Lab-grown livers have come a step closer to reality thanks to a 3D printer loaded with cells, New Scientist reports.
Created by Organovo in San Diego, California, future versions of the system could produce chunks of liver for transplant.
The mini-livers that Organovo made are just half a millimeter deep and 4 millimeters across but can perform most functions of the real thing.… read more
Today’s Internet runs on linked silicon chips, but a future quantum version might be built from diamond crystals, Nature News reports.
Physicists report in Nature that they have entangled information kept in pieces of diamond 3 meters apart, so that measuring the state of one quantum bit (qubit) instantly fixes the state of the other — a necessary step for exchanging quantum information over large distances.… read more
Two European Physical Journal D papers challenge established wisdom about the nature of vacuum.
In one paper, Marcel Urban from the University of Paris-Sud and colleagues identified a quantum-level mechanism for interpreting vacuum as being filled with pairs of virtual particles with fluctuating energy values.
As a result, the inherent characteristics of vacuum, such as the speed of light, may not be a constant… read more
Resistive memory cells (ReRAM) are actually not purely passive components but must be regarded as tiny batteries, researchers at Jülich Aachen Research Alliance (JARA) have demonstrated and published in Nature Communications (open access).
Unlike the building blocks of conventional hard disk drives and memories, ReRAM cells are regarded as a promising solution for future generations of computer memories. They promise to dramatically reduce the energy… read more
![Nano-suit: images of a larva protected by electron-beam-irradiated Tween 20. The small white square in C are is shown magnified (D), with high resolution. [Scale bars: 0.3 mm (C) and 1 μm (D)]](http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/nano-suit.png "nano-suit")
Put a fruit fly larva in a spacelike vacuum, and within minutes, the animal will collapse into a crinkled, lifeless husk.
Now, researchers have found a way to protect the bugs: bombard them with electrons, which form a “nano-suit” around their bodies, according to an open-access paper in Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
The advance could help scientists take high-resolution photographs of tiny living… read more
Linden Lab intends to integrate the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset with Second Life, Wagner James Au reports on New World Notes.
“The Oculus could become Second Life’s killer app, but only if Linden Lab is willing to go all in,” said Au. “Sounds like they are doing just that, in an official capacity.
We’ll get to experience Second… read more
“So what we plan to do is unleash swarms of hundreds of microscopic ‘grippers’ into your colon and let them just snip away at you, OK?” — Future gastroenterologist to patient
By using swarms of untethered grippers, each as small as a speck of dust, Johns Hopkins engineers and physicians have devised a new way to perform biopsies that could provide a more effective way… read more
Mars One has launched its astronaut selection program for the first humans to set foot on Mars and make it their home.
Mars One invites would-be Mars settlers from anywhere in the world to submit an online application — the first of the four rounds in the selection procedure.
Round One will run for over five months and end on 31st August… read more
Three “PhoneSats” rode to space Sunday aboard the maiden flight of Orbital Science Corp.’s Antares rocket from NASA’s Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia.
The goal of NASA‘s PhoneSat mission is to determine whether a consumer-grade smartphone — such as the Nexus One phones running Android, used here — can be used as the main flight avionics of a capable, yet very inexpensive,… read more
Sophisticated genetic circuits allow an individual bacterium within a colony to act on its own while also ensuring that the colony pulls together in hard times, striking a balance between selflessness and selfishness,.researchers from Rice University’s Center for Theoretical Biological Physics (CTBP), Tel Aviv University, and Harvard Medical School have shown.
“Our findings suggest new principles for collective decisions that allow both random behavior by… read more
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) have found a way to turn bone marrow stem cells directly into brain cells.
Current techniques for turning patients’ marrow cells into cells of some other desired type are relatively cumbersome, risky and effectively confined to the lab dish.
The new finding points to the possibility of simpler and safer techniques.
Cell therapies derived from patients’… read more
Now you can your own glowing plant at home, using synthetic biology and computer software.
All backers from the USA who back this Kickstarter project with $40 or more will receive seeds to grow a glowing plant at home.
From the Kickstarter page:
Once we have the plant, it is just a matter of breeding enough offspring to grow seeds for all backers. You can… read more
NASA‘s Kepler mission has discovered two new planetary systems that include three super-Earth-size planets in the “habitable zone,” the range of distance from a star where the surface temperature of an orbiting planet might be suitable for liquid water.
Two of the newly discovered planets orbit a star smaller and cooler than the sun. Kepler-62f is only 40 percent larger than Earth, making… read more
VizWiz, a free iPhone app, gives real-time help to blind users, The New York Times reports.
VizWiz users take a photograph as best as they can — it may take several tries before the desired object is properly framed — and then record one question about it (“What is on the label of the can?”).
Besides needing help identifying food labels, they may want… read more
Keeping up with current scientific literature is a daunting task, considering that hundreds to thousands of papers are published each day. Now researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a computer program to help them evaluate and rank scientific articles in their field.
The researchers use a text-mining algorithm to prioritize research papers to read and include in their Comparative Toxicogenomics Database… read more