#Delivering drugs straight into the brain A team of Canadian scientists has found a way to inject the drugs directly into the brain,
breaking the barrier of the human body that keeps the nervous and circulatory systems apart by using arrierantibodies.
That system known as the blood-brain barrier (BBB) protects the human skull from any microbes or chemicals,
such as disease fighting drugs from entering the nervous system. It only allows a selected few types of molecules to cross including water, some gases and lipid soluble molecules.
The antibodies are able to squeeze past the barrier not just because of their size (these are fragments that consist of one molecule)
The single domain antibodies are exploiting the same mechanism that allows nutrients into the brain,
The scientists add that the method allows them to target multiple types of diseases by producing different carrier molecules.
The method is part of the NRC Therapeutics Beyond Brain Barriers (TBBB) program which has been developing special carrier molecules for the past six years. t really opens the possibilities to use many different types of therapeutics for different diseases that we couldn really use before
unless we inject them directly into the brain which is highly invasive, r. Danica Stanimirovic,
the project`s scientific head, told Motherboard. Scientists add that it could become a significant step towards slowing the spread of brain diseases like Alzheimer, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson.
The discovery follows years of scientific Work at the moment drugs are placed usually into the blood
#Tunable voltage-controlled liquid metal antenna North carolina State university (NCSU) researchers have created, using electrochemistry, a reconfigurable,
voltage-controlled liquid metal antenna that may play a role in future mobile devices and the coming Internet of things.
By placing a positive or negative electrical voltage across the interface between the liquid metal and an electrolyte,
they found that they could cause the liquid metal to spread (flow into a capillary)
or contract, changing its operating frequency and radiation pattern. sing a liquid metal such as eutectic gallium
and indium that can change its shape allows us to modify antenna properties such as frequency more dramatically than is possible with a fixed conductor,
explained Jacob Adams, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer engineering at NCSU and a co-author of an open-access paper in the Journal of Applied Physics, from AIP Publishing.
The positive voltage lectrochemically deposits an oxide on the surface of the metal that lowers the surface tension,
while a negative voltage removes the oxide to increase the surface tension, Adams said. These differences in surface tension dictate which direction the metal will flow.
This advance makes it possible to emove or regenerate enough of the xide skinwith an applied voltage to make the liquid metal flow into or out of the capillary.
We call this lectrochemically controlled capillarity which is much like an electrochemical pump for the liquid metal, Adams noted.
Although antenna properties can be reconfigured to some extent by using solid conductors with electronic switches,
the liquid metal approach greatly increases the range over which the antenna operating frequency can be tuned. ur antenna prototype using liquid metal can tune over a range of at least two times greater than systems using electronic switches,
he pointed out. Previous liquid-metal designs typically required external pumps that can be integrated easily into electronic systems.
Extending frequencies for mobile devicesobile device sizes are continuing to shrink and the burgeoning Internet of things will likely create an enormous demand for small wireless systems,
Adams said. nd as the number of services that a device must be capable of supporting grows,
so too will the number of frequency bands over which the antenna and RF front-end must operate.
This combination will create a real antenna design challenge for mobile systems because antenna size and operating bandwidth tend to be conflicting tradeoffs. his is why tunable antennas are highly desirable:
they can be miniaturized and adapted to correct for near-field loading problems such as the iphone 4 well-publicized eath gripissue of dropped calls
when by holding it by the bottom. Liquid metal systems ield a larger range of tuning than conventional reconfigurable antennas,
and the same approach can be applied to other components such as tunable filters, Adams said. In the long term, Adams and colleagues hope to gain greater control of the shape of the liquid metal in two-dimensional surfaces to obtain nearly any desired antenna shape. his would enable enormous flexibility in the electromagnetic properties of the antenna
and allow a single adaptive antenna to perform many functions, he added. Image and article via Kurzweila o
#tronger than steelclothes from yeast-engineered silk Bolt Threads, a Bay Area startup, which announced a new $40 million round funding on Thursday,
is giving spiders and silkworms a run for their money. The company has developed a synthetic, rogrammablealternative to larval-or arachnid-produced silk.
Engineered using proteins derived from yeast, the fibers can be manipulated to deliver any combination of softness, strength, and durability.
Theye even machine-washable. hink of the strength a delicate, pliable spiderweb must have to stop insects hurtling through the air, Jim Kim and Tanguy Chau, members of the venture-capital group Formation 8
and you get a fabric with 100 times the strength of reinforced steel but that is as soft and flexible as the most comfortable fabrics.
