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You didn’t think scientists would let IBM’s “world’s smallest computer” boast go unchallenged, did you? Sure enough, University of Michigan has produced a temperature sensing ‘computer’ measuring 0.04 cubic millimeters, or about a tenth the size of IBM’s former record-setter. It’s so small that one grain of rice seems gigantic in comparison — and it’s so sensitive that its transmission LED could instigate currents in its circuits.

The size limitations forced researchers to get creative to reduce the effect of light. They switched from diodes to switched capacitors, and had to fight the relative increase in electrical noise that comes from running on a device that uses so little power.

The result is a sensor that can measure changes in extremely small regions, like a group of cells in your body. Scientists have suspected that tumors are slightly hotter than healthy tissue, but it’s been difficult to verify this until now. The minuscule device could both check this claim and, if it proves true, gauge the effectiveness of cancer treatments. The team also envisions this helping to diagnose glaucoma from inside the eye, monitor biochemical processes and even study tiny snails.

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Insilico and its researchers are the first in the world to use GANs to generate molecules.

“The GAN technique is essentially an adversarial game between two deep neural networks,” as Alex explains.

While one generates meaningful noise in response to input, the other evaluates the generator’s output. Both networks thereby learn to generate increasingly perfect output.

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KrioRus charges $36,000 to cryonize a corpse, or half that for just the head. The process is fairly straightforward: First, cryonicists drain the blood of the “patient,” and pump in a solution resembling antifreeze. The body goes into a cooling chamber beneath KrioRus’s 2,000-square-foot hangar in Sergiyev Posad, a suburb north of Moscow, for roughly a week. Then it’s immersed, head first, in a double-walled dewar of liquid nitrogen, where it hangs indefinitely until scientists figure out how to revive it. In this way, KrioRus has cryopreserved 61 people and 31 pets, including a cat, a goldfinch, and a chinchilla. At least 487 others have signed up.

“Maybe in five, 30, or 300 years, there will be a way to wake her again,” Riabinina says.

Riabinina’s story is among several that Italian photographer Giuseppe Nucci documents in -196: The Pioneers of Resurrection. His ethereal, atmospheric images respectfully capture the quest for immortality in Russia, home to a visionary gaggle of cosmists, cryonicists, and transhumanists who believe in a deathless future. They preach resurrection, wear high-tech cyber-suits, and deep-freeze the corpses of loved ones they hope to meet again.

“We are all scared of death,” Nucci says. “The idea that humans will one day defeat it is fascinating.”

Continue reading “The Mystics Seeking Eternal Life Through Liquid Nitrogen” | >

The smallest Imperial Walker to ever attack the rebel alliance.

When it comes to matching simplicity with staggering creative potential, DNA may hold the prize. Built from an alphabet of just four nucleic acids, DNA provides the floorplan from which all earthly life is constructed.

But DNA’s remarkable versatility doesn’t end there. Researchers have managed to coax segments of DNA into performing a host of useful tricks. DNA sequences can form logical circuits for nanoelectronic applications. They have been used to perform sophisticated mathematical computations, like finding the optimal path between multiple cities. And DNA is the basis for a new breed of tiny robots and nanomachines. Measuring thousands of times smaller than a bacterium, such devices can carry out a multitude of tasks.

In new research, Hao Yan of Arizona State University and his colleagues describe an innovative DNA , capable of rapidly traversing a prepared track. Rather than slow, tentative steps across a surface, the DNA acrobat cartwheels head over heels, covering ground 10- to 100-fold faster than previous devices.

Continue reading “Built for speed: DNA nanomachines take a (rapid) step forward” | >

MINNEAPOLIS/ST.PAUL (03/01/17) — A research team, led by the University of Minnesota, has discovered a groundbreaking process to successfully rewarm large-scale animal heart valves and blood vessels preserved at very low temperatures. The discovery is a major step forward in saving millions of human lives by increasing the availability of organs and tissues for transplantation through the establishment of tissue and organ banks.

The research was published today in Science Translational Medicine, a peer-reviewed research journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS). The University of Minnesota holds two patents related to this discovery.

“This is the first time that anyone has been able to scale up to a larger biological system and demonstrate successful, fast, and uniform warming hundreds of degrees Celsius per minute of preserved tissue without damaging the tissue,” said University of Minnesota mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering professor John Bischof, the senior author of the study.

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