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Scientists from medical tech company Fluicell have partnered with clinical R&D firm Cellectricon and the Swedish Karolinska Institutet university to 3D bioprint neural cells into complex patterns.

Using the microfluidic printheads featured on Fluicell’s Biopixlar platform, the researchers were able to accurately arrange rat brain cells within 3D structures, without damaging their viability. The resulting cerebral tissues could be used to model the progress of neurological diseases, or to test the efficacy of related drugs.

“We’ve been using Biopixlar to develop protocols for the printing of different neuronal cells types, and we are very pleased with its performance,” said Mattias Karlsson, CEO of Cellectricon. “This exciting technology has the potential to open completely new avenues for in-vitro modeling of a wide range of central and PNS-related diseases.”

It’s electric! A startup emerged from stealth this week with grand plans to pioneer a new form of neurotech dubbed “electric medicine.”

Elemind’s approach centers on artificial intelligence-powered algorithms that are trained to continuously analyze neurological activity collected by a noninvasive wearable device, then to deliver through the wearable bursts of neurostimulation that are uniquely tailored to those real-time brain wave readings.

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HP Wolf Security’s latest threat insights disclosure put a spotlight on DarkGate – a group of web-based criminals using legal advertising tools to enhance their spam-based malware attacks.

The security report claims DarkGate has been operating as a malware provider since 2018, with an apparent shift in tactics last year of using legitimate advertisement networks “to track victims and evade detection.” The claims are that by using ad services, threat actors can analyze which lures generate clicks and infect the most users – helping them refine campaigns for maximum impact.

WASHINGTON — Lockheed Martin is experiencing a growth spurt in an unexpected corner of its business: small satellites. While traditionally known for its expertise in GPS and giant geostationary (GEO) satellites, the company has quietly built a backlog of 100 smallsats on order from Department of Defense and intelligence customers.

“This is probably a different picture than many of you may have in our minds” about what the company does, Johnathon Caldwell, head of Lockheed Martin’s military space business, told a military conference Feb. 14.

Speaking at the Air & Space Forces Association’s Warfare Conference in Aurora, Colorado, Caldwell said a greater focus on small satellites began with the company’s pursuit of Space Development Agency contracts. SDA is building a proliferated mesh network of satellites in low Earth orbit for the Defense Department, and unlike traditional cost-plus defense programs, the agency demands fixed-price bids from satellite manufacturers.

WASHINGTON — Viasat announced it completed the first satellite broadband upgrade on board a Military Sealift Command ship, and expects to update 105 vessels over the next year. The work is part of a $578 million contract that Inmarsat won in 2022 before it was acquired by rival satellite operator Viasat.

The U.S. Navy’s sealift organization, responsible for providing ocean transportation to the Department of Defense, operates a fleet of approximately 125 civilian-crewed ships that replenish Navy vessels at sea, transporting military equipment and personnel, and strategically positioning cargo around the world.

Viasat is revamping the ships’ satellite network from Ku-band to the company’s Global Xpress Ka-band and the ELERA L-band systems.

Researchers have demonstrated that magnetic spin waves called magnons can be controlled by voltage and thus could operate more efficiently as information carriers in future devices.

Magnonic devices are being developed to transmit signals, not with electrons, but with magnons—traveling waves in the magnetic ordering of a material. New work provides one of the missing elements of the magnonics toolbox: a voltage-controlled magnon transistor [1]. The device is made up of a magnetic insulator sandwiched between two metal plates. The researchers show that they can control the flow of magnons in the insulator through voltages applied to the plates. The results could lead to more-efficient magnonic devices.

A magnon can be imagined as a row of fixed magnetic elements, or “spins,” that tilt and rotate their orientations in a coordinated pattern. This “spin wave” can carry information through a material without involving the movement of charges, which can cause undesirable heating in a circuit. Magnonics—though still in its infancy—is a potentially energy-efficient alternative to traditional electronics, says Xiu-Feng Han from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The challenge right now for the magnonics field, he says, is developing practical versions of the four basic components of a magnonic circuit: a generator, a detector, a switch, and a transistor.