Lifeboat Foundation

One of the latest inventions out of Tel Aviv University can patch up broken hearts. We’re talking about the real organs here, especially those damaged by myocardial infarction or heart attack. A team from the Israeli university created a “cyborg heart patch” that combines both living tissue and electronic components to replace the damaged parts of the organ. “It’s very science fiction, but it’s already here,” says one of its creators, Prof. Tal Dvir. “[W]e expect it to move cardiac research forward in a big way.” The patch can contract and expand like real heart tissue can, but it can do much, much more than that.

The electronic components allow doctors to remotely monitor their patients’ condition from afar. A physician could log into a computer and see if the implant is working as intended. If he senses that something’s amiss, he could release drugs to, say, regulate inflammation or fix the lack of oxygen. That sounds dangerous to us, since computers can be hacked. But the researchers are aiming to develop the patch further so it can regulate itself with no human intervention.

Dvir warns that the “practical realization of the technology may take some time.” For now, those suffering from cardiovascular diseases will have to rely on current treatment methods. The team is still in the midst of refining their cyborg heart patch. Plus, they’re looking at how to create bionic brain and spinal cord tissues using what they’ve learned so far to treat neurological conditions.

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The wired rose leaf can be darkened or lightened with a zap of electricity.

Interesting — DNA Microchips to be released soon.

Researchers presented this incredible work at the national meeting and exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) in San Diego, California, on Sunday.

Adam T Woolley, professor of chemistry at Brigham Young University (BYU) said that they are planning to use DNA’s small size and base-pairing capabilities and ability to self-assemble, and direct it to make nanoscale structures that could be used for electronics.

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Scientists has opened a door to faster, cheaper computer chips with the help of ‘DNA origami.’ “We would like to use DNA’s very small size, base-pairing capabilities and ability to self-assemble, and direct it to make nanoscale structures that could be used for electronics,” Adam T. Woolley said.

Samsung’s new monster SSD is ready to ship, with a 16TB capacity, SAS support, and formally rated to perform one complete drive write per day for its entire life.

Seagate is demonstrating what they claim is the fastest SSD on the market, with a 10GB/s maximum throughput speed. That would mean the SSD is fully capable of using a PCI-Express 3.0 bus — all 16 lanes of it.

Bionics: surgically inserted sensors controlling a prosthetic limb. Meet the man who sometimes forgets that his bionic leg is not his own.

Quantum mechanics and relativity theory are two pillars of modern physics. With their amalgamation, many novel phenomena have been identified. For example, the Unruh effect [1] is one of the most significant outcomes of the quantum field theory. This effect serves as an important tool to investigate phenomena such as thermal emission of particles from black holes and cosmological horizons [2]. It has been 40 years since the discovery of the Unruh effect, however, this effect is too weak to be observed with current technique. There have been a lot of attempts in searching for the observational evidence of the Unruh effect and in general the experimental observation is still of great challenge. To address this issue, quantum simulators [3, 4] may provide a promising approach. Quantum simulation is widely applied for simulating the quantum systems which cannot be efficiently simulated by classical computers or are not directly tractable by the current techniques in the laboratory.

The researchers, led by Prof. Jiangfeng Du from University of Science and Technology of China, reported an experimental simulation of the Unruh effect with an NMR quantum simulator [5]. The experiments were performed on a Bruker Avance III 400MHz spectrometer. The researchers used a sample of 13C, 1H and 19F nuclear spins in chloroform as the NMR quantum simulator, as shown in Figure 1(a). The simulated Unruh effect on the quantum states can be realized by the pulse sequence acting on the sample, as depicted in Figure 1(b). By the quantum simulator, they experimentally demonstrated the behavior of Unruh temperature with acceleration, which agrees nicely with the theoretical prediction, as shown in Figure 2. Furthermore, they investigated the quantum correlations quantified by quantum discord between two fermionic modes as seen by two relatively accelerated observers. It is shown for the first time that the quantum correlations can be created by the Unruh effect from the classically correlated states. This work was recently published in the Science China-Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy.

It is interesting that the Unruh effect was in Feynman’s blackboard as one of the issues to learn at the time of his death in 1988, while it was also Feynman who conceived the idea of quantum simulation in 1982. This quantum simulation of the Unruh effect will provide a promising window to explore the quantum physics of accelerated systems, which widely appear in black hole physics, cosmology and particle physics.

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Amputee Dennis Aabo Sørensen is the first person in the world to recognize texture (smoothness vs. roughness) using an artificial “bionic” fingertip surgically connected to nerves in his upper arm. The experimental system was developed by EPFL (Ecole polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) and SSSA (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna).

“The stimulation felt almost like what I would feel with my hand,” says Sørensen. “I felt the texture sensations at the tip of the index finger of my phantom hand.”