40 additional full-time faculty, 1, 300 undergraduate students, more than 900 graduate students and more than 23
000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners across disciplines
and across the world to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.
#Market research Report on Global Tank Level Monitoring System According to the new market research report"Tank Level Monitoring System Market by Technology (Float & Tape Gauging, Pressure Level
the global tank level monitoring System market is expected to witness substantial growth, due to rising applications across various industry verticals,
The global Tank Level Monitoring System Market is expected to reach $859. 0 Million by 2020, at a CAGR of 6. 0%from 2015 to 2020.
Browse 45 market data Tables and 48 Figures spread through 93 Pages and in depth TOC on"Tank Level Monitoring System Market".
Globally, several clean energy policies and regulations have been implemented over the past decade to reduce the consumption of higher carbon fossil fuels.
Therefore, governmental regulations have influenced the growth of the tank level monitoring system market in the industrial and power sectors, due to their use in the monitoring and control of carbon emissions.
These regulations are expected majorly to be introduced in emerging economies, such as China, India, Brazil and South East Asian countries in the coming years.
Another major factor driving the Tank Level Monitoring System Market is lower installation cost. Increasing demand of tank level monitoring system for safety and efficiency requirements, especially from the process industries, such as chemical, pulp & paper, steel mills, power generation,
and glass manufacturing among others, is expected to boost the overall growth of the market. The global tank level monitoring system market is expected to witness substantial growth in the near future.
There is a growing adoption of tank level monitoring system in various sectors, such as oil & fuel
chemical industry, mining, agriculture & husbandry, automotive, and power plant. In 2014, the oil & fuel application was the largest segment of the global tank level monitoring application market,
and contributed a share of 36.0%.%The agriculture & husbandry was the fastest-growing application of the market,
and is projected to grow with a CAGR of 7. 6%from 2015 to 2020. The tank level monitoring system market in North america is the second-largest market for tank level monitoring system globally,
and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6. 4%during the forecast period. The research report is aimed at identifying emerging trends
and opportunities in the global Tank Level Monitoring System Market and analyzing the global tank level monitoring system market with explicit focus on high-growth applications and the fastest-growing market segments.
The research study also includes analysis of the future of the global tank level monitoring system market
and market opportunities till 2020. Apart from the market segmentation, this report also makes use of the Porter's Five Forces Analysis,
and opportunities in the global tank level monitoring market. The report includes company profiles of major players, recent activities in the market
#New Biosensors Allows Scientists to Control Engineered Bacteria Super productive factories of the future could employ fleets of genetically engineered bacterial cells,
such as common E coli, to produce valuable chemical commodities in an environmentally friendly way. By leveraging their natural metabolic processes,
bacteria could be reprogrammed to convert readily available sources of natural energy into pharmaceuticals, plastics and fuel products."
"said Wyss Core Faculty member George Church, Ph d, . who is a pioneer in the converging fields of synthetic biology, metabolic engineering, and genetics.
Church is the Robert Winthrop Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical school and Professor of Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard and MIT.
Critical to this process of metabolically engineering microbes is the use of biosensors. Made of a biological component-such as a fluorescent protein
-and a'detector'that responds to the presence of a specific chemical, biosensors act as the switches
and levers that turn programmed functions on and off inside the engineered cells. They also can be used to detect which microbial'workers'are producing the most voluminous amounts of a desired chemical.
In this way, they can be thought of as the medium for two-way communication between humans and cells.
But so far, scientists have had only access to a limited variety of biosensors that have little relevance to the biomanufacturing of valuable chemicals.
Now, Wyss Institute researchers led by Church have developed a new suite of such sensors reported in Nucleic acids Research journal,
but also respond to valuable products such as renewable plastics or costly pharmaceuticals and give microbes a voice to report on their own efficiency in making these products."
"If we compared this to controlling a computer, it's almost like we have had only the up and down arrows available to us,
the biosensors can be used to trigger individual cells to give off visible fluorescence in a rate directly proportional to how well they are able to produce a desired chemical commodity.
the most efficient microbial workers are identified easily so that they can serve as the predecessors for colonies of engineered bacteria that evolve to become more efficient at producing renewable chemicals with each subsequent generation.
The findings could also lead to new applications in environmental monitoring using genetically engineered microbes to issue warning signals in the presence of pollutants or toxins,
""With this work, George and his team are bringing us closer to a sustainable future in
which we would rely on biomanufacturing for the clean production of chemical and pharmaceutical commodities, "said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald E. Ingber, M d.,Ph d,
. who is also the Judah Folkman Professor of Vascular Biology at Harvard Medical school and Boston Children's Hospital,
and Professor of Bioengineering at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of engineering and Applied sciences s
#Innovative Light-Sensing System Reconstructs Human Postures Continuously and Unobtrusively A Dartmouth College team has created the first light-sensing system that reconstructs human postures continuously
and unobtrusively, furthering efforts to create smart spaces in which people control their environment with simple gestures.
Xia Zhou, an assistant professor of computer science and co-director of the Dartnets Lab at Dartmouth College,
and her team have created the first light-sensing system that reconstructs human postures continuously and unobtrusively.
the 21st annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. Light plays many roles in our lives
from illumination to energy source, but advances in visible light communication (VLC) add a new dimension to the list:
VLC encodes data into light intensity changes at a high frequency imperceptible to human eyes. Unlike conventional radio frequency systems that require complex signal processing,
VLC uses energy efficient light emitting diodes to transmit data inexpensively, securely, cleanly and with virtually unlimited bandwidth.
