#Scientists grow human mini-brains that are giving big insights into autism Scientists first grew mini-hearts in a lab. Then they 3d printed skin.
Now scientists have taken ody on a chipto a whole new level. Starting with skin cells from patient biopsies, scientists transformed them back into stem cells,
and from those grew pea-sized, self-organizing, crazy-looking nuggets of living yes, LIVING brain.
These erebral organoidsare the brainchild of Dr. Madeline Lancaster, a neuroscientist at Cambridge who is interested in how our brains develop as embryos.
A few years back while working as a postdoc in Vienna at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology (IMBA
Lancaster noticed off-hand that her cultured brain cells weren sticking to the bottom of the dish as usual instead,
they floated up and aggregated into tiny balls. Curiosity piqued, Lancaster tinkered around with growth conditions until her mini-brains expanded several millimeters wide tiny compared to a normal human brain,
but still something previously unachievable. The pale, opaque chunks of brain matter didn look like much on the surface,
but their intricate internal architecture blew Lancaster away. Under the microscope, the brain blobs were doppelgangers of 9-week-old fetus brains.
They contained neural stem cells that busily churned on making precursor cells that developed into fully functional neurons capable of firing away.
As the blobs grew, the tissue self-organized into distinct subregions populated by different types of neurons in fact,
In a study published last week in Cell, a team from Yale School of medicine used the technique to glean insight into why autism occurs in some people without a clear genetic cause.
Within a month, it was apparent that organoids created from people with autism overproduced one type of neuron that acts to dampen the chatter of normal neural activity.
and may in part cause the faulty wiring behind autism behavioral symptoms. Further sleuthing led the scientists to a single gene responsible for the glitch.
Before mini-brains, scientists had to shift through gobs of genomic data to fish out gene variants associated with autism.
The scientists were trying to take the long-winding road from genetics to biology, which proved to be tedious and difficult.
Scientists can now directly study the biology of complex neurological disorders and from there nail down the responsible genes.
This makes it much easier to home in on potential drug targets for therapy. Scientists also no longer have to solely rely on mouse models of human disorders.
Although similar, mouse brains don exactly follow the same developmental trajectory as human brains, so we don know how well the findings translate.
after all, how can one know for sure that a mouse is depressed autistic or hallucinating? Then there one more perk.
the core suffocates. But Lancaster and other organoid-enthusiasts are hard at work. Just last month at the International Society for Stem Cell Research conference in Stockholm, scientists reported updated methods to more reproducibly culture organoids with better architecture.
As of now, the organoids most certainly can hink without external output and mature neural networks to support information processing,
Besides the convenience of a great model, wrote Dr. Arnold Kriegstein, a stem cell researcher at the University of California, San francisco, in an article accompanying Lancaster publication,
#New gene therapy could rewire the eye to help blind people see Scientists might be able to change the cells in blind people eyes,
If the rods and cones that make up the photoreceptors of the eye fail because of injury or illness,
Now, scientists hope that they can use gene therapy to transform nerves in the eye to replace those lost photoreceptors.
It is part of a new field called optogenetics which uses molecules from algae or other microorganisms that respond to light,
the new field has given also insight into how the brain works. It can even be used to alter memories.
Optogenetics is a form of gene therapy and works by changing the makeup of the damaged cells.
But since it only converts rather than edits genes, it is not likely to cause the same kind of ethical and practical problems that blight work on other forms of gene therapy.
When the new genes are placed into cells, they will produce working copies of proteins to help it get back working again.
and has restored already the sight of people with a specific form of blindness. About 200,000 people in the US have inherited diseases that cause problems for the photoreceptors in their eye.
which usually work to take the information between the rods and cells and the brain.
#Machine that unboils eggs now being used to improve cancer treatment The device can rip things apart with great accuracy,
Using the invention on carboplatin a common cancer treatment drug, used against ovarian and lung cancers has boosted the potency by almost five times.
meaning that you need less of it to do the same work. That can reduce the side effects,
and reduce their impact on the environment. More of the devices are being made, reports ABC News,
the devices could start being sold worldwide Flinders University, where it was created, has formed already a company to sell the devices."
"There are 10,000 universities in the world and this has got applications in chemistry, engineering, biology, medicine,
so there's a lot of potential there and that's just for research purposes, Raston told ABC News t
#Audi R8 e-tron: super-fast electric concept sports car can drive itself Audi has revealed a new,
super slick electronic super car that can drive itself. The R8 e-tron has been designed to showcase technology for Audi future,
including a special lightweight design and systems that allow it to drive like a high-performance car
despite only being powered by batteries. And now the company has added self-driving capabilities that use a range of sensors to drive safely and more efficiently.
