and respond to toxic injury in ways that are similar to kidney tubules in people.
and Women Hospital in Boston and is now an assistant professor of medicine in the nephrology division at the University of Washington. nswering this question was important for understanding the potential of mini-kidneys for clinical kidney regeneration and drug discovery.
To re-create human disease, researchers used the gene-editing technique called CRISPR. They engineered mini-kidneys with genetic changes linked to two common kidney diseases:
polycystic kidney disease and glomerulonephritis. The organoids developed characteristics of these diseases. Those with mutations in polycystic kidney disease genes formed balloon-like, fluid-filled sacks, called cysts, from kidney tubules.
The organoids with mutations in podocalyxin, a gene linked to glomerulonephritis, lost connections between filtering cells. utation of a single gene results in changes kidney structures associated with human disease,
thereby allowing better understand of the disease and serving as models to develop therapeutic agents to treat these diseases,
says senior author Joseph Bonventre, chief of the renal division at Brigham and Women Hospital.
CLINICAL TRIALS IN A DISH hese genetically engineered mini-kidneys Freedman says, ave taught us that human disease boils down to simple components that can be re-created in a petri dish.
This provides us with faster, better ways to perform linical trials in a dishto test drugs
and therapies that might work in humans. Genetically matched kidney organoids without disease-linked mutations showed no signs of either disease,
Freedman says. RISPR can be used to correct gene mutations, explained Freedman. ur findings suggest that gene correction using CRISPR may be a promising therapeutic strategy.
In the United states, costs for kidney disease are about 40 billion dollars per year. Kidney disease affects approximately 700 million people worldwide.
Twelve million patients have polycystic kidney disease and two million have complete kidney failure. Dialysis and kidney transplantation, the only options for patients in kidney failure, can cause harmful side effects and poor quality-of-life. s a result of this new technology,
Freedman says, e can now grow, on demand, new kidney tissue that is 100 percent immunocompatible with an individual own body. e have shown that these tissues can mimic both healthy and diseased kidneys,
and that the organoids can survive in mice after being transplanted. The next question is whether the organoids can perform the functions of kidneys after transplantation.
The National institutes of health, the NCATS Loan Repayment Program the National Kidney Foundation, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, the Institute for Stem Cell and Regenerative medicine and the Kidney Research Institute, both at the University of Washington,
and the Biomedical Research Centre at the University of British columbia funded the work. Bonventre holds patents on kidney injury molecule-1
which have been assigned to Partners Healthcare. The other researchers declare no competing interests t
#Device plays sounds to let blind people eethe world is a jumble of sights, sounds, and smells.
While these signals may seem distinct and independent, they actually interact and integrate within the brain network of sensory neurons.
A new assistive device for blind people taps into this sensory network. It translates images into sounds,
allowing visually impaired people to detect their environment without the need for hours of training or intense concentration.
The work is described in a paper published in Scientific Reports. any neuroscience textbooks really only devote a few pages to multisensory interaction,
says Shinsuke Shimojo, a professor of experimental psychology at the California Institute of technology (Caltech) and principal investigator on the study. ut 99 percent of our daily life depends on multisensorylso called multimodalrocessing.
As an example, he says, if you are talking on the phone with someone you know very well,
and they are crying, you will not just hear the sound but will visualize their face in tears. his is an example of the way sensory causality is not unidirectionalision can influence sound,
Shimojo and postdoctoral scholar Noelle Stiles have exploited these crossmodal mappings to stimulate the visual cortex with auditory signals that encode information about the environment.
HOW THE DEVICE WORKS The researchers conducted trials with both sighted and blind people using a sensory substitution device,
The voice device is made up of a small computer connected to a camera that is attached to darkened glasses,
A computer algorithm scans each camera image from left to right and for every column of pixels, generates an associated sound with a frequency
and volume that depends upon the vertical location and brightness of the pixels. A large number of bright pixels at the top of a column would translate into a loud, high-frequency sound,
whereas a large number of lower dark pixels would be a quieter, lower-pitched sound. A blind person wearing this camera on a pair of glasses could then associate different sounds with features of their environment.
HEAR A SOUND, SEE A COLOR IN the trials, sighted people with no training or instruction were asked to match images to sounds;
while the blind subjects were asked to feel textures and match them to sound. Tactile textures can be related to visual textures (patterns) like a topographic mapright regions of an image translate to high tactile height relative to a page,
while dark regions are flatter. Both groups showed an intuitive ability to identify textures and images from their associated sounds.
