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Category: bioengineering – Page 65

A new nondestructive method for assessing bioengineered artificial tissues

Engineering organs to replace damaged hearts or kidneys in the human body may seem like something out of a sci-fi movie, but the building blocks for this technology are already in place. In the burgeoning field of tissue engineering, live cells grow in artificial scaffolds to form biological tissue. But to evaluate how successfully the cells develop into tissue, researchers need a reliable method to monitor the cells as they move and multiply.

Now, scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have developed a noninvasive method to count the in a three-dimensional (3D) . The real-time technique images millimeter-scale regions to assess the viability of the cells and how the cells are distributed within the scaffold—an important capability for researchers who manufacture complex biological tissues from simple materials such as living cells.

Their findings have been published in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research Part A.

A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence Medicine

The WHO says covid is no longer an emergency, yet does not say where covid originated from. No one knows. What I know is that covid is a cute name for SARS/Coronavirus. Something made in a lab at UNC Chapel Hill with Ralph Baric and his collegue from Wuhan China which he shared his gain of function research with. However the Nature article published in 2015 has this disclaimer, yet there is no animal origin after more than 3 years. So what do we believe?

“30 March 2020 Editors’ note, March 2020: We are aware that this article is being used as the basis for unverified theories that the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19 was engineered. There is no evidence that this is true; scientists believe that an animal is the most likely source of the coronavirus.”

The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. ACE2 🤔

Ralph Baric, Vineet Menachery and colleagues characterize a SARS-like coronavirus circulating in Chinese horseshoe bats to determine its potential to infect primary human airway epithelial cells, cause disease in mice and respond to available therapeutics.

Mind-reading machines are here: is it time to worry?

Neurotech will bring many amazing positive changes to the world, such as treating ailments like blindness, depression, and epilepsy, giving us superhuman sensory capabilities that allow us to understand the world in new ways, accelerating our ability to cognitively process information, and more. But in an increasingly connected society, neuroprivacy will represent a crucial concern of the future. We must carefully devise legal protections against misuse of “mind reading” technology as well as heavily invest in “neurocybersecurity” R&D to prevent violation of people’s inner thoughts and feelings by authorities and malignant hackers. We can capitalize on the advantages, but we must do establish safety mechanisms as these technologies mature. #neurotechnology #neuroscience #neurotech #computationalbiology #future #brain

Determining how the brain creates meaning from language is enormously difficult, says Francisco Pereira, a neuroscientist at the US National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “It’s impressive to see someone pull it off.”‘

‘Wake-up call’

Neuroethicists are split on whether the latest advance represents a threat to mental privacy. “I’m not calling for panic, but the development of sophisticated, non-invasive technologies like this one seems to be closer on the horizon than we expected,” says bioethicist Gabriel Lázaro-Muñoz at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “I think it’s a big wake-up call for policymakers and the public.”

This solar-powered motorhome was designed by students

A solar-powered motorhome, shaped like a huge elongated teardrop, silently rolled into Madrid on Friday as part of a month-long journey from the Netherlands to southern Spain to highlight more sustainable modes of transport.

Engineering students at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands created the blue and white vehicle, named Stella Vita – Latin for “star” and “life” – to inspire car makers and politicians to accelerate the transition toward green energy.

Expansive solar panels on the roof and on lateral wings that unfold when the vehicle stops allow the self-sustaining house on wheels, or SHOW, to travel up to 740 km (460 miles) on a sunny day, while the battery can also power a fridge, coffee maker and laptop in the two-person cabin.

Researchers develop gene-edited stem cells to reduce arrhythmias in heart attack patients

In a recent study published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, researchers hypothesized that pacemaker-like activity of human pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes (hPSC-CMs) resulted in engraftment arrhythmias (EAs), which hampers the clinical use of cell-based therapy using hPSC-CMs for treatment of myocardial infarction (MI).

Study: Gene editing to prevent ventricular arrhythmias associated with cardiomyocyte cell therapy. Image Credit: FrentaN / Shutterstock.

2023 MIT Club of Boston BioSummit

It was an honor to speak at MIT’s Broad Institute about some of my past and present synthetic biology research on redesigning bacteria and viruses to act as delivery systems for biomedicine! Video recording is now available! Here is a link which should take you to 1:40:18 when my talk starts:[ ]. My talk was part of the inaugural MIT Biosummit (https://mitbiosummit.com/), a forward-looking conference which this year focused on tackling challenges at the interface of climate change and health sciences. #futureofmedicine #future #biotech #mit Thank you Ryan Robinson for helping to organize this conference and for giving your own excellent talk!

