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| The Water Shelter, designed by Robert Nightingale Studio, incorporates a water-collection system with protection from the elements, and is designed to be air-dropped into disaster zones In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, aid workers are stymied by overwhelming obstacles: lack of fuel for relief vehicles, near-total absence of food, water and shelter, and social chaos on an apocalyptic scale. The tropical cyclone packed sustained winds of up 190 mph (305 km/h) in the hours before it made landfall, according to some estimates. It will likely go down as one of the five strongest storms in the last 50 years. The death toll for the storm is expected to exceed 2,000 people, according to NBC News While technology can't prevent storms like Haiyan, there are some clever devices that could alleviate the suffering of survivors and provide lifesaving access to clean drinking water and hot food. Solar lamps: In regions that Haiyan left in total darkness, cheap solar lamps could provide light to residents and aid workers. There are dozens of styles, but all work roughly the same way: After absorbing solar radiation during the day, the (usually LED) lamps are switched on at night to illuminate a student's desk, a mother's kitchen or a craftsman's workbench for several hours. The German Solar Energy Foundation (Stiftung Solarenergie) has launched a program to provide solar lamps to Tacloban, Ormoc and other hard-hit areas of the Philippines. Watts of Love, a Chicago-based nonprofit organization, is committed to sending 10,000 solar lamps to the Philippines by Christmas. Some solar lamps also have USB ports to recharge a cellphone. The lights are also a safer and more environmentally friendly alternative to kerosene lamps (by some estimates, kerosene lamps produce about 190 million tons of greenhouse gases each year) Water purifiers: Though people can live for several days without solid food, drinking water is a daily necessity. In areas without safe water, water filtration becomes critical. There are two widely used emergency methods of turning contaminated water into potable drinking water: water-filtration devices and water purification tablets or drops. Tablets and drops generally contain iodine, sodium dichloroisocyanurate (NaDCC) or another germicide. There are a wide range of water-filtration devices, from refrigerator-size units to small, handheld pumps. LifeStraw, a simple, suction-based water filter that was named one of Time magazine's "Best Inventions of the Year" in 2005, is co-sponsoring a "One-for-One" program with Eartheasy.com: By purchasing one LifeStraw, one is donated to survivors of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Radios: Getting information about evacuation, relief and other basics can be tricky when there's no power. A radio is useful — but not if the batteries die after a few hours. There are several manufacturers of radios that operate on an alternate power source: Many use a hand crank for emergency power, others use solar panels and a handful have both. Some, like the Eton Scorpion, also charge a cellphone through a USB port, access NOAA weather stations and incorporate an LED flashlight. Solar ovens: Though not inexpensive — the cheapest models start at $50 — solar ovens have proven to be beneficial even in nonemergency situations in areas where firewood, fossil fuels and other sources of energy are hard to come by. Some inexpensive solar ovens function more like solar slow-cookers, failing to reach temperatures above 250 degrees Fahrenheit (121 degrees Celsius). Others, like parabolic-mirror cookers that focus the sun's rays on a small point, can boil water in a few minutes and bake a pie in less than half an hour. Solar ovens can also sterilize medical equipment, heat water for bathing and dehydrate fruits, vegetables and meats. Shelter: A number of inventors have devised emergency shelters for flood-ravaged areas. Some, however, stand out for their ingenuity and functionality: The Water Shelter by Robert Nightingale Studio is designed to be airdropped (it opens like an umbrella while drifting down), can be linked together to create a larger dwelling and incorporates a water-collection system. Habitat for Humanity has developed emergency shelter kits that contain essential tools and equipment for repairing and cleaning shelters — buckets, shovels, torches, hammers and other supplies. The organization plans to distribute these kits to 50,000 Filipino families over the next few weeks |
Friday, 22 November 2013
An ambitious 3D-printed heart project aims to make a natural organ replacement for patients possible within a decade. But the researcher heading the "moonshot" effort also believes 3D-printing technology must harness the self-organizing power of biology to get the job done
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The idea of a 3D-printed heart grown from a patient's own fat stem cells comes from Stuart Williams, executive and scientific director of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute in Louisville, Ky. His lab has already begun developing the next generation of custom-built 3D printers aimed at printing out a complete heart with all its parts — heart muscle, blood vessels, heart valves and electrical tissue.
