Lifeboat Foundation

A team from the Universities of Glasgow, Strathclyde, the West of Scotland and Galway have created a device that sends nano vibrations across mesenchymal stem cells suspended in a collagen gel.

The authors of the paper, published in the Nature Biomedical Engineering journal, found that these tiny vibrations turn the cells into a 3D model of mineralised bone ‘putty’. This putty isn’t quite as hard as bone at this stage. That’s where the body comes in.

“We add the bone putty to an anatomically correct, rigid living scaffold, that we made by 3D printing collagen,” says Matthew Dalby, professor of cell engineering at the University of Glasgow, and one of the lead authors of the paper. “We put lots of cells in the body so it has a chance to integrate this new bone. We tell the cells what to do in the lab, then the body can act as a bioreactor to do the rest.”

Continue reading “How do you grow bone in a lab? Good vibrations” »

Researchers from Wits University have linked a brain directly to the internet. Data gathered from this project could help fuel the next steps in machine learning and brain-computer interfaces.

A team of researchers at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa have made a major breakthrough in the field of biomedical engineering. According to a release published on Medical Express, for the first time ever, researchers have devised a way of connecting the human brain to the internet in real time. It’s been dubbed the “Brainternet” project, and it essentially turns the brain “…into an Internet of Things (IoT) node on the World Wide Web.”

Continue reading “Researchers Have Linked a Human Brain to the Internet for the First Time Ever” »

TOKYO — A joint venture between Japanese and American high-technology power houses Hitachi and General Electric is developing special robots for removing nuclear debris from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the most difficult task in decommissioning the plant’s six reactors, three of which suffered core meltdowns in the March 2011 accident.

The machines under development by Hitachi-GE Nuclear Energy are called “muscle robots,” as their hydraulic springs operate like human muscles. The company, based in Hitachi, Ibaraki Prefecture, is stepping up efforts to complete the development project in time for the start of debris removal in 2021.

Hitachi-GE is testing the arms of the robots at a plant of Chugai Technos, a Hiroshima-based engineering service company, located a 30-minute drive from the center of the city. The testing is taking place in a structure with a life-size model of the primary containment vessel of the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima plant. The robots awkwardly move about, picking up concrete lumps standing in for fuel debris.

Continue reading “‘Muscle robots’ being developed to remove debris from Fukushima reactors” »

By 2045, we’ll have expanded the intelligence of our human machine civilization a billion fold. That will result in a technological singularity, a point beyond which it’s hard to imagine…

“Well, by 2020 we’ll have computers that are powerful enough to simulate the human brain, but we won’t be finished yet with reverse engineering the human brain and understanding its methods.”

Continue reading “The Coming Singularity: Ray Kurzweil” »

Futurist José Cordeiro talks longevity, AI, and the humanitarian crisis in Venezuela.

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Continue reading “Can Science Reverse Aging?” »

The was launched in 2002 by the publishers of NASA Tech Briefs magazine to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. The annual event has attracted more than 8,000 product design ideas from engineers, entrepreneurs, and students worldwide.

Researchers at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Ohio State’s College of Engineering have developed a new technology, Tissue Nanotransfection (TNT), that can generate any cell type of interest for treatment within the patient’s own body. This technology may be used to repair injured tissue or restore function of aging tissue, including organs, blood vessels and nerve cells.

Results of the regenerative medicine study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

Continue reading “Breakthrough device heals organs with a single touch” »

“This paper discusses the physics, engineering and mission architecture relating to a gram-sized interstellar probe propelled by a laser beam. The objectives are to design a fly-by mission to Alpha Centauri with a total mission duration of 50 years travelling at a cruise speed of 0.1c. Furthermore, optical data from the target star system is to be obtained and sent back to the Solar system. The main challenges of such a mission are presented and possible solutions proposed. The results show that by extrapolating from currently existing technology, such a mission would be feasible. The total mass of the proposed spacecraft is 23g and the space-based laser infrastructure has a beam power output of 15GW. Rurther exploration of the laser — spacecraft tradespace and associated technologies are necessary.”

https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.03556

Ray Kuzweil, a director of engineering at Google, reveals plans for a future version of Google’s “Smart Reply” machine-learning email software (and more) in a Wired article by Tom Simonite published Wednesday (Aug. 2, 2017).

Running on mobile Gmail and Google Inbox, Smart Reply suggests up to three replies to an email message, saving typing time or giving you ideas for a better reply.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil reveals plans for ‘linguistically fluent’ Google software” »