#FDA approves first 3d printed drug Aprecia Pharmaceuticals owns Spritam (levetiracetam), a solid oral pill to treat epileptic seizures.
The drug is manufactured using a three-dimensional printer which creates a porous formulation that helps bioavailability and patient uptake,
the company says. The 3d printer lets the company create a pill with a high drug load up to 1, 000mg of levetiracetam, in a single dose.
Levetiracetam is prescribed already widely for epilepsy. Aprecia said the new delivery formulation is designed to help patients who struggle with current dosage forms,
MIT invention3d printing has previously been used to make medical devices and replicate organs for preclinical studies,
but this is the first FDA approval of a drug product. Aprecia formulation platform, which it calls Zipdose technology,
and other high-dose medicines that rapidly disintegrate with a small amount of liquid, and says it has exclusive rights to pharmaceutical applications of the technology.
#Immune cell binding nanoparticle could lead to new sepsis treatment A nanoparticle that binds to immune cells in the body has been shown to tune down inflammation and offer a potential first-of-a-kind treatment for sepsis.
Sepsis is the single most frequent cause of death in hospitalised patients, causing 8 million deaths each year.
Supportive care is given, underlying infections treated, but there is no effective treatment. Researchers sprinkled a plastic nanoparticle with sialic acid ligands that modulated macrophage immune cells.
This produced a therapeutic response in mouse models of sepsis, in human lung cells and an ex vivo human lung model.
Sepsis occurs when chemicals released into the bloodstream to fight an infection trigger an inflammatory cascade that can damage organs. e saw increased survival in mice
and in in vitro and human models we saw reduced pro-inflammatory cytokine production, explained Chris Scott, researcher at Queens University Belfast, UK,
and senior author of a new study in Science Translational Medicine. ou need to get macrophages under control quickly in sepsis.
We hope wel have something that can be administered in an ICU to prevent a cytokine storm
or seen an effect within hours. rotein targetingthe nanoparticles target Siglecs, proteins found on the surface of immune cells that recognise a type of sugar called sialic acid. hese receptors help the immune system distinguish between self and non-self
and are important in regulation of immune responses in diseases like inflammation, molecular biologist James Paulson at the Scripps Research Institute in the US told this publication. he authors exploit Siglec function by attaching sialic acids to nanoparticles that exploit the function of Siglecs and control inflammation,
he added. The sialic acid ligands do not elicit the necessary response on their own, but do conjugated so only when to a nanoparticle. acrophages try to gobble up the nanoparticles and remove them from circulation,
so we are getting a targeting effect using the nanoparticle that you couldn get with a soluble antibody,
said Scott. Translation is keyhis team saw translation as key to their strategy. ften macromolecular drugs are very hard to translate
Cutting off the cycle of inflammation could allow sepsis but also a frequent complication called ARDS to be treated.
Up to 25%of patients with severe sepsis develop ARDS and up to half of these patients will die.
These findings are surprising ince it had not been reported previously that engaging this siglec receptor with nanoparticles displaying the glycan (sugar) ligand would have such profound effects on inflammation,
noted Paulson. he usual challenges are there regards moving to the clinic, but the novel therapeutics like this present additional manufacturing challenges
and might encounter an extended regulatory approval process, he adds. The new drug was developed by Queens University Belfast, UK,
and its efficacy in sepsis models was shown in collaboration with Trinity college Dublin, Ireland t
#Doctors can now put drugs straight into brains Doctors can now inject drugs straight into people brains,
after making a major discovery in breaking through the barrier that keeps the nervous and circulatory systems apart.
The blood-brain barrier (BBB) keeps us safe by ensuring that chemicals and microbes can't get through to our clean brain and cause it problems.
A team from the Canadian National Research Council has made carrier molecules that help disease-fighting ones break through,
where they can then release the therapeutics they need, straight into the nervous system. Doctors have been trying to get through the barrier
because the impact of the drugs would be so much more immediate and powerful if it went straight into the brain.
and grown in a lab. Those drugs can eventually be used to treat brain diseases, doctors hope,
But the discovery could help provide new understandings of the way that the biochemistry of the brain and body works, in the meantime e
#Lily drone: flying selfie camera follows you around as you ski or run A new drone camera has been released that allows users to simply throw it in the air
and have it follow them around. The drone is designed to allow people to be filmed without having someone do it for them.