"We can print individual components of the heart, but we're building next-generation printers to build the heart from the bottom up," Williams said
The heart represents one of the most ambitious goals for researchers working to create 3D-printed organs within the field of regenerative medicine. The ability of 3D printing to build human tissue by laying down living cells layer by layer has already allowed researchers to create small chunks of organs such as livers and kidneys — often by using stem cells extracted from fat or bone marrow as the source material
Williams and the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute have started out by first using 3D printing to create individual parts of what they have deemed the "bioficial" heart. That piecemeal approach could eventually allow researchers to print and piece together a fully functional heart within a week.
"I took a step back and looked at my colleagues, and said, 'Why don’t we build it like a large airplane?'" Williams. "Separate the organ into separate components, figure out the best way to make the components, and then put them together."
But building full-size organs also requires researchers to print human tissue in a way that includes the intricate networks of tiny blood vessels that keep the organs healthy. Williams envisions 3D printing as an ideal way to make smaller blood vessels — he and his colleagues have already built large blood vessels for transplant use in surgeries using methods other than 3D printing.
Still, 3D printers can only do so much bioengineering when working at the tiniest scales. The best printers may only print structures with the size of millimeters, whereas the smallest blood vessels can have a width of just a few microns, Williams explained, where 1 millimeter is equal to 1,000 microns.
That's why 3D printing may only get researchers partway toward the goal of creating a complete heart. Instead, researchers will have to rely upon the natural self-organizing tendency of cells to knit together blood vessels and eventually connect everything within a 3D-printed organ — a process that could take place within 24 hours.
"We will be printing things in the order of tens of microns or more like hundreds of microns, and then cells will undergo their biological developmental response in order to self-organize correctly," Williams said.
Most researchers don't expect full-size, 3D-printed organs to become reality anytime within the next 10 or even 15 years, but the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute continues to forge ahead with its goal of building a 3D-printed heart within a decade. Williams expects the next generation of "bioprinters" to begin rolling out in December
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| A group at the German Fraunhofer Institute has created blood vessels, by printing artificial biological molecules with a 3D inkjet printer and zapping them into shape with a laser |
Dying patients could someday receive a 3D-printed organ made from their own cells rather than wait on long lists for the short supply of organ transplants. Such a futuristic dream remains far from reality, but university labs and private companies have already taken the first careful steps by using 3D-printing technology to build tiny chunks of organs.
Regenerative medicine has already implanted lab-grown skin, tracheas and bladders into patients — body parts grown slowly through a combination of artificial scaffolds and living human cells. By comparison, 3D-printing technology offers both greater speed and computer-guided precision in printing living cells layer by layer to make replacement skin, body parts and perhaps eventually organs such as hearts, livers and kidneys.
"Bioprinting organs for human uses won't happen anytime soon," said Tony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. "But for tissues we've already implanted in patients — structures we've made by hand — we're now going back to those tissues and saying 'We know we can do better with 3D printing.'"
From skin to hearts
The difficulty of building organs with 3D printing falls into about four levels of complexity, Atala said. Flat structures with mostly one type of cell, such as human skin, represent the easiest organs to make. Second, tubular structures with two major cell types, such as blood vessels, pose a greater challenge
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| Hyun-Wook Kang oversees the 3D printer that will be used to print miniature organs for the "body on a chip" system |
A third level of complexity arises in hollow organs such as the stomach or bladder, each with more complicated functions and interactions with other organs. Finally, the fourth level of complexity includes organs such as the heart, liver and kidneys — the ultimate goal for bioprinting pioneers.
"With bioprinting, we're approaching it the same way we did with other organs," Atala told LiveScience. "We're going after flat structures first like skin, tubular structures like blood vessels next, and then hollow, nontubular organs like bladders."
Regenerative medicine has already proven it can implant lab-grown versions of the first three types of organs into patients. Atala and other researchers hope that 3D printing's efficiency can scale up the manufacturing of such organs for widespread use, as well as help make hearts, livers and kidneys suitable for implanting in patients.
How to print an organ
Atala's group previously built lab-grown organs by creating artificial scaffolds in the shape of the desired organ and seeding the scaffold with living cells. They used the technique to grow artificial bladders first implanted in patients in 1999, but spent the last decade building 3D printers that can print both an artificial scaffold and living cells at the same time — a process that involves liquid "glue," which hardens into the consistency of gummy candy as it dries out.
