futureofscience

[futureofscience]

Tiny Robots Step Closer to Treating Hard-To-Reach Parts of the Body

“Tiny remotely operated robots could be designed to diagnose and treat illness in hard-to-reach areas of the human body, research suggests.

In tests, a swarm of robots measuring a few millionths of a meter long—about the size of a blood cell—were guided magnetically to sites in the stomachs of rats.

The robots were manufactured by coating tiny algae with magnetic particles.

They could be tracked in tissue close to the skin's surface by imaging the algae's natural luminescence, and in hard-to-reach deeper tissue by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Scientists suggest their findings could lead to a way to deliver drugs to parts of the body that are otherwise difficult to treat.“

[futureofscience]

"Researchers led by a team at Harvard University have developed a tiny, 175-milligram (about two feathers) device with insect-inspired wings that can both flap and rotate, allowing it to either fly above the ground or swim in shallow waters and easily transition between the two. Researchers think it will one day be used for environmental monitoring studies, according to Science magazine, which dubbed the device the “robo-bee.”"

[futureofscience]

These Shoes Help Clean Lakes–Because They’re Made Of Polluting Algae

“After a massive explosion of algae growth in China’s Lake Taihu a decade ago left more than two million people in the area temporarily without safe drinking water, the government started spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to try to solve the algae problem. One part of the solution: working with a company that harvests algae from the lake before it grows out of control, and turns it into a flexible, rubbery material that is now being made into shoes.

Vivobarefoot’s water-resistant Ultra III shoes are usually made from a petroleum-based version of the same material, ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA). But a version that will launch in July is made from a blend of algae and EVA, instead. To get enough algae to make one pair means cleaning 57 gallons of water, which are then returned to the lake.”

[futureofscience]

Exploding Sea Cucumber Butt Threads Are a New Material

“The threads that sea cucumbers use to trap their enemies are called Cuvierian tubules. Inside the bodies of certain species, the waiting tubules float like limp noodles. When threatened, a sea cucumber contracts its body, tears a hole in an interior wall, and shoots a few of these noodles out its anus. The threads immediately stretch when they hit seawater, growing up to 20 times their original length before stiffening. They also become sticky when they reach a surface. Ideally, that surface is what Patrick Flammang and his coauthors describe as an “imprudent predator.”

Flammang, a marine biologist at the University of Mons in Belgium, and his colleagues studied Holothuria forskali sea cucumbers that scuba divers had scooped up off the coast of France. The researchers gathered Cuvierian tubules by pinching the sea cucumbers on the back and catching the tubules in a bucket of seawater. 

Some of the cells they spotted inside the tubules looked familiar: they were similar to cells that other sea creatures have in a material called mutable collagenous tissue (MCT). This tissue is common in echinoderms, the group of animals that includes starfish, sea urchins and sea cucumbers.

But the researchers didn’t expect to see an MCT here, Flammang says, because in other species these tissues behave differently. Some MCTs quickly switch back and forth between being squishy and stiff, which helps an animal crawl across the seafloor. Others turn just once from stiff to squishy, letting an animal like a starfish lop off one of its own arms to escape a predator. But the sea cucumber tubules do the opposite: they go from floppy to tough and never go back.

The shape-shifting tissues of echinoderms are already inspiring the design of “smart,” adaptive materials, Flammang says. Engineers can use a sea cucumber’s technology to create new substances that change form when we need them to.”

[futureofscience]

Robotic cheetah moves almost as efficiently as the real thing

“The fastest land animal on Earth, the cheetah, has inspired a number of swift-footed robots. The latest has cropped up at the University of Twente, where doctoral candidate Geert Folkertsma has spent four years developing a scale robotic cheetah that is not only capable of replicating many of the real animal's movements, but in doing so uses only 15 percent more energy than the real thing.

According to Folkertsma, the design of his 30 cm (1 ft)-long robot is based on an extensive study of cheetah videos and digital analysis of their movement. The purpose of this was to produce a robot that is a simulation of the cheetah's skeleton, models, and joints. However, the finished product was not a precise reproduction, but only an approximation that can move like a real cheetah in many ways, but isn't capable of, for example, climbing trees, and uses a simple, lightweight spring mechanism instead of a mechanical paw for greater efficiency.”

[futureofscience]

Spinach Leaf Transformed Into Beating Human Heart Tissue

“Scientists have found a way to use spinach to build working human heart muscle, potentially solving a long-standing problem in efforts to repair damaged organs.

Their study, published this month by the journal Biomaterials, offers a new way to grow a vascular system, which has been a roadblock for tissue engineering.

