The wings of a butterfly are made of chitin, an organic polymer that is the main component of the shells of arthropods like crustaceans and other insects. As a butterfly emerges from its cocoon in the final stage of metamorphosis, it will slowly unfold its wings into their full grandeur.
During the unfolding, the chitinous material becomes dehydrated while blood pumps through the veins of the butterfly, producing forces that reorganize the molecules of the material to provide the unique strength and stiffness necessary for flight. This natural combination of forces, movement of water, and molecular organization is the inspiration behind Associate Professor Javier G. Fernandez’s research.
Alongside fellow researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), Fernandez has been exploring the use of chitinous polymers as a sustainable material for engineering applications.
Summary: Researchers created a revolutionary tiny and efficient thermoelectric device, which can help amputees feel temperature with their phantom limbs.
Known as the wearable thin-film thermoelectric cooler (TFTEC), this device is lightweight, incredibly fast, and energy-efficient, potentially revolutionizing applications such as prosthetics, augmented reality haptics, and thermally-modulated therapeutics. Additionally, this technology has potential in industries like electronics cooling and energy harvesting in satellites.
The study conducted to test the TFTEC demonstrated its ability to elicit cooling sensations in phantom limbs, doing so significantly faster, with more intensity, and less energy than traditional thermoelectric technology.
The astonishing discovery is “important for the understanding of evolutionary processes because generation times could be stretched from days to millennia, and long-term survival of individuals of species can lead to the refoundation of otherwise extinct lineages,” according to a study published on Thursday in the journal PLoS Genetics.
“Their evolution was literally suspended for 40k years,” wrote Philipp Schiffer, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cologne and a co-author of the study, in an email to Motherboard.
“We are now comparing them to species from the same genus, which my team samples around the world,” he continued, noting that he is currently conducting fieldwork in the Australian Outback. “Studying their genomes we hope to understand a lot about how these populations became different in the last 40k years.”
For many people, depression turns out to be one of the most disabling illnesses that we have in society. Despite the treatments that we have available, many people are not responding that well. It’s a disorder that can be very disabling in society. It’s also a disorder that has medical consequences. By understand the neurobiology of depression we hope to be able more to find the right treatment for the patient suffering from this disease. The current standard of care for the treatment of depression is based on what we call the monoamine deficiency hypothesis. Essentially, presuming that one of three neurotransmitters in the brain is deficient or underactive. But the reality is, there are more than 100 neurotransmitters in the brain. And billions of connections between neurons. So we know that that’s a limited hypothesis. Neurotransmitters can be thought of as the chemical messengers within the brain, it’s what helps one cell in the brain communicate with another, to pass that message along from one brain region to another. For decades, we thought that the primary pathology, the primary cause of depression was some abnormality in these neurotransmitters, specifically serotonin or norepinephrine. However, norepinephrine and serotonin did not seem to be able to account for this cause, or to cause the symptoms of depression in people who had major depression. Instead, the chemical messengers between the nerve cells in the higher centers of the brain, which include glutamate and GABA, were possibilities as alternative causes for the symptoms of depression. When you’re exposed to severe and chronic stress like people experience when they have depression, you lose some of the connections between the nerve cells. The communication in these circuits becomes inefficient and noisy, we think that the loss of these synaptic connections contributes to the biology of depression. There are clear differences between a healthy brain and a depressed brain. And the exciting thing is, when you treat that depression effectively, the brain goes back to looking like a healthy brain, both at the cellular level and at a global scale. It’s critical to understand the neurobiology of depression and how the brain plays a role in that for two main reasons. One, it helps us understand how the disease develops and progresses, and we can start to target treatments based on that. We are in a new era of psychiatry. This is a paradigm shift, away from a model of monoaminergic deficiency to a fuller understanding of the brain as a complex neurochemical organ. All of the research is driven by the imperative to alleviate human suffering. Depression is one of the most substantial contributors to human suffering. The opportunity to make even a tiny dent in that is an incredible opportunity.
A tiny robot which can travel deep into the lungs to detect and treat the first signs of cancer has been developed by researchers at the University of Leeds. The ultra-soft tentacle, which measures just two millimeters in diameter, and is controlled by magnets, can reach some of the smallest bronchial tubes and could transform the treatment of lung cancer. The researchers tested the magnetic tentacle robot on the lungs of a cadaver and found that it can travel 37 percent deeper than the standard equipment and leads to less tissue damage. It paves the way for a more accurate, tailored, and far less invasive approach to treatment.
“This new approach has the advantage of being specific to the anatomy, softer than the anatomy and fully-shape controllable via magnetics,” notes Pietro Valdastri, PhD, director of the Science and Technologies Of Robotics in Medicine (STORM) Lab at the University of Leeds. “These three main features have the potential to revolutionize navigation inside the body.”
Can the fountain of youth come in the form a pill?
Imagine this: a cocktail of specialized chemicals that rejuvenates your whole body, from your eyes and brain to your kidneys and muscles—bringing you back to a more youthful version of yourself.
By donating these healthy corneas to individuals afflicted with corneal diseases, which are among the most common causes of vision loss, patients can benefit from improved vision and potentially regain their sight.
More often than not, studies of human biology are conducted when the body is under duress from infection or disease. Now, as part of a larger effort to delineate what “healthy” looks like, two Stanford Medicine teams have unfurled detailed molecular maps of healthy human intestinal and placental tissues. The maps, which capture cell types, cell quantity and other cellular nuances, are just two of a collection of maps that will establish a cellular baseline for the majority of the human body, including where cells in certain tissues congregate, how tissues develop during pregnancy and how cell-to-cell interactions drive human biology.
The studies, which published in Nature on July 19, are part of a larger effort spearheaded by the Human Biomolecular Atlas Program — called HuBMAP — funded by the National Institutes of Health. It aims to fill gaps in our knowledge of how the human body works when it’s in tip-top shape. Dozens of teams from the United States and Europe contribute to the HuBMAP consortium.
“In research, we have a habit of studying things that are abnormal without really understanding what normal looks like,” said Michael Angelo, MD, PhD, an assistant professor of pathology who is also the co-chair of the HuBMAP steering committee. “That’s created a big gap in our knowledge. HuBMAP is the only effort that is systematically focusing on the spatial architecture of these tissues.”