Still, Silicon valley is betting that Bolt silk could supplant petroleum-based textiles such as polyester, Lycra,
or even natural but resource-intensive fibers like cotton. With plans to launch high-performance productshink mountain-climbing apparel and other elite athletic wears early as 2016
Bolt Threads doesn have to rely on thousands of silkworms, a species struggling due to climate change. And its production methods give Bolt Threads great flexibility to innovate
is prepared to scale up production to manufacture tens of millions of pounds of fabric. Bolt breakthrough represents ust the first in a wave of technology-driven products from natural materials,
said Kim and Chau. he achievements of Bolt Threads should encourage entrepreneurs and investors to look beyond their comfort zone of apps and software to support true innovation and science,
#3d, high-capacity soft batteries created using trees Even as technology advances at a mind-boggling rate,
batteries always seem to lag behind. It often hinders the development of novel devices and gadgets simply due to their bulky size or limited storage capacity.
But progress is slowly being made, and scientists may have taken just a significant stride in the field with the development of two novel high-capacity energy storage devices made from a cheap and renewable material:
wood pulp. Tough yet flexible, these spongy devices can withstand both shock and stress, a feature that many stretchable electronics do not possess.
What more, the ultralight material they created to build the devices, an aerogel, allowed them to make 3d structures,
something that has been pursued for more than a decade. Although some 3d charge-storage devices have been created in the past, they have been limited by the manufacturing processes used to create the complex architecture. here are limits to how thin a battery can be,
but that becomes less relevant in 3d, lead researcher Max Hamedi, of KTH Royal Institute of technology, said in a statement. e are restricted no longer to two dimensions.
We can build in three dimensions, enabling us to fit more electronics in a smaller device.
And cramming more in means that more power can be stored but in less space than conventional batteries would allow,
Hamedi explains. To create their innovative wood-based aerogel material, scientists from KTH Royal Institute of technology and Stanford university started off by breaking down cellulose,
a long chain of sugar molecules found in plant cell walls that bestows wood with its strength.
After reducing these fibers to around one-millionth of their original thickness the resulting anocelluloseis then dissolved and freeze-dried to remove moisture.
Finally, the substance is put through a processing technique that stabilizes the molecules, preventing the foam-like material from collapsing. he result is a material that is both strong,
You can touch it without it breaking. he team then coated this spongy material with an ink that conducts electricity within the aerogel,
allowing the researchers to ultimately produce their two 3d energy storage devices: a hybrid battery and a supercapacitor,
which is a rapidly charging and discharging device capable of storing huge amounts of electrical charge.
Although there is much more work to be done before we start to see this material in use,
the researchers envisage that the devices could ultimately be used in electric cars, or even in clothing to charge gadgets on the go.
Image credit: Max Hamedi and Wallenberg Wood Science Center Via IFLSCIENC g
#Scientists create riction-freematerial US Department of energy Scientists at the Argonne National Laboratory have found a way to use diamonds
and graphene to create a new material combination that demonstrates so-called superlubricity. Led by nanoscientist Ani Sumant of Argonne Center for Nanoscale Materials (CNM) and Argonne Distinguished Fellow Ali Erdemir of Argonne Energy systems Division, the Argonne team combined diamond
nanoparticles, small patches of graphene, and a diamond-like carbon material to create superlubricity, a highly-desirable property in
which friction drops to near zero. According to Erdemir, as the graphene patches and diamond particles rub up against a large diamond-like carbon surface,
the graphene rolls itself around the diamond particle, creating something that looks like a ball bearing on the nanoscopic level. he interaction between the graphene
and the diamond-like carbon is essential for creating the uperlubricityeffect, he said in a statement. he two materials depend on each other.
By creating the graphene-encapsulated diamond ball bearings, or scrolls, the team found a way to translate the nanoscale superlubricity into a macroscale phenomenon.
Because the scrolls change their orientation during the sliding process, enough diamond particles and graphene patches prevent the two surfaces from becoming locked in state.
The team used large-scale atomistic computations on the Mira supercomputer at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility to prove that the effect could be seen not merely at the nanoscale
but also at the macroscale. scroll can be manipulated and rotated much more easily than a simple sheet of graphene or graphite,
Berman said. The team found, however, that superlubricity wasn maintained in a humid environment. Because this behaviour was counterintuitive,
the team again turned to atomistic calculations. e observed that the scroll formation was inhibited in the presence of a water layer,
therefore causing higher friction, said Subramanian Sankaranarayanan, a computational nanoscientist at Argonne and co-author of a paper describing the work in Science Express.