Any devices equipped with light sensors can recover data by monitoring light changes.""Here we are pushing the envelope further and ask:
Can light turn into a ubiquitous sensing medium that tracks what we do and senses how we behave?"
an assistant professor of computer science and co-director of the Dartnets (Dartmouth Networking and Ubiquitous Systems) Lab. Envision a smart space such as the home office
or gym that takes the advantage of the ubiquity of light as a medium that integrates data communication and human sensing.
Smart devices such as smart glasses, smart watches and smartphones equipped with photodiodes communicate using VLC.
Users can continuously gesture and interact with appliances and objects in a room-for example, a wall-mounted display,
computers, doors, windows, coffee machine--similar to using the Kinect or Wii in front of a TV.
But there are no cameras (high-fidelity sensors with privacy concerns) monitoring users or any on-body devices or sensors that users have to constantly wear or carry, just LED LIGHTS on the ceiling and photodiodes on the floor.
Compared to existing methods that use wireless radio signals such as Wi-fi to track user gestures, light-based sensing does not introduce electromagnetic interferences
and is limited not to classifying a predefined set of gestures and activities. In their new study
the researchers developed a system called Lisense that uses VLC to reconstruct a human skeleton's movements in real time (60 Hz.
They built the-first-of-its-kind light sensing testbed in the Dartnets lab using off-the-shelf LED LIGHTS, photodiodes, and microcontrollers.
they designed an algorithm to reconstruct human postures using 2-D shadow information with a limited resolution collected by photodiodes embedded in the floor."
We can naturally interact with surrounding smart objects such as drones and smart appliances and play games, using purely the light around us.
passive health and behavioral monitoring paradigm to foster healthy lifestyles or identify early symptoms of certain diseases.
When Bearings Inside Wind turbines Will Fail Engineers from the University of Sheffield have developed a novel technique to predict
The method, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A and developed by Mechanical engineering research student Wenqu Chen,
uses ultrasonic waves to measure the load transmitted through a ball bearing in a wind turbine. The stress on wind turbine is recorded
and then engineers can forecast its remaining service life. When a bearing is subject to a load
and the speed of sound is affected by the stress level in the material. Both these effects change the time of flight of an ultrasound wave through a bearing.
It uses a custom-built piezoelectric sensor mounted in the bearing to measure the time of flight
This sensor is less expensive and significantly smaller than currently available, making it suitable for smaller turbines.
It can also provide a better prediction of the maintenance needed saving money in servicing.
Professor Rob Dwyer-Joyce, co-author of the paper and Director of the Leonardo Centre for Tribology at the University of Sheffield says:"
"This technique can be used to prevent unexpected bearing failures, which are a common problem in wind turbines.
By removing the risk of a loss of production and the need for unplanned maintenance,
and is currently being tested at the Barnesmore wind farm in Donegal, Ireland by the company, Ricardo.
It is hoped it will be used in the future inside monitoring systems for other turbines s
#Blast Motion and EASTON Introduce First-Ever Precision Swing Motion Sensor Easton Baseball/Softball, a leading manufacturer of baseball and softball equipment, in partnership with Blast Motion,
today launched the EASTON Power Sensor, the brand's first-ever precision swing motion sensor to help players of all abilities hit with more power and efficiency.
The EASTON Power Sensor slips over the knob of any baseball or softball bat and has been designed to capture highly accurate swing metrics
and deliver advanced performance analysis. Weighing in at just 7. 7 grams, the EASTON Power Sensor utilizes Bluetooth wireless technology to capture
and store a wide-range of 3d data, including time to contact, swing speed, energy transfer, bat path, power, overall efficiency and much more.
All of these factors combine to provide a player with their Blast Factor, a 1-100 score that shows a player's overall swing performance and is a simple way to compare
and coach proper mechanics.""Whether it's kids, parents or coaches, today's consumers want instantaneous information to elevate their game,
"said Todd Harman, Executive vice president, Easton Baseball/Softball.""We're proud to deliver to baseball and softball enthusiasts our new EASTON Power Sensor that provides personalized swing biomechanics data,
instant feedback to make real-time improvements and Blast Motion's patented video integration for playback and sharing."
"The EASTON Power Sensor was developed in exclusive partnership with Blast Motion, a leader in motion capture and analysis technology.
By leveraging Blast Motion's patented Smart Video Capture#and adaptive slow-mo technology, the EASTON Power Sensor intelligently combines video
No user editing or playback intervention is required to experience this groundbreaking functionality.""With the launch of the EASTON Power Sensor, we're excited to offer the marketplace an industry leading baseball
and softball solution that leverages Easton's extensive swing analysis knowledge and expertise,"said Roger Weingarth, President and COO of Blast Motion."
#New Bio-Inspired Ultrasound Sensor Identifies Structural Defects An ultrasound sensor for detecting dangerous cracks in structures such as aircraft engines,
oil and gas pipelines and nuclear plants has been developed by researchers at the University of Strathclyde with inspiration from the natural world.
based on a natural phenomenon known in mathematics as fractals. These are irregular shapes which recur repeatedly to form objects such as snowflakes,
ferns and cauliflowers, making their structure appear more complex than it often actually is. The same concept also lies behind the hearing system of animals including bats, dolphins, cockroaches and moths.
and their design was done traditionally by manufacturing but now, with 3d printing, computer manufacturing and more laser technology,
If there are defects in a nuclear plant or an oil pipeline, we would be able to detect cracks that have a range of sizes
not only improve safety but also save a great deal of money, as early detection means inspections don have to be carried out as often.
Dr Mulholland was partnered in the study by Ebrahem Algehyne, a research student at Strathclyde Centre for Ultrasonic Engineering.
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