without relying on computer simulation or human intervention. Researchers led by the University of Cambridge have built a mother robot that can independently build its own children and test
which one does best; and then use the results to inform the design of the next generation,
Without any human intervention or computer simulation beyond the initial command to build a robot capable of movement,
and rossover where a new genome is formed by merging genes from two individuals. In order for the mother to determine which children were the fittest,
while mutation and crossover were introduced in the less successful children. The researchers found that design variations emerged
and gait patterns for the children over time, including some designs that a human designer would not have been able to build. ne of the big questions in biology is how intelligence came about wee using robotics to explore this mystery,
organisms are able to adapt their physical characteristics to their environment over time. These adaptations allow biological organisms to survive in a wide variety of different environments allowing animals to make the move from living in the water to living on land, for instance.
But machines are not adaptable in the same way. They are stuck essentially in one shape for their entire ives
and it uncertain whether changing their shape would make them more adaptable to changing environments. Evolutionary robotics is a growing field
Most work in this field is done using computer simulation. Although computer simulations allow researchers to test thousands or even millions of possible solutions,
this often results in a eality gapa mismatch between simulated and real-world behaviour. While using a computer simulation to study artificial evolution generates thousands,
or even millions, of possibilities in a short amount of time, the researchers found that having the robot generate its own possibilities,
without any computer simulation, resulted in more successful children. The disadvantage is that it takes time:
According to Iida, in future they might use a computer simulation to pre-select the most promising candidates,
whether that learning about intelligence, or finding ways to improve robotic locomotion. A robot requires between ten and 100 times more energy than an animal to do the same thing.
Iida lab is filled with a wide array of hopping robots, which may take their inspiration from grasshoppers,
One of his group developments, the hairless Chair is a wearable device that allows users to lock their knee joints and itanywhere,
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. ource:
Recently, researchers at Oxford university Department of Engineering science have been investigating mart gelsthat can switch from a stable gel to a liquid suspension of very small particles (a ol.
explains Abhijeet Chaudhari, a DPHIL student in the Multifunctional Materials & Composites (MMC) Laboratory at Oxford university Department of Engineering science,
who is the first author of the report. hen we scrutinised the hybrid gels under a scanning electron microscope (SEM),
SEM images (false colour) depicting the intricate gel fibre architecture They then discovered that intertwined amongst these microscopic fibres were a profusion of nanoparticles around 100 nanometres in size.
An X-ray diffraction technique confirmed that these were nanoparticles of KUST-1 a copper-based Metal-Organic Framework (MOF) notable for its very large surface area (exceeding 2000 square-metres in each gram.
Professor Jin-Chong Tan of the Department of Engineering science, who led the team, says: ecause of its fine-scale fibre network architecture,
what is happening inside the material at the microscopic scale where there is rapid molecular bond-breaking (gel to sol) and bondaking (sol to gel).
his fascinating phenomenon is exceptionally rare for gel systems incorporating MOF nanoparticles; to the best of our knowledge this is the first example of its kind reported in the literature.
Such shape-shifting materials could find applications in Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and NEMS devices. They could also create elf-healingcoatings that can repair themselves after impact
or corrosion damage or in energy technology to build new electrolytes for rechargeable batteries or enhanced dielectrics for supercapacitors.
But it the promise of MOF nanoparticles suitable to make into thin films for sensors and microelectronics that is particularly alluring.
e discovered that copious amounts of high-quality HKUST-1 (MOF) nanoparticles can be harvested straightforwardly by breaking down the gel fibres using methanol. hese MOF nanoparticles can then be used as a recursor making it easy to fabricate multifunctional thin
for instance, function as a coupled temperature-moisture sensor that rapidly switches from turquoise to dark blue colour for easy identification, reversibly, upon heating.
Thin film sensors created using MOF nanoparticles harvested from hybrid gels The team worked with Isis Innovation to patent the technology and Samsung Electronics
are looking to translate this discovery into a range of real-world applications including optoelectronics, thin-film sensors,
and microelectronics. e believe our method has huge potential, comments Jin-Chong, t opens the door to exploiting MOF-based supramolecular gels as a new 3d scaffolding material useful for engineering optoelectronics and innovative micromechanical devices n
#Novel technology may illuminate mystery moon caves It widely believed that the moon features networks of caves created when violent lava flows tore under the surface from ancient volcanoes.