While the field of tribology has long been concerned with ways to reduce friction and therefore the energy demands of different mechanical systems superlubricity has proved elusive. veryone would dream of being able to achieve superlubricity in a wide range of mechanical systems,
but it a very difficult goal to achieve, said Sanket Deshmukh, another CNM postdoctoral researcher on the study. he knowledge gained from this study will be crucial in finding ways to reduce friction in everything from engines
or turbines to computer hard disks and microelectromechanical systems, said Sumant e
#World thinnest lightbulb developed using graphene A postdoctoral research scientist, Young Duck Kim, has led a team of scientists from Columbia, Seoul National University (SNU),
and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) that have demonstrated for the first time ever an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon,
as a filament. They attached small strips of graphene to metal electrodes, suspended the strips above the substrate,
and passed a current through the filaments to cause them to heat up. The study, right visible light emission from graphene
is published in the Advance Online Publication on Nature Nanotechnology website on June 15. ee created what is essentially the world thinnest light bulb,
says Hone, Wang Fon-Jen Professor of Mechanical engineering at Columbia Engineering and co-author of the study. his new type of roadbandlight emitter can be integrated into chips
and will pave the way towards the realization of atomically thin, flexible, and transparent displays,
and graphene-based on-chip optical communications. Creating light in small structures on the surface of a chip is crucial for developing fully integrated hotoniccircuits that do with light
what is now done with electric currents in semiconductor integrated circuits. Researchers have developed many approaches to do this but have not yet been able to put the oldest and simplest artificial light sourcehe incandescent light bulbnto a chip.
This is primarily because light bulb filaments must be extremely hothousands of degrees Celsiusn order to glow in the visible range
and micro-scale metal wires cannot withstand such temperatures. In addition, heat transfer from the hot filament to its surroundings is extremely efficient at the microscale,
making such structures impractical and leading to damage of the surrounding chip. By measuring the spectrum of the light emitted from the graphene,
the team was able to show that the graphene was reaching temperatures of above 2500 degrees Celsius,
hot enough to glow brightly. he visible light from atomically thin graphene is so intense that it is visible even to the naked eye,
without any additional magnification, explains Young Duck Kim, first and co-lead author on the paper and postdoctoral research scientist who works in Hone group at Columbia Engineering.
Interestingly, the spectrum of the emitted light showed peaks at specific wavelengths, which the team discovered was due to interference between the light emitted directly from the graphene
and light reflecting off the silicon substrate and passing back through the graphene. Kim notes, his is only possible
or the metal electrodes is due to another interesting property: as it heats up, graphene becomes a much poorer conductor of heat.
so that less energy is needed to attain temperatures needed for visible light emission, Myung-Ho Bae, a senior researcher at KRISS and co-lead author,
Yun Daniel Park, professor in the department of physics and astronomy at Seoul National University and co-lead author,
dison originally used carbon as a filament for his light bulb and here we are going back to the same element,
#Spoken sentences can be reconstructed from brain activity patterns It is now possible to reconstruct spoken sentences from activity patterns of the human brain surface. rain to Textcombines knowledge from neuroscience, medicine and informatics.
Brain waves associated with speech processes can be recorded directly with electrodes located on the surface of the cortex.
our recent results indicate that both single units in terms of speech sounds as well as continuously spoken sentences can be recognized from brain activity. hese results were obtained by an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers of informatics, neuroscience, and medicine.
In Karlsruhe, the methods for signal processing and automatic speech recognition have been developed and applied. n addition to the decoding of speech from brain activity
who developed the Brain-to-Text system within their doctoral studies. The present work is the first that decodes continuously spoken speech
and transforms it into a textual representation. For this purpose, cortical information is combined with linguistic knowledge
and machine learning algorithms to extract the most likely word sequence. Currently, Brain-to-Text is based on audible speech.
The brain activity was recorded in the USA from 7 epileptic patients who participated voluntarily in the study during their clinical treatments.
An electrode array was placed on the surface of the cerebral cortex (electrocorticography (ECOG)) for their neurological treatment.
Later on, the researchers in Karlsruhe analyzed the data to develop Brain-to-Text. In addition to basic science and a better understanding of the highly complex speech processes in the brain,
and NV Energy, is a network of charging stations planned along U s. Route 95 that would finally make it far easier to drive sparsely populated, mostly desert route between Reno and Las vegas with an electric vehicle.
Though only about 1, 400 electric vehicles are registered in Nevada, the state has been paying close attention to EVS lately because of Tesla motors.
The electric-car maker is building its giant battery igafactoryoutside of Reno. So the state fortunes will be tied to the success of electric cars.
Officials thought making charging easy along the only major highway connecting the state two largest cities would be a good place to start. ee all driven this road before
and have anxiety (even) with getting gas, said Sandoval. ow we can have confidence to charge our electric vehicles and drive them from place to place (in Nevada).
