#Scientists Control Brain cells Using Sound waves The ability to control brain cells with sound waves sounds like science fiction, right?
A similar technique, called optogenetics, is currently in practice and uses light pulses to control neurons. Just like a switch in your house turns your lights on and off,
light can be used to turn neurons on and off. Special light-sensitive channel proteins are added to specific neurons
an optical fiber is implanted surgically. Sonogenetics is less invasive as low-frequency sound waves can pass through tissue and bone with ease.
Sreekanth Chalasani of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and lead author said, n contrast to light,
low-frequency ultrasound can travel through the body without any scattering. Light-based techniques are great for some uses and
So far, the work has only been performed on worms. The team is confident the technique can be carried out on any animal,
whether this could work in a mammalian brain, "Chalasani says in a statement. His group has begun already testing the approach in mice."
"When we make the leap into therapies for humans, I think we have shot a better with noninvasive sonogenetics approaches than with optogenetics."
"Chalasani told the Guardian, e believe that, using gene therapy and a therapeutic virus, it may be possible to make target human neurons temporarily susceptible to the ultrasound signal in a clinical setting for certain neurological treatments."
"He added that other possible applications could focus on muscle and insulin-producing cells a
#This Ultrathin"Invisibility Cloak"Makes It Impossible To See Microscopic Objects Scientists have revealed they have developed a minuscule"invisibility cloak"that renders tiny objects impossible to see.
Importantly, the microscopic design is scalable, meaning it could be applied to things that aren't,
and conducted by scientists from the U s. Department of energy Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley.
They created a tiny kin cloakof gold nanoantennas, which was just 80 nanometers thick. The cloak was designed to reflect light waves in such a way that an object it covers appears flat.
When placed over an irregularly shaped microscopic object about the size of a few biological cells, the cloak reflected incoming red light differently at various locations, depending on how pronounced their features
and bumps were. This caused the object to appear flat, rather than its original shape,
as the light was reflected off the cloak like a mirror.""This is the first time a 3d object of arbitrary shape has been cloaked from visible light,
of which is engineering personalized tissue in this case, printing a personalized nerve scaffold for your post-injury healing.
However, it is the culmination of these efforts that may eventually see its way to a hospital near you.
If so, the treatment has the potential to aid more than 200,000 people a year who experience some sort of nerve injury or disease.
The process may be suited aptly for this field of medicine because nerves do not regenerate much after injury
if growth happens at all, it is usually slow and limited. Current treatment options include surgical procedures such as grafts or nerve guidance conduits
This printing technology takes a slightly different approach: After 3d scanning a rat sciatic nerve, the researchers used a custom-built 3d printer to make silicone guides for nerve regeneration.
These 3d printed nerve pathways were embedded with biochemical cues to promote growth. The final 3d printed product was implanted then into rats with severed nerves.
In about 10 to 12 weeks'time, the rats experienced improved walking ability. The advantage of this technology is that precise shapes can be printed to suit the patient,
"This represents an important proof of concept of the 3d printing of custom nerve guides for the regeneration of complex nerve injuries,
"said lead author Michael Mcalpine, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, in a statement.
and printer right at the hospital to create custom nerve guides right on site to restore nerve function. n
If confirmed, the research could one day allow infertile men to have their own biological children.
Startup biotechnology company Kallistem in Lyon, France, revealed the breakthrough earlier this year, but now have taken out a patent describing the technique, in tandem with The french National Centre for Scientific research (CNRS).
According to the researchers, thousands of men and even young boys rendered infertile by cancer and other diseases could benefit. his breakthrough opens the way for therapeutic avenues that have been awaited eagerly by clinicians for many years,
said CNRS in a statement. ndeed, no treatment is currently available to preserve the fertility of young,
Yet more than 15,000 young cancer patients are affected throughout the world. Nor is there any solution for the 120,000 adult men who suffer from infertility that cannot be treated using existing technologies.
so it will be interesting to see the reaction from experts when that happens. For now, most are declining to give their thoughts on the patent but if confirmed,
This adds to the demographic time-bomb of a greater number of older people suffering from ill-health.
Yet, according to the Global Burden of Disease study published in the Lancet, of the top ten health risks most are related lifestyle and within our power to change.
