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Feb 18, 2018
Stem Cell Based Stroke Treatment Repairs Brain Tissue
Posted by Ian Hale in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience
Summary: A new treatment that uses extracellular vesicles filled with exosomes derived from human stem cells could help repair brain damage following stroke, researchers report.
Source: University of Georgia.
A team of researchers at the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center and ArunA Biomedical, a UGA startup company, have developed a new treatment for stroke that reduces brain damage and accelerates the brain’s natural healing tendencies in animal models. They published their findings in the journal Translational Stroke Research.
Feb 18, 2018
Artificial muscles power up with new gel-based robotics
Posted by Ian Hale in categories: cyborgs, life extension, robotics/AI, wearables
A collaborative research team has designed a wearable robot to support a person’s hip joint while walking. The team, led by Minoru Hashimoto, a professor of textile science and technology at Shinshu University in Japan, published the details of their prototype in Smart Materials and Structures, a journal published by the Institute of Physics.
“With a rapidly aging society, an increasing number of elderly people require care after suffering from stroke, and other-age related disabilities. Various technologies, devices, and robots are emerging to aid caretakers,” wrote Hashimoto, noting that several technologies meant to assist a person with walking are often cumbersome to the user. “[In our] current study, [we] sought to develop a lightweight, soft, wearable assist wear for supporting activities of daily life for older people with weakened muscles and those with mobility issues.”
The wearable system consists of plasticized polyvinyl chloride (PVC) gel, mesh electrodes, and applied voltage. The mesh electrodes sandwich the gel, and when voltage is applied, the gel flexes and contracts, like a muscle. It’s a wearable actuator, the mechanism that causes movement.
Feb 17, 2018
3D printing construction
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: 3D printing, habitats
Feb 17, 2018
Physicists create new form of light
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: computing, quantum physics
MIT and Harvard physicists have created a new form of light that could enable quantum computing with photons.
Feb 17, 2018
Devon has been chosen to experience Europe’s first 360-degree immersive cinema
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: entertainment
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Feb 17, 2018
Boosting Bone Healing Using a Key Protein
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in category: genetics
Today, we would like to highlight a recent study in which researchers show a way to selectively accelerate bone regeneration. They have achieved this by delivering Jagged-1 to injuries instead of the bone morphogenetic proteins (BMPs) that have been traditionally used.
What is jagged-1?
Jagged-1 is an osteoinductive protein that activates the Notch signaling pathway, which regulates bone healing at the site of injury. Osteoinduction is the process by which osteogenesis is induced.
Feb 17, 2018
Physicists develop faster way to make Bose-Einstein condensates
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: particle physics, quantum physics
The world of an atom is one of random chaos and heat. At room temperatures, a cloud of atoms is a frenzied mess, with atoms zipping past each other and colliding, constantly changing their direction and speed.
Such random motions can be slowed, and even stopped entirely, by drastically cooling the atoms. At a hair above absolute zero, previously frenetic atoms morph into an almost zombie-like state, moving as one wave-like formation, in a quantum form of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate.
Since the first Bose-Einstein condensates were successfully produced in 1995 by researchers in Colorado and by Wolfgang Ketterle and colleagues at MIT, scientists have been observing their strange quantum properties in order to gain insight into a number of phenomena, including magnetism and superconductivity. But cooling atoms into condensates is slow and inefficient, and more than 99 percent of the atoms in the original cloud are lost in the process.
Continue reading “Physicists develop faster way to make Bose-Einstein condensates” »
Feb 17, 2018
This New Graphene Invention Makes Filthy Seawater Drinkable in One Simple Step
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: innovation, materials
Using a type of graphene called Graphair, scientists from Australia have created a water filter that can make highly polluted seawater drinkable after just one pass.
The technology could be used to cheaply provide safe drinking water to regions of the world without access to it.
“Almost a third of the world’s population, some 2.1 billion people, don’t have clean and safe drinking water,” said lead author Dong Han Seo.
Continue reading “This New Graphene Invention Makes Filthy Seawater Drinkable in One Simple Step” »
Feb 17, 2018
How China’s Massive AI Plan Actually Works
Posted by Shailesh Prasad in categories: engineering, government, military, robotics/AI
When the Chinese government released its Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Plan in July 2017, it crisply articulated the country’s ambition: to become the “world’s primary AI innovation center” by 2030. That headline goal turned heads within the global tech elite. Longtime Google CEO Eric Schmidt cited the plan as proof that China threatened to overtake the United States in AI. High-ranking American military leaders and AI entrepreneurs held it up as evidence that the United States was falling behind in the “space race” of this century. In December 2017, China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology followed up with a “three-year action plan,” a translation of which was recently released by New America’s DigiChina initiative.
But how do these plans actually work? There’s a tendency to place this AI mobilization within China’s longstanding tradition of centrally planned engineering achievements that have wowed the world. The rapid build-out of the country’s bullet train network stands as a monument to the power of combining central planning and deep pockets: in the span of a decade, the Chinese central government spent around $360 billion building 13,670 miles of high-speed rail (HSR) track, more mileage than the rest of the world combined.
But putting the AI plan in this tradition can be misleading. While it follows this model in form (ambitious goal set by the central government), it differs in function (what will actually drive the transformation). The HSR network was dreamed up and drawn up by central government officials, and largely executed by state-owned enterprises. In AI, the real energy is and will be with private technology companies, and to a lesser extent academia.