Dong and his team will build miniature greenhouses that precisely control light intensity humidity temperature carbon dioxide chemicals and even pathogens.
and Madan Bhattacharyya who's studying how fungal pathogens interact with soybean seeds at different moisture levels.
and is an academic research tool that has many of the same features as powerful learning aids that are currently on the market.
These tools which are called sometimes digital tutors can be used as study aids or as platforms for administering homework
According to the Gates Foundation the awards recognize researchers who are developing ways to manage human waste that will help improve the health and lives of people around the world.
and treat human waste result in serious health problems and death--food and water tainted with pathogens from fecal matter results in the deaths of roughly 700000 children each year.
Linden's team is one of 16 around the world funded by the Gates Reinvent the Toilet Challenge since 2011.
and transferred to the fiber-optic cable system--similar in some ways to a data transmission line--can heat up the reaction chamber to over 600 degrees Fahrenheit to treat the waste material disinfect pathogens in both feces and urine and produce char.
Everyone is very creative patient and supportive and there is a lot of innovation. It is exciting to learn from all of the team members.
For example the systems biology approach could be applied in research to develop sweeter citrus fruit disease-resistant rice or drought-resistant trees.
and technology leaders including Dr. Charles Wyman our president and CEO who will take this novel catalyst from the lab to the marketplace.
and keep the corn cubs for food we have come a long way says Per Morgen professor at the Institute of Physics Chemistry and Pharmacy University of Southern Denmark.
The research offers new perspective on evolutionary biology microbiology and the production of natural gas and may shed light on climate change agriculture and human health.
and human health They live in the digestive systems of cattle and sheep where they facilitate the digestion of feed consumed in the diet.
Helps babies struggling to breathethe first clinical study of a low-cost neonatal breathing system created by Rice university bioengineering students demonstrated that the device increased the survival rate of newborns with severe respiratory illness from 44
The results which were published online this week in the open-access journal PLOS ONE came from a 10-month study of 87 patients at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Blantyre Malawi.
The researchers found that premature infants with complications like sepsis very low birth weight and respiratory distress syndrome (RDS) benefited most from the new technology.
Survival rates more than doubled for babies with RDS and more than tripled for babies in the other two categories after treatment with bubble CPAP.
Premature birth is now the second leading cause of death among children worldwide and most premature babies are born in low-resource settings where many of the basic technologies
and approaches that lead to improved outcomes are said unavailable Dr. Elizabeth Molyneux a pediatrician at QECH who co-authored the report with colleagues from Rice QECH Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Malawi.
The results from the bubble CPAP clinical study are dramatic and thanks to the partnership of QECH Rice
and the Malawi Ministry of Health we are already implementing bubble CPAP nationwide. CPAP helps babies breathe more easily by keeping their lungs inflated
but with a price around $6000 conventional neonatal CPAP machines are too expensive for hospitals in the developing world.
°Institute for Global Health Technologies'award-winning hands-on engineering education program Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB.
QECH the main referral hospital in southern Malawi admits about 3000 babies per year to its neonatal ward.
The 2012 clinical study involved newborns suffering from respiratory distress. Patients were treated with bubble CPAP
whenever a machine and trained staff were available. The study included data from 62 infants who were treated with bubble CPAP
respiratory distress syndrome 64 percent with bubble CPAP compared with 23 percent without; very low birth weight 65 percent with bubble CPAP compared with 15 percent without;
and sepsis 61 percent with bubble CPAP and zero without. The improvement that we saw for premature babies with respiratory distress syndrome mirrored the improvement that was seen in the United states
when CPAP was introduced first here said Rice's Rebecca Richards-Kortum the Stanley C. Moore Professor and chair of the Department of Bioengineering and director of both BTB and Rice 360â°.
Based on the dramatic results from the study QECH Rice 360â°and the Malawi Ministry of Health have partnered to provide bubble CPAP at all 27 of the country's government hospitals.
To date 22 of the machines have been installed at nine hospitals and 354 clinicians have been trained to use them.
Richards-Kortum and Maria Oden director of Rice's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) founded the hands-on BTB engineering education program in 2006.
and to establish an innovation hub at the hospital where student-developed technologies can be showcased proven
It's difficult to overstate the importance of the clinical results for bubble CPAP said Oden a co-author of the new study.