It looks to be positioned towards the same people who use Go Pros, mounting them to their head to film snowboarding and other extreme sports,
To use the drone, users simply turn it on and throw it up into the air.
From there it will follow a special transmitter or go in preprogrammed routes. The drone is waterproof and small,
only weighing 2. 8 lbs. While it flying, users can choose where to send the drone either following or leading ahead of people,
or circling around them. Then those photos and videos can be exported and viewed after the fact.
The drone has a camera that can take 1080p video, or 120 frames per second slomo films at 820p.
It also takes 12 megapixel stills. The drone can be ordered pre now for $599, plus $20 shipping.
But they won be delivered until February 2016
#Fingerprints can show cocaine use history, could lead to improved drug testing Fingerprints carry a marker of cocaine use,
scientists have claimed, in a discovery that they hope will create a new and much easier form of drug testing.
researchers at the University of Sussex say. And by collecting and analysing those fingerprints, they could find out
since the mass spectrometers that are being used cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. But the same technology could eventually be incorporated into easy and small testing kits for anywhere that people need them,
including courts, prisons and even in workplaces o
#Apple car: Visit to BMW factory fuels further rumours of possible partnership During the visit executives from the technology company asked detailed questions about tooling and production,
and BMW board members signalled their readiness to license parts, according to a Reuters report that quoted sources at BMW.
Although there are no plans at present for jointly developing a passenger vehicle, according to BMW, one of the sources quoted by Reuters said exploratory talks between senior managers may be revived at a later stage.
Rumours of a possible partnership that would see Apple using the body of BMW's'i'vehicles as the basis for an Apple Car
have been circulating for months. Last year after a visit by Tim cook, Apple's CEO, to BMW's headquarters,
but news of the Leipzig visit only emerged in Germany's Manager-Magazin last week.
According to the Reuters sources discussions between Apple and BMW ended inconclusively. Apple appears to want to explore developing a passenger car on its own,
while BMW is said to be cautious about sharing its manufacturing know-how as it wants to avoid becoming a mere supplier to a software or internet giant.
Since the Leipzig visit, there has been a reshuffle at the top of BMW with Harald Krueger, appointed BMW Chief executive in May, in favour of establishing his own team and his plans for BMW by year end,
before engaging in new projects, a person familiar with his thinking told Reuters. A further complication is the departure of Herbert Diess,
the BMW's board member for development who played a leading role in initial discussions with Apple.
He defected to Volkswagen in December. Apple's car project is named code'Project Titan 'but details remain a closely guarded secret.
Recent hires by Apple have stoked also the rumour mill. In July Doug Betts a former senior vice-president at the Chrysler Group, joined Apple.
The company has hired also Paul Furgale, a researcher on autonomous vehicles, according to a report by The Wall street journal l
#'Brain training'game helps people with schizophrenia live a normal life Patients who played the game regularly for a month were four times better than non-players at remembering the kind of things that are critical for normal, day-to-day life,
researchers said. The computer game was based on scientific principles that are known to rainthe brain in episodic memory,
which helps people to remember events such as where they parked a car or placed a set of keys,
said Professor Barbara Sahakian of Cambridge university, the lead author of the study. People recovering from schizophrenia suffer serious lapses in episodic memory
which prevent them from returning to work or studying at university, so anything that can improve the ability of the brain to remember everyday events will help them to lead a normal life,
Professor Sahakian said. Schizophrenia affects about one in every hundred people and results in hallucinations and delusions (Rex) his kind of memory is essential for everyday learning
and everything we do really both at home and at work. We have formulated an ipad game that could drive the neural circuitry behind episodic memory by stimulating the ability to remember where things were on the screen,
Professor Sahakian said. Schizophrenia affects about one in every hundred people and results in hallucinations and delusions it is estimated to cost the NHS about £2bn a year in treatment alone,
with wider costs for society such as lost work. Although the main symptoms can be treated with antipsychotic drugs,
there is no proven drug therapy for treating losses in episodic memory, which has led scientists to find ways of training the brain through computer-based games. e need a way of treating the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as problems with episodic memory,
but slow progress is being made towards developing a drug treatment, Professor Sahakian said. o this proof-of-concept study is important
because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have failed so far. Because the game is interesting
even those patients with a general lack of motivation are spurred on to continue the training,
she said. Game designers worked alongside the Cambridge researchers for nine months to develop a gaming app called Wizard,
which plays on the idea of having to remember different locations of characters on the screen of an ipad.
