Last week at CES, South San Francisco based Profusa showed off an upcoming injectable sensor that can be used to continuously monitor oxygen levels in tissue. Measuring only five millimeters long and a tiny 250 microns in diameter, the biosensor can be injected into tissue with just a hypodermic needle. It consists of a soft hydrogel scaffold that allows it to be biologically compatible with the surrounding tissue without any foreign body response. The sensor also contains a special chemical marker that changes fluorescence depending on the amount of oxygen that reacts with it. An optical reader placed on the skin measures the fluorescence and relays the data to a smartphone. The biosensor can last as long as two years (at which point the chemical marker begins to lose its potency), and because it contains no electronics and is completely biocompatible there’s no need to remove it.
On stage at the CES Digital Health Summit, Profusa CEO Dr. Ben Hwang gave a live demonstration of how the sensor works in action. As two of his colleagues with the sensors implanted and using a blood pressure cuffs performed stretches to simulate changes in blood flow, a graph displayed the live view of the changing tissue oxygen levels at the site of the sensors.
We had the opportunity to talk to Dr. Hwang after his talk, and he shared that the first application of the sensor is the Lumee Oxygen Sensing System, which is designed to monitor oxygen levels during the wound healing process. Sufficient oxygen flow through a wound is vital to the healing process, and Lumee can detect low oxygen levels early in the healing process and even before treatment or surgery begins.
Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) commissions a machine from Nikola Tesla (David Bowie) during Tesla’s time in Colorado Springs. This video clip is taken from the motion picture ‘The Prestige’ (Touchstone Pictures **Copyright 2006 — All rights reserved**). I own NO rights for this clip, which is intended to be used purely for your entertainment purposes. Do not copy, or in any way otherwise distribute this copyrighted material. Thank you! — JT.
As we explore opportunities in space to colonized or even expand business opportunities in space such as mining, and discovering materials that could be brought back to earth to use; it will be important for scientists and researchers to look at ways in how technologies like CRISPR, nanobots, synthetic implants, etc. can assist in mitigating the impacts on humans in space.
A new report commissioned by NASA highlights many of the risks connected with one of the agency’s major goals: putting more humans in space for longer periods of time.
Today, a group of scientists — John A. Rogers, Eric Seabron, Scott MacLaren and Xu Xie from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Slava V. Rotkin from Lehigh University; and, William L. Wilson from Harvard University — are reporting on the discovery of an important method for measuring the properties of nanotube materials using a microwave probe. Their findings have been published in ACS Nano in an article called: “Scanning Probe Microwave Reflectivity of Aligned Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes: Imaging of Electronic Structure and Quantum Behavior at the Nanoscale.”
The researchers studied single-walled carbon nanotubes. These are 1-dimensional, wire-like nanomaterials that have electronic properties that make them excellent candidates for next generation electronics technologies. In fact, the first prototype of a nanotube computer has already been built by researchers at Stanford University. The IBM T.J. Watson Research Center is currently developing nanotube transistors for commercial use.
For this study, scientists grew a series of parallel nanotube lines, similar to the way nanotubes will be used in computer chips. Each nanotube was about 1 nanometer wide — ten times smaller than expected for use in the next generation of electronics. To explore the material’s properties, they then used microwave impedance microscopy (MIM) to image individual nanotubes.
DNA is similar to a hard drive or storage device, in that contains the memory of each cell of every living, and has the instructions on how to make that cell. DNA is four molecules combined in any order to make a chain of one larger molecule. And if you can read that chain of four molecules, then you have a sequence of characters, like a digital code. Over the years the price of sequencing a human genome has dropped significantly, much to the delight of scientists. And since DNA is a sequence of four letters, and if we can manipulate DNA, we could insert a message and use DNA as the storage device.
At this point in time, we are at the height of the information age. And computers have had an enormous impact on all of our lives. Any information is able to be represented as a collection of bits. And with Moore’s law, which states that computing power doubles every 18 months, our ability to manipulate and store these bits has continued to grow and grow. Moore’s law has been driven by scientists being able to make transistors and integrated circuits continuously smaller and smaller, but there eventually comes a point we reach in which these transistors and integrated circuits cannot be made any smaller than they already are, since some are already at the size of a single atom. This inevitably leads us into the quantum world. Quantum mechanics has rules which are, in many ways, hard for us to truly comprehend, yet are nevertheless tested. Quantum computing looks to make use of these strange rules of quantum physics, and process information in a totally different way. Quantum computing looks to replace the classical bits which are either a 0 or a 1, with quantum bits, or qubits, which can be both a 0 and a 1 at the same time. This ability to be two different things at the same time is referred to as a superposition. 200 qubits hold more bits of information than there are particles in the universe. A useful quantum computer will require thousands or even millions of physical qubits. Anything such as an atom can serve as a quantum bit for making a quantum computer, then you can use a superconducting circuit to build two artificial atoms. So at this point in time we have a few working quantum transistors, but scientists are working on developing the quantum integrated circuit. Quantum error correction is the biggest problem encountered in development of the quantum computer. Quantum computer science is a field that right now is in its very early stages, since scientists have yet been able to develop any quantum hardware.
