Lifeboat Foundation

The fabrication of a prototype tissue with functional properties close to natural tissues is crucial for effective transplantation. Tissue engineering scaffolds are typically used as supports that allow cells to form tissue-like structures essentially required for the correct functioning of the cells under the conditions close to the three-dimensional tissue.

Scientists of the Bionanotechnology Lab at Kazan Federal University combined biopolymers chitosan and agarose (polysaccharides) and gelatine protein to produce tissue engineering scaffolds and demonstrated the enhancement of mechanical strength, higher water uptake and thermal properties in chitosan-gelatine-agarose hydrogels doped with halloysite.

Chitosan, a natural biodegradable and chemically versatile biopolymer, has been effectively used in antibacterial, antifungal, anti-tumour and immunostimulating formulations. To overcome the disadvantages of pure chitosan scaffolds such as mechanical fragility and low biological resistance, chitosan scaffolds are typically doped with other supporting compounds that allow for mechanical strengthening, thus yielding composite biologically resistant scaffolds.

Continue reading “Clay nanotube-biopolymer composite scaffolds for tissue engineering” »

What are epigenetic modifications, and how might they play out across generations?

By Jen Christiansen on May 12, 2016.

Definitely.

Google owns some of the most advanced robotics firms in the world. Two patents shed light on what Google has planned for these bots.

In the US we have an old saying “fight fire with fire” and in this case “fight bots with bot/s” It should be noted, having a bot or any type of AI on your network is not necessarily going to prevent 100% of the hacking and Cyber threats today due to the weak connected infrastructure across the net, etc. However, to counter attack the pesky bots that we’re seeing around online ads, click monitoring can be limited by AI.

Roughly half of all Web traffic comes from bots and crawlers, and that’s costing companies a boatload of money.

That’s one finding from a report released Thursday by DeviceAtlas, which makes software to help companies detect the devices being used by visitors to their websites.

Continue reading “Half the Web’s traffic comes from bots, and that’s costing you more than you think” »

Very nice.

The Food and Drug Administration has given so-called “breakthrough” status to a treatment that uses the once-feared polio virus to target aggressive forms of brain cancer, in the hope of speeding it to market.

The therapy, developed at Duke University, hopes to use the virus’ debilitating properties to help fight cancer instead of harming its host, CBS News reported Thursday.

Continue reading “FDA fast-tracks treatment that uses polio virus to fight brain cancer” »

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Mj6wbbrH03I

Why biocomputing is proving that bio and technology integrated can do amazing things and will eventually get us to real Singularity. Now imaging, take what you have seen so far in technology today and add Quantum to that picture then add bio to that; then you will truly see amazing SINGULARITY.

Continue reading “Innovative Bio-glass Could Re-grow Cartilage” »

I am told by a TOTEM manager that this is public news and so it can be blogged about — so here I would like to explain a rather cunning plan that the TOTEM and the CMS collaborations have put together to enhance the possibilities of a discovery, and a better characterization, of the particle that everybody hopes is real, the 750 GeV resonance seen in photon pairs data by ATLAS and CMS in their 2015 data.

What is TOTEM, first of all? Well, TOTEM is a collaboration that operates some high-rapidity detectors located around the CMS collision point at the LHC. And before you ask, rapidity is a measurement of how close to the beam a particle is emitted by a collision. Particles emitted orthogonally have rapidity equal to zero; particles traveling at angles increasingly close to the z axis (which we take to be the beam axis at the collision point) have higher positive or negative rapidity (the sign depends on the verse, and is determined by convention). Below is a schematic of the detector.

Continue reading “Catching The 750 GeV Boson With Roman Pots?!” »

May. 12, 2016 — 5:58 — Tech Take: Allison Barrie on the DARPA designed hidden high-tech ocean pods designed to unleash Naval drones.

What if you could alter a video of anyone to emulate facial and mouth movements that never existed in the source video—by yourself, at home, using a cheap webcam?

Meet Face2Face. Using RGB input from one video and mapped pixels from a second video, manipulating someone’s face—including distinct facial and mouth movements—has become incredibly easy. A team of researchers recently released a video showing what this looks like in real-time. While the method is still imperfect, it has major implications for future online content.

Continue reading “New Digital Face Manipulation Means You Can’t Trust Video Anymore” »