Over time, the polymer mesh breaks down harmlessly. After growing on the special mesh for just four days,
or to sculpt scar tissue over wounds in a more seamless way. Designer tissue ach case that a surgeon would be presented with is going to be unique,
says team member Miles Montgomery at the University of Toronto, Canada. ou could build it in situ, almost like designer tissue.
The team plans to seek regulatory approval for human use soon. think this technology is very cool,
says Jay Zhang of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, although he adds that clinical applications are some way off. he real test is how it works in vivo,
to repair hearts, to repair vessels, to repair valves. The technique could potentially be used to grow other complex tissues,
#Cancer trap grabs wandering tumour cells to warn of early spread The trouble with cancer is it spreads sometimes even before someone knows they are ill.
A small implant that traps cancer cells as they migrate through the blood could make a lifesaving early-detection system. his could be the canary in the coal mine,
says Lonnie Shea of the University of Michigan at Ann arbor, one of the developers. So far the idea has been tested in mice.
then once it is in place the implant could be scanned for cancer cells while inside the body either by doctors,
or one day perhaps just with a smartphone. hat the fantasy, says Shea. Shea devised the approach along with Jacqueline Jeruss, a breast cancer surgeon.
Jeruss had noticed how common it was for her patientsfirst symptom to be breathlessness as the cancer had already spread to their lungs.
They and their colleagues devised an implant made from an inert porous material already used in medical devices,
and loaded it with a signalling molecule called CCL22. This attracts certain immune cells, which encourages cancer cells to follow suit.
the team showed that cancer cells could be detected in the implant while it was still in place, via a new scanning system called optical coherence tomography (OCT). This technique,
which can penetrate living tissue by a few millimetres, involves measuring the way light is scattered off large molecules and structures inside cells.
Various firms are developing devices that would let OCT be done with a smartphone. In mice, the implants cut the number of tumour cells that migrated to secondary sites like the lungs.
They probably wouldn trap enough cells to work as an anticancer therapy says Shea, but the implant could boost people chances of survival by identifying early on that cancer cells are on the move allowing the patient to begin chemotherapy right away.
The main challenge, says Shea, will be getting the OCT scanner to penetrate human skin, which is thicker than rodent skin.
Other groups are investigating tumour traps that attract certain types of cancer cells via different, more specific, chemical signals.
The new implant should in theory attract a wide range of cancer cells although so far the team have shown only it works for one tumour type other than breast cancer,
in unpublished work. They envisage first using the trap in women at a high risk of breast cancer,
such as those who have had already surgery to remove a tumour and might experience a recurrence.
If a scan reveals that cancer cells are present, the implant could even be removed and the cells analysed to see which cancer drugs they are most susceptible to.
Gerhardt Attard of the Institute of Cancer Research in London says there is growing interest in personalising cancer treatments by testing cancer cells in the blood. his could be a very powerful way of risk stratifying patients for treatment
he says i
#Donated liposuction stem cells could heal difficult wounds IT a quiet revolution. Simple stem cell therapies are finally making their way towards the clinic,
and a treatment for wounds caused by Crohn disease could be the first off-the-shelf therapy to get European union approval.
Hard-to-treat wounds near the anus afflict around 50,000 people in Europe every year. In a phase III trial, a treatment developed by Tigenix in Belgium improved the chances of healing such wounds by 50 per cent and apparently with no adverse side effects.
The therapy uses stem cells derived from donated liposuction tissue which have extremely low levels of the proteins that trigger immune reactions,
says Tigenix head Eduardo Bravo. This means that the treatment, should it be approved after the full results are published next year,
can be given off-the-shelf the stem cells from a single person could be used to treat 2500 people.
By contrast, the only stem-cell-based medicinal product that is currently approved for use in the EU a cornea treatment involves removing cells from each individual eye
and growing them outside the body for weeks. And bone-marrow transplants, which also involve stem cells
and have been performed for decades, require a matched donor t
#Clumps of gold nanoparticles can evolve to carry out computing Move over, microchip. A random assembly of gold nanoparticles can perform calculations normally reserved for neatly arranged patterns of silicon.
