Lifeboat Foundation

A shirt that monitors your blood pressure or a pair of socks that can keep track of your cholesterol levels might be just a few years away from becoming reality.

In an article published in Applied Physics Reviews, researchers examine the use of microfibers, and even smaller nanofibers, as wearable monitors that could keep track of a patient’s vital signs.

The microfiber- and nanofiber-based technology addresses growing concerns in the medical community about monitoring chronic illnesses like diabetes, asthma, obesity, and high blood pressure as the population ages.

Spider silk is a protein fiber spun by spiders, which they use to make webs or other structures, which function as sticky nets to catch other animals, or as nests or cocoons to protect their offspring, or to wrap up prey. They can also use their silk to suspend themselves, to float through the air, or to glide away from predators.

Each spider and each type of silk has a set of mechanical properties optimized for their biological function, but in particular, their dragline silks, have exceptional mechanical properties. They exhibit a unique combination of high tensile strength and extensibility which enables a silk fiber to absorb a large amount of energy before breaking with this estimated tensile strength several times that of steel.

Continue reading “The Real Spider Man — Alex Greenhalgh, CEO, Spintex — Novel And Powerful Bio-Materials and Fabrics” »

Dr yu shrike zhang phd is assistant professor at harvard medical school and associate bioengineer at brigham and women’s hospital.

Dr. Zhang’s research interests include symbiotic tissue engineering, 3D bio-printing, organ-on-a-chip technology, biomaterials, regenerative engineering, bioanalysis, nanomedicine, and biology.

Continue reading “Dr. Yu Shrike Zhang — Symbiotic Tissue Engineering — Harvard Medical School” »

The Asian honeybee (Apis cerana) isn’t just on the look-out for flowers. In some areas, it’s also on the prowl for poo.

When threatened by a species of giant hornet (Vespa soror) — closely related to the murder hornet — workers will fly off to collect fresh animal faeces to smear carefully around the entrance of their nest, according to a study on bee hives in Vietnam.

It’s still not clear how this dung actually protects the colony, but in the field, it appears to stop scouting hornets from chewing through the nest and causing mass slaughter.

Today we’re joined by Melodie Yashar — Designer, Researcher, Technologist, co-founder of the firm Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch+), Senior Research Associate with San Jose State University Research Foundation at NASA Ames Research Center, and an Associate Researcher within the UC Davis Center for Human/Robotics/Vehicle Integration and Performance (HRVIP). She also teaches undergraduate and graduate design at Art Center College of Design and is a 2019–2020 Future Space Leaders Fellow.

Melodie’s current work focuses on the relationship of advanced software & hardware systems for spaceflight and maintains ongoing research interests in the design of augmented environments, human-machine interaction, human performance studies, and space technology development.

Continue reading “Melodie Yashar — Co-Founder of Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch+)” »

A new robot created by researchers at Northwestern University looks and behaves like a tiny aquatic animal, and could serve a variety of functions, including moving things place to place, catalyzing chemical reactions, delivering therapeutics and much more. This new soft robot honestly looks a heck of a lot like a lemon peel, but it’s actually a material made up of 90% water for the soft exterior, with a nickel skeleton inside that can change its shape in response to outside magnetic fields.

These robots are very small — only around the size of a dime — but they’re able to perform a range of tasks, including walking at the same speed as an average human, and picking up and carrying things. They work by either taking in or expelling water through their soft components, and can respond to light and magnetic fields thanks to their precise molecular design. Essentially, their molecular structure is crafted such that when they’re hit by light, the molecules that make them up expel water, causing the robot’s “legs” to stiffen like muscles.

Northwestern University researchers have developed a first-of-its-kind life-like material that acts as a soft robot. It can walk at human speed, pick up and transport cargo to a new location, climb up hills and even break-dance to release a particle.

Nearly 90% water by weight, the centimeter-sized robot moves without complex hardware, hydraulics or electricity. Instead, it is activated by light and walks in the direction of an external rotating magnetic field.

Resembling a four-legged octopus, the robot functions inside a water-filled tank, making it ideal for use in aquatic environments. The researchers imagine customizing the movements of miniature robots to help catalyze different chemical reactions and then pump out the valuable products. The robots also could be molecularly designed to recognize and actively remove unwanted particles in specific environments, or to use their mechanical movements and locomotion to precisely deliver bio-therapeutics or cells to specific tissues.

Gollum in “The Lord of the Rings,” Thanos in the “Avengers,” Snoke in “Star Wars,” the Na’vi in “Avatar”—we have all experienced the wonders of motion-capture, a cinema technique that tracks an actor’s movements and translates them into computer animation to create a moving, emoting—and maybe one day Oscar-winning—digital character.

But what many might not realize is that motion capture isn’t limited to the big screen, but extends into science. Behavioral scientists have been developing and using similar tools to study and analyze the posture and movement of animals under a variety of conditions. But motion-capture approaches also require that the subject wears a complex suit with markers that let the computer “know” where each part of the body is in three-dimensional space. That might be okay for a professional actor, but animals tend to resist dressing up.

To solve the problem, scientists have begun combining motion-capture with deep learning, a method that lets a computer essentially teach itself how to optimize performing a task, e.g., recognizing a specific “key-point” in videos. The idea is to teach the computer to track and even predict the movements or posture of an animal without the need for motion capture markers.