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Engineers at MIT have built a three-fingered robotic hand that can identify and safely grasp delicate objects by relying on an increasingly popular approach to making robots useful: making them soft.

Human hands are not easy for robotics engineers to emulate. The simple act of picking up an item involves all kinds of abilities that humans don’t notice. Among other things, our grip has to be secure without crushing the thing we’re grasping, and our fingers have to form shapes that can fit many types of objects — everything from a sheet of paper or a piece of fruit to a pencil or a living thing.

Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory designed a soft silicone “hand” with embedded sensors that they can train to recognize different things. The team will present its research at this month’s International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Hamburg, Germany.

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While scientists have had success in the past printing structures like “bionic ears,” a clear path to making functional internal organs and tissue hasn’t really emerged. However, researchers at the University of Florida in Gainesville have developed a way of printing complex objects in gel, a method that could help pave the way to 3D-printed organs in the future.

The hard thing about printing intricate organic structures like blood vessels and complicated organs is that they collapse under their own weight before they solidify. The gel here, which is made of an acrylic acid polymer, acts as a scaffold to hold the structure in place during the printing process. That approach has already allowed the team to print with organic materials — and even make a replica of a human brain.

Printing in gel isn’t an entirely new idea. And, of course, the method isn’t perfect. For one thing, using inorganic gel as a scaffold can’t keep organic tissue alive. For another, printing very small objects could lead to some particles slipping through the material. However, it’s certainly a solid step forward on the way to printing organs for patients in need someday.

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Pulitzer-prize winning science writer Jonathan Weiner writing about transhumanism and longevity issues:

Science writer Jonathan Weiner writes: Even if you’ve been following the presidential campaign pretty closely, you may not have heard about Zoltan Istvan, the hopeful from the newly formed Transhumanist Party. Istvan’s platform is simple: We should all live forever. He’s driving across the country in a bus painted to look like a coffin, with big white letters on its side: “Immortality Bus.”

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Researchers have developed a new technique to produce a 3D ‘micro-printed’ array of needles capable of drug delivery. The technique would offer a pain-free drug delivery device that would allow drugs to diffuse within the body as the biomaterial device degrades in the body. This offers treatments for a wide range of diseases, including melanoma cancers.

The results are published today, Wednesday 30th September, in the journal Biofabrication .

The researchers, based at the University of Akron and the University of Texas, report producing a drug-loaded array for transdermal delivery of a , fabricated using microstereolithography. The arrays consisted of 25 poly(propylene fumarate) microneedles, each needle having a tip and base diameter of 20 µm and 200 µm, respectively, and a height of 1 mm.

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The brand new space opera novel Lightless is a fast-paced, gripping read, and like all good science fiction, explores the human side of cutting-edge scientific concepts. We talked to debut author C.A. Higgins about using real physics in her story.

In Lightless, a prototype spaceship on its maiden voyage on behalf of a totalitarian regime is infiltrated by escaped terrorists. And it’s up to Althea, a socially awkward computer scientist who prefers the company of the Ananke’s disturbingly sentient electronic system to that of her crewmates, to save the day as her well-ordered world begins to unravel.

http://www.amazon.com/Lightless-C-A-Higgins/dp/0553394428?ta…9236004136

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Wow, first they create a real hoverboard, and now they’re on the road to creating a real lightsaber? Joy! wink

Killjoy physicists have long pointed out the sheer unlikelihood of building a working light saber. But now, they’ve taken a small step toward realizing the dream of Star Wars fans worldwide, by figuring out how to get photons to stick together like molecules in a super-chilled gas.

This latest work builds on prior experiments from 2013, when Harvard physicists first announced a new state of matter.

Photons don’t have mass and zip along at the speed of light, with no time to hang around in clumps. They also aren’t charged particles and thus don’t interact with each other much at all. They love to hang out with charged electrons, though. And that’s what’s going on here: the Harvard experiment created a special kind of medium in which photons act like charged particles with mass, enabling them to form molecules.

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Visionary Liz Parrish shares some of the remarkable ways that genetic therapies are helping humanity transcend disease, aging and physical limitations. We discuss some of the current applications of gene therapy, what we can reasonably expect given the rate of progress and some of the moral implications of this science. If you’re anything like us, you’ll be astounded to hear about this work; it can already make you stronger and faster, and it may help future generations live upwards of 400 years!

Click to download the episode directly (right click, then click save as) Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. Subscribe to the podcast on Stitcher.

“Known as “the woman who wants to genetically engineer you,” Elizabeth Parrish is the CEO of BioViva USA Inc ™ she is a humanitarian, entrepreneur and innovator and a leading voice for genetic cures. As a strong proponent of progress and education for the advancement of gene therapy, she serves as a motivational speaker to the public at large for the life sciences. She is actively involved in international educational media outreach and sits on the board of the International Longevity Alliance (ILA). She is an affiliated member of the Complex Biological Systems Alliance (CBSA) whose mission is to further scientific understanding of biological complexity and the nature and origins of human disease. She is the founder of BioTrove Investments LLC and the BioTrove Podcasts which is committed to offering a meaningful way for people to learn about and fund research in regenerative medicine. She is also the Secretary of the American Longevity Alliance (ALA) a 501©(3) nonprofit trade association that brings together individuals, companies, and organizations who work in advancing the emerging field of cellular & regenerative medicine with the aim to get governments to consider aging a disease.” –Blurb taken from Liz’ LinkedIn Profile.

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