Andreas Velten, a Morgridge medical engineering affiliate and scientist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation (LOCI
The system sends a pulse of laser light off of a wall or surface and into a nonvisible space.
The scattering photons from the laser bounce off obstacles and make their way back to sensors in the camera.
This technology is included in the NASA PERISCOPE project, which seeks to illuminate some of the more than 200 suspected lunar caves lurking under skylights.
Assisted by chemical engineering undergraduate Jessica Zeman, Velten completed a first phase using cave models this summer,
and climb into cave walls and ceilings. ven though geology tells us there should be caves at these sites,
we don really know what down there, Velten says. e don want to spend hundreds of millions on a rover mission,
Cerebrovascular disease often entails complex tangles of vessels in sensitive brain areas. hese children had unique anatomy with deep vessels that were very tricky to operate on,
Harvard Medical school associate professor of neurosurgery at Boston Children Hospital and senior author of the paper. he 3-D printed models allowed us to rehearse the cases beforehand
who co-directs the Cerebrovascular Surgery and Interventions Center at Boston Children. ou can physically hold the 3-D models,
and get tactile feedback. s described in the Journal of Neurosurgery: Pediatrics, the models were based on the children actual brain scans.
Data from the scans were used to program a 3-D printer that laid down synthetic resins layer by layer.
Prints were made not just of the cerebrovascular malformations but also from the normal vessels feeding and draining them,
I practiced those steps ahead of time. he surgery went off without complications, and last month Adam had a clean one-year follow-up angiogram.
Adam mother, Amy, keeps a photo of his 3-D-printed vessels on her smartphone. want to dip it in gold and wear it as a necklace
Darren Orbach, HMS associate professor of radiology and co-director of the Cerebrovascular Surgery and Interventions Center at Boston Children, treated a 2-month-old infant who had a rare vein of Galen malformation in
Orbach used an interventional radiology technique called embolization to seal off the malformed blood vessels from the inside. ven for a radiologist who is comfortable working with
and extrapolating from images on the computer to the patient, turning over a 3-D model in your hand is said transformative,
he. ur brains work in three dimensions, and treatment planning with a printed model takes on an intuitive feel that it cannot
Katherine Cohen, Boston Childrengreater precision, greater safetythe life-sized and enlarged 3-D models, based on brain magnetic resonance and magnetic resonance arteriography data from each child
, were created in collaboration with the Boston Children Hospital Simulator Program (SIMPEDS), directed by HMS associate professor of anesthesia Peter Weinstock, the paper first author.
Measurements of the models showed 98 percent agreement with the children actual anatomy. All four children malformations were removed successfully
surgeon and operating roomhose with 3-D models had their surgical time reduced by 30 minutes,
but even a 30-minute reduction is significant for children who are especially sensitive to anesthesia.
The SIMPEDS program is tracking use of 3-D printed models across Boston Children Hospital,
-D printing has become a regular part of our process, says Smith. t also a tool that allows us to educate our junior colleagues and trainees in a way that safe,
#Flexible, biodegradable device can generate power from touch Longstanding concerns about portable electronics include the devicesshort battery life and their contribution to e waste.
& Interfaces the development of a biodegradable nanogenerator made with DNA that can harvest the energy from everyday motion and turn it into electrical power.
and tapping on our keyboards release energy that largely dissipates, unused. Several years ago, scientists figured out how to capture some of that energy
and convert it into electricity so we might one day use it to power our mobile gadgetry.
Achieving this would not only untether us from wall outlets, but it would also reduce our demand on fossil-fuel-based power sources.
The first prototypes of these nanogenerators are currently being developed in laboratories around the world. And now, one group of scientists wants to add another feature to this technology:
biodegradability. The researchers built a nanogenerator using a flexible, biocompatible polymer film made out of polyvinylidene fluoride, or PVDF.
To improve the material energy harvesting ability, they added DNA, which has good electrical properties and is biocompatible and biodegradable.