Additional pilot programs for bubble CPAP are set to begin this year at teaching hospitals in Tanzania Zambia
and South africa thanks to a $400000 prize announced Nov 14 as part of the inaugural Healthcare Innovation Award program sponsored by pharmaceutical giant Glaxosmithkline and London-based nonprofit Save the Children.
to address the major health challenges facing women and children around the world. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Rice university.
valos who joined forces with Dr. Elizabeth Dumont and a mechanical engineer Dr. Ian Grosse (both of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) in a recently published paper in Evolution that lays out the team's findings relating mechanical advantage
Dr. Beth Clare Queen Mary University. The key finding is that in a highly diverse group--New world Leaf-nosed bats--selection for mechanical advantage has shaped three distinct optimal skull shapes that correspond to feeding niches Dr. Dá
valos explains. The key development is an engineering model of a very complex structure--the skull--that can morph into both known observed skulls as well as into forms that do not exist
Dr. Dávalos and her Stony Brook University students generated the evolutionary hypotheses evolutionary trees and tests of selection reported in the study;
This means that even though these bats have been diverging for millions of years we can still find the signatures of natural selection in their current diversity says Dr. Dá
My goal as a scientist is to uncover the evolutionary forces that have shaped biodiversity says Dr. Dá
Do we have heat stress mitigation plans in place at the feeding facilities? Are we pushing that boundary of having too heavy weight carcasses?
Are we using low-stress cattle handling techniques? How far away from the load out facility are the fat cattle being moved?
and Drug Administration (FDA) and considered safe from a food safety perspective to improve the cattle's natural ability to convert feed into more lean muscle.
However Merck Animal health manufacturer of Zilmax voluntarily suspended sales of the product last September when major U s. meat packer Tyson announced it would stop buying cattle fed Zilmax due to an animal welfare concern
what he calls cattle fatigue syndrome. This isn't a new phenomenon Thomson said. We've seen this in other species. The swine industry 15 to 20 years ago discovered pig fatigue syndrome.
It occurred about the time they started feeding beta-agonists at a very high level to pigs.
and were going through stress. Thomson said many in the swine industry started calling these pigs NANI pigs meaning non-ambulatory non-injured.
and they don't have any clinical signs of injury besides that they don't move Thomson said.
while the others did not experience any stress. They were able to recreate the same syndrome that we're now seeing in some cattle Thomson said.
Generally physical stress whether they were on a beta-agonist or not showed clinical signs of fatigue in these market hogs.
Still the swine industry has since cut the dose of beta-agonists in feeding by about 75 percent Thomson said.
A closer look at cattle fatigue syndromethe beef industry has a really good start on understanding
what cattle fatigue syndrome is said Thomson but the reason more research must be done is that like the NANI pigs the syndrome has shown up in cattle that were fed a beta-agonist
and cattle that were fed not a beta-agonist. In our research when we've looked at cattle that are stressed not
and they're on one of the beta-agonists on the market we've not seen anything
when we have seen the issues with this fatigue cattle syndrome at packing facilities it's during the summer months
when we have heat stress. Moving forward Thomson said the industry needs to better-understand the clinical and physiological responses of beta-agonists in cattle
if dosages in cattle feeding rations might need to be altered and if there is a potential genetic component to it as well.
While Merck recently announced that it is too early to determine when Zilmax will return to the market (Merck Animal health Shares Progress on Zilmax
and the Five-Step Plan for Responsible Beef) many feedlots might have switched to using a competing beta-agonist called Optaflexx or ractopamine.
And it's occasionally addicted to energy. New york and Pennsylvania are sitting on an enormous reserve of natural gas, the Marcellus Shale.
and is poised to take up residence at other universities, train stations, hospitals, corporate campuses and shopping centers. Briggo will open a kiosk at Austin Bergstrom International airport this fall.
Numbers on the screen flashed quickly like digits on a blood pressure monitor, measuring things like temperature, pressure
24/7 (for the ER doctor at the hospital or the late-arriving passenger at the train station).
Investors are hearing a lot of pitches about medical devices and energy products these days, and then they see this,
Tech, sustainability meet on the robotic marijuana farmmr. Greenthumb's latest gardening tool may just be...
is a hi-tech mobile trailer used for cultivating medicinal marijuana. The aptly-named Big Bud is a fully functional weed farm that features programmable lights,
nutrient injectors and even an app that allows owners to control all these processes remotely from their iphone.
But he did he took some time out of his hectic schedule to speak to this correspondent about dirt-free farming, wasteful agricultural practices and, of course, cannabis.
So about this trailer designed to grow marijuana, where did the idea come from? Oddly enough, it's something that's been done for about 30 years.
Old school marijuana growers started out planting them in shipping containers and buried the crops in the ground before they eventually switched to using trailers.
so what we did was just take it to the next level by implementing hydroponic technology and developing it into a full line of trailers for not only the medical marijuana community,
On the non-marijuana agricultural side, there's a need too. California, for example, every year loses some of it's agricultural land to dust bowling
Some of the things that indoor growing environments don't have are pests, molds and infections.
