A Texas Water Development Board plan shows the state population is supposed to increase more than 70% by 2070, which is expected to strain our water supply.
Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science & Technology (DGIST, President Yang Kook) Professor Hongsoo Choi’s team of the Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering collaborated with Professor Sung-Won Kim’s team at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, Catholic University of Korea, and Professor Bradley J. Nelson’s team at ETH Zurich to develop a technology that produces more than 100 microrobots per minute that can be disintegrated in the body.
Microrobots aiming at minimal invasive targeted precision therapy can be manufactured in various ways. Among them, ultra-fine 3D printing technology called two-photon polymerization method, a method that triggers polymerization by intersecting two lasers in synthetic resin, is the most used. This technology can produce a structure with nanometer-level precision. However, a disadvantage exists in that producing one microrobot is time consuming because voxels, the pixels realized by 3D printing, must be cured successively. In addition, the magnetic nanoparticles contained in the robot can block the light path during the two-photon polymerization process. This process result may not be uniform when using magnetic nanoparticles with high concentration.
To overcome the limitations of the existing microrobot manufacturing method, DGIST Professor Hongsoo Choi’s research team developed a method to create microrobots at a high speed of 100 per minute by flowing a mixture of magnetic nanoparticles and gelatin methacrylate, which is biodegradable and can be cured by light, into the microfluidic chip. This is more than 10,000 times faster than using the existing two-photon polymerization method to manufacture microrobots.
The joint research team of Professor Choi Hongsoo at Robotics Engineering, DGIST, a senior researcher Jinyoung Kim from DGIST-ETH Microrobotics Research Center, and the research team of Professor Sung Won Kim at Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital of the Catholic University, made a breakthrough for the improvement of the therapeutic efficacy and safety in stem cell-based treatments.
The team developed a magnetically powered human nuclear transfer stem cells (hNTSC)-based microrobot and a method of minimally invasive delivery of therapeutic agents into the brain via the intranasal pathway. And they also accomplished transplanting the developed stem cell-based microrobot into brain tissue through the intranasal pathway that bypasses the blood-brain barrier. The proposed method is superior in efficacy and safety compared to the conventional surgical method and is expected to bring new possibilities of treating various intractable neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and brain tumors, in the future.
The limitation of stem cell therapy is the difficulty in delivering an exact amount of stem cells to an accurate targeted location deep in the body where the treatment is with high risk. Another limitation is that both efficacy and safety of the treatment are low owing to a large amount of the therapeutic agent loss during delivery, while the cost of the treatment is high. In particular, when delivering stem cells into the brain through blood, the efficiency of cell delivery may decrease owing to the “blood-brain barrier,” which is a unique and specific component of the cerebrovascular network.
One day they shall make nano bots out of graphine.
A team of researchers affiliated with several institutions in South Korea has created microrobots that are able to serve as bridge builders between rat nerve cell networks. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes how their microrobots were constructed and how well they served as a bridge builder between neural networks.
Scientists have taken many approaches to study of the brain. One way is to try to grow a brain from nerve cells. Prior work has shown that it is possible to grow a network of neural cells on a glass plate Such a network is, of course, 2-D. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a step toward the creation of a 3D neural network by devising a way to connect 2-D neural networks using microrobots.
Continue reading “Microrobots used to build bridge between rat nerve cell networks” »
The NUHS Centre for Healthy Longevity will look for biomarkers of ageing and test ways to slow ageing.
All eyes are on the Emerald Isle this week as the Longevity Summit Dublin brings together a host of speakers covering the spectrum of this booming sector. Delegates have been hearing from some of the leading entrepreneurs, companies, investors, and researchers in the field as they address many of the hot-button topics affecting longevity. One of those speakers is the so-called “father of genomics” – Harvard professor of genetics, George Church – who closes the conference later today with a keynote on Gene, cell and organ therapies for de-aging.
Longevity. Technology: In addition to his Harvard professorship, Church heads up synthetic biology at the Wyss Institute, where he oversees development of new tools with applications in regenerative medicine. Much of his focus more recently has been on the development of gene therapies targeting age-related disease, a passion that led him to co-found Rejuvenate Bio, with the goal of creating “full age reversal gene therapies.” We caught up with Church ahead of his Dublin presentation for a brief conversation on longevity.
Dr Church’s name is synonymous with genomic science, and he was a key contributor to the Human Genome Project and technologies including next-generation fluorescent and nanopore sequencing, aimed at understanding genetic contributions to human disease. However, he doesn’t feel that those initiatives did a huge amount to move the aging field forward.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsWOZ4IAHNU
If there is one thing science fiction movies and comics have taught us, it’s that humans have no.
limitations, and we will one day be able to open a portal that transverses into another dimension. What if I tell you that day is closer to us than ever? This is the latest discovery made.
by scientists and is by far the biggest of the century.
Will we finally get to find out if we are the only beings in the cosmos? What technology have.
scientists designed capable of making interstellar teleportation possible? How and where will.
the portals take us?
Join us as we explore how scientists have finally found a way to open a portal to another.
dimension.
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1. The videos have no negative impact on the original works.
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Scientist from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have found a novel way of growing cell-based meat by zapping animal cells with a magnet. This new technique simplifies the production process of cell-based meat by reducing reliance on animal products, and it is also greener, cleaner, safer and more cost-effective.
Cultured meat is an alternative to animal farming with advantages such as reducing carbon footprint and the risk of transmitting diseases in animals. However, the current method of producing cultured meat involves using other animal products, which largely defeats the purpose, or drugs to stimulate the growth of the meat.
To cultivate cell-based meat, animal cells are fed animal serum—usually fetal bovine serum (FBS), which is a mixture harvested from the blood of fetuses excised from pregnant cows slaughtered in the dairy or meat industries—to help them grow and proliferate. This is a critical, yet cruel and expensive, step in the current cell-based meat production process. Ironically, many of these molecules come from the muscles within the slaughtered animal, but scientists did not know how to stimulate their release in production scale bioreactors. Other methods to promote cell growth are using drugs or relying on genetic engineering.
Researchers at UCLA have created an edible particle that helps make lab-grown meat, known as cultured meat, with more natural muscle-like texture using a process that could be scaled up for mass production.
Led by Amy Rowat, who holds UCLA’s Marcie H. Rothman Presidential Chair of Food Studies, the researchers have invented edible particles called microcarriers with customized structures and textures that help precursor muscle cells grow quickly and form muscle-like tissues. Edible microcarriers could reduce the expense, time, and waste required to produce cultured meat with a texture that appeals to consumers. The results are published in the journal Biomaterials.
“Animal cells that can be coaxed to form tissues similar to meats could offer a protein source to a world facing food insecurity caused by threats ranging from epidemics to natural disasters,” said Rowat, who is an associate professor of integrative biology and physiology at the UCLA College. “Cultured meat products are not yet on the market in the U.S. and strategies to enable mass production are still emerging.”
Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed microscopic robots, called microrobots, that can swim around in the lungs, deliver medication and be used to clear up life-threatening cases of bacterial pneumonia.
In mice, the microrobots safely eliminated pneumonia-causing bacteria in the lungs and resulted in 100% survival. By contrast, untreated mice all died within three days after infection.
The results are published Sept. 22 in Nature Materials.