Their device was powered with gentle tapping, and it lit up 22 to 55 light-emitting diodes
#Major Innovation in Molecular Imaging Delivers Spatial and Spectral Info Simultaneously Using physical chemistry methods to look at biology at the nanoscale,
a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researcher has invented a new technology to image single molecules with unprecedented spectral and spatial resolution,
thus leading to the first rue-colorsuper-resolution microscope. Ke Xu, a faculty scientist in Berkeley Lab Life sciences Division, has dubbed his innovation SR-STORM,
or spectrally resolved stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy. Because SR-STORM gives full spectral and spatial information for each molecule,
the technology opens the door to high-resolution imaging of multiple components and local chemical environments,
such as ph variations, inside a cell. The research was reported in the journal Nature Methods in a paper titled, ltrahigh-throughput single-molecule spectroscopy and spectrally resolved super-resolution microscopy,
with co-authors Zhengyang Zhang, Samuel Kenny, Margaret Hauser, and Wan Li, all of UC Berkeley. Xu is also an assistant professor at UC Berkeley Department of chemistry. e measure both the position
and spectrum of each individual molecule, plotting its super-resolved spatial position in two dimensions and coloring each molecule according to its spectral position,
Xu built on work he did as a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard with Xiaowei Zhuang, who invented STORM, a super-resolution microscopy method based on single-molecule imaging and photoswitching.
and back of the sample at the same time and achieved unprecedented optical resolution (of approximately 10 nanometers) of a cell.
Next they dyed the sample with 14 different dyes in a narrow emission window and excited and photoswitched the molecules with one laser.
and thus readily identifiable. hat useful because it means we had a way to do multicolor imaging within a very narrow emission window,
and each subcellular structure was a distinct color. o using this method we can look at interactions between four biological components inside a cell in three-dimension and at very high resolution of about 10 nanometers,
Xu said. he applications are mostly in fundamental research and cell biology at this point, but hopefully it will lead to medical applications.
This gives us new opportunities to look at cell structures how theye built up, and whether there any degradation of those structures in diseases.
Many diseases are caused either by an invading pathogen or degradation of a cell internal structure.
Alzheimer, for example, may be related to degradation of the cytoskeleton inside neurons. he cytoskeleton system is comprised of a host of interacting subcellular structures and proteins,
and make it work with conventional microscope systems, thus making it more broadly accessible. He is also trying to develop suitable dyes
and probes to monitor the local environment, such as the ph, in live cells at the nanometer scale
#Scientists visualize critical part of basal ganglia pathways Breakthrough could help see pathways that degenerate with Parkinson and Huntingdon disease Certain diseases,
like Parkinson and Huntingdon disease, are associated with damage to the pathways between the brain basal ganglia regions.
The basal ganglia sits at the base of the brain and is responsible for, among other things, coordinating movement.
For the first time, Carnegie mellon University Brainhub scientists have used a noninvasive brain imaging tool to detect the pathways that connect the parts of the basal ganglia.
Published in Neuroimage the research provides a better understanding of this area circuitry, which could potentially lead to technologies to help track disease progression for Parkinson and Huntington disease and other neurological disorders. linically,
it is difficult to see the pathways within the basal ganglia with neuroimaging techniques, like the ever popular MRI,
because many of the fiber bundles that make up key parts of this circuit are very small and buried within dense cell bodies,
said Patrick Beukema, the lead author and a graduate student in the Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh (CNUP) and the joint Pitt and CMU Center for the Basis of Neural Cognition (CNBC).
Because they are important for motor control, this damage can result in substantial motor deficits, so it is highly desirable to discover more about this area,
The results from both imaging techniques showed that it is possible to detect the small but important fiber connections in the brain.
said Timothy J. Verstynen, assistant professor of psychology in CMU Dietrich College of Humanities and Social sciences and CNBC faculty member.
CMU is the birthplace of artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology and has been a leader in the study of brain and behavior for more than 50 years.
The university has created some of the first cognitive tutors, helped to develop the Jeopardy-winning Watson,
founded a groundbreaking doctoral program in neural computation, and completed cutting-edge work in understanding the genetics of autism.
Building on its strengths in biology computer science, psychology, statistics and engineering, CMU launched Brainhub, an initiative that focuses on how the structure and activity of the brain give rise to complex behaviors m
#High-sensitivity, high resolution magnetocardiography (MCG) for use at room temperature developed Researchers at Tohoku University have succeeded in developing a sensor for the living body that can detect the bio-magnetic field with high sensitivity
and high resolution. This was achieved by using a tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) device to work at room temperature.
In a world first, the group led by Professor Yasuo Ando of the Graduate school of Engineering in collaboration with Konica Minolta,
Inc. succeeded in detecting the heart magnetic field by using the TMR device. This device enables cardiac electric activity to be measured in a nonaggressive way
so that the diagnosis of heart conditions such as coronary heart disease or arrhythmia can be improved greatly. In the future, a special shield room for detecting the bio-magnetic field would be unnecessary
because this device has a large field range. This would mean that heart conditions can be measured and treated in a more relaxed environment.