Patients were involved in the game design to ensure they would understand it and enjoy it,
Professor Sahakian said. The study, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, involved 22 schizophrenia patients who played the game for eight hours over a period of four weeks
with players of the game being compared with non-players in terms of a psychological test known as global assessment functioning (GAF.
he GAF measures participants'social occupational and psychological function. Importantly, the patients with schizophrenia enjoyed playing the game
and were motivated to continue. The group that played the game was approximately four times better in terms of their memory than the group that did not,
Professor Sahakian said. Professor Barbara Sahakian of Cambridge university, the lead author of the study Professor Peter Jones of Cambridge university,
the leader the study, said: hese are promising results and suggest that there may be the potential to use game apps to not only improve a patient episodic memory,
but also their functioning in activities of daily living. e will need to carry out further studies with larger sample sizes to confirm the current findings,
but we hope that, used in conjunction with medication and current psychological therapies, this could help people with schizophrenia minimise the impact of their illness on everyday life. i
#Lexus Hoverboard is real, lets people glide around using magnets and liquid nitrogen Lexus has unveiled the first working hoverboard,
powered by magnets and nitrogen but we won be flying around like Back To The Future just yet.
The company has showed finally off its lidehoverboard concept, after a series of teasing videos. But the magnet-powered board only hovers slightly off the ground
and can only do so when it on top of a metal surface. The board levitates by using two ryostatsreservoirs of superconducting material that must be cooled by being put into liquid nitrogen.
It uses those to push itself slightly above the metal surface levitating as it goes. he magnetic field from the track is effectively rozeninto the superconductors in the board,
maintaining the distance between the board and track essentially keeping the board in a hover,
said Oliver de Hass, CEO of one of the companies that helped Lexus make the board,
in a statement. he force is strong enough that the rider can stand and even jump on the board.
Like biological evolution, the robots mother could look out for the best traits in her children,
They were built out of small plastic cubes with motors inside. The experiments found that those baby robots passed down all of their best traits.
according to the researchers. ne of the big questions in biology is how intelligence came about wee using robotics to explore this mystery,
said Iida. ut what we do have are a lot of enabling technologies that will help us import some aspects of biology to the engineering world. m
Latest devices allow employers to track behaviour of their workers In the past, companies looking to increase the productivity of their staff may not have stretched much further than a modest increase to the Christmas bonus pot or the installation of a new coffee machine.
But the dawn of wearable technology has led to the creation of devices capable of building up workerspersonalised biological profiles,
allowing them to analyse when they are at their peak and when they are having an off-day.
is attracting the interest of hedge funds, banks, consultancies and call centres across the UK. Dr John Coates, a fellow in neuroscience and finance at the University of Cambridge who specialises in the biology of risk taking and stress, said he is now getting bout one call a weekfrom financial institutions,
healthcare companies and tech firms interested in applying his research in the workplace. p to now,
if you weren doing well at your job, most people thought the corrective was more information or better reasoning, some kind of psychological intervention,
or safety in the workplace but the new gadgets could allow firms to link their staff behaviour and physiological data to their business performance for the first time,
If the technology works, a wearable gadget could potentially warn a stock market trader to slow down
when they are n the zoneas well as analysing the wearer current biological signals, the technology could also predict what their physical state might be days ahead of a crucial meeting.
That going to happen in the work world. roducts offering biological monitoring are already on the market.