Other labs think they can bypass the artificial scaffolds by harnessing living cells' tendencies to self-organize. That avoids the challenge of choosing scaffold material that can eventually dissolve without affecting the living cells, but leaves the initial structure of living cells in a delicate position without the supporting scaffold.
"If you do what we do with putting cells in the right place, you don't start with anything structural to hold things up," said Keith Murphy, chairman and CEO of Organovo, a startup San Diego-based company. "For us, the challenge is the strength and integrity of the structure."
Organovo scientists have experimented with building tiny slices of livers by first creating "building blocks" with the necessary cells. The company's 3D printers can then situate the building blocks in layers that allow the living cells to start growing together.
Stem cells taken from a patient's fat or bone marrow can provide the 3D-printing material for making an organ that the body won't reject, Murphy said. His company worked with Stuart Williams, executive and scientific director of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute in Louisville, Ky., on extracting the stem cells from fat.
The tiniest challenges
The ability to print full-size functioning organs depends on figuring out how to seed 3D-printed organs with both large and small blood vessels that can supply nutrient-rich blood to keep living tissue healthy. So far, no lab has succeeded in 3D-printing organs with the network of blood vessels necessary to sustain them
Organovo has begun working toward that goal by experimenting with 3D-printing blood vessels 1 millimeter or larger in width. The company has also built tissues containing tiny blood vessels about 50 microns or smaller (1 millimeter is equal to 1,000 microns) — enough to sustain a millimeter-thick chunk of organ.
Even the best 3D printers remain limited when working on the tiniest scales of building blood vessels and organs. But Williams, head of the Cardiovascular Innovation Institute's effort to create a 3D-printed heart, agreed with Organovo that the solution involves harnessing the self-organization tendencies of living cells.
"We will be printing things on the order of tens of microns, or more like hundreds of microns, and then cells will undergo their biological developmental response in order to self-organize correctly," Williams said. "Printing is only going to take us partway."
Beyond organ implants
For now, bio printing pioneers hope to make use of even the smallest 3D-printed organs. Atala's lab recently received U.S. Department of Defense funding for a collaborative project aimed at printing tiny hearts, livers and kidneys to form a connected "body on a chip" — ideal for testing possible drugs and the effects of diseases or chemical warfare agents on the human body.
Organovo has already started developing a 3D-printed liver model for testing the safety and efficacy of drugs. The startup company is also creating cancerous versions of living tissue models for testing cancer drugs.
The bioprinting revolution could eventually begin to deliver "tissue on demand" within the next 10 or 15 years, Murphy said. That may not fulfill the wildest of organ implantation dreams, but for many patients, it may prove life-changing enough.
"You'll see a heart muscle patch, a blood vessel for bypass or a nerve graft to bridge a gap in a nerve," Murphy said.
Quantum mechanics has been hailed as the next big thing in technology. And quantum computers are a media favourite. But there is a little-known quantum technology that can peer beneath the earth, which could be ready before the quantum computing revolution comes about.
These technologies makes use of the counter-intuitive consequences of quantum mechanics – the principal theory explaining our world on a microscopic scale. One of these consequences is that a single object can be in several different places (or in several different “states”) at the same time. In the quantum world, strange as it may seem, a person could pass a tree simultaneously on the right and the left side, or be wearing business clothes and beach attire simultaneously.
The difficulty in realising quantum technologies and why quantum computers are not yet commercially available lies in another peculiar feature – “it only works if no one looks”. Our everyday experience is of large objects that can be easily observed, forcing them to a well-defined state and position. At the microscopic objects, such as atoms and photons, observation becomes more difficult and quantum mechanics takes over.
Such technology relies on meticulous shielding of quantum particles inside from any possible observation. Quantum communication makes a virtue of this challenge – any eavesdropper observing information encoded in quantum particles will force these particles to give up any superposition and choose a specific state – a change which can be detected at the other end of the line. Thus the in principle absolutely secure quantum communication systems are currently the only reliable quantum technology in the market, which find use in the finance sector.
Four million holes are dug in UK roads every year. But only a third of the time do the diggers know what infrastructure may be buried under the road. This makes the task much slower because of the care needed. The result is more traffic troubles. Soon, quantum “gravimeters” will revolutionise this business.
Gravity appears to be the same anywhere on Earth. But a sensitive quantum gravity sensor can pick up variations, by letting single atoms explore different paths in the gravitational field of the Earth. From those differences one can infer what lies beneath the Earth’s surface. The precision of this method is so great that laboratory prototypes can detect a nearby person by their gravity field.