Traditional computers rely on ordered circuits that follow preprogrammed rules, but this strategy limits how efficient they can be. he best microprocessors you can buy in a store now can do 1011 operations per second
and use a few hundred watts, says Wilfred van der Wiel of the University of Twente in The netherlands. he human brain can do orders of magnitude more and uses only 10 to 20 watts.
That a huge gap. To close that gap researchers have tried building rain-likecomputers that do calculations without their innards having been laid specifically out for the purpose,
but so far no one had found a material that could reliably perform real calculations. Now, van der Wiel and his colleagues have enabled a clump of gold grains to handle bits of information in the same way that conventional microprocessors do.
Voltage selector The team used gold particles about 20 nanometres across. They laid a few tens of these in a rough circle, each about 1 nanometre from its nearest neighbours,
and surrounded them with eight electrodes. The computations happened when they applied just the right voltages to the cluster at six specific locations.
Then the gold effectively forms a network of transistors that lacks the strict order of connections in a regular microchip,
allowing them to run calculations using less energy. Nothing about the particles told the researchers what the voltages should be, however.
They started with random combinations of voltages and learned which were the most useful using a genetic algorithm,
a procedure that borrows ideas from Darwinian evolution to home in on the ittestones. It compared many sets of voltages,
discarding those for which the unit behaviour made no sense, creating slightly different versions of those that seemed promising,
and trying again. In effect, the clump of gold particles was evolving towards the behaviour the researchers hoped to get.
New path to logic As a proof of concept the algorithm found the voltages that transformed the system into any one of the six ogic gatesthat are the building blocks of conventional computer chips.
It even found the combination for a higher-order logic unit, which can add two bits of information. his shows that you can get to calculating ability by a completely different route,
van der Wiel says. The clump of particles has to be cooled to just 0. 3°C above absolute zero,
Van der Wiel hopes the research will lead to specialised processors that can solve problems such as pattern recognition
which are difficult for computers that do calculations one after the other. If a whole clump of grains is doing the calculation,
says Jie Han of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. he physics is there, but of course you still have to demonstrate it.
either using more nanoparticles or more electrodes. he electrodes are probably more important, so that you can have more inputs and outputs. o
#Bionic pancreas automatically controls diabeticsblood sugar SENSOR, pump action! An app linked to a glucose sensor
and insulin pump can make life a lot easier for people with type 1 diabetes. he sense of potential freedom is amazing,
says Juliet Hughes, mother of 8-year-old Felix, who took part in a trial to see
if a bionic pancreas could free diabetics from the daily routine of monitoring and regulating their glucose levels (New england Journal of Medicine, doi. org/7s4).
Type 1 diabetes is caused by destruction of beta cells in the pancreas that make insulin to control how much sugar circulates in the blood.
When the pancreas is no longer in control, a person risks coma and death from plunging glucose levels.
A glucose sensor and insulin pump, both attached to the abdomen, are used by some people with type 1 diabetes to manage their condition,
but they still have to check their glucose levels themselves, and adjust their insulin intake manually.
The bionic pancreas does this job itself, using an algorithm on a tablet computer or a phone to monitor a person blood glucose.
When levels rise for example after a meal, the algorithm automatically sends instructions to the insulin pump. t tells the pump how much insulin to deliver
and it does it day and night, says Roman Hovorka of the University of Cambridge.
This means there is no need to wake up to check blood sugar levels throughout the night. To see if their bionic pancreas really would improve quality of life,
Hovorka team ran a three-month trial involving 33 adults and 25 children. Compared with a sensor and pump without an algorithm,
children using the bionic device spent half as much time with seriously low sugar levels, just 5 minutes a night. t took time to trust the system,
says Hughes e
#Clump of gold nanoparticles can evolve to carry out computing MOVE OVER, microchip. A random assembly of gold nanoparticles can perform calculations normally reserved for neatly arranged patterns of silicon.
