#'Smart bandage'detects bed sores before they are visible to doctors Abstract: Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, are developing a new type of bandage that does far more than stanch the bleeding from a paper cut or scraped knee.
Thanks to advances in flexible electronics, the researchers, in collaboration with colleagues at UC San francisco, have created a new"smart bandage"that uses electrical currents to detect early tissue damage from pressure ulcers,
or bedsores, before they can be seen by human eyes -and while recovery is still possible.
Associate professor Michel Maharbiz explains how the smart bandage works to detect bedsores. Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Phil Ebiner"We set out to create a type of bandage that could detect bedsores as they are forming
before the damage reaches the surface of the skin, "said Michel Maharbiz, a UC Berkeley associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and head of the smart-bandage project."
"We can imagine this being carried by a nurse for spot-checking target areas on a patient,
or it could be incorporated into a wound dressing to regularly monitor how it's healing."
"The researchers exploited the electrical changes that occur when a healthy cell starts dying. They tested the thin,
noninvasive bandage on the skin of rats and found that the device was able to detect varying degrees of tissue damage consistently across multiple animals.
Tackling a growing health problemthe findings, to be published Tuesday, March 17, in the journal Nature Communications, could provide a major boost to efforts to stem a health problem that affects an estimated 2. 5 million U s. residents at an annual cost of $11 billion.
Pressure ulcers, or bedsores, are injuries that can result after prolonged pressure cuts off adequate blood supply to the skin.
Areas that cover bony parts of the body such as the heels, hips and tailbone, are common sites for bedsores.
Patients who are bedridden or otherwise lack mobility are most at risk.""By the time you see signs of a bedsore on the surface of the skin,
it's usually too late, "said Dr. Michael Harrison, a professor of surgery at UCSF and a co-investigator of the study."
"This bandage could provide an easy early warning-system system that would allow intervention before the injury is permanent.
If you can detect bedsores early on, the solution is easy. Just take the pressure off."
"Bedsores are associated with deadly septic infections, and recent research has shown that odds of a hospital patient dying are 2. 8 times higher
when they have pressure ulcers. The growing prevalence of diabetes and obesity has increased the risk factors for bedsores."
"The genius of this device is that it's looking at the electrical properties of the tissue to assess damage.
We currently have no other way to do that in clinical practice, "said Harrison.""It's tackling a big problem that many people have been trying to solve in the last 50 years.
As a clinician and someone who has struggled with this clinical problem, this bandage is great."
"Cells as capacitors and resistorsthe researchers printed an array of dozens of electrodes onto a thin, flexible film.
They discharged a very small current between the electrodes to create a spatial map of the underlying tissue based upon the flow of electricity at different frequencies, a technique called impedance spectroscopy.
The researchers pointed out that a cell's membrane is relatively impermeable when functioning properly,
thus acting like an insulator to the cell's conductive contents and drawing the comparison to a capacitor.
As a cell starts to die, the integrity of the cell wall starts to break down allowing electrical signals to leak through, much like a resistor."
"Our device is a comprehensive demonstration that tissue health in a living organism can be mapped locally using impedance spectroscopy,
"said study lead author Sarah Swisher, a Ph d. candidate in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley.
To mimic a pressure wound, the researchers gently squeezed the bare skin of rats between two magnets.
They left the magnets in place for one or three hours while the rats resumed normal activity.
The resumption of blood flow after the magnets were removed caused inflammation and oxidative damage that accelerated cell death.
The smart bandage was used to collect data once a day for at least three days to track the progress of the wounds.
The smart bandage was able to detect changes in electrical resistance consistent with increased membrane permeability, a mark of a dying cell.
Not surprisingly, one hour of pressure produced mild, reversible tissue damage while three hours of pressure produced more serious, permanent injury.
Promising future"One of the things that makes this work novel is that we took a comprehensive approach to understanding how the technique could be used to observe developing wounds in complex tissue,
"said Swisher.""In the past, people have used impedance spectroscopy for cell cultures or relatively simple measurements in tissue.