In principle one can infer the value of gravity using a ruler to record the position of the falling apple over time. For the quantum sensor the ruler is replaced by a laser beam and the apple by a cloud of atoms.
The process is a little more complicated, of course. First the 1997 Nobel prize-winning technology of laser cooling has to be brought on stage. It is used to collect the atoms inside a vacuum chamber and bring them close to a standstill, such they can be observed the drop without any disturbance. Then three laser pulses are used to invoke the “quantum magic” and send each of the atoms along two simultaneous but different paths in the gravity field, which recombine at the end. Only at this point one is allowed to look at the state of the atoms, which encodes the value of gravity.
Currently all this technology can be packaged into the size of a large backpack for a six-figure price tag, making it suitable for high-value applications such as oil and mineral exploration. However, soon sizes and prices will shrink by orders of magnitude, moving the applications into the roadworks and possibly even private use domain.
Quantum gravity sensors will be the first in this new industrial revolution, with remarkably diverse applications. Helping determine the spatial extent of aquifers that have run dry or or the equivalent processes in oil and gas recovery. It can also help climate change science (snow cover of mountains and magnitude of ocean currents) and archaeology (“seeing” without digging).
Neelie Kroes, vice president of the European Union (EU), called these sensors the “coolest thing” at the 2013 EU Information and Communication Technologies meeting this week in Vilnius. This area, which brings together the oldest part of physics, gravity, with one of the most recent, ultra-cold quantum atomic gases, shows the capacity of scientific research driven by curiosity to have large and unexpected dividends.
It’s Bluetooth everywhere. Be it smartphones, tablets, laptops or desktops, and now even some televisions — every new gizmo, it seems, has the technology on board. What the arrival of this pervasive wireless technology means is that you can easily add external speakers to the device without the trouble of coping with lengthy wires or stumbling on them. And, with the advent of NFC — or near field communication — all you do is tap your NFC-enabled device, and the speaker gets paired with the device. If your device does not have NFC, it can pair with the speaker the old-fashioned Bluetooth way. Some can even work as hands-free sets for your cellphone. Let’s take a look some of these
Bose SoundLink Mini
@ Rs. 16,200
@ Rs. 16,200
Bose is known for great acoustics. Their SoundLink Mobile speaker was hugely successful, so naturally there had to be a variant.The Mini is slightly smaller, and much more portable than the original SoundLink. It delivers full natural sound, while fitting in the palm of your hand. The Bose quality comes through. Even at low volumes, the Mini manages to fill a moderate room with its sound. The speaker comes in a grey-and-black finish, with optional covers in blue, green and orange (at additional cost). The interface is simple, with buttons on top for power-on, volume up/down, mute, Bluetooth and an auxiliary port (when you want to connect a device via 3.5-mm pin and cable) The speaker body is rugged and durable, and weighs about 600 grams. The battery lasts about 8 hours. To charge it, you put it on its charging dock.
Jabra Solemate Mini
@ Rs. 4,999
@ Rs. 4,999
The Solemate Mini is the new avatar of Jabra’s SoleMate. The speaker has feet shaped like shoe soles (which lends stability when it is placed anywhere), hence the name. The speaker is the smallest in our lineup , and yet produces quite good sound. The audio quality is a bit mixed though, but it did live up to the claimed 8-hour battery life. Sound is good for a small room, and also seemed to do well in an open-air setting. The speaker has all-round rubber protection, lending durability and protection from scratches to the device. It comes in four colours — red, blue, black and yellow — and also has NFC. But it cannot handle calls. In a neat touch, the 3.5 mm cable is stored at the bottom of the speaker.
Creative Airwave™ HD
@ Rs. 12,999
@ Rs. 12,999
Heavier than the Bose Mini at 980 grams, the Airwave is also portable and come in a handy size for the desk. It has NFC, so if your smart device is enabled for NFC, all you do is tap to connect. The speaker can manage loud volumes, and also has an auxiliary input port, and the triangular shape makes it stand out. The Airwave can also handle phone calls with a built-in speakerphone and a concealed microphone. The call and microphone quality are good. There are four colours --- black, blue, red and green, and the battery lasted about 9 hours in our tests, though Creative claims a 12-hour battery life
HMDX JAM Plus
@ Rs. 3,990
@ Rs. 3,990
The Jam plus is a mono speaker unlike the others in this review. However, you can add one more speaker to the first one (via Bluetooth), and the pair offers full stereo sound. Battery life is about six hours, but the Jam Plus does not have NFC or call-answering capability. On the other hand, you can put one speaker in one room and a second in another and fill your home with music, or bring them together in the same room for full stereo effect. The Jam Plus is available in 4 neon colours and a subtle black. It shows up as Jam2 in Bluetooth search. The downside: the buttons were the most difficult to operate among the four we tested.