Currently, much of energy intensive light used to grow cannabis is wasted instead of being absorbed since plants can only photosynthesize so much of it.
With more and more states allowing the use of medical marijuana, what I'm seeing is broader acceptance of it.
I mean think of the actual patient that's using medicinal marijuana; it's probably a cancer
or HIV patient that can't hold down food because of the disease's affect on their appetite.
The last thing they need to be introducing into their system are extra toxins and parasites.
Giving them the marijuana from a sterilized environment like our trailers is a huge benefit to this industry.
So what kind of customers do you get who express interest in owning a Big Bud trailer?
You get everyone from ex-mortgage brokers to attorneys and doctors. It's been pretty interesting
it's time for the health sector to get involved Earthquake could threaten California water supply Invention may lead to greener power plants Accidental environmentalist designs furniture from invasive species
A subsequent major development was the development of disease-resistant strains of wheat that could handle artificial fertilizer and produce higher yields.
but minutes after its birth the calf died of lung abnormalities (which have been cloned common among animals to date).
but you have to realize that with the BP-Transocean oil spill we just poisoned half the food chain down there in the Gulf of mexico.
Binetti, theã Â president of Dupont's Nutrition & Health and Applied Biosciences divisions, says he sees large potential market opportunities for his group that will lead to 7 percent annual growth
which includes the company's Bio-PDFO, Sorona, Omega-3, biosurfaces and biomedical products; and biofuels,
--which are critically important for tracking sources of contamination. We take our responsibility in the food supply chain seriously,
Now, we're able to extract contaminants from the wastewater--for example salt, which can then be used for road salt here in the Northeast.
management tips from Intel Pepsico grant supports clean water in rural China Many businesses blind to water risks
and don't have access to doctors or nurses or midwives, or optometrists, or dentists, teaching them how to take care of these needs for their own people.
That's really what we're doing. The achievement of Saint's ultimate altruistic goals will involve first commercializing the product in markets like North america
and Western europe Scale will be the key to driving costs down for emerging markets, he says.)
Second, the honey in question contained antibiotics that are regulated more closely in the United states. It turns out
but are also literally killing themselves from inhaling the toxic soot. These are things we should be doing right away to buy us some time to solve the harder problem of how to stop burning fossil fuels.
Transportation The industrial world addiction to cars is costly and will become more so. The U s. uses roughly 21 million barrels of oil per day.
Public transportation is cited often as a cure for oil addiction. In the United states, rise of disabled elderly Americans will strain public transportation systems.
but with fewer human casualties. In the unmanned vehicle invasion scenario, oethe UAVS do the initial strike;
Futurist Fixes 1. The Food Pill. In the future, we may see a type of pill for replacing food,
but experts say it likely would not be a simple compound of chemicals. A pill-sized food replacement system would have to be extremely complex because of the sheer difficulty of the task it was being asked to perform
more complex than any simple chemical reaction could be. The most viable solution, according to many futurists, would be a nanorobot food replacement system.
Dr. Robert Freitas, author of the Nanomedicine series and senior research fellow at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, has described several potential food replacement technologies that are somewhat pill-like.
The key difference, however, is that instead of containing drug compounds, the capsules would contain thousands of microscopic robots called nanorobots.
These would be in the range of a billionth of a meter in size so they could easily fit into a large capsule,
Freitas has two other nanobot solutions. oenutribots floating through the bloodstream would allow people to eat virtually anything, a big fatty steak for instance,
A nanobot Dr. Freitas calls a oelipovore would act like a microscopic cosmetic surgeon, sucking fat cells out of your body and giving off heat,
In the January-February 2010 issue of THE FUTURIST magazine, Freitas lays out his ideas for improving human health through nanotechnology. 2. Better Design.
With sections focusing on food, water, shelter, health and sanitation, energy and transportation, and education, oedesign for the Other 90%focused on problem solving for the vast majority of the world people who survive under the poverty level
Vestergaard-Frandsen Disease Control Textiles, www. vestergaard-frandsen. com or www. lifestraw. com. Check it outline:
Health The U s. spends more money on healthcare than any other nation. We spend a higher proportion of GDP (roughly 15)
Futurist Fixes 1. Telemedicine and Robotic Surgery. As originally covered in the FUTURIST: Allison Okamura of the Johns hopkins university Department of Mechanical engineering says the real potential of robotic surgery
or rather computer-enhanced surgery is to reduce the impact of surgeries (make them less invasive,
less costly) and improve patients health. Haptic systems are a particularly promising area of research in the field of robotics.
Haptics involve making robotic surgical instruments more sensitive to human touch and, reciprocally, allowing robot tools to convey sensory tactile data to the doctors who wield them.
Okamura and her team have developed a haptic system that helps doctors view how much pressure their robotic instruments are applying to a given area.
