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DARPA and NIH to fund ‘human body on a chip’ research

MIT-led team to receive up to $32 million from DARPA and NIH to develop technology that could accelerate pace and efficiency of pharmaceutical testing
August 1, 2012

DARPA_MPS

Researchers in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT plan to develop a technology platform that will mimic human physiological systems in the laboratory, using an array of integrated, interchangeable engineered human tissue constructs, with $32 million funding over the next five years from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

A cooperative agreement between MIT and DARPA worth up to… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Biotech | Nanotech/Materials Science

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Australian billionaire wants to build Jurassic Park-style resort

August 1, 2012

jurassic_park

Controversial billionaire Clive Palmer is rumored to be planning to clone a dinosaur from DNA so he can set it free in a Jurassic Park-style area at his new Palmer Resort in Coolum, Sunshine Coast Daily reports.

Palmer has apparently been in deep discussion with the people who successfully cloned Dolly the sheep to bring his dinosaur vision to life.

A spokesman said Palmer would hold a… read more

Topics: Biotech | Entertainment/New Media | Environment/Climate

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Human workers, managed by an algorithm

August 1, 2012

mobileworks

The latest trend in crowdsourcing is organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine tasks that computers aren’t yet good at, assigned by an algorithm, Technology Review reports.

Several startups, including CrowdFlower and CrowdSource, have written software that works on top of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, adding ways to test and rank workers, match them up to tasks, and organize work so it gets… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Social/Ethical/Legal

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Low-power chips to model a billion neurons

August 1, 2012

spinnaker_machine_architecture

A miniature, massively parallel computer, powered by a million ARM processors, could produce the best brain simulations yet, Steve Furber suggests in IEEE Spectrum.

With traditional digital circuits, that would require a supercomputer that’s 1000 times as powerful as the best ones we have available today. And we’d need the output of an entire nuclear power plant to run it.

Fortunately, there are at… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Cognitive Science/Neuroscience | Electronics

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New tissue engineering tool creates large patches of precision-designed tissue

Could be used as grafts for burn victims or as cell cultures for the development of therapeutic drugs
August 1, 2012

ibmme_toronto

University of Toronto researchers have invented a new tissue engineering tool that makes uniform, layered, large patches of engineered tissue that could one day be used as grafts for burn victims or vascular patches.

Along with graduate students from their labs — Lian Leng, Boyang Zhang, and Arianna McAllister —  Associate Professor Axel Guenther of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, cross-appointed to the… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Nanotech/Materials Science

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Floating cities of the future

August 1, 2012

seascraper_national_geographic

Touted as an eco-friendly floating city, the Seascraper  is among concepts for sustainable offshore settlements described by National Geographic.

“With more than seven billion people on the planet, mass migrations to cities, and increased risks of flooding and sea level rise, more and more architects and innovators seem to be weighing anchor,” NatGeo says.

Topics: Environment/Climate | Innovation/Entrepreneurship | Social/Ethical/Legal

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Chronic 2000-04 drought, worst in 800 years, may be the ‘new normal’

July 31, 2012

Pinyon pine forests near Los Alamos, N.M., had already begun to turn brown from drought stress in the image at left, in 2002, and another photo taken in 2004 from the same vantage point, at right, show them largely grey and dead. (Photo by Craig Allen, U.S. Geological Survey)

The chronic drought that hit western North America from 2000 to 2004 left dying forests and depleted river basins in its wake and was the strongest in 800 years, scientists have concluded, but they say those conditions will become the “new normal” for most of the coming century.

Such climatic extremes have increased as a result of global warming, a group of 10 researchers reported Sunday in Nature Geoscience. And… read more

Topics: Environment/Climate

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Microsoft tech to control computers with a flex of a finger

July 31, 2012

microsoft_fingers_interface

In the future, Microsoft apparently believes, people may simply twitch their fingers or arms to control a computer, game console or mobile device, ReadWriteWeb reports.