Verdict
The Bose SoundLink Mini is the best in class in terms of sound. We also loved its charging dock and the additional coloured covers, but budget-wise, the Creative Airwave goes one-up as it can also answer calls. The Jam Plus has interesting possibilities if you buy two speakers, while the Jabra’s pocketable design and rubberised tough finish were strong points.
Thursday, 14 November 2013
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| Scientists at the University of Iowa have created an implantable bio patch that regrows bone in a living body, using existing cells. Potential applications include tooth implants and cranio-facial reconstruction Scientists at the University of Iowa have created an implantable bio patch that regrows bone in a living body, using existing cells. Potential applications include tooth implants and cranio-facial reconstruction The bone-regeneration kit relies on a collagen platform seeded with particles containing the genes needed for producing bone. In experiments, the gene-encoding bio patch successfully regrew bone fully enough to cover skull wounds in test animals. It also stimulated new growth in human bone marrow stromal cells in lab experiments. The study is novel in that the researchers directly delivered bone-producing instructions (using piece of DNA that encodes for a platelet-derived growth factor called PDGF-B) to existing bone cells in vivo, allowing those cells to produce the proteins that led to more bone production. Previous attempts had relied on repeated applications from the outside, which is costly, intensive, and harder to replicate consistently. "We delivered the DNA to the cells, so that the cells produce the protein and that's how the protein is generated to enhance bone regeneration," explains Aliasger Salem, professor in the College of Pharmacy and a co-corresponding author on the paper, published in the journal Biomaterials. "If you deliver just the protein, you have keep delivering it with continuous injections to maintain the dose. With our method, you get local, sustained expression over a prolonged period of time without having to give continued doses of protein." The researchers believe the patch has several potential uses in dentistry. For instance, it could be used to rebuild bone in the gum area that serves as the concrete-like foundation for dental implants. That prospect would be a "life-changing experience" for patients who need implants and don't have enough bone in the surrounding area, says Satheesh Elangovan, assistant professor in the UI's College of Dentistry and a joint first author, as well as co-corresponding author, on the paper. It also can be used to repair birth defects where there's missing bone around the head or face. "We can make a scaffold in the actual shape and size of the defect site, and you'd get complete regeneration to match the shape of what should have been there," Elangovan says. The team started with a collagen scaffold. The researchers then loaded the bio patch with synthetically created plasmids, each of which is outfitted with the genetic instructions for producing bone. They then inserted the scaffold on to a 5-millimeter by 2-millimeter missing area of skull in test animals. Four weeks later, the team compared the bio patch's effectiveness to inserting a scaffold with no plasmids or taking no action at all. The plasmid-seeded bio patch grew 44-times more bone and soft tissue in the affected area than with the scaffold alone, and was 14-fold higher than the affected area with no manipulation. Aerial and cross-sectional scans showed the plasmid-encoded scaffolds had spurred enough new bone growth to nearly close the wound area, the researchers report. The plasmid does its work by entering bone cells already in the body – usually those located right around the damaged area that wander over to the scaffold. The team used a polymer to shrink the particle's size (like creating a zip file, for example) and to give the plasmid the positive electrical charge that would make it easier for the resident bone cells to take them in. "The delivery mechanism is the scaffold loaded with the plasmid," Salem says. "When cells migrate into the scaffold, they meet with the plasmid, they take up the plasmid, and they get the encoding to start producing PDGF-B, which enhances bone regeneration." The researchers also point out that their delivery system is nonviral. That means the plasmid is less likely to cause an undesired immune response and is easier to produce in mass quantities, which lowers the cost. "The most exciting part to me is that we were able to develop an efficacious, nonviral-based gene-delivery system for treating bone loss," says Sheetal D'mello, a graduate student in pharmacy and a joint first author on the paper. Elangovan and Salem next hope to create a bio platform that promotes new blood vessel growth– needed for extended and sustained bone growth. |
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