What makes this unique is extending that to detect and extract useful information from wounds developing in the body.
That's a big leap.""Maharbiz said the outlook for this and other smart bandage research is bright."
"As technology gets more and more miniaturized, and as we learn more and more about the responses the body has to disease and injury,
we're able to build bandages that are very intelligent, "he said.""You can imagine a future where the bandage you
or a physician puts on could actually report a lot of interesting information that could be used to improve patient care."#
"##Other lead researchers on the project include Vivek Subramanian and Ana Claudia Arias, both faculty members in UC Berkeley's Department of Electrical engineering and Computer sciences;
and Shuvo Roy, a UCSF professor of bioengineering. Additional co-authors include Amy Liao and Monica Lin, both UC Berkeley Ph d. students in bioengineering;
and Yasser Khan, a UC Berkeley Ph d. student in electrical engineering and computer sciences, who fabricated the sensor array.
Study co-author Dr. David Young, UCSF professor of surgery, is now heading up a clinical trial of this bandage.
The project is funded through the Flexible Resorbable Organic and Nanomaterial Therapeutic Systems (FRONTS) program of the National Science Foundation.##
###For more information, please click herecontacts: Sarah Yangwriteemail('berkeley. edu','scyang';'510-643-7741copyright#University of California, Berkeleyissuers of news releases, not 7th Wave, Inc. or Nanotechnology Now, are solely responsible for the accuracy of the content.
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#NC State researchers create'nanofiber gusher':'Report method of fabricating larger amounts of nanofibers in liquid A simple process for batch
or continuous formation of polymer nanofibers and other nanomaterials in the bulk of a sheared fluid medium is introduced.
The process could be of high value to commercial nanotechnology as it can be scaled easily up to the fabrication of staple nanofibers at rates that could exceed tens of kilograms per hour.
Creating large amounts of polymer nanofibers dispersed in liquid is a challenge that has vexed researchers for years.
But engineers and researchers at North carolina State university and one of its start-up companies have reported now a method that can produce unprecedented amounts of polymer nanofibers
which have potential applications in filtration, batteries and cell scaffolding. In a paper published online in Advanced Materials,
the NC State researchers and colleagues from industry, including NC State start-up company Xanofi, describe the method that allows them to fabricate polymer nanofibers on a massive scale.
The method-fine-tuned after nearly a decade of increasing success in producing micro -and nanoparticles of different shapes-works as simply as dropping liquid solution of a polymer in a beaker containing a spinning cylinder.
Glycerin-a common and safe liquid that has many uses-is used to shear the polymer solution inside the beaker along with an antisolvent like water.
When you take out the rotating cylinder says Dr. Orlin Velev, Invista Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular engineering at NC State and the corresponding author of the paper describing the research,
you find a mat of nanofibers wrapped around it. When they first started investigating the liquid shearing process,
the researchers created polymer microrods, which could have various useful applications in foams and consumer products."
"However, while investigating the shear process we came up with something strange. We discovered that these rods were really just pieces of'broken'fibers,
"Velev said.""We didn't quite have the conditions set perfectly at that time. If you get the conditions right,
the fibers don't break.""NC State patented the liquid shear process in 2006 and in a series of subsequent patents while Velev and his colleagues continued to work to perfect the process and its outcome.
First, they created microfibers and nanoribbons as they investigated the process.""Microfibers, nanorods and nanoribbons are interesting and potentially useful,
but you really want nanofibers, "Velev said.""We achieved this during the scaling up and commercialization of the technology."
"Velev engaged with NC State's Office of Technology Transfer and the university's TEC (The Entrepreneurship Collaborative) program to commercialize the discoveries.
They worked with the experienced entrepreneur Miles Wright to start a company called Xanofi to advance the quest for nanofibers
and the most efficient way to make mass quantities of them.""We can now create kilograms of nanofibers per hour using this simple continuous flow process,
which when scaled up becomes a'nanofiber gusher, '"Velev said.""Depending on the concentrations of liquids, polymers and antisolvents,
you can create multiple types of nanomaterials of different shapes and sizes.""""Large quantities are paramount in nanomanufacturing,
so anything scalable is said important Wright, the CEO of Xanofi and a co-author on the paper."