The concept car was shown off at CES Asia, where the company revealed that it go from 0 to 100 km h in just 3. 9 seconds,
and can reach a top speed of 250 km h. It does so using a special T-shaped battery
and a light frame that is built to absorb collisions. But the company has added now an array of sensors,
including a laser scanner, several video cameras and ultrasonic and radar sensors. All of that data is fed into he central driver assistance control unit (zfas), a compact central computer
which uses the data to create a comprehensive image of the environment around the car.
The car can then use that information to drive itself. That helps the car use the battery even more efficiently than it already does.
The company says that it can build the car o meet special customer requests But its main job is as a igh-tech mobile laboratory it says trying out technologies that will eventually make it to production vehicles u
#Self-healing technology one step closer after scientists produce aircraft wings which fix themselves Their research,
due to be presented at a Royal Society meeting in London this week, is being billed as an important step in an emerging field
which could soon produce self-healing nail polish and a cure for cracked mobile phone screens. A team at the University of Bristol has been quietly developing the technology for the past three years.
Speaking exclusively to The Independent on Sunday, its leader, Professor Duncan wass said he expected self-healing products to reach consumers in the ery near future
If crash helmets could self heal their durability could be increased massively (AFP/Getty) His team specialises in modifying carbon fibre composite materials,
the strong but lightweight substances used increasingly widely in the manufacture of everything from commercial aircraft wings to sports racquets and high-performance bicycles.
Professor Wass and his team have been working with aerospace engineers at the university, who wanted to know
if there was a way of preventing the tiny, almost undetectable cracks that form in an aircraft wings and fuselage.
The team ingenious solution started n the back of an envelopebut has developed since into useable technology.
It involves adding tiny, hollow icrospheresto the carbon material so small that they look like a powder to the human eye
which break on impact, releasing a liquid healing agent. The agent seeps into the cracks left by the damage before coming into contact with a catalyst,
Professor wass said. ee not evolved to withstand any damage if we were like that we have a skin as thick as a rhinoceros
Sports equipment such as golf clubs are made often from carbon fibre composites (Getty) Laboratory tests have established that the material is
Professor wass said. The technology could also make airline safety checks far cheaper as a dye could be added to the healing agent causing any damage to an aircraft to stand out like a bruise.
Professor wass said a bruise was a ood analogybut accepted that the dye would need to be tweaked to cater for nervous fliers. e probably do it with something
Professor wass said. The research was funded by the Engineering and Physical sciences Research Council UK Catalysis Hub, a collaborative project between universities and industry.
This week conference, entitled Catalysis Improving Society, will be one of the first events at which the team achievements have been detailed in public.
The BMW i8 electric sports car has a carbon fibre passenger compartment to make up for the weight of its heavy battery Professor Richard Catlow of the University of London,
at a elatively low costthe Bristol team advances could be applied to all kinds of carbon fibre composite materials meaning that self-healing golf clubs, tennis racquets,
fishing rods and bike helmets could be just around the corner. The cosmetics firm Lréal has contacted also the team to register its interest in self-healing nail varnish.
but Professor wass said the general principle would remain the same. ee definitely getting to the stage where in the next five
or 10 years wee going to see things like mobile phone screens that can heal themselves if they crack,
when researchers at the University of Illinois in the US created a plastic capable of repairing itself
Last year, the same team created a polymer, inspired by the human blood-clotting system, which patched holes up to 3cm wide.
Offshore wind turbines could benefit from selfhealing technology, as they are damaged often by bird strikes (AFP/Getty) Professor Wass team at the University of Bristol has been focusing on the creation of self-healing versions of carbon fibre composite materials,
which are used widely in the aerospace industry but also have many other applications.**The BMW i8 electric sports car has a carbon fibre passenger compartment to make up for the weight of its heavy battery.
The material is already attractive to car manufacturers as it is 30 per cent lighter than aluminium and self-healing technology would make it safer too.*
*The Airbus a380 passenger jet has a carbon fibre reinforced plastic fuselage for a lower fuel consumption. The researchers claim the new technology would allow wings to fix themselves in mid-flight,
and allow engineers to spot cracks more easily.**Offshore wind turbines could also benefit from self-healing technology,
as they are damaged often by bird strikes. The carbon composite blades are 100 feet in the air,
so maintaining them is notoriously expensive and difficult.**Carbon fibre bicycle frames are popular with cyclists as they are so light,
*Sports equipment such as tennis racquets, fishing rods and golf clubs are made often from carbon fibre composites for the same reasons i
letting people take back their embarrassing emails Gmail newest addition is an ndo sendfeature, which lets people recall emails that have been sent,
up to 30 seconds after theye been despatched. It works by holding back the email for a predefined time,
and then letting it go if users don say that theye sent it in error.
