After that stem-cell synth yesterday, we’re in the mood for some serious bodymods—so let’s take it from Cronenberg and into Gibson. Software company Chaotic Moon is currently working on tattoos made with conductive ink, which they’re calling Tech Tats. While still mainly used in the medical field, we can already imagine a fully developed 303 implemented under your skin. Who needs a hoverboard when you can make acid with a tattoo?
(via designboom)
Nanoparticles form in a 3-D-printed microfluidic channel. Each droplet shown here is about 250 micrometers in diameter, and contains billions of platinum nanoparticles. (credit: Richard Brutchey and Noah Malmstadt/USC)
USC researchers have created an automated method of manufacturing nanoparticles that may transform the process from an expensive, painstaking, batch-by-batch process by a technician in a chemistry lab, mixing up a batch of chemicals by hand in traditional lab flasks and beakers.
Consider, for example, gold nanoparticles. Their ability to slip through the cell’s membrane makes them ideal delivery devices for medications to healthy cells, or fatal doses of radiation to cancer cells. But the price of gold nanoparticles at $80,000 per gram, compared to about $50 for pure raw gold goes.
Posted in biotech/medical, food
A breakthrough in understanding human skin cells offers a pathway for new anti-ageing treatments.
For the first time, scientists at Newcastle University, UK, have identified that the activity of a key metabolic enzyme found in the batteries of human skin cells declines with age.
A study, published online in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, has found that the activity of mitochondrial complex II significantly decreases in older skin.
You could say that Illumina is to DNA sequencing is what Google is to Internet search, but that would be underselling the San Diego-based biotech company. Illumina’s machines, the best and cheapest on the market, generate 90 percent of all DNA sequence data today. Illumina is, as they say, crushing it.
But as lucrative as that 90 percent slice is for Illumina now, the whole pie is likely to get even bigger in the future. Less than 0.01 percent of the world’s population has been sequenced so far. So recently, Illumina has made bold moves positioning itself for the future: The company is consolidating its core hardware business—this week, it sued an upstart competitor, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, for patent infringement—while moving into the genetic testing business with new ventures like the liquid cancer biopsy spinoff, Grail.
The company is a looking toward a future in which a lot more people gets genetic tests—and a lot more often. “Grail’s business will be very different than Illumina’s core business,” Eric Endicott, Illumina’s director of global public relations, said in an email. “We are at a tipping point in genomics, where a broad community of scientists and researchers continue to translate the potential of the genome from science to discoveries and applications.”
Attention to all fortune tellers, tea leave readers, Shaman/ Shawoman, etc. Wall Street needs a new futurist to predict the 2016 Stock Market.
So far, 2016 has been the worst opening act in the history of the stock markets. The moving parts, and the speed at which they are changing is mind dulling. Predicting what is coming next will take a rare talent – if it does exist, it will likely be fleeting.
Investment success is really a combination of common sense, experience, and to some extent luck. Part of my plan going into the next 10 months is to review my investment thesis. In other words, define what I believed before they year began, so here goes.
European turboprop aircraft manufacturer ATR said a prototype ATR 72 conducted a demonstration flight to test an all-electrical energy management system that aims to optimize electrical power distribution.
The flight is the second the ATR 72 demonstration aircraft has flown as part of the European Union’s “Clean Sky Joint Undertaking” program. The first test flight by the ATR 72 prototype, conducted in July 2015, trialed “new and more effective composite insulation materials and new vibro-acoustic sensors integrated into a large panel of the ATR aircraft fuselage,” ATR said in a statement.
The manufacturer said the two demonstration flights “also tested new generation optical fibers for improved identification of micro-cracks and easier maintenance.”
A new US Mystery has emerged at Apple. Wonder what it could be?
Strange sounds emanating from a mysterious building in the dead of night. White cars following families as they walk their dogs nearby. Science fiction movie? No, just Apple’s latest project.
Residents of Sunnyvale, Calif., who live near a complex of buildings Apple started occupying in 2014 tell the San Jose Mercury News it’s clear something is going on at the complex, where the sheet metal fences are 12 feet high and security is intense, but no one knows what.
One local says he hears “bangs,” “thumps,” and beeping (like a truck when it backs up) in the wee hours; another says he hears what sounds like a person “waving around” a big piece of sheet metal.