Traditional computers rely on ordered circuits that follow preprogrammed rules, but this limits their efficiency. he best microprocessors you can buy in a store now can do 1011 operations per second,
and use a few hundred watts, says Wilfred van der Wiel of the University of Twente in The netherlands. he human brain can do orders of magnitude more and uses only 10 to 20 watts.
That a huge gap. To close that gap researchers have tried building rain-likecomputers that can do calculations
even though their circuitry was designed not specifically to do so. But no one had made one that could reliably perform calculations.
Van der Wiel and his colleagues have hit the jackpot, using gold particles about 20 nanometres across.
They laid a few tens of these grains in a rough heap, with each one about 1 nanometre from its nearest neighbours,
and placed eight electrodes around them. When they applied just the right voltages to the cluster at six specific locations,
the gold behaved like a network of transistors but without the strict sequence of connections in a regular microchip.
The system not only performed calculations but also used less energy than conventional circuitry. Nothing about the particles told the researchers what voltages to try, however.
They started with random values and learned which were the most useful using a genetic algorithm,
a procedure that borrows ideas from Darwinian evolution to home in on the ittestones. The team was able to find voltages to transform the system into any one of the six ogic gatesthat are the building blocks of computer chips.
The algorithm even arrived at the combination for a higher-order logic unit, which can add two bits of information. his shows that you can get to calculating ability by a completely different route,
van der Wiel says (Nature Nanotechnology, doi. org/7s5. The gold clump has to be cooled to just 0. 3°C above absolute zero,
but making the grains even smaller would allow the working temperature to rise. Van der Wiel says there is no reason the approach couldn work at room temperature. he physics is there,
says Jie Han of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Van der Wiel hopes the work will lead to specialised processors that can solve problems that are difficult for computers, such as pattern recognition.
That because the gold grains work in parallel much like neurons in the human brain which is especially good at these tasks c
#Gel scaffold paves way for 3d printing of biological organs To improve 3d printing, simply add gel.
if wee ever to print the biological structures that make up organs, blood vessels and other tissue.
is made of an acrylic acid polymer. It works like a scaffold, allowing the printing of intricate patterns that would collapse without its support such as nested Russian-doll-like structures and thin
complex branching networks. This complexity is important. Researchers have wanted long to 3d-print whole human organs,
Printing into supportive gel gets around that challenge preventing the creations from sagging or buckling before they solidify.
says Thomas Angelini at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who led the research. Print for your life Angelini team has used already the technique to print material out of living cells including human blood-vessel and canine kidney cells.
The researchers can also use silicone, hydrogel and other polymers, and made a replica of a colleague brain in the soft,
so they based the brain on detailed images of the professor grey matter. e could foresee a future in which, before brain surgery,
the surgeon 3d prints a brain out of hydrogel and then practises on it, says Angelini. hen the surgeon knows exactly how that surgery is going to happen. heye made,
I think, a significant advance, says Jennifer Lewis of Harvard. t a beautiful piece of work. One of the limitations, she says,
#Earthquake algorithm picks up the brain vibrations Your brain is buzzing. Analysing those natural vibrations might help spot tumours and other abnormalities,
and now an algorithm normally used to study earthquakes has been adapted to do just that. The elasticity of different parts of the body is a useful way to tell
if something is wrong. Lumps can be a sign of cancer, of course, and stiffness in certain organs can indicate disease.
Ultrasound scans that measure the elasticity of the liver, for example, can show up cirrhosis. It is more difficult to measure the elasticity of the brain.
Ultrasound isn an option because it can pass through the skull. Doctors are limited to touching the brain directly
when a section of the skull has been removed during surgery. octors can only feel a few centimetres deep,
so only have information about the elasticity of the surface of the brain, says Stefan Catheline at INSERM in Paris, France.
Catheline team, and others around the world, have been working on a way to use modified MRI SCANNERS to measure brain elasticity.
MRI usually works by measuring water content, but with modification it can be made to measure the movement of water molecules.