Surprisingly, the untrained (also called aive group performance was significantly above chance, and not very different from the trained.
The intuitively identified textures used in the experiments exploited the crossmodal mappings already within the voice encoding algorithm. hen we reverse the crossmodal mappings in the voice auditory-to-visual translation
can be used to make sensory substitution intuitive with no instruction or training. The researchers do not exactly know yet what each sensory region of the brain is doing
the group is currently using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri) data to analyze the crossmodal neural network. These preexisting neural connections provide an important starting point for training visually impaired people to use devices that will help them see.
and the brain automatically processes images and information for seamless interaction with the environment. Current devices for the blind and visually impaired are not so automatic or intuitive to use,
generally requiring a user full concentration and attention to interpret information about the environment. The Shimojo lab new finding on the role of multimodal processing and crossmodal mappings starts to address this issue.
HAT IS SEEING? Beyond its practical implications, Shimojo says, the research raises an important philosophical question:
The National Science Foundation, the Della Martin Fund for Discoveries in Mental illness, and the Japan Science and Technology Agency, Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology funded the work
#Physicists discover a weird new form of matter A team of physicists has discovered an unusual form of matterot a conventional metal, insulator,
or magnet, for example, but something entirely different. This phase, characterized by an unusual ordering of electrons, offers possibilities for new electronic device functionalities and could hold the solution to a longstanding mystery in condensed matter physics having to do with high-temperature superconductivityhe ability
for some materials to conduct electricity without resistance, even at ightemperatures approaching 00 degrees Celsius. he discovery of this phase was unexpected completely and not based on any prior theoretical prediction,
says David Hsieh, an assistant professor of physics at California Institute of technology (Caltech), who previously was on a team that discovered another form of matter called a topological insulator. he whole field of electronic materials is driven by the discovery of new phases,
which provide the playgrounds in which to search for new macroscopic physical properties. Hsieh and his colleagues describe their findings in Nature Physics.
Liuyan Zhao, a postdoctoral scholar in Hsieh group, is lead author. The physicists made the discovery
while testing a laser-based measurement technique that they recently developed to look for what is called multipolar order.
first consider a crystal with electrons moving around throughout its interior. Under certain conditions, it can be energetically favorable for these electrical charges to pile up in a regular,
repeating fashion inside the crystal, forming what is called a charge-ordered phase. The building block of this type of order, namely charge, is simply a scalar quantityhat is,
it can be described by just a numerical value, or magnitude. In addition to charge, electrons also have a degree of freedom known as spin.
When spins line up parallel to each other (in a crystal, for example they form a ferromagnethe type of magnet you might use on your refrigerator
and that is used in the strip on your credit card. Because spin has both a magnitude and a direction,
a spin-ordered phase is described by a vector. Over the last several decades, physicists have developed sophisticated techniques to look for both of these types of phases.
if the building block of the ordered phase was a pair of oppositely pointing spinsne pointing north and one pointing southescribed by
When you shine a red laser pointer at a wall, for example, your eye detects red light. However, for all materials, there is a tiny amount of light bouncing off at integer multiples of the incoming frequency.
So with the red laser pointer, there will also be some blue light bouncing off of the wall.
The Hsieh group experiment exploited the fact that changes in the symmetry of a crystal will affect the strength of each harmonic differently.
Since the emergence of multipolar ordering changes the symmetry of the crystal in a very specific way way that can be largely invisible to conventional probesheir idea was that the optical harmonic response of a crystal could serve as a fingerprint of multipolar order
. e found that light reflected at the second harmonic frequency revealed a set of symmetries completely different from those of the known crystal structure,
Cuprates are the only family of materials known to exhibit superconductivity at high temperaturesxceeding 100 Kelvin (73 degrees Celsius.
A high enough level of doping will transform cuprates into high-temperature superconductors, and as cuprates evolve from being insulators to superconductors, they first transition through a mysterious phase known as the pseudogap,
where an additional amount of energy is required to strip electrons out of the material. For decades, scientists have debated the origin of the pseudogap
and its relationship to superconductivityhether it is a necessary precursor to superconductivity or a competing phase with a distinct set of symmetry properties.