Recording of the MIT Club of Boston 2023 BioSummit: Human Health 2050 held at the Broad Institute on April 27, 2023. Note: Although the video is almost 6 hours long, you can rapidly navigate and skip to a particular speaker or session by scrubbing along the video timeline (in Chrome or Edge) or using the time markers listed below in blue (in all browsers). You can also use chapter browsing in the YouTube app on platforms where it is available.

Mitbiosummit.com.

0:00:00 Introductory remarks: Ryan Robinson, Whitney Espich.
0:08:44 Morning keynote: Bradley Willcox.
0:57:14 Infectious disease panel introduction, Lindsey Baden.
1:02:21 Kieren Marr.
1:38:27 Speaker transition with Lindsey Baden.
1:39:36 Logan Collins.
1:56:36 Ryan Robinson.
2:13:13 Infectious disease panel Q&A
2:24:00 Longevity panel introduction, Eduardo Cornejo.
2:27:14 Joseph Coughlin.
2:46:47 Vladim Gladyshev.
3:02:28 Cavin Ward-Caviness.
3:18:55 Longevity panel Q&A
3:37:44 Food supply panel introduction, Viji Thomas.
3:48:32 Gary Cohen.
4:05:16 Greg Sixt.
4:21:50 Anirban Kundu.
4:37:32 Food supply panel Q&A
5:15:03 Sebastian Eastham.
5:42:13 Closing remarks, preview of next year’s BioSummit Stephanie Licata.

Deep learning pioneer Geoffrey Hinton quits Google

Geoffrey Hinton, a VP and engineering fellow at Google and a pioneer of deep learning who developed some of the most important techniques at the heart of modern AI, is leaving the company after 10 years, the New York Times reported today.

According to the Times, Hinton says he has new fears about the technology he helped usher in and wants to speak openly about them, and that a part of him now regrets his life’s work.

Forget AI; Organoid Intelligence May Soon Power Our Computers

While the world has been captivated by recent advances in artificial intelligence, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have identified a new form of intelligence: organoid intelligence. A future where computers are powered by lab-grown brain cells may be closer than we could ever have imagined.

What is an organoid? Organoids are three-dimensional tissue cultures commonly derived from human pluripotent stem cells. What looks like a clump of cells can be engineered to function like a human organ, mirroring its key structural and biological characteristics. Under the right laboratory conditions, genetic instructions from donated stem cells allow organoids to self-organize and grow into any type of organ tissue, including the human brain.

Although this may sound like science-fiction, brain organoids have been used to model and study neurodegenerative diseases for nearly a decade. Emerging studies now reveal that these lab grown brain cells may be capable of learning. In fact, a research team from Melbourne recently reported that they trained 800,000 brain cells to perform the computer game, Pong (see video). As this field of research continues to grow, researchers speculate that this so-called “intelligence in a dish” may be able to outcompete artificial intelligence.

The Optimal Angle for Cleaning with Bubbles

A stream of air bubbles can be most effective at cleaning produce or industrial equipment if it strikes at the correct angle.

Researchers believe that washing vegetables and food-processing equipment with flowing liquids filled with air bubbles could be effective, but little is known about how to optimize the process. Now engineers, using experiments and simulations, have shown that bubbles exert an optimal cleaning effect if they strike a surface at an angle of about 22.5° [1]. The researchers hope that this insight will help improve methods for the gentle cleaning of fruits and vegetables, potentially leading to a commercial food-cleaning device that they call a “fruit Jacuzzi.”

As bioengineer Sunghwan “Sunny” Jung of Cornell University points out, bubbles injected into fluid have long been used to clean biofilm-encrusted surfaces in settings such as wastewater treatment facilities. Experts generally believe that the technique works because bubbles flowing over a surface exert a shear force, parallel to the surface, which tends to remove attached contaminants. “It’s similar to how you move your hand along the surface of your skin when you’re cleaning your body, applying a shearing force at the surface,” says Jung. Even so, he says, little is known about the basic science behind the effect and in particular about how the motions of bubbles within the liquid might optimize the cleaning.