The device is expected to make a difference in medical treatments, preventive health care and sports p
#New synthetic tumor environments make cancer research more realistic Tumors are notoriously difficult to study in their natural habitat body tissues
but a new synthetic tissue environment may give cancer researchers the next-best look at tumor growth and behavior.
University of Illinois researchers have developed a new technique to create a cell habitat of squishy fluids, called hydrogels,
which can realistically and quickly recreate microenvironments found across biology. To illustrate the potential of their technique,
the Illinois team mixed breast cancer cells and cells called macrophages that signal cancer cells to spread
and grow into a tumor. They were able to observe how differently cells act in the three-dimensional
gel-like environment, which is much more like body tissues than the current research standard:
a flat, hard plastic plate. Led by materials science and engineering professor Kristopher Kilian, chemistry professorjeffrey Moore and graduate student Joshua Grolman,
the team published its results in the journal Advanced Materials. Kilian said his team synthetic microenvironment lies somewhere in the middle of two extremes in the field of modeling biology:
the hard plastic plate, and expensive mouse avatars that are created by injecting human tumor cells into mice. his is really the first time that it been demonstrated that you can use a rapid methodology like this to spatially define cancer cells and macrophages,
Kilian said. hat important, because once you have that architecture, then you can ask fundamental biological questions.
Kilian said these questions range from the basic how macrophages signal to the breast cells to the more long-term:
Can therapeutics be used to disrupt that communication? What sets the team model apart from mouse avatars
and hard plastic plates is that it can replicate much more accurately the sizes and shapes of the microenvironment within the patient problem area.
The materials that pharmaceutical companies use to test drugseffects on cells don allow for three-dimensional vascularization, a network of capillaries that carry drugs and other materials throughout the body.
The team model does, creating networks that go from straight, to snakelike, to any shape. ow,
researchers can ask more sophisticated biological questions than they could, Kilian said. And they can do it quickly.
The process the team came up with to produce the synthetic environments takes an estimated 15 minutes
and finds out theye been diagnosed with some sort of solid tumor, Kilian said. ou take a biopsy of those cells,
you put it into this device, grow them and see how they respond to different treatments. h
#Closing the loop with optogenetics Optogenetics provides a powerful tool for studying the brain by allowing researchers to activate neurons using simple light-based signals.
meaning they lack the kind of feedback control that most biological and engineering systems use to maintain a steady operating state.
An engineering example of closed-loop control is a simple thermostat used to maintain a steady temperature in the home.
Without it, heating or air conditioning would run without reacting to changes in outside conditions, allowing inside temperatures to vary dramatically.
Optogenetics technology places genes that express light-sensitive proteins into mammalian cells that normally lack such proteins.
which closes the loop in optogenetic systems. The technique uses a computer to acquire and process the neuronal response to the optical stimulus in real-time
and then vary the light input to maintain a desired firing rate. By providing this feedback control
the optoclamp could facilitate research into new therapies for epilepsy, Parkinson disease, chronic pain and even depression. ur work establishes a versatile test bed for creating the responsive neurotherapeutic tools of the future,
said Steve Potter, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. eural modulation therapies of the future,
whether they be targeted drug delivery, electrical stimulation or even light-plus-optogenetics through fiber optics, will all be closed loop.
That means they will be responsive to the moment-to-moment needs of the nervous system. The research
By providing precise optical control of firing in neuronal populations, the technology will help scientists disentangle causally related variables of circuit activation.
and found considerable variation in the responses of neuronal networks grown on multi-electrode arrays
who built the optoclamp while a Ph d. student in Georgia Tech Laboratory for Neuroengineering. Newman is now a postdoctoral researcher at MIT. he amount of optical stimulation needed to achieve the same level of activity varied by orders of magnitude,
which can include as many as a million cells. ecause we have all those electrodes, we can process the data in real-time
and then compare the amount of activity being expressed by the culture to a target rate,
The optoclamp can be used to control cell cultures grown atop electrode arrays as well as in living animal models in
which electrodes have been implanted. In research conducted with colleagues at Emory University, the optoclamp ability to maintain a steady neural firing state allowed researchers to study a key control issue in homeostatic plasticity, a phenomenon that results from a lack of neural stimulation.