Users must enable the feature through the settings page in Gmail, by clicking in the cog at the top right hand screen
and scrolling through the general tab. It also gives the option to choose how long the undo send feature shows for offering settings between 5 and 30 seconds.
Google's special mobile app that organises emails and aims to make them easier to read.
which gives Gmail users special features that can usually be accessed, before moving them to the main product if theye successful.
Other features currently being experimented with are options to use canned responses to emails so that they don have to be typed out every time,
#High school student from Canada invents revolutionary iaid gadget for blind people Alex Deans, from Ontario in Canada, began creating the device after becoming curious
while helping a blind woman cross the street one day. he told me that all existing devices only let users see in one direction
The device, known as iaid, uses GPS and ultrasonic technology to help visually impaired people get around safely.
The belt-like gadget comes with a joy stick and works by releasing sound waves that bounce-off objects in the user path to show how close things are to them.
The iaid workings have been compared to the combination of a whale sonar and the technology used in cars to alert drivers
when theye close to reversing into something. Alex Deans wants to see his device replace canes
and guide dogs Whereas canes tell users what directly in front of them, they don help them figure out where they are in relation their destination
and objects that are explained farther away the teen. Describing how his creating started as a hobby,
me two to three years just to get the programming and coding knowledge. he teen invention has been attracting attention
Alex will be starting at Montreal Mcgill University in the autumn, but hopes the iaid will be approved for US and Canadian rights so that, one day,
scientists could make an internet of human brains Scientists have attached successfully together the brains of monkeys
scientists suggest that they could create Brainets a system of brains attached together to make an rganic computer The experiments found that the successfully connected animals brains were at least as good as one single one,
In the monkey experiment, the three animals were attached together using special sensors that were implanted in their brain
The three of them successfully learnt to control a virtual avatar on a screen, working together to move its arm.
#Rotterdam may be first city to build roads from plastic bottles Rotterdam could be the first city to build streets with plastic bottles after the city council announced it is considering piloting a new type of road surface.
which is responsible for 1. 6 million tons of global carbon dioxide emissions a year and 2 per cent of all road transport emissions.
Sections of the road will be made pre in a factory and then transported on-site, which means a shorter construction time, lower maintenance and less road works.
Senior directors at Volkerwessels have said that the project is still at a conceptual stage, but the company aims to put down the first fully recycled road within three years.
lastic offers all kinds of advantages compared to current road construction, both in laying the roads and maintenance.
It fits very well within its sustainability policy and it has said it is keen to work on a pilot
from the University of California at Berkeley, told the magazine. The same technique might also be used to create other parts of the human body.
But in the shorter term, the tiny hearts can be used to study how humansbigger ones work.
'Roboticists at the Ransselaer Polytechnic institute adapted it for a trio of robots, two of which were told they had been given a"dumbing pill
Last year, a supercomputer became the first AI to pass the Turing Test, successfully (and worryingly for cybercrime) convincing humans it was a 13-year-old boy
#It is illegal to rip music off a CD or put DVDS onto hard drives, UK High court says The ruling had previously been in place,
or films off discs so that they can be watched on portably entertainment gadgets like ipods or ipads.
It also means that anyone taking music for future study like teachers using videos in a class,
more effective use of biocompatible materials in repairing human tissues. Focusing on the difficult case of restoring cartilage,
The composites they tested showed elasticity and stiffness comparable to knee-joint tissue, as well as the ability to support the growth
simultaneously providing room for cell growth as well as the needed mechanical stiffness. This method offers much more freedom in the design of scaffolding to promote healing
and growth of new tissue, explained professor Dietmar W. Hutmacher, one of the lead researchers. t allows us to more closely imitate nature way of building joint cartilage,
he said, hich means reinforcing a soft gel proteoglycans or, in our case, a biocompatible hydrogel with a network of very thin fibers.
Scaffolding filaments produced by melt electrospinning writing can be as thin as five micrometers in diameter
#3d printed Graphene Nanoflakes May Play Role in Regenerative medicine and Tissue Engineering (3d printing Industry) A research team at Northwestern University has begun printing three-dimensional structures with graphene nanoflakes.