The state has 150 charging stations installed so far. The Nevada Electric Highway initiative will kick off by adding five more by November.
What makes those five stations especially crucial is where theyl be located. In addition to connecting the northern and southern parts of the state for electric vehicle owners,
the Electric Highway is expected also to link rural areas and bring business to those communities from EV owners who make the stop to charge their cars.
The state says it is looking for community partners in rural areas such as Fallon, Hawthorne, Tonopah, Beatty and Indian Springs.
Potential sites include businesses near U s. Route 95 that are willing to host the charging stations
which will be installed for free by NV Energy. Host sites must agree to let consumers use the stations at no charge for at least five years
and make them available for 24 hours. Each charging station will come with two Level 2 chargers that can charge vehicles in several hours plus one Direct current
or DC Fast Charger that can juice up compatible vehicles in less than an hour. The state is also working with Tesla motors to help increase the number of Tesla fast chargers in the state as well.
The charging stations can be expensive costing $6, 000 for a basic version and even more for those that feature fast charging, according to NV Energy. t close to a 7 1/2-hour drive and one day,
youl be able to do it with an electric vehicle, said NV Energy CEO Paul Caudill
#Google Project Soli will put gesture controls everywhere Every motion controller currently on the market may have just become obsolete thanks to Google.
At a time when most gesture-sensing technology is unreliable and clunky, Project Soli, one of Google latest cutting-edge experiments from its secretive Advanced Technology
and Projects group (ATAP), provides an enticing example of the type of powerful motion controller that could actually change how we interact with everything from smartwatches and tablets to appliances and other everyday objects.
At a basic level, motion controllers are premised on the idea that a user hands replace traditional input devices like touch screens or mouse and keyboards.
Rather than touching a physical object like a display or button to control a device, you use hand gestures.
Using hand gestures, proponents say, makes user interfaces much more intuitive and easy to use and opens up new ways for designers
and developers to create better user experiences. Radar to gesturesproject Soli gesture-tracking takes a particularly unique approach in that it depends on radar.
Radar, which detects objects in motion through high frequency radio waves, enables what Project Soli design lead Carste Schwesig calls a undamentally different approachto motion tracking. typical model of the way you think about radar is like a police radar
or baseball where you just have an object and you measure its speed, explains Schwesig. ut actually we are beaming out a continuos signal that gets reflected by an arm,
for exampleo you measure the differences between the emitted and the received signal. It a very complex wave signal
and from that we can provide signal processing and machine learning techniques to detect gestures. f course,
gesture-based controllers are not, in themselves, new. Companies like Leap Motion and, more recently, Intel (via Realsense) have been experimenting with motion controllers for some time.
But these systems rely on cameras for their motion-tracking abilities, which limits the effectiveness and accuracy of the devices,
says Schwesig. Since Soli sensors can capture motion at up to 10,000 frames per second, it is much more accurate than camera-based systems,
which track motion at much lower frame rates, Schwesig says. And unlike cameras, radar can pass through certain types of objects,
making it adaptable to more form factors than a camera. ou can do things you would never be able to do with a camera,
Schwesig tells Mashable. he speed doesn mean you have to move extremely fast, it just means you can detect very high accuracy. here it goingwhen project lead Ivan Poupyrev demoed it onstage during I/O,
he talked about Project Soli mainly in the context of smartwatches. As displays shrink, he said,
interacting with devices becomes increasingly difficult. Even the most responsive smartwatch displays can be difficult to navigate in some situations.
But Soli utility isn limited to wearables at all. In its current form, its radar tech lives in a single tiny chip that can be embedded in about any type of device,
even objects that don have a traditional display. t in chip form, since there are no moving parts involved it can be embedded inside devices,
it can work through some materials, we can reimagine this in everyday objects or even with existing products,
Soli sensors can detect motion at a range of about two to three feet, Schwesig says,
Imagine dismissing smartphone notification with the wave of a hand or pressing your fingers together to play music from a bluetooth speaker.
With Ara, people submitted applications for a chance to get their hands on the project development hardware
Where the radar-based gesture tech eventually ends up will likely depend on developer response and the level of interest from hardware manufacturers.
One obvious example would be Android Wear watchmakers: It no secret that Android Wear sales have been lackluster
since the first devices went on sale last year. Soli new gesture-based interface could potentially revitalize sales.
But the size and flexibility of the chip itself leaves many, many more possibilities open. In hands-on demos at Google I/O, ATAP focused more on displaying Soli gesture-recognizing capabilities rather than specific implementations.