Between 1990 and 2013, life expectancy in the UK increased by 6. 2 years for men to 79.1 years
) Chronic Disease And Disability A surprising fact is that, nowadays, fewer than 4%of people are completely free of any health problem,
with more people living with chronic and under-reported illnesses. The number of years lived with disability have increased in almost every country, attributable to the growth of chronic diseases such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, cancer, back pain, mental health disorders, dementia, road injuries, HIV
/AIDS and malaria. This has increased also the demand for care. A comparison of years of life lost between regions of the UK, the EU15 group of countries
plus Australia, Canada, Norway and the US, shows that England worst affected region the northwest (with northeast England close behind) is similar to Scotland, Northern ireland and the US.
if we tackled the main health risks that affect us. Globally, the leading ten risks are smoking, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes
alcohol use, high cholesterol, kidney disease, low physical activity, diets low in fruits and vegetables and drug use.
These are drawn from 79 biological, behavioural, environmental and occupational factors. The list is similar in the UK, with smoking, high blood pressure,
where Wales scored worse in physical activity but better in blood pressure, or where drug use was a greater problem in the southwest, southeast and the east of England than elsewhere.
Of metabolic (biological), environmental, or behavioural (lifestyle) factors affecting health, it is lifestyle factors that carry the most weight.
when fighting for funding to tackle a single disease in isolation is no longer effective. Health problems tend to cluster from childhood to adulthood
and then around the end of life They also share both biological and environmental risks.
The main risk factors leading to chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, obesity, smoking and heavy alcohol consumption might result from family problems, social inequality or poverty, beliefs or customs of particular subcultures
, selfish business models, bullying or violence, poor education (awareness), depressive mood and even the changeable weather.
Current prevention and interventions programmes and social and health policies aimed at reducing the leading risks might have limited effects.
Instead, we should focus on the context and mechanism of actions of these risks. We, therefore, need to restructure human society in each country
shorter working hours with lower unemployment rates), the built environment (including housing and neighbourhoods renewal, the transport system, etc), consistent culture,
education and parenting, hobbies and so on. This is the grand challenge that faces us in the next decade
And Back On One Tank Of Fuel An ion engine that smashes the fuel efficiency record has been registered for an innovation patent.
Inventor Patrick Neumann told University of Sydney student newspaper Honi Soit the drive could go to ars
and back on a tank of fuel but its first application may be shunting networks of small satellites around in Earth orbit.
Neumann says the idea for the ion engine came to him as a third year student assisting a postdoc as part of a program to connect undergrads with real research.
Neumann measured the speed of titanium ions released by a pulsed electric arc similar to an arc welder. he titanium was coming out at 20 kilometers per second 12.4 miles per second and
In subsequent work Neumann proved his hunch right, eventually testing the suitability of 11 materials.
He says ther metals have lower efficiency but higher thrust. So you would need more fuel to get to Mars,
Magnesium is found as olivine in asteroids, but Neumann has achieved promising results with titanium, aluminium and other widely used metals.
Spaceships using his drive might find capturing fuel made from a dead satellite a handy way to refuel,
very early calculations we think 20 kilograms 44 pounds of magnesium could get a 100 kilogram 220 pound ship to Mars and back.
and there will be some weight for the craft, solar panels and communications, but we think there would be 20 kilograms left over for the payload,
Neumann says experiments with pulsed electric arcs on metals go back to the 1920s, and some of the data collected was useful to him in assessing
what to test. This work was done with less than half the current he uses and no one before him had tried using high current pulsed arcs for thrust u
#Light-Based Data Breakthrough Could Lead To Much Faster Computers Researchers say they have developed a method to store data permanently in a memory chip using light.
The breakthrough, published in the journal Nature Photonics, could lead to significantly faster computers in the future.
To store data, it is essential a device must be able to work when power is both on and off think of a CD, DVD or hard drive.
But computers are limited in their speed by the transmission of electric data between a processor
and the memory stored in these devices called the Von neumann bottleneck. This means that faster processors don't necessarily mean better computing power
when it is speed the transmission of the data that is the limiting factor. Using light, or photons, to transfer data could
therefore allow for much greater speeds. But until now, scientists had struggled to find a way to create a light-based device that can store data for a significant period of time. here no point using faster processors
if the limiting factor is the shuttling of information to -and-from the memory, said University of Oxford's Professor Harish Bhaskaran,
who led the research, in a statement. ut we think using light can significantly speed this up.
In this research which also included the University of Münster, the Karlsruhe Institute of technology and the University of Exeter,
the team created the world first all-photonic nonvolatile memory chip. It uses a material called Ge2sb2te5 (GST),
which is used also in rewritable CDS and DVDS, to store data. Pulses of light can change the material's state from an ordered to a random state,
or crystalline to amorphous. This change can be used to store information, in the form of 1s and 0s, for decades.
