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“What makes organ chips potentially so effective in drug testing is that they create not just the biochemical environment necessary for the cells to thrive but also the physical one…This use of stem cells in organ chips raises the possibility of a device that represents an individual patient—a patient-on-a-chip, if you like. In this case all the tiny organs would be derived from a single person: tests could then be carried out on the device to find what combinations of drugs and dosages work best for that patient.” Read more

Eric Larsen heads research in society and technology at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development in Sunnyvale, Calif. He says that while vehicles will be shared, Americans are not likely to give up their own cars.

“We don’t think people will give up their own cars. Americans like to do everything in the cars. They eat in cars, they drink in cars, they have entertainment in cars and they change clothes in cars — people who leave the office at lunch and sleep in their cars, or wait in their cars for an hour at a time for their children. Driving is really the distracting thing we do in cars.” Read more

Startship controlled by a tractor beam

Levitation and the defiance of gravity is possible. If until now levitation was just a magic act or circus “reality” or, tractor beam technology existed just in sci-fi movies, recently, a team of Japanese researchers have demonstrated the first technology that not only brings the mythology of levitation to life but leap frogs it to create a tractor beam, lifting and moving objects across 3 dimensions using sound alone.

The essence of levitation technology is the countervailing of gravity. By stoping gravity, levitation is possible. It is known that an ultrasound standing wave is capable of suspending small particles at its sound pressure nodes. The acoustic axis of the ultrasound beam in conventional studies was parallel to the gravitational force, and the levitated objects were manipulated along the fixed axis (i.e. one-dimensionally) by controlling the phases or frequencies of bolted Langevin-type transducers.

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