"When we produce the nanofibers via continuous flow, we get exactly the same nanofibers you would get
if you were producing small quantities of them. The fabrication of these materials in liquid is advantageous
because you can create truly three-dimensional nanofiber substrates with very, very high overall surface area. This leads to many enhanced products ranging from filters to cell scaffolds, printable bioinks, battery separators, plus many more."#
"##The research was funded by the National Science Foundation's Accelerating Innovation Research program. NC State's researchers Stoyan Smoukov, Tian Tian and Eunkyoung Shim co-authored the paper,
as did Narendiran Vitchuli, Sumit Gangwal, Miles Wright and Pete Geisen from Xanofi Inc.;Manuel Marquez from Ynano Llc.;
and Jeffrey Fowler from Syngenta Co o
#Click! That's how modern chemistry bonds nanoparticles to a substrate Abstract: Nanoparticles of various types can be quickly
and permanently bonded to a solid substrate, if one of the most effective methods of synthesis, click chemistry, is used for this purpose.
The novel method has been presented by a team of researchers from the Institute of Physical chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland.
A small movement of the hand, the characteristic'click!''-and the snap fastener quickly and securely fastens our clothes.
One of the newest methods of synthesis in modern chemistry, click chemistry, works on a similar basis. Here, molecules are combined to form new chemical compounds by means of chemical'snaps'.
'The method has so far been used mainly for the synthesis of more complex organic compounds. Now at the Institute of Physical chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IPC PAS) in Warsaw, Poland, they have managed to show that click chemistry chemical snaps can quickly,
effectively and permanently bond much larger structures: gold nanoparticles to a glassy carbon substrate. The main idea of click chemistry was formulated in the final years of the previous century.
It was inspired by nature, among others by the large number of proteins that arise from the diverse combination of amino acids with the same bond (peptide).
Chemistry according to the click method has a lot of advantages. Many reactions take place at low temperatures, in addition in a single solvent,
which can often be environmentally friendly water. What's more, the yield of the reaction is high:
usually approx. 80-90%.%The versatility, efficiency and selectivity of click chemistry has made it very popular, especially in the synthesis of new organic compounds."
"Click chemistry is similar to building new structures with building blocks. The blocks can be various chemical compounds,
what is important is for them to have matching snaps. A problem arises when they are not present.
Then you have to consider whether you can somehow attach the right snaps to a given building block,
"says Dr. Joanna Niedzi? ka-Jnsson (IPC PAS. The Warsaw-based chemists decided to apply click chemistry not to chemicals,
as was previously the norm, but to bond nanoparticles-i e. relatively large objects-to solid substrates."
"Usually, nanoparticles are deposited simply on the substrate and they attach to it by quite weak physical, for example electrostatic, interactions.
We decided to show that with click chemistry they can be bonded to the substrate with covalent chemical bonds and thus permanently,"stresses Dr. Adam Le?
niewski (IPC PAS), winner of the Iuventus Plus grant from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher education, under which the study was carried Out to form the bond,
the researchers from the Institute of Physical chemistry of the PAS used well-known chemical'snap fasteners':'groups of three nitrogen atoms (azides),
which in the presence of a catalyst can combine with groups of carbon atoms (terminal alkynes) located at the end of other molecules.
When they are connected, the two groups form stable nitrogen-carbon (triazole) rings. In this study, the azide groups were located on a glassy carbon substrate,
and the terminal alkynes were introduced onto the surface of gold nanoparticles. In earlier studies at the IPS PAS the catalyst participating in the reaction was produced chemically.
Currently an electrochemical method is used for its generation, in which the role of the substrate is played by an appropriately prepared carbon electrode."