If that relationship were understood better scientists believe, it might be possible to develop materials that superconduct at temperatures approaching room temperature.
and temperature window where the pseudogap is present. The researchers are still investigating whether the two overlap exactly,
but Hsieh says the work suggests a connection between multipolar order and pseudogap phenomena. here is also very recent work by other groups showing signatures of superconductivity in Sr2iro4 of the same variety as that found in cuprates,
he says. iven the highly similar phenomenology of the iridates and cuprates, perhaps iridates will help us resolve some of the longstanding debates about the relationship between the pseudogap and high-temperature superconductivity.
Hsieh says the finding emphasizes the importance of developing new tools to try to uncover new phenomena. his was enabled really by a simultaneous technique advancement,
Tel aviv University, Iowa State university, and the University of Kentucky. The Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation (NSF),
and the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, funded the work o
#Can 3d printing keep lab-grown organs alive? Using sugar, silicone, and a 3d printer, bioengineers and surgeons have created an implant with an intricate network of blood vessels.
The work points toward a future of growing replacement tissues and organs for transplantation. The research may provide a method to overcome one of the biggest challenges in regenerative medicine:
How to deliver oxygen and nutrients to all cells in an artificial organ or tissue implant that takes days
or weeks to grow in the lab prior to surgery. A research team led by Jordan Miller, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice university,
and Pavan Atluri, assistant professor of surgery at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted the study. Published in the journal Tissue Engineering Part C:
Methods, it shows that blood flowed normally through test constructs that were connected surgically to native blood vessels.
KEEPING LIVERS AND KIDNEYS ALIVE Miller says one of the hurdles of engineering large artificial tissues,
such as livers or kidneys, is keeping the cells inside them alive. Tissue engineers have relied typically on the body own ability to grow blood vesselsor example,
by implanting engineered tissue scaffolds inside the body and waiting for blood vessels from nearby tissues to spread to the engineered constructs.
In this study, we are taking the first step toward applying an analogy from transplant surgery to 3d printed constructs we make in the lab. Miller
and his team thought long-term about what the needs would be for transplantation of large tissues made in the laboratory. hat a surgeon needs
in order to do transplant surgery isn just a mass of cells; the surgeon needs a vessel inlet
and an outlet that can be connected directly to arteries and veins, he says. SUGAR AGESBIOENGINEERING graduate student Samantha Paulsen and research technician Anderson Ta worked together to develop a proof-of-concept construct small silicone gel about the size of a small candy gummy bearsing 3d printing.
But rather than printing a whole construct directly, the researchers fabricated sacrificial templates for the vessels that would be inside the construct.
leaving behind a network of small channels in the silicone. hey don yet look like the blood vessels found in organs,
but they have some of the key features relevant for a transplant surgeon, Miller says. e created a construct that has one inlet and one outlet,
Collaborating surgeons at Penn in Atluri group connected the inlet and outlet of the engineered gel to a major artery in a small animal model.
and unobstructed for up to three hours. his study provides a first step toward developing a transplant model for tissue engineering where the surgeon can directly connect arteries to an engineered tissue,
and mental states, has been linked to numerous neurological and mental illnesses, including depression. But because there has been no way to obtain live human serotonin neurons to study these diseases,
most serotonin research has been done with lab animals. Now, researchers have generated human serotonin neurons from human fibroblasts,
says lead author Jian Feng, professor in the department of physiology and biophysics in the University at Buffalo School of medicine and Biomedical sciences.
The work, published in Molecular Psychiatry, builds on previous studies showing that human fibroblasts can be converted to neurons,
and the selective uptake of serotonin. he researchers found that they could produce induced serotonergic neurons from fibroblasts by introducing four genes that control the development of serotonin neurons. hese genes change how the human genome,
which is like a computer hard drive, is read, so that the cell switches from a lung cell to a serotonin neuron,
since they can be generated from individual patients suffering from illnesses involving the neurotransmitter. hese patient-specific serotonin neurons will be very useful to the discovery of new drugs for diseases ranging from depression
and anxiety to obsessive-compulsive disorder and many others, says Feng. hey will not only allow researchers to study why certain individuals develop a disease
and tissues in the body. eng coauthors are from University at Buffalo, and Ruijin Hospital and Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of medicine.
Feng also has an appointment at the Veterans Affairs Western New york Healthcare System in Buffalo.
and the National institutes of health supported the work. Source: University at Buffal t
#Drug combo shows promise for skin cancer n transitnew melanoma research finds a combination therapy is highly effective at treating patients with skin metastases.
The treatment, interleukin (IL)- 2 combined with imiquimod and topical retinoid therapy, is a promising option for patients with so-called n-transit metastases.