A prototype I saw used visualizations to show how the chip was able to detect
and respond to various hand motions. The shapes and position of the visualization changed in response to how people moved their hands.
and hardware manufacturers to help determine the future of Project Soli. ATAP has shown already, in just one day,
#Reducing traffic congestion in India with suspended, driverless pods t an electric car, except you don drive it,
Proponents of PRT believe that such systems can provide the personal convenience of cars with the dedicated infrastructure of mass transit,
congestion and air pollution. When Ollie Mikosza describes Metrino pods, it sounds like he telling a riddle. t an electric car,
except you don drive it, he says. Metrino pods are the individual units of his personal rapid transit system that the Indian government is looking into.
Proponents of PRT believe that such systems can provide the personal convenience of cars with the dedicated infrastructure of mass transit,
congestion and air pollution. For now, the Indian government has given effectively the go ahead for a pilot program.
The major catch for now is that investors haven seem have joined in. Miksoza says he is need still in of private financing to actually construct the network.
He has a right-of-way from the Indian government, but doesn have the cash to make it happen. very single major invention like thishether they were cell phones
or personal computers or airplanes or carsere laughed at by their contemporaries in every case, says Mikosza y
#Researchers invent super-elastic conducting fibers to make artificial muscles, sensors, and capacitors A University of Texas at Dallas research team has made electrically conducting fibers that can be stretched reversibly to more than 14 times their initial length and
whose electrical conductivity increases 200-fold when stretched. The research team is using the new fibers to make artificial muscles,
as well as capacitors with energy storage capacity that increases about tenfold when the fibers are stretched. Fibers and cables derived from the invention might one day be used as interconnects for super-elastic electronic circuits
robots and exoskeletons having great reach, morphing aircraft, giant-range strain sensors, failure-free pacemaker leads,
and super-stretchy charger cords for electronic devices. Wrapping carbon nanotube sheets into fibers In a study published in the July 24 issue of the journal Science,
the scientists describe how they constructed the fibers by wrapping lighter-than-air, electrically conductive sheets of tiny carbon nanotubes to form a jellyroll-like sheath around a long rubber core.
The new fibers differ from conventional materials in several ways. For example, when conventional fibers are stretched,
the resulting increase in length and decrease in cross-sectional area restricts the flow of electrons through the material.
But even a iantstretch of the new conducting sheath-core fibers causes little change in their electrical resistance, said Dr. Ray Baughman,
senior author of the paper and director of the Alan G. Macdiarmid Nanotech Institute at UT Dallas. One key to the performance of the new conducting elastic fibers is the introduction of buckling into the carbon nanotube
sheets. Because the rubber core is stretched along its length as the sheets are being wrapped around it,
when the wrapped rubber relaxes, the carbon nanofibers form a complex buckled structure, which allows for repeated stretching of the fiber. hink of the buckling that occurs
when an accordion is compressed, which makes the inelastic material of the accordion stretchable, said Baughman,
the Robert A. Welch Distinguished Chair in Chemistry at UT Dallas. e make the inelastic carbon nanotube sheaths of our sheath-core fibers super stretchable by modulating large buckles with small buckles,
so that the elongation of both buckle types can contribute to elasticity. These amazing fibers maintain the same electrical resistance,
even when stretched by giant amounts, because electrons can travel over such a hierarchically buckled sheath as easily as they can traverse a straight sheath.
Radical electronic and mechanical devices possible By adding a thin overcoat of rubber to the sheath-core fibers and then another carbon nanotube sheath
the researchers made strain sensors and artificial muscles in which the buckled nanotube sheaths serve as electrodes
and the thin rubber layer is a dielectric, resulting in a fiber capacitor. These fiber capacitors exhibited the unrivaled capacitance change of 860 percent
when the fiber was stretched 950 percent. Adding twist to these double-sheath fibers resulted in fast,
electrically powered torsional or rotating artificial muscles that could be used to rotate mirrors in optical circuits
or pump liquids in miniature devices used for chemical analysis. The conducting elastomers can be fabricated in diameters ranging from the very small about 150 microns
or twice the width of a human hair to much larger sizes, depending on the size of the rubber core.
Individual small fibers also can be combined into large bundles and plied together like yarn or rope,
according to the researchers. his technology could be well-suited for rapid commercialization, said Dr. Raquel Ovalle-Robles MS6 Phd8,
an author on the paper and chief research and intellectual properties strategist at Lintec of America Nanoscience & Technology Center. he rubber cores used for these sheath-core fibers are inexpensive and readily available,
she said. he only exotic component is the carbon nanotube aerogel sheet used for the fiber sheath. o
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