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Category: engineering

A research team led by Professor Ed X. Wu of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Hong Kong has used an innovative neuroimaging tool to interrogate the complex brain networks and functions.

The team has successfully manipulated two pioneering technologies: optogenetics and imaging (fMRI), for investigation of the dynamics underlying activity propagation. Their breakthrough to simultaneously capture large-scale brain-wide neural activity propagation and interaction dynamics, while examining their functional roles has taken scientists a step further in unravelling the mysteries of the brain. It could lead to the development of new neurotechnologies for early diagnosis and intervention of brain diseases including autism, Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.

The findings have recently been published in the prestigious international academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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Nice.

Submarine manufacturer saves major time and cost by 3D Printing a titanium Variable Ballast tank with EBM technology from Sciaky.

The production of an Arctic Explorer submarine was nearly scuppered after the supplier of a component went out of business. To find a solution, however, International Submarine Engineering (ISE) didn’t have to dive too deep. They turned instead to additive manufacturing.

ISE had originally planned to produce the titanium Variable Ballast (VB) tank with traditional manufacturing methods. Their key supplier was an overseas titanium forging facility that previously produced propellant tanks for the Russian space program. But then the supplier went bankrupt.

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I cannot wait. However, wish they would look at cancer treatment as one of the first trials.

SCIENCE

Medical Robotics: Microrobots Could Be The Answer To Future Medicine

More specifically, nanorobotics refers to the theoretical nanotechnology engineering discipline of designing and building nanorobots for medical aid.

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By now, you’ve probably heard a lot about STEM education (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Careers in STEM are the next best thing: as a matter of fact, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor, jobs in STEM will increase by up to 30 percent by 2022, a dramatic increase over the average industry projection of just 11 percent in the past years.

With that being said, it’s time to think more about using virtual reality in education; as education officials are seeing an increase in opportunity that will help bring STEM learning to life for today’s middle, and high school students.

By presenting a complete view of the world by use of virtual reality, teachers can help offer a new opportunity to students that will close some of the pedagogical gaps that have appeared off and on throughout the duration of the 21st-century classroom environment. These gaps generated from the fact that the curriculum and content in our education have not caught up with one another yet. In other words, education has not caught up with technology advancements.

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The brain is the fattiest organ in your body made up of 60% fat, the dry part that is. 75% of your brain is actually water which houses 100,000 miles of blood vessels that use up 20% of all your oxygen and blood. It’s an amazing piece of hardware. Of all the moonshot projects out there, the ones that relate to augmenting the brain are perhaps the most fascinating. Companies like Kernel have actually succeeded in writing long-term memories to a chip – well, at least 80% of them. When that number hits 100%, the sky is the limit to what we can do with the brain.

If you want a graphic image of what the future holds, imagine a robotic arm on top of your table (no wires) moving its fingers or trying to grab something powered only by someone’s thought. After all those Terminator movies, this could be a bit creepy. You may not get Terminator at your doorstep just yet, but someone with neuroprosthesis might just be ringing your doorbell a few years from now.

Neuroprosthetics or neuroprosthesis is a field of biomedical engineering and neuroscience concerned with the development of neural prostheses which are a series of devices that can substitute your brain’s motor, sensory or cognitive functionality that might have been damaged as a result of an injury or a disease.

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Metamaterials are an almost magical class of materials that can do things that seem impossible, but they can only perform one miracle at a time. Now Harvard researchers have come up with a toolkit for constructing metamaterials that flow from one shape and function into another, like origami.

Metamaterials have been around since the 1940s, but only in recent years has their development taken off. Unlike conventional substances, metamaterials have functions and properties that are independent of what they’re made of. Instead, their repetitive microstructures allow them to do the seemingly impossible – think flat lenses that act like they’re curved, structures that shrink instead of expanding when heated, and even invisibility cloaks.

The problem is that the substructures that metamaterials rely on are very specific, so each metamaterial can only do one thing at a time. Last year, Harvard researchers demonstrated a way to overcome this limitation with reconfigurable metamaterials made of thin polymer sheets. Now a team from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University have developed a more general framework to help engineers to create metamaterials that can change shape and function.

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Scientists simulate evolution in the lab by introducing mutations iteratively into biomolecules such as nucleic acids and selecting for desired properties. When carrying this process out specifically on RNA molecules, they can evolve the RNAs to bind specific small molecules. But many of these so-called aptamers don’t bind well to their targets when put inside cells because they don’t fold into stable structures.

“As we solved the structures of naturally occurring aptamers, we noticed they had much more complex secondary and tertiary structures” than versions made in the lab, says Robert T. Batey of the University of Colorado, Boulder. “So we decided to use these naturally occurring RNA folds as starting points” for producing more stable artificial aptamers.

To prove their concept, Batey and coworkers used RNA sequences from naturally occurring ribozymes and riboswitches as scaffolds to evolve aptamers that bind amino acids and other small molecules used to make neurotransmitters (Nat. Chem. Biol. 2017, DOI: 10.1038/nchembio.2278). The resulting aptamers are selective for these precursor molecules over structurally similar amino acids and the neurotransmitters themselves.

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Research by scientists at Swansea University is helping to meet the challenge of incorporating nanoscale structures into future semiconductor devices that will create new technologies and impact on all aspects of everyday life.

Dr Alex Lord and Professor Steve Wilks from the Centre for Nanohealth led the collaborative research published in Nano Letters. The research team looked at ways to engineer electrical contact technology on minute scales with simple and effective modifications to nanowires that can be used to develop enhanced devices based on the nanomaterials. Well-defined electrical contacts are essential for any electrical circuit and electronic device because they control the flow of electricity that is fundamental to the operational capability.

Everyday materials that are being scaled down to the size of nanometres (one million times smaller than a millimetre on a standard ruler) by scientists on a global scale are seen as the future of electronic devices. The scientific and engineering advances are leading to new technologies such as energy producing clothing to power our personal gadgets and sensors to monitor our health and the surrounding environment.

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Scientists have now made metamaterials scalable in their purpose and usage.

Metamaterials — materials whose function is determined by structure, not composition — have been designed to bend light and sound, transform from soft to stiff, and even dampen seismic waves from earthquakes. But each of these functions requires a unique mechanical structure, making these materials great for specific tasks, but difficult to implement broadly.

But what if a material could contain within its structure, multiple functions and easily and autonomously switch between them?

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute of Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed a general framework to design reconfigurable metamaterials. The design strategy is scale independent, meaning it can be applied to everything from meter-scale architectures to reconfigurable nano-scale systems such as photonic crystals, waveguides and metamaterials to guide heat.

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Biological engineers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have invented a microchip that can be lined with living human cells in order to revolutionise medicine, particularly relating to drug testing, disease modelling and personalised medicine.

The ‘human organs-on-chip’ is a microchip made from a clear flexible polymer that contains hollow microfluidic channels that are lined with living human cells, together with an interface that lines the interior surface of blood vessels and lymphatic vessels, known as an endothelium.

The idea is that the microchip can emulate the microarchitecture and functions of multiple human organs such as the lungs, kidneys, skin, bone marrow, intestines and blood-brain barrier. And if you were able to do this, you could then test out drugs and study how diseases affect the body without having to endanger human patients, or waste precious organs needed for transplants.

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