The team, led by Ramille Shah, assistant professor of Materials science and engineering at the Mccormick School of engineering and Surgery at the Feinberg School of medicine, has developed a new kind of graphene ink that can be used to print large 3d structures.
Shah ink uses 60 to 70 percent graphene, preserving the integrity of the material, including its electrical conductivity.
The secret ingredient in Shah ink is a mix of biocompatible elastomer and fast-evaporating solvents.
This particular graphene-based ink is just one of 30 printable bio inks that Shah has formulated with her graduate team.
and all of them could potentially be used as ground zero for printing more complex organs. Shah believes these inks could one day play a significant role in regenerative medicine and tissue engineering.
In fact, her team has already run some tests populating one of the scaffolds with stem cells l
#Researchers Develop 3d printing Method to Produce Shell Capsules That Can Be loaded with Therapeutic Drugs Researchers at the University of Minnesota have introduced a novel 3d printing based method to produce highly monodisperse core/shell capsules that can
be loaded with biomolecules such as therapeutic drugs. They expect that this platform of 3d printed programmable release capsules will be useful in applications such as dynamic tissue engineering, 3d printed drug delivery systems, synthetic/artificial tissues, programmable matter,
and bionic nanosystems. Another important application area could be combinatorial screening of biomolecular gradients drugs, toxins, pollutants,
etc. against cell types. ur method provides us with robust control over particle properties, passive release kinetics,
and particle distributions throughout a 3d matrix, Michael Mcalpine, an associate professor in mechanical engineering at the university, said. urthermore,
we render these capsules stimuli-responsive by incorporating gold nanorods into the polymer shell, allowing for highly selective photothermal rupture
and triggered temporal release of the biomolecular payload. a
#Micron3dp Announces Breakthrough in 3d printing of Liquid, Hot Glass Israel Micron3dp has announced a breakthrough in glass 3d printing.
Micron3dp has succeeded in printing oftglass at a temperature of 850 degrees Celsius, as well as borosilicate glass at a melting temperature of 1640 degrees Celsius.
Eran Gal-Or, R&d manager of Micron3dp, explained, icron3dp made a successful 3d printing test, and although efforts have been made in the past by other companies to print with this medium,
once perfected, may open the door to a variety of new 3d printing applications within the art industry, medicine, aerospace, security, architecture, and more.
Micron3dp is reportedly seeking investors who are interested in helping them further the technology involved within these new processes w
#3d printing Technique Being developed for Bone Regeneration A team of scientists from the University of Nottingham has developed a new 3d bioprinting technique that allows them to 3d-print a thick paste filled with protein-releasing microspheres that can be used to greatly speed up bone regeneration
after fractures. While this 3d-bioprintable paste is yet to reach clinical trials, this study could be the first step to a revolutionary treatment method.
Potentially complicated applications such as filling bone fractures with this doughy material could make bones stronger during recovery from fractures.
Dr. Jing Yang from the University of Nottingham one of the leading researchers, explained, nitially wee targeting the clinical application of this material as injectable bone defect filler,
Smartphone-Based 3d printed Diagnostic Device for Viruses (3ders. org) A team of researchers from the California Nanosystems Institute at UCLA has created a low-cost,
smartphone-based device and app that is made with a 3d printer and can read enzyme-linked immunosorbant assay (ELISA) diagnostic plates on the spot, with up to 99.6 percent accuracy for certain viruses. With the UCLA researcher new invention,
a small and low-cost 3d printed device is attached to a smartphone and illuminates a 96-well plate with an LED array.
A custom-designed smartphone app then reads the resulting images and analyzes them using a machine-learning algorithm.
The diagnostic results can be sent back to the phone within one minute. The ELISA is a common diagnostic tool that requires large and expensive readout instruments that can only be found in well-equipped hospital labs. ELISA is not typically available in remote or developing countries in
which the ability to track and diagnose contagious and life-threatening viruses such as HIV, West Nile and Hepatitis b could save thousands, if not millions of lives every year
#Photonics Moves Forward for Future Computing Technology The development of photonic technologies to speed up computing has taken two steps forward,
following recent announcements demonstrating the use of photonics in both processing and data transfer. Optalysys, a start-up company based in Cambridge England,
has announced that, starting next month, its prototype optical processing system will be used in large-scale DNA sequence searches,
saving up to 95 per cent of energy costs compared to conventional electronic methods, the company claims. in addition,
IBM has announced that it has produced an integrated wavelength multiplexed silicon photonics chip, which will allow the bulk manufacturing of 100 Gbps optical transceivers.