Scientists have already created large-scale human tissue in a lab using methods like 3D printing, but it’s been much harder to grow the small, delicate blood vessels that are vital to tissue health.

“The main limiting factor for tissue engineering … is the lack of a vascular network,” says study co-author Joshua Gershlak, a graduate student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in Massachusetts, in a video describing the study. “Without that vascular network, you get a lot of tissue death.”

One of the defining traits of a leaf is the branching network of thin veins that delivers water and nutrients to its cells. Now, scientists have used plant veins to replicate the way blood moves through human tissue. The work involves modifying a spinach leaf in the lab to remove its plant cells, which leaves behind a frame made of cellulose.”

[futureofscience]

Neutrinos are tiny particles spit out by supernovas that were rumored to travel faster than light. Even though we still don't have FTL spaceships (sigh), I share with you why neutrinos are still freaking amazing.

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[futureofscience]

A New Form of Stem-Cell Engineering Raises Ethical Questions

“In a report published Tuesday in the journal eLife, researchers at Harvard Medical School said it was time to ponder a startling new prospect: synthetic embryos.

In recent years, scientists have moved beyond in vitro fertilization. They are starting to assemble stem cells that can organize themselves into embryolike structures.Soon, experts predict, they will learn how to engineer these cells into new kinds of tissues and organs. Eventually, they may take on features of a mature human being.In the report, John D. Aach and his colleagues explored the ethics of creating what they call “synthetic human entities with embryolike features” — Sheefs, for short. For now, the most advanced Sheefs are very simple assemblies of cells

But in the future, they may develop into far more complex forms, the researchers said, such as a beating human heart connected to a rudimentary brain, all created from stem cells. Such a Sheef might reveal important clues about how nerves control heartbeats. Scientists might be able to use other Sheefs to test out drugs for diseases such as cancer or diabetes.”

[futureofscience]

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Millions and billions of years ago, Earth may have looked more like the icy moons of Europa or Enceladus than the blue-green planet we know today! Earth underwent three "Snowball Earth" periods in its history, and yet life somehow managed to survive. This has exciting implications for thinking about how we may find alien life in the future.

[futureofscience]

"Two University of Oxford biomedical researchers are calling for robots to be built with real human tissue, and they say the technology is there if we only choose to develop it. Writing in Science Robotics, Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy and Andrew Carr argue that humanoid robots could be the exact tool we need to create muscle and tendon grafts that actually work. Right now, tissue engineering relies on bioreactors to grow sheets of cells. These machines often look like large fish tanks, filled with a rich soup of nutrients and chemicals that cells need to grow on a specialized trellis. The problem, explain Mouthuy and Carr, is that bioreactors currently "fail to mimic the real mechanical environment for cells." In other words, human cells in muscles and tendons grow while being stretched and moved around on our skeletons. Without experiencing these natural stresses, the tissue grafts produced by researchers often have a broad range of structural problems and low cell counts. That's where robots come in. The researchers propose a "humanoid-bioreactor system" with "structures, dimensions, and mechanics similar to those of the human body." As the robot interacted with its environment, tissues growing on its body would receive the typical strains and twists that they would if they grew on an actual human. The result would be healthy tissue, grown for the exact area on the body it was destined to replace. Mouthuy and Carr note that this would be especially helpful for "bone-tendon-muscle grafts... because failure during healing often occurs at the interface between tissues.""

[futureofscience]

SpaceX Plans to Send 2 Tourists Around Moon in 2018

“While the trip appears to be within the technical capabilities of SpaceX, industry observers wondered whether the company could pull it off as quickly as Mr. Musk indicated. “Dates are not SpaceX’s strong suit,” said Mary Lynne Dittmar, executive director of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration. The Dragon 2 and Falcon Heavy are years behind schedule and have yet to fly.“It strikes me as risky,” Dr. Dittmar said, adding that autonomous systems are not infallible. “I find it extraordinary that these sorts of announcements are being made when SpaceX has yet to get crew from the ground to low-Earth orbit.””

[futureofscience]

“Ocado says its robot arm was particularly difficult to design because fruit and vegetables vary in shape and size. They also damage easily. So in response to these issues, the team chose to go with a gripper called the RBO Hand 2, which relies on pressurized air and rubber. It adjusts its grip, thereby keeping fruit intact.”

[futureofscience]

This Technology Could Finally Make Brain Implants Practical

“In labs testing how brain implants could help people with physical disabilities, tales of success can be bittersweet.

Experiments like those that let a paralyzed person swig coffee using a robotic arm, or that let blind people “see” spots of light, have proven the huge potential of computers that interface with the brain. But the implanted electrodes used in such trials eventually become useless, as scar tissue forms that degrades their electrical connection to brain cells (see “The Thought Experiment”).