The findings appear online in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. WHY ISN THIS TREATMENT CATCHING ON?
t unclear if the recently developed targeted melanoma therapies that have revolutionized management of patients with internal melanoma metastases are useful in patients with metastatic disease limited of the skin,
says study leader Emanual Maverakis, an associate professor of dermatology at the University of California, Davis. ur results demonstrate that intralesional therapy with a protein that causes immune cells to divide,
given in combination with a topically applied immune activator, can be a highly effective treatment for these patients.
Although intralesional IL-2 has recently been included in the US National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines for management of melanoma metastases of the skin
US physicians have not adopted it, according to the researchers. About 10 percent of patients with advanced melanoma develop
what are called cutaneous metastases, often located n-transitto the patientslymph nodes. Historically, treatment for these metastatic lesions has been surgical excision with or without radiation therapy,
but disease recurrences can still be very high. For the study, the researchers did a retrospective analysis of patients with either stage III
or stage IV melanoma who had history of treatment with IL-2 therapy combined with imiquimod and a topical retinoid.
The patients had been seen by the dermatology service between 2006 and 2015; most were had elderly and other illnesses.
Ten of the 11 patients had experienced recurrences of the disease after surgery, and several had failed nonsurgical treatments, as well.
TWO YEARS LATER The data indicate that all patients achieved complete clinical response to the treated lesions within one to three months of starting the intralesional IL-2-based therapy.
After two years, 82 percent of patients were alive, and seven were alive at the conclusion of the study without melanoma recurrence.
The remaining five patients died from unrelated causes. he favorable outcomes in these patients are encouraging
and suggest that the therapeutic regimen may have a survival benefit, conclude Maverakis and the research team.
The authors note that the study has limitations in that the records of only 11 patients were analyzed,
and there were no experiments conducted to determine the effects of the therapeutic regimen on the systemic immune response.
Funding for the study came from Burroughs Wellcome Fund, Howard hughes medical institute, and the National institutes of health N
#Synthetic ribosome can keep bacteria alive Scientists have engineered a tethered ribosome that works nearly as well as the real thingn organelle that produces all the proteins and enzymes within the cell.
Researchers may be able to manipulate the human-made ribosome in the laboratory to do things natural ribosomes cannot.
This could lead to the production of new drugs and next-generation biomaterials and to a better understanding of how ribosomes function.
Called Ribo-T, the artificial ribosome was created in the laboratories of Michael Jewett, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering in the Northwestern University Mccormick School of engineering and Applied science
and Alexander Mankin, director of the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Pharmacy Center for Biomolecular Sciences.
Ribo-T may be able to be tuned to produce unique and functional polymers for exploring ribosome functions
or producing designer therapeuticsnd, eventually perhaps even non-biological polymers. No one has developed ever something of this nature. e felt like there was a smallery smallhance Ribo-T could work,
but we did not really know, Mankin says. Mankin, Jewett, and their colleagues were frustrated in their investigations by the ribosomessubunits falling apart
Jewett says. ur new protein-making factory holds promise to expand the genetic code in a unique and transformative way, providing exciting opportunities for synthetic biology and biomolecular engineering,
and the David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellowship supported the work. Sam Hostettler at the University of Illinois at Chicago contributed to writing of this release.
Source: Northwestern Universit
#Tiny metal illarssurvive 1, 100 degrees Celsius Scientists have produced a thin film out of a new class of metal alloys that can survive very high temperatures and extreme pressures.
Researchers at ETH Zurich then used the filmust 3 micrometers thicko form icropillarsthat have very special properties:
Scientists refer to this deformability as ductility. The high-entropy alloy materialade of equal parts niobium, molybdenum, tantalum,
Following heat treatment, micropillars made of the alloy perform significantly better in terms of strength and ductility than those made of pure tungsten.
This is despite the fact that the high-entropy alloy melting point is significantly lower than that of pure tungsten (around 2, 900 versus 3, 400 degrees Celsius.
The scientists produced the 3-micrometer film using magnetron sputtering, a coating method often used in the field of microelectronics.
This was the first time the technique had been used to produce a high-entropy alloy by atomizing the four elements and spraying them onto a substrate material.