This allows them to pick up on movements in tissues when they are shaken up. Shake it up
But such devices haven made it to the clinic yet, in part because they aren very comfortable to use,
who study how to extract information from the seismic waves created by earthquakes. He borrowed the algorithm his colleagues used to analyse the Earth vibrations,
and incorporated it into his modified MRI SCANNER. As a result, his team were able to measure the natural vibrations in the brains of two healthy volunteers information normally dismissed as oise The body noise t is an intriguing approach
says Armando Manduca at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. here could potentially be great value in using
what has been considered the body noise, which is seen usually as a problem. Such scans will be able to reveal a lot more information about
says Neil Roberts at the University of Edinburgh, UK. The water content of our cells doesn tend to vary much,
an elastography scan could reveal huge variation in stretchiness, hardness or gloopiness. eing able to essentially touch inside the brain is going to be much more discriminatory than conventional MRI,
and diagnosis. Catheline hopes his technique will eventually help doctors diagnose diseases and monitor the success of their treatment.
The plaques found in some forms of dementia, for example, have more elasticity than normal brain tissue the new technique might be able to detect those differences.
This can be useful before surgery he says: while a soft mass can be sucked swiftly away,
#EU ruling means Facebook and Google can send data to the US If you live in Europe,
which personal data can be moved from the EU to the US for processing. The ruling against the 15-year-old law, known as Safe Harbour, threatens the business models of more than 3000 companies that use it to ship data to the US,
including Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. The decision is the culmination of a case that Austrian lawyer Max Schrems brought against Facebook in 2013 for participation in US mass surveillance.
It means that The irish Data protection Commission which presides over Facebook data-export operations, is unable to use Safe Harbour as a reason not to investigate Facebook data protection practices in the US.
In a statement, The irish Data protection Commissioner confirmed that Schrems case would be brought back before The irish High court s soon as practicable The ruling also removes the legal blanket that allowed companies to send data gathered in the EU to the US for processing.
It not yet clear whether this will disrupt the day-to-day operation of major technology firms, but their ability to pool data from both sides of the Atlantic for analysis will be affected.
Apple new privacy policy explicitly states that personal data collected for its icloud service in the European Economic Area is shipped to Apple Inc in the US for processing via Cork in Ireland. t quite a huge thing to say that one region set of laws
is superior to that of the US, says Carly Nyst, a lawyer and privacy consultant based in London. hat the bigger implication of this the EU exerting its might over the US.
Theye saying our standards are higher than yours, and you need to step up your game:
the EU is not going to stand for the US doing whatever it wants. Surveillance concerns Although the court decision is ostensibly about data protection,
it inevitably addresses surveillance. The ruling backs up the claim by Schrems that he law and practice of the United states do not offer sufficient protection against surveillance by the public authorities of the data transferred to that country This claim must now be heard
and decided upon by The irish authorities. The development will stretch US-EU relations, which are misaligned already over the right to be forgotten
and net neutrality. he gap between American and European legislation on privacy is at breaking point,
says Mark Skilton of the Warwick Business school in Coventry, UK. Nyst adds that eyond it being a slap in the face to the US,
it sets a great precedent for the legal challenges to mass surveillance happening in Europe For all the internet power to connect people globally,
the ruling is a step towards an internet that takes local rights and laws into account.
Nyst says that data protection standards are emerging around the world, providing a crucial component of an internet that is not only hugely useful,
but also preserves the privacy of its users. aw and technology are misfits, she says. aw is all about jurisdiction
which area you commit a certain act in. Technology is all about breaking down those divisions.
A global internet with standards for protecting our data may help bridge that gap. Paul Bernal of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, says the judgement makes it hard to see how it is legal for any personal data gathered in the EU to now be sent to the US for processing. he ruling basically says US surveillance cannot be allowed to override our fundamental rights,
but US law says surveillance must override fundamental rights, says Bernal. he EU court is largely saying that indiscriminate gathering of data is enough to interfere with fundamental rights,
and therefore you shouldn be able to do it. In a statement on the ruling, Max Schrems said that S companies that obviously aided US mass surveillance may face serious legal consequences from this ruling
when data protection authorities of 28 member states review their cooperation with US spy agencies He added that he average consumer will not see any restrictions in daily use,
An invisibility cloak built for a mouse could hide warm bodies from predators with thermal vision
which harness the unusual properties of light-bending metamaterials, have shown theoretical promise for years. But outside of dramatic illusions made with lenses,
so instead early designs deflected longer wavelengths like microwaves. Cloaks have struggled also to handle many wavelengths of light at once.
