Lifeboat Foundation

Nice.

Indian scientists have designed high precision DNA probes for breast cancer detection, which they claim can bring down costs of diagnostics ten-fold.

Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology — Guwahati relied on ‘magic bullets’ of science, a class of molecules called aptamers, that can bind to virtually any molecule, clasping it in a firm lock-and-key fit.

Continue reading “Indian scientists design ‘magic’ DNA for low cost breast cancer detection” »

Dear men, beware! Prolonged exposure to work-related stress may increase likelihood of cancer. The findings indicate that the link was observed in men, who had been exposed to 15 to 30 years of work-related stress and in some cases, more than 30 years. According to the study published in journal of Preventive Medicine, prolonged exposure of men to work-related stress has been linked to an increased likelihood of lung, colon, rectal and stomach cancer and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Researchers at INRS and Université de Montréal in Canada conducted the study to assess the link between cancer and work-related stress perceived by men throughout their working life. On average, the study participants had held four jobs, with some holding up to a dozen or more during their working lifetime. A link between work-related stress and cancer was not found in participants who had held stressful jobs for less than 15 years. Significant links to five of the eleven cancers considered in the study were revealed.

The most stressful jobs included firefighter, industrial engineer, aerospace engineer, mechanic foreman, and vehicle and railway-equipment repair worker and for the same individual, stress varied depending on the job held. The study also shows that perceived stress is not limited to high work load and time constraints. ‘One of the biggest flaws in previous cancer studies is that none of them assessed work-related stress over a full working lifetime, making it impossible to determine how the duration of exposure to work-related stress affects cancer development,’ the authors explained. ‘Our study shows the importance of measuring stress at different points in an individual’s working life,’ the authors noted.

Interesting write up by Stanford on Astrocytes and neurodegenerative diseases. One area that I will be interested in finding research is any ties to Dystonia as Astrocytes own impact to the central nervous system.

Judging from the very terms used to designate brain research — neuroscience, neuro logy, neuro biology — you might figure nerve cells (or neurons, as brain scientists like to call them) are the only cells in the brain worth knowing about or, indeed, the only cells resident in that organ.

Not true. In fact, neurons account for a measly 10 percent of the cells in a healthy human brain. And over the past 25 years Stanford brain scientist Ben Barres, MD, PhD, has arguably done as much as any human on earth to advance the status of the 90 percent of cells in the brain that aren’t neurons. Among those are a particularly interesting group called astrocytes because of their star-shaped appearance, and they were the focus of a just-published study by Barres’ group.

Continue reading “Jekyll & Hyde Tale Unfolding Within The Human Brain May Explain Neurodegenerative Disease” »

The emerging discipline of synthetic biology sits at the crux of the intersection between design, biology, computing and manufacturing…[I]t appears more and more probable that we are on the cusp of a paradigm shift, where…biology is adopted as the next big manufacturing technology.

[The objective of Ginkgo Bioworks, an “organism design” company,] is to take synthetic biology techniques to an industrial level, machine-injecting DNA sequences into baker’s yeast creating “living organism” products like perfumes, sweeteners, cosmetics and other things that are typically extracted from plants.

There are two main potential benefits from the technology. Replacing consumption of finite natural resources with lab-grown alternatives, and the potential to replicate actual genes to produce authentic fragrances replacing chemical synthetic scented products that currently dominate the marketplace.

Continue reading “Manufacturing could be revolutionized by synthetic biology” »

After making significant progress in understanding algae genetics, growth characteristics and increasing oil production, Synthetic Genomics, Inc. and ExxonMobil said they would extended their joint research agreement into advanced algae biofuels.

The two companies have been researching and developing oil from algae for use as a renewable, lower-emission alternative to traditional transportation fuels since 2009. They are seeking to develop strains of algae that demonstrate significantly improved photosynthetic efficiency and oil production through selection and genetic engineering of higher-performance algae strains.

Nice; ReRam with multi-state processing and reliable storage.

Short of full blown molecular computers or universal quantum computers or optical computers memristors have the most potential for a hardware change to dramatically boost the power and capabilities of computers. The boost to computer power could be nearly a million times by fully leveraging memristors. It would likely be more like a thousand times with more near to mid term usage of memristors.

Memristors (aka ReRAM) could become computer memory that is over 10 times denser than Flash or DRAM in two dimensions. Memristors like flash would be nonvolatile memory that would not need power for retain memory. Memristors are created from nanowire lattices which could be stacked in three dimensions. Memristors have also previously been shown to behave like brain synapses which could be used for computer architectures that emulate the human brain for neuromorphic computing. Now there is work on multistate memristors that perform computation. This means that eventually processing and memory could be tightly integrated.

Continue reading “Memristor can do multistate processing as well as nonvolatile memory” »

Solar cells convert light into electricity. While the sun is one source of light, the burning of natural resources like oil and natural gas can also be harnessed.

However, solar cells do not convert all light to power equally, which has inspired a joint industry-academia effort to develop a potentially game-changing solution.

“Current solar cells are not good at converting visible light to electrical power. The best efficiency is only around 20%,” explains Kyoto University’s Takashi Asano, who uses optical technologies to improve energy production.

Cracks sank the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic; decrease the performance of touchscreens and erode teeth. We are familiar with cracks in big or small three-dimensional (3D) objects, but how do thin two-dimensional (2D) materials crack? 2D materials, like molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), have emerged as an important asset for future electronic and photoelectric devices.

However, the mechanical properties of 2D materials are expected to differ greatly from 3D materials.

Scientists at the Center for Integrated Nanostructure Physics (CINAP), within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) published, on Nature Communications (“Dynamical observations on the crack tip zone and stress corrosion of two-dimensional MoS2”), the first observation of 2D MoS2 cracking at the atomic level. This study is expected to contribute to the applications of new 2D materials.

Scientists have now made metamaterials scalable in their purpose and usage.

Metamaterials — materials whose function is determined by structure, not composition — have been designed to bend light and sound, transform from soft to stiff, and even dampen seismic waves from earthquakes. But each of these functions requires a unique mechanical structure, making these materials great for specific tasks, but difficult to implement broadly.

But what if a material could contain within its structure, multiple functions and easily and autonomously switch between them?

Continue reading “A toolkit for transformable materials” »