Companies and labs are racing to build next-generation devices that track and translate brain activity to help people immobilized by disease or injury handle tasks requiring movement.
Artificial intelligence (AI) backed drug discovery company Insilico Medicine announced last week that it was dosing the first healthy volunteer in a microdose trial of ISM 001–005. Designed with the help of AI, the drug is a small-molecule inhibitor of a biological target that was discovered by Pharma. AI. The trial is being conducted in Australia.
The AI-designed drug will be used to treat chronic lung disease idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, or IPF usually leads to progressive and irreversible lung-function decline and affects 20 people out of over 100,000 globally.
Chief Scientific Officer of Insilico, Freng Ren, said in a press release that this drug discovery and trial marks a significant milestone in the AI-drug discovery space. This is because the said candidate is the first-ever AI-discovered novel molecule based on an AI-discovered target.
Targeting cancers and viruses, better knowledge of the human immune system is leading to new medicines.
Researchers at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science (CEMS) and the RIKEN Cluster for Pioneering Research (CPR) in Japan have developed a technique to improve the flexibility of ultra-thin electronics, such as those used in bendable devices or clothing. Published in Science Advances, the study details the use of water vapor plasma to directly bond gold electrodes fixed onto separate ultra-thin polymer films, without needing adhesives or high temperatures.
As electronic devices get smaller and smaller, and the desire to have bendable, wearable, and on-skin electronics increases, conventional methods of constructing these devices have become impractical. One of the biggest problems is how to connect and integrate multiple devices or pieces of a device that each reside on separate ultra-thin polymer films. Conventional methods that use layers of adhesive to stick electrodes together reduce flexibility and require temperature and pressure that are damaging to super-thin electronics. Conventional methods of direct metal-to-metal bonding are available, but require perfectly smooth and clean surfaces that are not typical in these types of electronics.
A team of researchers led by Takao Someya at RIKEN CEMS/CPR has developed a new method to secure these connections that does not use adhesive, high temperature, or high pressure, and does not require totally smooth or clean surfaces. In fact, the process takes less than a minute at room temperature, followed by about a 12-hour wait. The new technique, called water-vapor plasma-assisted bonding, creates stable bonds between gold electrodes that are printed into ultra-thin—2 thousandths of a millimeter—polymer sheets using a thermal evaporator.
Researchers have discovered that using a thin-film coating of copper or copper compounds on surfaces could enhance copper’s ability to inactivate or destroy the SARS-CoV-2 virus responsible for COVID-19.
In a study that began soon after the pandemic hit in March 2020, University of Waterloo engineering graduate students investigated how six different thin metal and oxide coatings interacted with HCov-229E, a coronavirus that is genetically like SARS-CoV-2 but safer to work with.
“While there was already some data out there on the lifetime of the virus on common-touch surfaces like stainless steel, plastics and copper, the lifetime of the virus on engineered coatings was less understood,” said Kevin Mussleman, the Waterloo mechanical and mechatronics engineering professor who led the study.
Shake With Your New Robot Hand
Posted in robotics/AI
Korean researchers have created a very realistic and capable robot hand that looks very promising. It is strong (34N of grip strength) and reasonably lightweight (1.1 kg), too. There are several videos of the hand in action, of which you can see two of them below including one where the hand uses scissors to cut some paper. You can also read the full paper for details.
Like many good projects, this one started with requirements. The team surveyed existing hands noting the positives and negatives of each design. They then listed the attributes they wanted in a new design.
The 22 cm hand has 4 fingers, a thumb, and sensors on each fingertip. Overall, there are 20 joints resulting in 15 degrees of freedom so the hand is very dexterous. The construction looks taxing with eccentric motors, ball screws, and linkages. However, the hand is self-contained and ready to mount on any robot arm.
A team of researchers from Europe and Asia claim to have quantum entangled frozen tardigrades, microscopic animals that are extremely hardy and can withstand practically any conditions or abuse.
According to a new controversial preprint, the researchers managed the feat by placing frozen tardigrades between two capacitor plates of a superconductor circuit to form a qubit, the quantum equivalent of a bit.
Upon contact, they say, the tardigrade changed the qubit’s frequency.
Circa 2017
A new interface system allowed three paralyzed individuals to type words up to four times faster than the speed that had been demonstrated in earlier studies.
AI machine learning presents a roadmap to define new materials for any need, with implications in green energy and waste reduction.
Scientists and institutions dedicate more resources each year to the discovery of novel materials to fuel the world. As natural resources diminish and the demand for higher value and advanced performance products grows, researchers have increasingly looked to nanomaterials.
Nanoparticles have already found their way into applications ranging from energy storage and conversion to quantum computing and therapeutics. But given the vast compositional and structural tunability nanochemistry enables, serial experimental approaches to identify new materials impose insurmountable limits on discovery.
The long-acting injectable HIV medications cabotegravir and rilpivirine, which are administered by a healthcare provider once a month, can be successfully implemented in health practises in the United States, according to a study presented at the 11th International AIDS Society Conference on HIV Science (IAS 2021). What’s more, providers and people with HIV encountered few barriers to giving or receiving the injections despite changes in health services during COVID-19.
“Over the course of a year, even with the added challenges of COVID-19, the barriers that providers and patients thought they would face turned out not to be as concerning as originally thought,” Dr Maggie Czarnogorski of ViiV Healthcare said in a press release.
In October 2020, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the injectable combination regimen, which consists of an extended-release formulation of ViiV Healthcare’s new integrase inhibitor cabotegravir (Vocabria) plus an injectable version of Janssen’s non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor rilpivirine (Rekambys, sold in pill form as Edurant). The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the combination, sold in North America as Cabenuva, in January 2021.