Scientists had believed that the effect was controlled by the firing rate of cells, but the optoclamp allowed a team of researchers from Georgia Tech
and Emory University to clamp firing at normal levels during the addition of a drug that inhibits neurotransmission.
This showed that neurotransmission levels not firing activity, governed a key form of homeostatic plasticity. ffectively,
we were able to decouple two things that are normally very closely related, said Newman. his is potentially a very big deal in terms of developing therapies for aberrant forms of synaptic plasticity.
Potential applications include chronic pain, epilepsy, tinnitus, phantom limb syndrome and other nervous systems disorders where the brain has overreacted to the loss of normal inputs.
That work, recently published in the journal Nature Communications, was a collaboration with Emory University Professor Pete Wenner and former graduate student Ming-fai Fong,
demonstrating the value of bringing biological scientists together with engineers. Newman, an engineer by training, says concepts common in engineering can be useful in the life sciences. losed-loop control is a concept that is woven through all engineered systems,
but it often hard to find in the biological sciences, he said. ny time you can introduce feedback control into an experiment,
it almost always produces better control of the variables of interest. Feedback control is an extremely important concept for the life sciences.
Scientists are already using the optoclamp in its current form, but the researchers hope to improve spatial differentiation of the optical signals,
allowing experiments to focus stimulation on specific areas of the brain or brain cell cultures. The light signals now affect an entire culture
or brain region. e want to precisely control where photons are being sent to activate different cells, Newman said. ptogenetics allows genetic specification
of which cells express these proteins, and that gives you some level of spatial control. But I don believe that as precise as what will be required to speak the language of the brain
#Scientists discover the mechanism behind the innate immunological memory There can be no argument it is extremely important to understand how immunity works.
Better knowledge about immunity would help scientists to come up with new, more effective ways to prevent outbreaks of diseases.
However, at this moment science is needed lacking knowledge about human immunity. For example, for a long time it was believed that acquired immunity type of immunity mediated by T-and B-cellsad memory,
whereas innate immunityhich is mediated by macrophages and other types of cells that react to certain molecules typically associated with pathogensid not.
But now scientists know things are not so simple. This was not hard to figure out
as plants and insects have innate immunity only, but seem to have immunological memory. Furthermore, scientists observed that herpes virus infection increases the resistance against bacteria in vertebrates,
which suggests that innate immunity also has memory, even though researchers have struggled to understand the mechanism behind it.
However, now scientists from the RIKEN Molecular genetics Laboratory have revealed the mechanism underlying the memory of innate immunity.
It turns out there are epigenomic changes induced by pathogen infections mediated by a transcription factor called ATF7.
Although it seems to be complicated extremely phenomenon, in the future this discovery may help everyone, including those, who struggle to understand the mechanisms behind the memory of innate immunity.
At first, research team discovered that in ATF7 knockout mice, macrophages appear similar to wild-type macrophages that have been activated by exposure to molecules that occur commonly in infections.
Even before that scientists knew heat shock or psychological stress induced epigenomic changes were mediated by ATF7-related transcription factors.
After exposure to that stress, changes remained for a long duration of time. This made researchers think that pathogen infections could induce epigenomic changes in macrophages via ATF7.
Scientists found that ATF7 transcription factor simply binds itself to a group of innate immune genes and silences their expression
which makes cells less responsive to infections. Scientists managed to make ATF7 inactive, by using a molecule found in the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria,
called a lipopolysaccharidel. It made ATF7 phosphorylated and immune-related genes in mice models were silenced no longer.
First of all, it may increase our understanding of the ygiene hypothesis It is the concept saying that pathogen infection
and unhygienic environment during infancy reduces the risk of allergy later in life. ygiene hypothesisis used to explain why in more developed countries with better hygiene habits the incidence of allergies
and asthma is increasing. Now scientists say that since they can explain that the pathogen-induced epigenomic changes mediated by ATF7 maintain for a long period of time,
they have a better explanation about how the changes are induced. Secondly, these new findings may be very helpful developing vaccines with more effective adjuvants.
Adjuvants are used compounds in vaccines that activate innate immunity they are necessary ingredient of efficient vaccines.
For a long time scientists thought that the effect of adjuvant can be maintained a several days only. But this new research shows that it is not necessarily true.
which would make for much more effective vaccines. As much as human immune system still remains not completely clear for science
this new research provides better understanding about how our immune system remembers appropriate reactions to stress.
Knowing how to form these memories may hide the key to creating better, more effective and long-lasting vaccines a
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