A quantum computer would be perfect for tackling quantum problems like simulating the properties of a new molecule or material or help us to create a catalyst that will remove CO2 from the atmosphere, or make pattern recognition in computers much more efficient, and also in code breaking, and privacy and security of personal information since quantum information can never be copied.
A great deal of the energy we create has to go into maintaining computations and data storage but we can reduce our energy expenditure significantly by looking to nature. Nature is much more effective at information processing. For example, in the process of photo synthesis, there is a nanowire, who’s quantum efficiency is almost 100%. DNA is also a great example of energy efficiency represented in nature, since DNA base pairing can be considered a computational process. Computers generate heat by performing computations because each computation is irreversible. Quantum mechanics can make those computations reversible, since a quantum computer can perform two functions at the same time.
Science Documentary: Large Hadron Collider, Time, Galaxy Formation a Documentary on Particle Physics.
Up until now, everything we’ve ever used in space has been brought there from Earth. Planetary Resources Inc. has long-term ambitions to mine the infinite resources space provides. In the mean-time, they’ve proven its possible by 3D printing material derived from an asteroid.
Imagine if your clothing could, on demand, release just enough heat to keep you warm and cozy, allowing you to dial back on your thermostat settings and stay comfortable in a cooler room. Or, picture a car windshield that stores the sun’s energy and then releases it as a burst of heat to melt away a layer of ice.
According to a team of researchers at MIT, both scenarios may be possible before long, thanks to a new material that can store solar energy during the day and release it later as heat, whenever it’s needed. This transparent polymer film could be applied to many different surfaces, such as window glass or clothing.
Although the sun is a virtually inexhaustible source of energy, it’s only available about half the time we need it—during daylight. For the sun to become a major power provider for human needs, there has to be an efficient way to save it up for use during nighttime and stormy days. Most such efforts have focused on storing and recovering solar energy in the form of electricity, but the new finding could provide a highly efficient method for storing the sun’s energy through a chemical reaction and releasing it later as heat.
For years, the term “Anthropocene” has been used to informally describe the human era on Earth. But new evidence suggests there’s nothing informal about it. We’re a true force of nature — and there’s good reason to believe we’ve sparked a new and unprecedented geological epoch.
A team of international geoscientists say the time has come for us to formally recognize the Anthropocene as a new epoch, one as significant as previous geological eras like the Holocene and Pleistocene. According to the new study, which appears in the latest issue of Science, it began sometime around the midpoint of the 20th century, and is fueled by a number of unquestionably human influences — including elevated greenhouse gas levels and the global proliferation of invasive species, along with the spread of materials such as aluminium, concrete, fly ash, and even fallout from nuclear testing.
3D printed ceramics are still something of a rarity, compared to other materials. The material has several limitations; it’s generally printed by sintering powder materials that result in porous, relatively weak end products with low heat resistance. This greatly limits the size and shape of objects that can be printed; 3D printed ceramic objects have thus far been pretty much limited to relatively small decorative items or tableware. But that’s all about to change, thanks to a new material developed by research and development company HRL Laboratories, LLC.
HRL, which is owned by Boeing and General Motors, has developed a ceramic resin that can be printed through stereolithography. The company actually calls it a “pre-ceramic” resin that prints like a typical plastic resin, and is then fired in a high temperature kiln, which turns it into a dense ceramic. The resulting objects are about ten times stronger than other 3D printed ceramics, have virtually no porosity, and can withstand temperatures higher than 1700°C.
“With our new 3D printing process we can take full advantage of the many desirable properties of this silicon oxycarbide ceramic, including high hardness, strength and temperature capability as well as resistance to abrasion and corrosion,” said program manager Dr. Tobias Schaedler.
Last week at CES, South San Francisco based Profusa showed off an upcoming injectable sensor that can be used to continuously monitor oxygen levels in tissue. Measuring only five millimeters long and a tiny 250 microns in diameter, the biosensor can be injected into tissue with just a hypodermic needle. It consists of a soft hydrogel scaffold that allows it to be biologically compatible with the surrounding tissue without any foreign body response. The sensor also contains a special chemical marker that changes fluorescence depending on the amount of oxygen that reacts with it. An optical reader placed on the skin measures the fluorescence and relays the data to a smartphone. The biosensor can last as long as two years (at which point the chemical marker begins to lose its potency), and because it contains no electronics and is completely biocompatible there’s no need to remove it.