The material is remarkable not only for its extremely intricate pillar structure but also for its internal crystal structure.
this material also consists of a large number of small individual crystals. The special feature of the alloy is that these individual crystals are tinyhis is referred to as a nanocrystalline material. lthough nanocrystalline materials have many desirable properties,
they often also bring disadvantages, explains Yu Zou, a doctoral student and first author of the study published in the journal Nature Communications. or example,
these materials are usually not temperature-resistant, as heating causes the individual crystals to expand
and therefore changes the properties of the material. ccording to the scientists, the alloy ability to withstand extreme temperatures may be related to the relatively disordered atomic distribution of the elements inside the material.
In particular, the researchers suspect that the disorder at the internal boundary surfaces of individual crystals in high-entropy alloys means the crystals tend to grow less than in other materials when heated.
Whether this theory is accurate is something the scientists wish to investigate in another research project,
for example for building sensors that are required to operate in extreme conditions. Source: ETH Zuric o
#Depth sensor could bring Kinect games outdoors A new imaging technology could address a major drawback of depth-sensing cameras, such as Microsoft Kinect controller:
the inability to work in bright light, especially sunlight. The key is to gather only the bits of light the camera actually needs.
associate professor of robotics at Carnegie mellon University. e don need new image-processing algorithms, and we don need extra processing to eliminate the noise,
This is all done by the sensor. ne prototype based on this model synchronizes a laser projector with a common rolling-shutter camerahe type of camera used in most smartphoneso that the camera detects light only from points being illuminated by the laser as it scans across the scene.
including medical imaging, inspection of shiny parts, and sensing for robots used to explore the moon and planets.
It also could be incorporated readily into most smartphones. Depth cameras work by projecting a pattern of dots
or lines over a scene. Depending on how these patterns are deformed or how much time it takes light to reflect back to the camera,
if only briefly, notes Kyros Kutulakos, a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. ven though wee not sending a huge amount of photons, at short time scales,
wee sending a lot more energy to that spot than the energy sent by the sun, he explains.
Alternatively, if other camera hardware is used, the mathematical framework developed by the team can compute energy-efficient codes that optimize the amount of energy that reaches the camera. e have a way of choosing the light rays we want to capture
and only those rays. n addition to enabling the use of Kinect-like devices to play videogames outdoors,
the new approach also could be used for medical imaging, such as skin structures that otherwise would be obscured
when light diffuses as it enters the skin. Likewise, the system can see through smoke despite the light scattering that usually makes it impenetrable to cameras.
William edwhittaker, a robotics professor at Carnegie mellon, says the system offers a number of advantages for extraterrestrial robots.
noting that a robot sensors expend a relatively large amount of energy because they are always on. very watt matters in a space mission. arasimhan says depth cameras that can operate outdoors could be useful in automotive applications,
and the Natural sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada funded the work. The researchers will present their findings at SIGGRAPH 2015, the International Conference on Computer graphics and Interactive Techniques, in Los angeles t
#Tantalum shows promise for high-density storage Scientists have created a solid-state memory technology that allows for high-density storage with a minimum incidence of computer errors.
The memories are based on tantalum oxide, a common insulator in electronics. Applying voltage to a 250-nanometer-thick sandwich of graphene, tantalum, nanoporous tantalum oxide,
and platinum creates addressable bits where the layers meet. Control voltages that shift oxygen ions
The discovery by the Rice university lab of chemist James Tour could allow for crossbar array memories that store up to 162 gigabits
Eight bits equal one byte; a 162-gigabit unit would store about 20 gigabytes of information.
Details appear online in the journal Nano Letters. Like the Tour lab previous discovery of silicon oxide memories, the new devices require only two electrodes per circuit,
making them simpler than present-day flash memories that use three. ut this is a new way to make ultradense, nonvolatile computer memory,
Tour says. Nonvolatile memories hold their data even when the power is off, unlike volatile random-access computer memories that lose their contents
when the machine is shut down. 100 times less energy Modern memory chips have many requirements: They have to read
and write data at high speed and hold as much as possible. They must also be durable and show good retention of that data
while using minimal power. Tour says the new design, which requires 100 times less energy than present devices,
has the potential to hit all the marks. his tantalum memory is based on two-terminal systems,
so it all set for 3d memory stacks, he says. nd it doesn need even diodes
or selectors, making it one of the easiest ultradense memories to construct. This will be a real competitor for the growing memory demands in high-definition video storage and server arrays.
Tour says tantalum oxide memories can be fabricated at room temperature. He notes the control voltage that writes
and rewrites the bits is adjustable, which allows a wide range of switching characteristics. Researchers from Korea University-Korea Institute of Science and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, collaborated on the project
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