A firm called Equivital makes a chest-mounted wearable sensor that measures heart rate, stress, breathing, skin temperature and body position.
Humanyze, meanwhile, makes mart work badgescontaining microphones so employeesvoices can be analysed. Chris Brauer, director of innovation at Goldsmiths, University of London, said financial traders may soon produce their own iometric CVSTO prove to prospective employers that they have
what it takes to cope with stress in much the same way that a sports star medical information might be handed over
when they sign with a new team. t not just about other people learning about what makes their employees productive,
he said. hen workers learn about themselves and get intra-personal knowledge about their own habits and
what makes them perform to a higher standard, they find that incredibly insightful. m
#Yahoo Livetext: company makes app to stop video chats being awkward Livetext, quietly launched weeks ago
and now being rolled out worldwide, allows people to chat without actually talking, instead sending video feeds and messages in text.
The app works by showing a video of the person that youe chatting with, in the same way as with a Facetime or Skype call.
But instead of talking to them which wouldn be heard the app pops up a chat box where users can send messages or emoji.
Yahoo found that the audio was often he biggest inhibitor of video chat according to Adam Cahan, SVP of mobile and emerging products at Yahoo.
That matched the feedback from the young people that Yahoo hopes will use the app,
Group who stole information from website for cheating spouses make good on promise to post data online A group calling itself the Impact Team compromised the site
which encourages married users to cheat on their spouses and advertises 37 million members last month.
At least two other dating sites, Cougar Life and Established Men, also owned by the same parent group, Avid Life Media (ALM),
also had compromised their data. After the intrusion the hacked demanded that Ashley Madison and Established Men,
which promises to connect beautiful young women with rich sugar daddies o fulfill their lifestyle needs take down the two sites.
a sister site run by ALM that promises to connect older women with younger men was targeted not by the group
which claimed to have complete access to the company database, including every single members user records.
While the hackers took issue with the questionable morals of the sites, their main point of contention was the fact that Ashley Madison charges users a £15 fee to carry out a full delete of their information should they decide to leave it.
They claimed that ALM actually retained that date on their company servers. vid Life Media has been instructed to take Ashley Madison and Established Men offline permanently in all forms
or we will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customerssecret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses,
and employee documents and emails, the hackers wrote in a statement following the breach. Their warnings were ignored by ALM who said they had beefed up security following the attack.
However, a data dump of 9. 7 gigabytes was posted on Tuesday to the dark web using an Onion address accessible only through the Tor browser,
according to Wired. com. It appears to include all of the information they had threatened to release including member account details
and logins for the social networking site. vid Life Media has failed to take down Ashley Madison and Established Men,
Impact Team wrote in a statement accompanying the online dump Tuesday, Wired. com reported. e have explained the fraud, deceit,
and stupidity of ALM and their members Chances are signed your man up on the world biggest affair site,
and videos The site has forced always users to crop their pictures into perfect squares, however they were taken originally.
But now users can share photos in portrait or landscape, the site has said, giving people a ormaticon that lets them adjust
what size they need. The pictures and videos then show up as normal in the feed,
Instagram has been pushing its video offering hard, especially alongside the growth of Twitter competitor Vine
which also forces its users to push their videos into square boxes. Instagram stressed in its announcement that quare format has been
and you can capture the Golden gate bridge from end to end. he update is available in the new version of Instagram on Android and ios,
#Apple iphone 6s release date: new phone and Apple TV SET to be launched on September 9 The company will hold the event on September 9,
as had previously been rumoured, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San francisco a much bigger venue than previous launches have been held in.
Apple is expected to launch the next iphone the iphone 6s and iphone 6s plus at the event.
But it could also reveal the next Apple TV and new ipads, according to leaks. The back of an Apple iphone 6 Plus gold, is shown here at a Verizon store on September 18
2014 in Orem, Utah But Apple didn mention any new products in the invitation, only suggesting that curious people ask Siri.
