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Um microrobô com controlo remoto que parece e se move como uma bactéria.

Ao contrário dos robôs convencionais, estes microroboô são suaves, flexíveis,. Elas são feitas de um hidrogel biocompatível e nanopartículas magnéticas e sem motor. Estas nanopartículas têm duas funções. Eles dão aos microrobôs sua forma durante o processo de fabricação, e torná-los mover-se e nadar quando um campo magnético é aplicado.

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(Medical Xpress)—A team of researchers at Sichuan University’s West China Hospital has announced plans to begin a clinical trial where cells modified using the CRISPR gene editing technique will be used on human beings for the very first time. They plan to edit genes in such a way as to turn off a gene that encodes for a protein that has been shown by prior research to slow an immune response and by so doing treat patients with lung cancer.

The CRISPR has been in the news a lot of late as scientists creep ever closer to using it as a means to treat diseases or to change the very nature of biological beings. China has been a leader in promoting such research on human beings—they were the first to use the technique to on human embryos.

This new effort is seen as far less controversial—a team in the U.S. is planning a similar study as soon as they can get regulators to greenlight their project. The Chinese team plans to retrieve T cells from patients that have incurable and then edit the genes in those cells. More specifically, they will be looking to disable a gene that encodes for a protein called PD-1—prior research has shown that it acts as a brake on an to help prevent attacks on healthy cells. Once the cells have been edited and inspected very carefully to make sure there were no editing errors they will be allowed to multiply and then all of the cells will be injected back into the same patient’s bloodstream. It is hoped that the edited cells will cause the immune system to mount a more aggressive attack on , killing them and curing the patient.

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SAN FRANCISCO Facebook Inc (FB.O) said on Thursday it had completed a successful test flight of a solar-powered drone that it hopes will help it extend internet connectivity to every corner of the planet.

Aquila, Facebook’s lightweight, high-altitude aircraft, flew at a few thousand feet for 96 minutes in Yuma, Arizona, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a post on his Facebook page. The company ultimately hopes to have a fleet of Aquilas that can fly for at least three months at a time at 60,000 feet (18,290 meters) and communicate with each other to deliver internet access.

Google parent Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) has also poured money into delivering internet access to under served areas through Project Loon, which aims to use a network of high-altitude balloons to made the internet available to remote parts of the world.

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The UK’s first double hand transplant operation has taken place at Leeds General Infirmary and the patient says his new hands look “tremendous”.

Chris King, from Doncaster, lost both his hands, apart from the thumbs, in an accident involving a metal pressing machine at work three years ago.

The 57-year-old received two new hands from a donor and says he already has some movement in them.

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Overview

This is the third article in a series of posts documenting how a team of six interns used IBM Watson to program robots to play poker.

In the previous article, we introduced the Watson services that are available to developers and how to interact with them with Watson Developer Cloud. In this article, we’ll show how we used the Speech-to-Text service to extract speech from audio.

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US social networking giant Facebook announced on Thursday a successful test of its solar-powered Aquila drone, which will beam Internet to people in remote areas.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Facebook has been working on Aquila Project with leading experts in aerospace and communication technologies, from NASA’s jet propulsion lab to a small UK firm that created one of the world’s longest flying solar-powered drones.

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