Research into ways of boosting the speeds of both processors and interconnects is looking at many different technologies.
Some use conventional silicon-based electronic technologies, such as FPGS as discussed in Robert Roe article,
Will Opencl open the gates for FPGAS?,while other avenues being explored include server on a chip
and IBM Openpower initiative as discussed in Robert Roe second article on Future processing technologies.
More exotic and much longer term techniques such as quantum computing are also being explored as discussed in Quantum computing takes a step closer.
Optalysys hopes optical processing will accelerate computation by performing processor-intensive tasks at much faster rates and with a significant reduction in energy consumption.
The principle is similar in some ways to how a GPU is used to accelerate compute intensive tasks
but the Optalyssys prototype is sized a desktop system rather than a single card connected through PCIE.
The prototype demonstrates optical derivative functions mathematical building blocks commonly used in complex engineering model simulations such as weather prediction and aerodynamic modeling.
The prototype achieves a processing speed equivalent to 320 Gigaflops and, because it uses light rather than electricity as the processing medium,
it is much more energy efficient than classical processing devices. The first project to utilise Optalysys technology starts next month in collaboration with The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) to build a genetic search system called GENESYS that will perform large-scale DNA sequence searches.
The project has received £500 000 in funding from the UK Government agency, Innovate UK. According to the chairman of the company, James Duez, Optalysys initial products will launch in 2017
and he expects them to achieve HPC-levels of performance up to an equivalent processing rate of 9 petaflops. He said that this was omparable to the 5th fastest computer in the world today.
Following that we plan to pursue the design of larger systems capable of achieving multiple exaflops by 2020.
and tested a fully integrated wavelength multiplexed silicon photonics chip, which will soon enable manufacturing of 100 Gbps optical transceivers.
This will allow datacenters to offer greater data rates and bandwidth for cloud computing and Big data applications.
IBM silicon photonics chips uses four distinct colours of light travelling within an optical fibre to transmit data in and around a computing system.
The critical point is that IBM has integrated the optical components side-by-side with electrical circuits on a single silicon chip using sub-100nm semiconductor technology.
The ability to manufacture the components using conventional electronic industry techniques thus permits mass production and hence lower prices that will ensure more widespread commercial use of silicon photonics.
Most of the optical interconnect solutions employed within datacenters as of today are based upon vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) technology,
where the optical signals are transported via multimode optical fibre. Demands for increased distance and data rate between ports, due to cloud services for example, are driving the development of cost-effective single-mode optical interconnect technologies,
which can overcome the bandwidth-distance limitations inherent to multimode VCSEL links. IBM CMOS integrated nanophotonics technology combines the essential parts of an optical transceiver, both electrical and optical, on one silicon chip.
IBM engineers have demonstrated a reference design, targeting datacenter interconnects with a range up to two kilometers.
This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World. Sign up for our insidehpc Newsletter u
#D-Wave Breaks 1000 Qubit Quantum computing Barrier Today D-Wave Systems announced that it has broken the 1000 qubit barrier,
developing a processor about double the size of D-Wave previous generation. According to D-Wave, this is a major technological and scientific achievement that will allow significantly more complex computational problems to be solved than was possible on any previous quantum computer.
D-Wave quantum computer runs a quantum annealing algorithm to find the lowest points, corresponding to optimal or near optimal solutions, in a virtual nergy landscape.
Every additional qubit doubles the search space of the processor. At 1000 qubits the new processor considers 21000 possibilities simultaneously,
a search space which dwarfs the 2512 possibilities available to the 512-qubit D-Wave Two. n fact,
the new search space contains far more possibilities than there are articles in the observable universe. As the only manufacturer of scalable quantum processors, D-Wave breaks new ground with every succeeding generation it develops.
The new processors, comprising over 128,000 Josephson tunnel junctions, are believed to be the most complex superconductor integrated circuits ever successfully yielded.
They are fabricated in part at D-Wave facilities in Palo alto, CA and at Cypress Semiconductor wafer foundry located in Bloomington,
Minnesota. The 1000-qubit milestone is the result of intensive research and development by D-Wave and reflects a triumph over a variety of design challenges aimed at enhancing performance
and boosting solution quality. Beyond the much larger number of qubits, other significant innovations include:
A 1000 qubit processor will also be on display at the upcoming GEOINT conference in D-Wave booth,#10076.
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011