"We have managed to adjust the conditions of the whole process so that the suspension of gold nanoparticles in the solution surrounding the electrode remains stable
while maintaining an appropriate concentration of copper two ions and supporting electrolyte. In this environment, the production of the right catalyst, complexes of copper one and the bonding of nanoparticles itself to the substrate is very efficient,
"explains Phd student Justyna Matyjewicz (IPC PAS). Using a flow of current has shortened significantly the reaction time of the nanoparticles bonding to the substrate."
"We have been working with gold nanoparticles and carbon substrates, but our method is universal and in the future it can be used to produce substrates from other materials,"emphasises Dr. Niedzi?
ka-Jnsson. Substrates produced by the Warsaw chemists are already making it easy to detect, among others, nitrites in the presence of sulphites.
Sensors constructed on the basis of such substrates can be used, for example, to detect the presence of preservatives in foodstuffs.
In the future, the type of click chemistry proposed by the IPC PAS researchers may find an application in the production of new,
stable substrates for a variety of chemical sensors and electrodes employed in flow systems.#####About Institute of Physical chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciencesthe Institute of Physical chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences was established in 1955 as one of the first chemical institutes of the PAS.
The Institute's scientific profile is strongly related to the newest global trends in the development of physical chemistry and chemical physics.
Scientific research is conducted in nine scientific departments. CHEMIPAN R&d Laboratories, operating as part of the Institute, implement,
produce and commercialise specialist chemicals to be used, in particular, in agriculture and pharmaceutical industry. The Institute publishes approximately 200 original research papers annually.
For more information please click herecontacts: Dr. Eng. Joanna Niedzi? ka-Jnssonwriteemail('ichf. edu. pl','jniedziolka';
'48-223-433-130copyrigh h
#Sharper nanoscopy: What happens when a quantum dot looks in a mirror? Abstract: The 2014 chemistry Nobel prize recognized important microscopy research that enabled greatly improved spatial resolution.
This innovation, resulting in nanometer resolution, was made possible by making the source (the emitter) of the illumination quite small
and by moving it quite close to the object being imaged. One problem with this approach is that in such proximity,
the emitter and object can interact with each other, blurring the resulting image. Now, a new JQI study has shown how to sharpen nanoscale microscopy (nanoscopy) even more by better locating the exact position of the light source.
Diffraction limittraditional microscopy is limited by the diffraction of light around objects. That is when a light wave from the source strikes the object, the wave will scatter somewhat.
This scattering limits the spatial resolution of a conventional microscope to no better than about one-half the wavelength of the light being used.
For visible light, diffraction limits the resolution to no be better than a few hundred nanometers. How then, can microscopy using visible light attain a resolution down to several nanometers?
By using tiny light sources that are no larger than a few nanometers in diameter. Examples of these types of light sources are fluorescent molecules, nanoparticles, and quantum dots.
The JQI work uses quantum dots which are tiny crystals of a semiconductor material that can emit single photons of light.
If such tiny light sources are close enough to the object meant to be mapped or imaged, nanometer scale features can be resolved.
This type of microscopy, called"Super-resolution imaging,"surmounts the standard diffraction limit. Image-dipole distortionsjqi fellow Edo Waks and his colleagues have performed nanoscopic mappings of the electromagnetic field profile around silver nanowires by positioning quantum dots (the emitter) nearby.
Previous work summarized at http://jqi. umd. edu/news/using-single-quantum dots-probe-nanowires. They discovered that sub-wavelength imaging suffered from a fundamental problem,
namely that an"image dipole"induced in the surface of the nanowire was distorting knowledge of the quantum dot's true position.
This uncertainty in the position of the quantum dot translates directly into a distortion of the electromagnetic field measurement of the object.
The distortion results from the fact that an electric charge positioned near a metallic surface will produce just such an electric field
as if a ghostly negative charge were located as far beneath the surface as the original charge is above it.
This is analogous to the image you see when looking at yourself in a mirror; the mirror object appears to be as far behind the mirror as you are in front.
The quantum dot does not have a net electrical charge but it does have a net electrical dipole, a slight displacement of positive and negative charge within the dot.
Thus when the dot approaches the wire, the wire develops an"image"electrical dipole whose emission can interfere with the dot's own emission.
