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AggreBots: Tiny living robots made from lung cells could one day deliver medicine inside the body

A brand-new engineering approach to generate “designer” biological robots using human lung cells is underway in Carnegie Mellon University’s Ren lab. Referred to as AggreBots, these microscale living robots may one day be able to traverse through the body’s complex environments to deliver desired therapeutic or mechanical interventions, once greater control is achieved over their motility patterns. In new research published in Science Advances, the group provides a novel tissue engineering platform capable of achieving customizable motility in AggreBots by actively controlling their structural parameters.

Biobots are microscopic, man-made biological machines capable of autonomous movement and programmability to perform specific tasks or behaviors. Previously, enabling biobots’ motility has been centered around using , which allow them to move by contracting and relaxing like real muscles.

A novel, alternative mechanism of actuation can be found by using cilia, the nanoscopic, hair-like, organic propellers that continuously move fluids in the body (like in the lungs) and help some aquatic creatures, like Paramecium or comb jellies, swim. However, a reliable way to control the exact shape and structure of a cilia-powered biobot (CiliaBot, for short), and thereby its motility outcome, has proven difficult to come by.

Professor Dragan Primorac, MD, PhD — Shaping The Future Of Personalized Medicine

Shaping The Future Of Personalized Medicine — Professor Dragan[ ](https://www.facebook.com/PrimoracDragan?__cft__[0]=AZWpslTHjsy1a1kjedsti2RJw9yv6FhOXDFg2kyiufa2-D4Gk8TYoTy6HPaDPGARaq1EESF8mpBiV9Jjt2gpkh8Np3gpvzqTNu4cOTW-m31Hn4MVmEFyC6gnP5_-bMEdn1Gn81MUYh3llD5MqtPqF8dPWOZxq1Oo7MbC2g5664Of2FI4tc98YxJrFewUmig_tH0&__tn__=-]K-R)Primorac MD, PhD — Founder, St. Catherine Specialty Hospital

Professor Dragan Primorac, MD., PhD (https://www.draganprimorac.com/) is a globally recognized physician-scientist whose work spans personalized medicine, regenerative therapies, and forensic genetics.

From 2003 to 2009 Prof. Primorac served as the Minister of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia. The Ministry of Science and Education of Croatia is the ministry in the Government of Croatia which is in charge of primary, secondary and tertiary education, research institutions and sports (https://mzom.gov.hr/en).

Prof. Primorac is the Founder of St. Catherine Specialty Hospital in Zagreb Croatia (https://www.stcatherine.com/), the official hospital of the Croatian Olympic Committee as well as the official hospital of the Croatian Football Federation. St. Catherine Hospital is affiliated with four medical schools and the Ministry of Science and Education recently announced that the St. Catherine Hospital became Scientific Center of Excellence for the Personalized Medicine\.

Scientists launch world’s most comprehensive human virus protein database

Harnessing the power of AI, a research team at the MRC-University of Glasgow Center for Virus Research has launched Viro3D —the most comprehensive database of human and animal virus protein structure predictions in the world.

The free and searchable AI-powered offers a completely new, in-depth perspective on viruses, allowing us to quickly learn more about their origins and evolution.

Although are the most abundant biological entities on our planet, these tiny structures remain among the least well-understood. Insights into the key structures within viruses have, until now, only been achieved through slow and laborious research work, a pace that has impacted our ability to develop treatments and vaccines at speed.

Controlling Light Emission with Photonic Time Crystals

A material whose dielectric properties vary in time could produce exotic light-emission phenomena in a nearby atom, theorists predict.

Traditional photonic technologies rely on mirrors, lenses, and diffraction gratings to shape light as it travels through a medium. Recent advances in material science have opened a strikingly different route. Instead of sculpting material properties in space, researchers can now dynamically modulate them in time [1]. Such temporal modulation transforms a passive medium into an active one, as the act of modulation itself can inject or extract energy. Adding a temporal dimension to material design confronts long-standing notions of light–matter interactions and reveals phenomena with no static counterpart. Now Bumki Min of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and his collaborators have exploited this capability to reshape the photonic density of states (DOS), which quantifies the number of available optical modes into which light can be emitted [2].

3D particle-in-cell simulations demonstrate first true steady state in turbulent plasma

Plasma is a state of matter that emerges when a gas is heated to sufficiently high temperatures, prompting some electrons to become free from atoms. This state of matter has been the focus of many astrophysical studies, as predictions suggest that it would be found in the proximity of various cosmological objects, including pulsars and black holes.

Previous research findings suggest that the environment around these celestial objects is turbulent, which essentially means that magnetic fields and electric fields within it fluctuate chaotically across many scales. These chaotic fluctuations would in turn influence the movements and acceleration of particles.

Researchers have been trying to reproduce the turbulent environment associated with the emergence of in space using numerical simulations. However, they were so far unable to realize a steady state in which a system’s properties no longer change over time, such as that one might observe in real cosmic systems.

Termite observations reveal their sophisticated technique to prevent contamination in fungal crop

Some species of termites are known to cultivate their own crops of fungus within their nests, similar to the way humans maintain farms to feed people. One such species is Odontotermes obesus, which cultivates the fungus Termitomyces. The relationship between these termites and the fungus can be thought of as a sort of symbiotic one. In this case, Termitomyces feeds the termites, and the termites protect the fungus from an invasive “weed-like” fungus called Pseudoxylaria can quickly overrun Termitomyces if left to its own devices.

A new study, published in Science, sheds some light on the methods these insects use to protect their crops, which was previously unclear. The research team investigated these methods through a series of experiments in which Pseudoxylaria was introduced into the termite’s crop of Termitomyces combs.

In the first part of the experiment, only a small amount of weed was placed on a comb, and the termites’ responses were observed and compared to the response to an uninfected comb. Then, a highly infected comb was introduced next to a healthy comb, and termite responses were observed. Finally, the team attached a healthy comb to an infected comb to find out how the termites responded. Then, the boluses, which were used by the termites to cover certain pieces of comb, were analyzed for microbial content and fungistatic properties using sequencing and inhibition assays.

Physics-informed AI learns local rules behind flocking and collective motion behaviors

Researchers at Seoul National University and Kyung Hee University report a framework to control collective motions, such as ring, clumps, mill, flock, by training a physics-informed AI to learn the local rules that govern interactions among individuals.

The paper is published in the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

The approach specifies when an ordered state should appear from random initial conditions and tunes geometric features (average radius, cluster size, flock size). Furthermore, trained on published GPS trajectories of real pigeons, the model uncovers interaction mechanisms observed in real flocks.

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