Microsoft applied for a patent on electromyography (EMG) controlled computing on Thursday, suggesting that a future smart wristwatch or armband might simply detect a user’s muscle movements and interpret them as gestures or commands.

The “Wearable Electromyography-Based Controller” could also… read more

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI

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Why graphene may be the substrate for the next generation of computer chips

Sandwiching individual graphene sheets between insulating layers to produce electrical devices with unique new properties could open up a new dimension of physics research
July 31, 2012

graphene layers

Wonder material graphene is a two-dimensional material consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb or chicken wire structure. It is the thinnest material in the world and yet is also one of the strongest. It conducts electricity as efficiently as copper and outperforms all other materials as a conductor of heat.

Now University of Manchester scientists have shown that a new side-view imaging technique… read more

Topics: Computers/Infotech/UI | Electronics

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A Casimir chip that exploits the vacuum energy

July 31, 2012

Casimir forces on parallel plates (credit: Emok/Wikipedia Commons)

University of Florida researchers have have developed a way to keep objects flat enough to measure the strange Casimir force, which pushes two parallel conducting plates together when they are just a few dozen nanometers apart,  Technology Review Physics arXiv Blog reports.

They carved a single device out of silicon that is capable of measuring the Casimir force between a pair of parallel silicon beams, the first on-chip… read more

Topics: Nanotech/Materials Science | Physics/Cosmology

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FDA OK’s ingestible sensor chip

Chip tracks adherence to oral medications, can report to caregiver
July 31, 2012

Injestible chip

Proteus Digital Health, Inc. announced Monday that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared its ingestible sensor for marketing as a medical device.

The ingestible sensor (formally referred to as the Ingestion Event Marker or IEM) is part of the Proteus digital health feedback system, an integrated, end-to-end personal health management system designed to help improve patients’ health habits and connections to caregivers.… read more

Topics: Biomed/Longevity | Electronics

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Giving ancient life another chance to evolve

Scientists place 500-million-year-old gene in modern organism
July 31, 2012

paleo-experimental-evolution

It’s a project 500 million years in the making. Only this time, instead of playing on a movie screen in Jurassic Park, it’s happening in a lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Using a process called paleo-experimental evolution, Georgia Tech researchers have resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. This bacterium has now been growing… read more

Topics: Biotech | Synthetic Biology

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WiFi Direct system may help drivers avoid hitting bicyclists and spaced-out texters

4,280 pedestrians and 618 bicyclists died in collisions with motor vehicles in 2010 in the U.S.
July 31, 2012

Wireless_pedestrian_detection

General Motors researchers are developing a wireless system that could detect pedestrians and bicyclists on congested streets or in poor visibility conditions before the driver notices them.

4,280 pedestrians and 618 bicyclists lost their lives in collisions with motor vehicles in 2010 in the U.S., according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The new system could help. It relies on Wi-Fi Direct, a… read more

Topics: Internet/Telecom | Social/Ethical/Legal

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Where is self-awareness located in the brain?

July 31, 2012

Brain regions activated more strongly during lucid dreaming than in a normal dream. (credit: MPI of Psychiatry)

Neuroscientists from the Max Planck Institutes of Psychiatry in Munich, Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, and Charité in Berlin have identified a specific cortical network associated with self-awareness.

They used EEG and fMRI brain imaging to study “lucid dreamers,” who have access to their memories during dreaming and are aware of themselves, although remaining in a dream state and not waking up.

The researchers found neural activations… read more

Topics: Cognitive Science/Neuroscience

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The end of Chinese manufacturing and rebirth of US industry

July 30, 2012

Tesla-Manufacturing

There is great concern about China’s real-estate and infrastructure bubbles.  But these are just short-term challenges that China may be able to spend its way out of.

The real threat to China’s economy is bigger and longer term: its manufacturing bubble.

Rising costs and political pressure aren’t what’s going to rapidly change the equation. The disruption will come from a set of technologies that are advancing at exponential… read more

Topics: AI/Robotics | Nanotech/Materials Science | Social/Ethical/Legal

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