Since the measured light from the dot is the substance of the imaging process, the presence of light coming from the"image dipole"can interfere with light coming directly from the dot.
This distorts the perceived position of the dot by an amount which is 10 times higher than the expected spatial accuracy of the imaging technique
(as if the nanowire were acting as a sort of funhouse mirror). The JQI experiment successfully measured the image-dipole effect
and properly showed that it can be corrected under appropriate circumstances. The resulting work provides a more accurate map of the electromagnetic fields surrounding the nanowire.
The JQI scientists published their results in the journal Nature Communications. Lead author Chad Ropp (now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Berkeley) says that the main goal of the experiment was to produce better super-resolution imaging:"
"Any time you use a nanoscale emitter to perform super-resolution imaging near a metal
or high-dielectric structure image-dipole effects can cause errors. Because these effects can distort the measurement of the nano-emitter's position they are important to consider for any type of super-resolved imaging that performs spatial mapping.""
""Historically scientists have assumed negligible errors in the accuracy of super-resolved imaging, "says Ropp.""What we are showing here is that there are indeed substantial inaccuracies
and we describe a procedure on how to correct for them."#"##For more information, please click herecontacts:
Phillip F. Schewewriteemail('umd. edu','pschewe';'301-405-0989copyright#Joint Quantum Instituteissuers of news releases, not 7th Wave, Inc. or Nanotechnology Now, are solely responsible for the accuracy of the content.
Bookmark: Reference report:""Nanoscale probing of image dipole interactions in a metallic nanostructure,"Chad Ropp, Zachary Cummins, Sanghee Nah, John T. Fourkas, Benjamin Shapiro, Edo Waks
, Nature Communications, 19 march 2015; Doi: 10.1038/ncomms7558: News and information New optical materials break digital connectivity barriers:
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2015fei Joins University of Ulm and CEOS on SALVE Project Research Collaboration: The Sub-ngstrm Low Voltage Electron (SALVE) microscope should improve contrast
and reduce damage on biomolecules and two-dimensional nanomaterials, such as graphene March 18th, 2015rice fine-tunes quantum dots from coal:
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1 step closer with defect-free logic gate-Developing a new approach to quantum computing, based on braided quasiparticles as a logic gate to speed up computing,
first requires understanding the potential error-inducing factors March 19th, 2015iranian Scientists Apply Nanotechnology to Produce Electrical insulator March 7th,
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first requires understanding the potential error-inducing factors March 19th, 2015click! That's how modern chemistry bonds nanoparticles to a substrate March 19th, 2015new optical materials break digital connectivity barriers:
Tel aviv University researcher discovers novel nanoscale'metamaterial'could serve as future ultra-high-speed computing units March 19th,
2015buckyballs become bucky-bombs: New creation could one day be used for demolition of cancer cells March 19th,
2015announcements NC State researchers create'nanofiber gusher':'Report method of fabricating larger amounts of nanofibers in liquid March 19th,
2015new optical materials break digital connectivity barriers: Tel aviv University researcher discovers novel nanoscale'metamaterial'could serve as future ultra-high-speed computing units March 19th, 2015an improved method for coating gold nanorods March 19th,
2015buckyballs become bucky-bombs: New creation could one day be used for demolition of cancer cells March 19th, 2015interviews/Book reviews/Essays/Reports/Podcasts/Journals/White papers Click!
That's how modern chemistry bonds nanoparticles to a substrate March 19th, 2015nc State researchers create'nanofiber gusher':
'Report method of fabricating larger amounts of nanofibers in liquid March 19th, 2015new optical materials break digital connectivity barriers:
Tel aviv University researcher discovers novel nanoscale'metamaterial'could serve as future ultra-high-speed computing units March 19th, 2015an improved method for coating gold nanorods March 19th,
2015tools XEI Scientific and University of Southern California announce a publication in Advanced Materials on the use of downstream plasma cleaning March 18th,
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Controlling particles with light and microfibers March 18th, 2015nano piano's lullaby could mean storage breakthrough March 16th, 201 2
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