Hugh Herr is building the next generation of bionic limbs, robotic prosthetics inspired by nature’s own designs. Herr lost both legs in a climbing accident 30 years ago; now, as the head of the MIT Media Lab’s Biomechatronics group, he shows his incredible technology with the help of ballroom dancer Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost her left leg in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing.
Automated data searches and new customized patient care are the future of cancer treatment.
Each day information floods into every cancer clinic. Oncologists are scrambling for new ways to tap it to deliver the best of modern cancer care.
This article was produced by Hackensack Meridian Health in partnership with Scientific American Custom Media, a division separate from the magazine’s board of editors.
After a decade of design and fabrication, General Atomics is ready to ship the first module of the Central Solenoid, the world’s most powerful magnet. It will become a central component of ITER, a machine that replicates the fusion power of the Sun. ITER is being built in southern France by 35 partner countries.
ITER’s mission is to prove energy from hydrogen fusion can be created and controlled on earth. Fusion energy is carbon-free, safe, and economic. The materials to power society with hydrogen fusion for millions of years are readily abundant.
Despite the challenges of Covid-19, ITER is almost 75 percent built. For the past 15 months, massive first-of-a-kind components have begun to arrive in France from three continents. When assembled together, they will make up the ITER Tokamak, a “sun on earth” to demonstrate fusion at industrial scale.
When exposed to human-made noise, seagrass posidonia reveals permanent severe lesions in their sensory organs that sense gravity, which threatens their survival. This is the main conclusion of a recent study of the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB) of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya BarcelonaTech (UPC) titled “Seagrass Posidonia is impaired by human-generated noise,” which is published in Nature Communications Biology.
These new findings demonstrate that plants have the physiological ability to perceive sounds, and just as importantly, reveal that commonly encountered sources of noise in the ocean can contribute to deplete their populations.
The last 100 years have seen the introduction of many sources of artificial noise in the sea environment, which have shown to negatively affect marine organisms. Many aspects of how noise and other forms of energy may critically impact the natural balance of the oceans are still unstudied. A lot of attention has been devoted to determining the sensitivity to noise of fish and marine mammals, especially cetaceans and pinnipeds, because they are known to possess hearing organs. Recent studies conducted at the Laboratory of Applied Bioacoustics (LAB) of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona Tech (UPC) have also shown that cephalopods, anemones and jellyfish, while lacking similar auditory receptors, are also affected by artificial sounds. Indeed, marine invertebrates have sensory organs whose main functions allow these species to maintain equilibrium and sense gravity in the water column.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now calls the Delta variant of the novel coronavirus, also known as B.1.617.2, a “variant of concern.”
The variant of concern designation is given to strains of the virus that scientists believe are more transmissible or can cause more severe disease. Vaccines, treatments and tests that detect the virus may also be less effective against a variant of concern. Previously, the CDC had considered the Delta variant to be a variant of interest.
Possibly one of the most surprising ways in which our mind and body are interlinked with one another is the gut-brain axis, which is a collection of bidirectional biochemical signals which are transmitted between the nervous system of the body and the digestive system. This is understandably surprising, as the functions of these two distinct parts of the body are completely different to one another. The gut is unlike most other parts of the body, because a large part of its function and health is dictated by cells which are not part of the body, but are instead bacteria cells which colonise the inner lining of the gut.
It has been known for a while now that the makeup of the gut flora changes as we age, which has in turn been linked to cognitive decline through the disruption of the aforementioned gut-brain axis. It has even been shown that faecal transplants can help to correct this cognitive decline in mice, and has been shown to be able to generate a direct positive effect on cognitive function.
Further research into this phenomenon has revealed that the graduate degradation of the gut flora, or more commonly referred to as the ‘good’ bacteria inside the gut has revealed that these bacteria play an important role at keeping unwanted bacteria in check. Researchers at the University Of Florida have found that certain types of ‘good’ bacteria inside the gut produce a chemical known as butyrate, which supresses the growth of pathogenic bacteria such as Enterobacteriaceae. These pathogenic, or ‘bad’ bacteria effect the body in numerous ways, such as interfering with the protein folding, resulting in a build up of toxic and mis-formed proteins within the body. This disruption to protein folding causes problems all across the body, including in the muscles, intestines, gonads, and most notably the brain and central nervous system.
Volumetric 3D bioprinter manufacturer and EPFL spin-out Readily3D has taken the first step towards developing a 3D printed living model of the human pancreas for testing diabetes medicines.
Readily3D’s novel technology is being deployed within the EU-funded Enlight project and is reportedly capable of 3D printing a biological tissue containing human stem cells in just 30 seconds.
As the project’s official bioprinter manufacturer, the company has adapted its proprietary contactless tomographic illumination technology to suit the specific needs of pancreatic tissue structures.
Circa 2019 o,.o.
For more than 50 years, cardiac surgeons and biomedical engineers at the Texas Heart Institute (THI) have been questing for an artificial heart that can fully replace natural ones, which are in terribly short supply for transplant. They’ve seen their share of metal and plastic contraptions that used a variety of pumping mechanisms, but none of these machines could match the astounding performance of the human heart.
In April 2019, the possible culmination of that long quest was inside a shaggy brown cow, which stood peacefully chewing its cud at a THI research facility in Houston. The animal was part of a 90-day trial in which it lived its life powered by an implanted artificial heart made by our company, Bivacor. Throughout the trial, the calf stayed healthy and energetic, and gained weight at a normal rate. It even jogged on a treadmill for 30-minute stretches.
Our company is now working toward human trials of our device. It relies on a dramatic new approach: Rather than using a mechanical pump that mimics the structure and actions of the four-chambered human heart, it uses a spinning disk, suspended in a magnetic field. With just one moving part, the Bivacor heart is able to send oxygen-rich blood out to the body and return oxygen-depleted blood to the lungs.
Circa 2019
The evolution of micro and nanofabrication approaches significantly spurred the advancements of cardiac tissue engineering over the last decades. Engineering in the micro and nanoscale allows for the rebuilding of heart tissues using cardiomyocytes. The breakthrough of human induced pluripotent stem cells expanded this field rendering the development of human tissues from adult cells possible, thus avoiding the ethical issues of the usage of embryonic stem cells but also creating patient-specific human engineered tissues. In the case of the heart, the combination of cardiomyocytes derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells and micro/nano engineering devices gave rise to new therapeutic approaches of cardiac diseases. In this review, we survey the micro and nanofabrication methods used for cardiac tissue engineering, ranging from clean room-based patterning (such as photolithography and plasma etching) to electrospinning and additive manufacturing. Subsequently, we report on the main approaches of microfluidics for cardiac culture systems, the so-called “Heart on a Chip”, and we assess their efficacy for future development of cardiac disease modeling and drug screening platforms.