And using a technique known as multiplexing which involves sending and directing different wavelengths of light down a silicon nitrate waveguide a single pulse can write
and read data simultaneously, providing irtually unlimited bandwidth, Professor Wolfram Pernice of the University of Münster said in the statement. his is a completely new kind of functionality using proven existing materials,
added Professor Bhaskaran. hese optical bits can be written with frequencies of up to one gigahertz and could provide huge bandwidths.
This is the kind of ultra-fast data storage that modern computing needs. The team will now work to develop the technology,
including finding ways to perform more tasks using light instead of electrical signals t
#Cancer drug Promises To Break down Barrier To HIV Cure Researchers have found a promising way of kicking the AIDS virus out of its hiding place in infected cells,
potentially removing the main obstacle to curing HIV. While antiretroviral treatment successfully suppresses HIV replication in an infected person,
it can completely remove the virus. This is due to the virus'ability to integrate itself into the DNA of cells,
where it can lie dormant and invisible to the body immune system for years. These so-called eservoirsof what is known as atent virusare the primary barrier to an HIV cure.
Recent research has focused on a hock and killmethod to shock the dormant virus out of its comfortable place in the reservoir.
and activation of the virus. Research published today in PLOS Pathogens shows the HDAC inhibitor,
romidepsin-a drug currently being used to treat cancer-to be the most potent, and thus successful, inhibitor trialled so far.
Six patients, who had been on antiretroviral treatment for around 10 years, each received three transfusions of romidepsin.
University of Melbourne Professor and Director of the Doherty Institute, Sharon Lewin, said the results were promising. t is an interesting study
so that was encouraging as well, said Professor Lewin, who was involved not in the study. Dr Kersten Koelsch, who was involved in the study,
which play an important part in fighting infection. e know that the HIV reservoir needs to be controlled to some extent by T cell responses,
who is a senior lecturer at UNSW Australia Kirby Institute. o if you had a weak T cell response after an intervention,
researchers were by no means close to a HIV cure. nless a miracle happens, there not going to be a cure for HIV for at least 10 or even 20 years,
he said. mall studies like this can be very informative for the next study which can then build upon it,
He said romidepsin was a romising agent to check in future studies in combination with immunotherapies or vaccines.
which will use a combined therapy of romidepsin with a HIV vaccine to kill the infected cells. ombination studies are of highest interest now.
That really what wee after now, said Professor Lewin. Senior Research Officer at the Burnet Institute, Lachlan Gray said the latest research was extremely promising.
But he added there were limitations to current HIV research as it focused only on eliminatig the viral reservoir in the blood. ackling the blood reservoir has been the major focus of cure research to this point
#Drug Treats Protein That May Cause Alzheimer's disease The drug salsalate has been found to prevent and even reverse the development of tau protein tangles in mice with a condition similar to Alzheimer's disease.
While so far the success is only in animals, salsalate has a head start on other potential treatments as it has passed already the safety trials required to be used to treat arthritis.
As society ages, Alzheimer's disease the most common cause for dementia looms ever larger as a prime source of suffering.
Drugs with promise have been identified but progress has been slowed in part by debates over the disease's main culprit.
Debate rages between those who blame the formation of tau protein tangles within neurons, and those who believe a buildup of beta amyloid plaques are the main cause.
and other researchers argue Alzheimer's is actually a complex of diseases with different causes but similar symptoms.
This makes the announcement in Nature Medicine that salsalate inhibits and reverses the acetylation of tau particularly significant.
"We identified for the first time a pharmacological approach that reverses all aspects of tau toxicity, "said Gan in a statement."
even though it was administered after disease onset, indicating that it may be an effective treatment option.""When salsalate was given to mice,
Salsalate, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory, does carry risks, particularly an increased danger of heart attacks and strokes. However, these have been assessed as low enough to justify the drug's use against pain from both osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis
and to be explored to counteract insulin resistance in TYPE II DIABETES. Tau buildup is observed also in rarer conditions,
including progressive supranuclear palsy and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The same mouse model is used to study Alzheimer's and FTD,
with researchers believing that a single gene in mice triggers the two conditions that have related differing,
but, causes in humans. Consequently, hopes are high that salsalate could be effective for FTD as well.
#New Experiment Confirms Fundamental Symmetry In Nature With the help of the Large hadron collider (LHC) heavy ion detector ALICE (A large Ion Collider Experiment),
By making precise measurements of particle mass and electric charge, researchers from the University of São paulo (USP) and the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) confirmed the symmetry between the nuclei of particles and antiparticles in terms of charge, parity
and identification capabilities to take measurements of particles produced from high-energy heavy ion collisions. The purpose of their experiment was to look for subtle differences in the ways protons
a professor at USP's Physics Institute (IF) and a member of the Brazilian team working on ALICE.