Next month, tests will begin in monkeys of a new implant for piping data into the brain that is designed to avoid that problem. The project is intended to lead to devices that can restore vision to blind people long-term.

Researchers at Harvard Medical School will use a new kind of implant that will go beneath the skull but can rest on the surface of an animal’s brain, instead of penetrating inside the organ. An array of microscopic coils inside the hair-like device can generate powerful, highly targeted magnetic fields to induce electrical activity at particular locations in the brain tissue underneath. The implant will also be tested when placed inside brain tissue. The device will be used to stimulate the visual cortex of the monkeys to try and re-create the activity normally triggered by signals from the eyes—creating the sensation of sight without the eyes’ input. Ultimately, the goal is to use the implant to convert signals from a camera into brain activity. Unlike conventional electrodes, the coils' effectiveness shouldn't degrade over time. Magnetic fields aren't impeded by tissue forming around an implant as electric currents are.”

[futureofscience]

“In the film, the scientists discover that the circles typically represent a full statement, but the statement can be broken up into words. The protagonists eventually create an index of these inky words, so they can write messages to the aliens. In reality, Vermette said he and Villeneuve had their own index of about 100 alien words made in the style that Bertrand designed. As the project moved forward, the pair consulted with real-world linguists and archaeologists to help refine the design. 

Seth Shostak, a scientist at the SETI Institute (SETI stands for search for extraterrestrial intelligence), said some scientists have thought about how humans might translate alien languages. Linguists have shown that there are many redundancies in human languages, which is part of how we are able to comprehend spoken languages at all, Shostak said. For example, studies have shown that if all the vowels are removed from a written document, a person (who has never seen the document in its complete form) can still read most of the words. 

"It turns out there's a mathematical law for the redundancy of any language," Shostak said. "And you can apply that to the sounds made by dolphins or even other critters, like ants. And they follow this same mathematical law. So that suggests that it's not just noise [the animals are making], there's actually a language there. So I think that if you picked up a signal coming from aliens, you'd do the same thing."”

[futureofscience]

Could We Find Alien Life on Saturn's Moon Enceladus? Saturn's icy moon, Enceladus, is one of the most beautiful moons in our solar system, and it may also be the best place to discover extraterrestrial life!

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[futureofscience]

Why NASA Wants to Send a Submarine to Titan

“Saturn's largest moon, Titan, boasts a thick atmosphere, complex weather cycle, and seas shaped by waves and tidal currents — much like Earth.

But you wouldn't recognize it. That thick atmosphere is a dense layer of orange smog that swaddles the moon. The weather cycle causes rain to only downpour once every several hundred years. And those seas are full of liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane.

The paradox — plus Titan's potential to sustain exotic life — has encouraged scientists to dream of better probing the moon. Although NASA's Cassini spacecraft has flown past it several times since 2004 — and even dropped the Huygens probe onto Titan's surface in January 2005 — scientists are still eager to get their feet wet.

The latest idea is to send a submarine to explore Titan's alien seas. The mission study, with funding from NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC), an initiative for projects by scientists who think outside the box, is in its infancy.

"We do these really advanced almost-science-fiction — but never actually-science-fiction — studies that are meant to show what might be possible in the future," says NIAC's Program Executive Jason Derleth.

A Titan sub fits that bill perfectly.

A World Similar and Yet Utterly Bizarre From Europa's subsurface liquid ocean to Enceladus's plumes of liquid water that shoot above the icy moon's south pole, the outer solar system is rich with moons begging to be explored. But Titan is too unique to pass up.

"It's just such a strange and fascinating system," says Jason Goodman, an astronomer at Wheaton College, who is not directly involved in the NIAC study. "A lot of our ideas about geography and oceanography kind of get turned on their head when we start thinking about materials other than water."”

[futureofscience]

3D Printing Human Skin

“A team of researchers has demonstrated, for the first time, that it is possible to produce functional human skin with 3D printing technology. José Luis Jorcano, professor in the department of Bioengineering and Aerospace Engineering at Carlos III University of Madrid, has stated that this skin "can be transplanted to patients or used in business settings to test chemical products, cosmetics or pharmaceutical products in quantities and with timetables and prices that are compatible with these uses.

"This new human skin is one of the first living human organs created using bioprinting to be introduced to the marketplace. It replicates the natural structure of skin, with a first external layer, the epidermis, with its stratum corneum, which acts as protection against the external environment, together with another thicker, deeper layer, the dermis. This last layer consists of fibroblasts that produce collagen, the protein that gives skin its elasticity and mechanical strength.You can read the published research here.”