Archive for the ‘Health’ Category
Optical Speedbumps Create Illusion of Little Girl Darting Out In Front Of You
The painting, like the one above, is being trialed by authorities in a West Vancouver school zone starting yesterday and will be removed after a week of evaluation. From a distance it appears as more or less a smudge, but at a certain distance the stretched image becomes coherent to the driver and appears to rise from the pavement in 3-D. The faster the car is traveling, the faster the image pops into view. A nearby sign bears a motherly admonition: “You’re probably not expecting kids to run into the road.”
It seems like there’s room for epic backfire here, something that reads in the Vancouver Sun like “Driver Runs Down 11 Schoolchildren on Sidewalk After Swerving to Miss Optical Illusion.” But it is an interesting way to trick drivers into thinking about the ramifications of their driving habits. Right after they pull their hearts out of their throats.
Researchers Translate Thoughts into Speech, Potentially Allowing “Locked-In” Patients to Communicate
The method leaves a lot of room for improvement, but it does prove out some technology that could make thought-to-speech technology more reliable for patients suffering from traumatic brain injuries or illnesses that render them unable to communicate with others. Using two grids of 16 microelectrodes placed over two regions of the brain known to generate human speech, the team was able to record brain signals for 10 useful words – yes, no, hot, cold, thirsty, hungry, goodbye, hello, more and less – and use that data to discern between any two words a patient was thinking between 76 and 90 percent of the time.
But when they tried to distinguish between all ten words at the same time, that success rate dropped to between 28 percent and 48 percent. That’s better than chance – which would be one-in-ten or just 10 percent – but less than reasonably useful.
The electrodes used were non-penetrating, meaning they sit between the patient’s brain and skull, but do not actually poke into the brain. That means they are closer and more sensitive to specific brain waves than externally worn EEG caps, but are less invasive than penetrating electrodes. These electrodes can pick up on weak electrical signals within the brain, meaning they are more nuanced than other brain monitoring sensors and could possibly provide the technological sensitivity needed to get reliable thought-to-speech translation working.
But first the researchers will have to refine their translation techniques to raise the success rates from one-in-four to something more like three-in-four, and ideally be able to distinguish between more than just 10 words. To get to that point, the next round of tests will involve larger, 11-by-11 arrays containing 121 electrodes each. Those larger implants should yield much more brain signal data that could in turn improve translation accuracy to the point that thought-to-speech translation could become a viable clinical solution.
Cockroach Brains Could Hold the Key to Next Generation of Antibiotics
The researchers identified nine different molecules found in the insects' nervous system tissues that are toxic to bacteria but harmless to human cells. Those tissues could be used to engineer new kinds of antibiotics that are effective in treating infections that are resistant to conventional drugs.
For strains of infectious bacteria like MRSA, that could be huge. MRSA is highly-resistant to the usual battery of antibiotics used to treat bacterial infections and is particularly troublesome in hospital environments where it can take up residence and be particularly difficult to eradicate -- kind of like an infestation of cockroaches. When conventional drugs don't work, doctors have to reach deeper into their medicine bags, and some of the treatments they are forced to fall back on have very unpleasant side effects on healthy human tissue.
Considering the pharmaceutical industry is having a hard time finding novel (or profitable) ways of combating drug-resistant bacteria like MRSA, this new method could provide a cheap source of effective antimicrobial drugs. So before you go crushing that tiny little pharma factory skittering across your living room floor, think twice. Then go ahead and do it. Cockroaches are disgusting, dude.
Researchers Announce First Implantable Artificial Kidney Prototype
Led by a University of California-San Francisco scientist, a consortium of about 10 different research teams unveiled a new artificial kidney prototype this week, saying a room-sized version has already shown promise for the sickest patients. Fabrication processes used to make silicon chips could conceivably be used to make coffee-cup-sized devices, which could take thousands of people off dialysis machines or kidney-donor waiting lists.
The multi-institutional team, led by UCSF professor Shuvo Roy, formerly of the Cleveland Clinic, is the first to demonstrate technology that could be feasibly downsized into a transplant device.
It’s a two-stage system involving thousands of nanoscale filters placed in a “BioCartridge,” which would remove toxins from the blood. A "HemoCartridge" bioreactor made of engineered renal tubule cells would mimic the metabolic and water-balancing roles of a real kidney. The system uses a patient’s blood pressure to perform filtration without the use of pumps, according to a UCSF news release.
Currently, transplants and dialysis are the only ways to treat kidney failure. An implantable device would obviously be preferable, but so far, scientists have not been able to come up with a system that mimics everything the kidney can do.
The new system relies on the latest advances in nanotechnology and tissue generation, Roy said. He hopes to use silicon-fabrication technology to make the device small enough for transplant.
“This could dramatically reduce the burden of renal failure for millions of people worldwide, while also reducing one of the largest costs in U.S. healthcare,” he said.