This sort of research will enable surgeons to better perform minimally invasive surgeries. Surgical robots can also photograph,
survey and collect data in ways that humans cannot and give surgeons a better sense of how the operation went,
after the fact. oewhen you do assisted robot surgery, you re already tracking the tools that are inside the patient,
says Okamura. oeyou can have force-sensors and other ways of examining force, and then you re acquiring data at the same time that you re doing the procedure,
so you can be getting even more information that can be used for diagnosis or in scheduling postop appointments.
You can model tissue health based on the data you acquired during operation by the robot.
The hope is that it will also improve our knowledge about how the patient is doing.
This type of technology may play a role in future telesurgeries. A Hawaiian heart doctor named Benjamin Berg dictated a complicated surgery over an Internet feed for a Guam man located 3, 500 miles away.
Berg monitored every move and heartbeat of the patient via sensors embedded in the catheter that had been inserted into the patient heart.
Faster Internet speeds will allow doctors to monitor their patients around the clock in their patients homes.
The Renaissance Computing Institute in North carolina has developed an Outpatient Health Monitoring System (OHMS) for patients with chronic conditions such as asthma.
The device uses wireless sensors to constantly monitor patients and check environmental factors in the patients home
like the presence of allergens, pollution, or humidity. It like getting a remote checkup from your doctor all the time. 2. Genome Specific Cures.
A few years ago, the notion of cancer treatment that was specific to a person genome was seen as a fantasy.
But, as geneticist and open-source medicine evangelist Andrew Hessel wrote in the January-February 2010 issue of THE FUTURIST, oethanks to rapidly moving technologies like synthetic biology,
the prospects are very different today. This is a powerful new genetic engineering technology founded on DNA synthesis that amounts to writing software for cells.
It the ideal technical foundation for open-source biotechnology. Moreover synthetic biology drops the cost of doing bioengineering by several orders of magnitude.
Small proteins, antibodies, and viruses were amenable to the technology and within reach of a startup.
According to Hessel, individualized drugs could lower the cost of drug development across the entire spectrum of the development chain.
Only very small-scale manufacturing capability is necessary. Lab testing is simplified. And clinical trials are reduced to a single person:
No large phased trials are necessary, so there no ambiguity about who will be treated, and every patient can be profiled rigorously.
This shaves money and years off development. Moreover, with the client fully informed and integral to all aspects of development and testing,
These abundant smart devices, Dr. Lazowska added, will oeinteract intelligently with people and with the physical world.
One is a smart hospital room, equipped with three small cameras, mounted inconspicuously on the ceiling.
and after touching patients lapses that contribute significantly to hospital-acquired infections. Computer vision software can analyze facial expressions for signs of severe pain, the onset of delirium or other hints of distress,
and send an electronic alert to a nearby nurse. Last month, G. E. announced that it was opening a new global software center in Northern California
and would hire 400 engineers there to write code to accelerate the commercial development of intelligent machines. oeour role is to build the software that enables us to do this industrial Internet,
According to Hickok Cole submission, oeworker productivity increases due to a focus on the health and well-being of employees.
and fitness centers to oeattractors-or unique building amenities-like fabrication labs, shared data centers or stadium-sized recreational facilities that can be shared by tenants
on the ground floor, with a diverse mix of uses such as restaurants, studios, galleries, gyms, theatres, supermarkets, places of worship, medical facilities and community spaces,
and medicine might lead to an increase or loss of biodiversity. The framing paper for the conference was oehow will synthetic biology
industrial compounds, high-value compounds, plastics, chemical synthesis, etc. â human health: medical drugs and devices, over-the-counter medicine, clinical therapies, etc.
This field has taken on a life of its own due to economic incentives: In 2010, U s. revenues from genetically modified systems reached over $300 billion,
genetically modified drugs (i e.,, oebiologics) at $75 billion; genetically modified seeds and crops at $110 billion;
livestock which produce medications or biological substances such as spider-silk; and an optimal source of biofuel.
For our health, we may see new ways to target infectious diseases and cancer, develop vaccines
and cell therapies, enable regenerative medicine, or make cancer cells self-destruct. The potential seems limitless.
The paper bioethical discussion was on target for including this key paragraph: Synthetic life delivers private benefits.
The Guardian covered the conference by focusing on a recent lab achievement to produce the antimalarial drug, artemisinin
Along with that loss may come the loss of the plant diversity and a new, less desirable oemonotherapy drug.
Critics say the new drug production method is potentially damaging, entirely unnecessary, and causes harm by taking away the livelihood of poor farmers.
The Guardian goes on to say that similar stories will soon be told for vanilla farmers, patchouli farmers, rubber producers, coconut farmers and saffron growers.
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