A range of details have already been revealed about the new iphone, however all collected in our round up of rumours for the iphone 6s and 6s Plus s
#Google logo history: A trip through search engine's gradually smoothening logo Google just launched a new logo the first major redesign in years,
and a reflection of the changing nature of the search engine in all of our lives. But the site has been on a gradual evolution
since it began in 1998, slow shedding the design of years past and becoming more smooth and less objectionable.
At its beginning, Google wasn called even by that name t launched as ackrub That site had a rather obvious picture at the top:
a photo of a hairy hand on top of what appears to be skin, with large letter saying ackrubplaced on top of it.
It became Google in late 1997. The look was a little reminiscent of Word Art of old:
the 3d letters tipped back, with strange pixelated edges. At that time, the site was just as youthful.
It was still functioning largely as a search engine for Stanford university, as well as the web, and offered an explanation of
what it was at the top with a little text box underneath. The logo then got slightly more grown-up.
It got a little flattened down the 3d letters becoming curvy rather than looking like real objects and the colours changed.
Google also briefly got an exclamation mark in 1999. It disappeared a year later. That shouting logo would be the last very different one that the site would have.
Until today redesign the site stuck by its formula: two blue letters, two red and one yellow and one green, all in an entirely unobjectionable serif font.
The company would gradually change that look, moving letters around, softening the colours and getting rid of shadow,
but harder to read on the tiny screens of mobiles. In doing so, it recognised one of the most important changes during its 17 years like Google itself,
the logo had been designed to be looked at on screens, but now a huge proportion of web browsing is done from phones and other mobile devices n
#iphone 6s Plus photos: leaks show Force Touch display, subtly altered size The pictures are one of the first glimpses of the iphone 6s Plus,
the bigger of the two new phones that Apple is expected to release at its event next week.
They show a slightly bigger phone that contains a sensor for Apple Force Touch technology
which allows the phone screen to be pressure sensitive to allow extra input options. The pictures, reported to have leaked from the Taiwanese supply chain,
show the front of the new phone. As well as the slightly larger size and changed display
they appear to feature a bigger front camera. It has already been suggested that the new iphone will feature an improved front-facing,
or selfie, camera. As well as better hardware for more clear photos, the software will be improved ncluding a feature that will use the screen to create a flash for taking pictures in the dark.
Apple has previously been rumoured to be strengthening the body of the iphone 6, in order to avoid a repeat of the endgateproblems that led some to complain their phone had been curving in their pocket.
Apple will use a more reinforced metal for the phone body the reports have indicated. That slightly larger body will have a smaller battery than the iphone 6, according to previous leaks.
It isn't clear whether that will mean that the phone will have less battery life, however, since Apple has been rumoured to be adding new, more efficient components.
The company doesn't usually make any external changes to the"s"phones, instead using the same external design
but improving the internal hardware. Apple Force Touch powered by the small sensor that can be seen in the centre of the display allows the phone to tell how hard its screen is being pressed
and trigger extra events on screen. Some details of how exactly it will work have already been revealed
indicating that the hard press will trigger further menu options. Force Touch was launched with the Apple Watch in April,
helping users interact with its small screen. It was added then to Apple Macbooks, giving extra options for how quickly to fast forward, for instance d
#Prosthetic hand lets man actually feel what he touches for the first time Researchers have created a prosthetic hand that people can actually feel through, for the first time ever.
The technology lets paralysed people feel actual sensations when touching objects including light taps on the mechanical finger
and could be a huge breakthrough for prosthetics, according to its makers. The tool was used to let a 28-year-old man who has been paralysed for more than a decade.
While prosthetics have previously been able to be controlled directly from the brain, it is the first time that signals have been sent successfully the other way. ee completed the circuit,
said DARPA program manager Justin Sanchez in a statement. rosthetic limbs that can be controlled by thoughts are showing great promise,
but without feedback from signals traveling back to the brain it can be difficult to achieve the level of control needed to perform precise movements. y wiring a sense of touch from a mechanical hand directly into the brain,
this work shows the potential for seamless biotechnological restoration of near-natural function. The prosthetics work by running wires from the part of the brain that controls movement into the special hand,
as part of a project by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the US Department of defense. The man was able to accurately report
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