Electrified Cotton Filter Soaked in Nanotech Cheaply and Quickly Purifies Large Volumes of Water
Most water filters simply trap living bacteria as it passes through a series of tiny pores, a method that is effective but prone to a variety of problems. For one, they are painfully slow, and in disaster situations that can lead to critical shortages as thirsty populations wait for the water to trickle through.
Further, the water must be driven through the filters with pumps, which themselves require a decent amount of electricity – a resource that can be in short supply in remote regions or at disaster sites. Such filters are also susceptible to biofouling, in which trapped bacteria form a film that clogs the pores of the filter.
The Stanford team’s filter circumvents most of these problems by simply letting the bacteria pass freely through, zapping them with fatal doses of voltage as they go. By dipping plain cotton cloth procured at Wal-Mart into a solution of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires, the team created a filter that can kill 98 percent of Escherichia coli bacteria in water with a mere 20 volts of electricity, less than is required to operate the pumps on conventional filters.
Addressing the problems with conventional filters noted above, the team knew that carbon nanotubes are efficient conductors of electricity and that silver has bacteria-killing chemical properties. So they went about figuring out how to get all these ingredients into a single, inexpensive filter (the amount of silver used is so small that it’s negligible). The cotton simply serves as an inexpensive platform on which to lay their nanotube/nanowire structure.
Plugged into a couple of 12-volt batteries or a hand cranked generator, the filter can run until the energy runs out, its larger pores letting vast volumes of water pass quickly, and cleanly, through. No pump is needed because the pores are large enough that gravity does the trick.
The next step is trying the filter on various other bacteria to see how universal the silver-carbon combo really is. One filter can kill 98 percent of the Escherichia coli in water, but a compound filter with layers of different materials might be able to push that number even closer to 100 percent for a variety of bacteria known to cause water-borne illnesses.
NIH Research Chief: Shut Down Human Embryonic Stem Cell Experiments Immediately
The move comes after an injunction barring federal funding for stem cell research
The move, reported in ScienceInsider, comes on the heels of a ruling last week that blocked the use of federal funds to study new embryonic stem cell lines. A judge said President Obama's 2009 executive order violates a federal law barring the use of federal funds to destroy embryos.
Scientists are seething over today's ruling, announced in a memo from NIH intramural research chief Michael Gottesman. According to ScienceInsider, Gottesman said: "The injunction ... is applicable to the use of human embryonic stem cells in intramural research projects. In light of this determination, effective today, intramural scientists who use human ES cell lines should initiate procedures to terminate these projects. Procedures that will conserve and protect the research resources should be followed."
So far, outside labs are unaffected -- intramural means researchers in labs on the NIH campus, while extramural refers to researchers at other institutions who receive NIH grants.
The agency has eight research projects that use human embryonic stem cells, most if not all of which use lines approved under the Bush Administration back in 2001.
Under Obama's rules, federal money could be used for research on cell lines in addition to the ones Bush greenlighted nine years ago. After the injunction, scientists were hopeful they could still use the original cell lines -- but now the future looks murky.
ScienceInsider says the Department of Justice might ask the courts to delay the injunction, which could allow experiments to continue uninterrupted.
Taking Cues From Medical Tech, Big Oil Could Use Nanoparticles to Hunt for Leftover Crude in Spent Wells
In some ideological camps, there is nothing worse than drilling for oil. But while opinions on that issue are mixed, most would likely agree that drilling into the Earth only to leave behind up to half the oil that resides down there is extremely wasteful. Yet that's often what happens when the free-flowing oil from a well is depleted; oil clinging to sediments in rock formations or stuck within porous rock structures apart from the primary reservoir goes unused because it's terribly difficult to locate and extract.
In medical science, researchers have turned to nanotech to track down elusive elements within the body and to deliver drugs to highly specific areas. Now, the oil industry is doing the same, hoping to use nanoparticles to locate and extract oil deep within exhausted wells.
One method under development at Rice University in Houston involves coating nanoparticles with hydrocarbon-philic compounds that also react with the oil. By scattering nanoparticles in water that is pumped into dying wells, engineers could then examine the particles left in the water that comes back up to determine if there are still large pockets of oil hiding in porous rock below. Another method under development at Penn State exploits the saline gradient between the fresh water pumped into wells with the briny water naturally occurring within them, using the difference in salinity to propel the particles forward into the formation where a coating on the particles make it actively seek out oil hiding in the rock.
But while these methods would help engineers figure out if there is remaining oil underfoot, it won't help them get at it. For that, researchers at the University of Kansas are working on an idea very similar to the nanocapsule drug delivery systems used in medicine. Such methods coat a drug-filled nanocapsule with a coating that only lets it release its pharmaceutical payload in the presence of, say, a cancer cell. Similar nanocapsules filled with a detergent that causes oil to break free from sediment could be used to seek out hydrocarbons and release detergents onto them right where they are hiding, releasing oil into water that can then ferry it to the surface.
None of these methods is ready for the oilfield just yet, but as the technology progresses -- not just in oil exploration labs, but also in biotech laboratories -- nanoparticles could help oil companies unlock the estimated 360 billion barrels of oil laying unused in U.S. oil wells alone without resorting to further drilling.