Lifeboat Foundation

Google has patented technology that will let users control its smartwatches and earbuds by simply touching their skin.

The patent titled “Skin interface for Wearables: Sensor fusion to improve signal quality” was spotted by folks over at LetsGoDigital. It details tech that users can use to operate wearable devices using skin gestures.

Patent documents show that users can swipe or tap the skin near the wearables in order to control them. The gesture creates a mechanical wave that is picked up by the sensors in the wearables. The “Sensor Fusion” tech then combines this movement data collected from various sensors into an input command for the wearable.

Pager, a nine year old Macaque, plays MindPong with his Neuralink.

www.neuralink.com

Researchers at NTNU have managed to restore muscle function in older mice with muscle loss using advanced gene therapy. The hope is that this method might eventually be used on humans to prevent severe loss of muscle mass.

“Gene therapy is the most effective method to be able to give these people the same health benefits you normally get with physical exercise,” says Moreira, who has been involved in the new research. He is part of the Cardiac Exercise Research Group (CERG).

With age comes experience. And with experience come sore backs, tired bones, and increased risks from a large number of diseases.

Scientists have long been trying figure out how to stop these aches and pains in our twilight years, and to make us live longer and healthier lives at the same time.

While it’s likely a long way off from being ready for humans, a new study investigating the long-term ‘partial reprogramming’ of cells in mice appears to have produced some very intriguing results.

Circa 2014

New research on nanoparticles shows that they could be used to encode information when suspended in a liquid. This could one day allow us to store vast amounts of data in a very small volume of “digital colloid.”

Circa 2015

Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash and his students have developed a synchronous computer that operates using the unique physics of moving water droplets.

Continue reading “Stanford engineers develop computer that operates on water droplets” »

Adult cells in our body can only give rise to the same cell type. For example, a skin cell cannot give rise to a muscle cell but to skin cells only. This limits the potential use of adult cells for therapy. During early development, however, the cells in the embryo have the capacity to generate all cell types of our body, including stem cells. This capacity, which is called totipotency, has served as an inspiration for researchers to find new ways to recapitulate totipotency through cellular reprogramming in the lab.

Totipotent cells have their own speed

Totipotent cells have many properties, but we do not know all of them yet. Researchers at Helmholtz Munich have now made a new discovery: “We found out that in totipotent cells, the mother cells of stem cells, DNA replication occurs at a different pace compared to other more differentiated cells. It is much slower than in any other cell type we studied,” says Tsunetoshi Nakatani, first-author of the new study.

Researchers have restored muscle function in research animals with gene therapy. The approach could someday lead to new treatment methods in the elderly.

From pv magazine Australia

A team of researchers from Monash University’s Faculty of Engineering have redesigned the heart of a lithium-sulfur battery, creating a new interlayer that allows for exceptionally fast lithium transfer, as well as an improvement in the performance and lifetime of the batteries.

Continue reading “Australian researchers announce lithium-sulfur battery breakthrough” »

Earlier this year, a space rock was estimated to hit the planet in 2023. Read on to know how this prediction changed, and how astronomers carry out studies for this type of event.