In their experiment, the researchers measured differences in the mass-overcharge ratio for deuterons and antideuterons along with helium-3 and antihelium-3. Researchers took that data
Data shows these particles combine to form nuclei as well as antinuclei at almost the same rate,
The team measured both the curvature of particle tracks within the detector magnetic field and the particlesflight time in order to calculate the mass-to-charge ratios.
After measuring both the curvature of particle tracks in the detector's magnetic field and the particles'time of flight
this new material may be the future for the world of electronics as it could facilitate information transfer.
Each magnet within the new metamaterial is shaped like a grain of rice and roughly 63 nanometers in length.
1 billion of these nanomagnets were placed in a honeycomb pattern on a flat substrate. In total
the nanomagnets covered an area spanning five-by-five millimeters. Initially, the scientists studied the material and its magnetic properties at room temperature.
PSI is designed to complement the high-energy experiments conducted at CERN Large hadron collider (LHC). The facility world-class equipment includes an instrument known as The swiss Muon Source (S S)
which uses muon beams acting as magnetic probes to reveal magnetic properties on a nanoscale.
and arrangement of the nanomagnets. This could allow for the creation of new states of matter,
tailored phase transitions could enable metamaterials to be adapted specifically for different needs in future, "explains Heyderman.
but with its adaptability, this new metamaterial could be the wave of the future. Apart from facilitating information transfer,
It could be useful in data storage, spintronics, or even in sensors that measure magnetic fields. We could even see it used in future computer technology t
#Douxmatok develops new technology that makes sugar twice as sweet, so you eat half as much A new technology in the food industry makes ordinary sugar twice as sweeto food tastes exactly the same with half the calories,
and without the controversy of artificial sweeteners. By coating tiny food safe particles with natural sugar like sucrose or glucose, the technology can trick the sweetness receptors on your tongue into thinking youe eating a full serving.
The startup behind the idea compares it to drug delivery in pharmaceuticals. rug delivery allows you to take less of an active material
and ship it to where you need it...You ship less of it and you create less damage along the way,
The sugar-carrying particle is already a commonly used food additive, so it doesn require new safety testing.
while theye losing weight or reducing their risk or diabetes or heart disease. ealth is not only a physical condition,
Determining an accurate number would require billions more dollars and a great deal more manpower than is given currently to the study of viruses. Though a handful of viruses live in
and on our bodies at all timesnown as the viromeot all of them make us ill; just as often, they lie dormant.
like the Virscan blood test, can tell you any infection youe ever had. However, a brand-new test developed by researchers at Washington University in St louis can now detect virtually any virus known to affect humans and animals.
Called Virocap, this test can also detect ovelviruses not yet identified, as long as they share a few genetic characteristics with known viruses. According to Kristine Wylie, assistant professor of pediatrics at the university Mcdonnell Genome Institute,
and co-author of the study, published in Genome Research, ne of the exciting things of using this high-throughput sequencing is the amount of data we are able to generate in a short amount of time.
Researchers developed the test by condensing one billion viral genetic base pairs to 200 million usable sequences.
Then they took a snippet of each sequence, and made those snippets into robesthat can turn up a genetic match in patient samples.
Because of its vast database of viruses, Virocap is more sensitive than the standardpolymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests commonly used
Researchers can scan the virus genetic sequences and look for a match from conserved genes that have been gathered in public repositories such as the Viral Genome Project.
Virocap has the capacity to detect a vast array of viruses, from the big, bad scary ones such as Ebola or SARS, to the everyday rhinoviruses and noroviruses that cause colds and gastrointestinal flu.
It so sensitive, Wylie says, that it can also detect genetic variants of a virus,
Researchers tested Virocap on the blood and stool samples of a small group of children with unexplained fevers.
Clinicians might find a virus they never thought could be causing a disease. When we did a study of kids with fever, for example,
one patient in that study had a virus we never would have looked for in the blood.
People with unexplained fevers are prescribed also often antibiotics if a virus can be detected. Wylie says Virocap could potentially cut down on the overuse of antibiotics.
researchers could also begin to look for drug-resistant mutations, and mutations in regions that would indicate
whether a vaccine would or would not be as effective. It may also help researchers understand why some people carry around viruses asymptomatically. e found on average that people carried about 5. 5 different viral genera that could cause disease in certain people,
Wylie says. n our study of kids, we found that rhinoviruses that cause colds were
just as common in kids that didn have colds as those that did. So we need to understand what circumstances cause some to be symptomatic.