Now, a team at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, has taken a significant step forward by making a cloak for infrared radiation,
using it to hunt down their prey. e want to simulate the scene of catching a mouse,
leaving a 2. 7-centimetre-wide cavity in the middle for the toy mouse. The camera was placed on one side.
The germanium sent infrared rays from behind the mouse on a curved path around the cavity, then bent them back into straight lines for the camera,
They also showed that the cloak could work as the environment around the toy varied between 30°C and 45°C (Advanced Optical Materials
says John Pendry of Imperial College London, who pioneered the mathematics behind invisibility cloaks. ith the basic theory done
and dusted, cloaking is moving on to practical considerations
#Migraines triggered by protein deep in the brain It can start with flashing lights, a tingling sensation and a feeling of unease, followed by excruciating pain.
or too much stress but their underlying cause has remained a mystery. Now researchers have found that a migraine may be triggered by a protein deep in the brain that stimulates the neurons controlling facial sensations.
The discovery creates a potential new target for safer migraine medicines and adds weight to the theory that neurons,
says Debbie Hay at the University of Auckland in New zealand. here has been a great deal of debate around the mechanisms of migraine.
To investigate, Simon Akerman at New york University and Peter Goadsby at Kings College London, UK,
they found that they could cause a headache or migraine about two hours later. Both peptides widen blood vessels,
which are known to trigger a headache. The pair measured the electrical activity of these neurons in anaesthetised rats
the neurons responsible for a headache no longer surged with activity. hese receptors could genuinely represent a new therapeutic target for migraine,
who wasn involved with the work. he receptors are a new and exciting target for migraine.
In need of relief New therapies are needed desperately. Triptans don work for half the people who try them,
At any rate, their development was based on a misunderstanding of how migraine works. In their study, Akermand and Goadsby found that both VIP
#World first trial of stem cell therapy in the womb Their bones are so brittle that they fracture while in the womb.
Now a clinical trial of stem cell therapy in the womb aims to help babies born with brittle bone disease start life with stronger skeletons. o our knowledge,
Brittle bone disease or osteogenesis imperfecta, is caused by mutations in the gene for making collagen a tough,
flexible material that strengthens bone. Götherström and her colleagues will inject fetuses around 20 weeks old with stromal stem cells containing unmutated copies of the collagen gene.
and fix any fractures. hey home to any site of injury, says Anna David of University college London,
By comparing the number of fractures in each group, they should be able to determine
they could open up space exploration to students and countries that lack their own space programmes, says Paulo Lozano at the Massachusetts institute of technology. e want to offer space access to people who don currently have space access,
Once theye there, they can do serious science, from climate modelling to exoplanet hunting. But they are stuck also in that orbit for their entire working lives.
it is safer and simpler to take it into space than a plasma or gas.
Applying an electric field can send these ions streaming away from the satellite at high speeds
This August, Lozano and his students tested the complete system, Cubesat and all. They put it in a vacuum chamber
After 20 minutes of continuous firing, the Cubesat spun at about 2 rotations per minute.
The tank was completely dry. This is the most exciting test we have run so far.
#Echoless light could help send signals through walls and skin IT a call with no response.
A new way of creating waves that don echo promises to improve everything from your Wi-fi signal to medical imaging.
This is a problem in telecommunications: if you send digital signals down a very long optical fibre,
the pulses stretch out and 1s start to blend into 0s. Now Joel Carpenter at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia,
and his colleagues have demonstrated a workaround. The team started with a 100-metre-long fibre optic-cable cable
for instance, allowing medical imaging devices to peer deeper into tissue than is now possible o
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