Virocap can help to add previously unidentified VIRAL DNA to the database of known viruses. he more genome coverage we have,
#Human heart can now be 3d printed using biological materials All 3d printed innovations have something in common:
plastic-based material. What about organic materials, such as human organs? Wouldn it be great if new organs could be printed out and used in surgical operations to save people lives?(
Video) As it turns out, a group of Carnegie mellon researchers have managed to do almost precisely this,
-D printing of various materials has been a common trend in tissue engineering in the last decade,
a graduate student in biomedical engineering at Carnegie mellon and lead author of the study, in a statement.
Biological materials are often soft and fragile in isolation, which proved a challenge for the scientists behind the study.
After the printing had concluded, the support gel could then be melted away by heating it to body temperature (37°C,
These soft materials were not mere plastic copies of biological material: collagens, muscle fibers, miniature brain structures,
and branching artery patterns made of biological matter have all been produced using the technique. Most impressively, using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of human coronary arteries and 3d images of embryonic human hearts,
the team have managed to 3d print replicas of both. This type of ioprintinghas been given the acronym of FRESH Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels.
who have produced complex biological structures with an unprecedented degree of precision. The team next step is to inject heart cells into these 3d printed biological tissue structures
essentially filling in the printed caffoldingwith its biological oncrete This research has obvious implications for medical science.
Let just take one example: the heart. Human heart tissue has lost its ability to repair
this FRESH technique could produce pieces of bespoke heart tissue for each specific case of heart damage. 3d bioprinters aren new:
in this growing field of science, most of these printers cost over $100, 000 (roughly £65, 000) and require a specialist team of operators to use.
and ackingit with open-source software and hardware, this research team have managed to replicate human organ structures for less than $1, 000 (£650) n
#Flexible wearable sensor enables 24-hour blood flow monitoring The best medical devices for measuring blood flow today require the patient to first show up at a clinic or hospital,
But an experimental sensor that clings to skin like a temporary tattoo could enable 24-hour monitoring of blood flow wherever a patient goes.
A wearable sensor could mean the difference between taking what is essentially a snapshot of a patient health
while he or she is at the clinic, and getting the equivalent of around-the-clock video of that person blood flow throughout the day.
Testing showed that a flexible pidermal electronicsblood flow monitor developed by an international team led by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign can measure the blood flow in the outermost 1 to 2 millimeters of skinven for human bodies in motion.
while they go about their daily lives. ay you have diabetic patients and want to be able to monitor changes in specific blood vessels continuously for 24 hours a day,
a Ph d. candidate in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois. here no way of doing that today.
The University of Illinois team developed the new wearable device in cooperation with the U s. National institutes of health and a broader group of U s and Chinese researchers.
Webb was the lead author of a paper detailing the group work; it was published in the 30 oct 2015 online issue of the journal Science Advances.
Webb and his colleagues turned to flexible electronics technology to find a possible wearable solution.
One of the study coauthors is John Rogers, a materials scientist and engineer at the University of Illinois
whose lab has pioneered many examples of biocompatible flexible electronics.)Researchers eventually developed a lightweight, ultra-thin device that sits on top of the skin without distorting the blood flow it seeks to measure.
This attraction prevents any motion between the sensor and skin that could affect the accuracy of readings.
As a backup, medical tape can ensure the device stays put. undamentally, what we were trying to do was remove the relative motion between the body and detector system,
Webb explains. hat allows you to get to same clinical information as state-of-the-art optical imaging devices without the restriction of immobilizing somebody.
and copper supported by silicone. Most of the sensor bulk comes from a 40-micrometer-thick layer of silicone.
Each of the other layers has a thickness of just tens or hundreds of nanometers.
The wearable gadget detects differences in heat patterns caused by the blood flow beneath the skin.
A 1. 5-millimeter thermal actuator within the device heats up by 6 to 7 degrees Celsius to provide a thermal background for the measurements.
Two rings of sensors around the actuator detect the temperature differences in the heat patterns with a precision within 0. 01 degrees Celsius.
Last but not least, computer algorithms help interpret the heat pattern differences as blood flow rate. Testing with the wearable device placed above the wrist veins of human volunteers showed how it could work in practice.
and components that would let it wirelessly transmit data to a laptop or other device, says Webb.
But once that happens, such devices could help revolutionize medicine by providing an unprecedented amount of data for understanding health conditions such as diabetes, the hardening of arteries,
and general human aging. Such flexible sensors could also be placed on internal organs, surgical tools, or implantable devices.
For now, Webb and his colleagues continue to refine the heat-mapping blood flow device with the goal of making it smaller.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011