BODY PARTS GROWN ON DEMAND WITH NO REJECTION FACTOR

At the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Dr. Anthony Atala’s lab is the largest in the world “manufacturing” body parts. We’re not talking about prosthetics here, and not robotics – this is growing new, living organs – and they are yours – made up of identical tissue found in the rest of your body. Growing a finger from the ground up: layering cartilage, bone, then muscle. A beating, engineered heart valve that’s learning how to pump blood before it’s implanted. It’s regenerative medicine and the goal is to help the tens of thousands of people worldwide waiting for organ transplants. In Pittsburgh, Dr. Steven Badylak has discovered a compound that tricks the body into repairing itself, much like the body knows how to do when it’s in the womb. The U.S. military has invested $250 million in regenerative research aimed at helping soldiers with severe battle injuries, regrowing muscle and skin for burn injuries, as well as transplant technology for lost limbs.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Failed Iron ore extraction by Thomas Edison

People know Thomas Alva Edison as a successful inventor but history books revealed that he has some failed inventions to his credit; in 1890’s he put in huge amounts of money into Iron ore mining as he was planning to supply iron to different buyers, but all his money went down the drain as he failed to extract iron from its ores.

Flying Aircraft Carrier – USS Macon/USS Akron

Flying aircraft carrier called USS Macon was a very useful military invention which was able to carry five F9C “Sparrowhawk” airplanes that could be launched as well as retrieved during flight but it was dumped later because it crashed due to design failure during a flight in 1935.

Cybernetic Walking Machine

A Robot like machine that walked, was designed by a man named Ralph Mosher to carry weapons in very difficult military environments, it was designed for General electric, but it was abandoned later, after its initial experimental launch in 1968 due to some unknown reason.

Ford Nucleon.Nuclear powered motor car by Ford

Ford Nucleon was a car designed by Ford Motor Company in late 1950’s and they had planned to use nuclear power as a fuel in that car having a small nuclear reactor in it ; it was an excellent idea by Ford Company but never implemented due to the dangerous issues of nuclear radiation and nuclear waste.

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Kinetoscope

Thomas Edison also tried his luck to invent a device which can combine sound and pictures to create motion pictures but he failed to do so, he dropped this idea by 1915.

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Fruit fly research could lead

to simpler and more

robust computer network systems

Over the years science has gleaned an enormous amount of knowledge from the humble fruit fly. Drosophila melanogaster was used to provide the post-Mendelian foundations for our understanding of genetics and has also been used extensively in neuroscience research. The latest fruit fly-inspired innovation could simplify how wireless sensor networks communicate and stands to have wider applications for computing.

This is not the first time computing systems have been compared to biological systems. Learning from a comparison between Linux and E.coli and using fly’s eyes to help develop faster visual receivers for robots are just two examples. This time round researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have discovered a highly efficient system of organizing cells in the fruit fly’s nervous system develops that stands to have applications in computer networking.

Without communication with surrounding cells or prior knowledge of what these other cells are doing the fly’s developing nervous system is able to organize itself so that a small number become leader cells or sensory organ precursor cells (SOP), while the rest become ordinary nerve cells. The SOPs which connect to adjoining nerve cells do not connect with other SOPs, but instead to the ends of the nervous system that are attached to tiny hairs for interacting with the outside world. What is extraordinary about how this hierarchy of cells organizes itself is the fact that the right number and combination of SOP cells and nerve cells form without the need for complicated information exchange.

The fly’s nervous system uses a probabilistic method to select the cells that will become SOPs. The cells have no information about how they are connected to each other but as various cells self-select themselves as SOPs, they send out chemical signals to neighboring cells that inhibit those cells from also becoming SOPs. This process continues for three hours, until all of the cells are either SOPs or are neighbors to an SOP, and the fly emerges from the pupal stage.

Ziv Bar-Joseph, associate professor of machine learning and computational biology at CMU and author of the report noted that the probability that any cell will self-select increases not as a function of connections, as with a maximal independent set (MIS) algorithm used in computer networking, but as a function of time. The researchers believe that computer networks could be developed using this innovative system creating networks which are much simpler and more robust.

“It is such a simple and intuitive solution, I can’t believe we did not think of this 25 years ago,” said co-author Noga Alon, a mathematician and computer scientist at Tel Aviv University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J.

Bar-Joseph, Alon and their co-authors – Yehuda Afek of Tel Aviv University and Naama Barkai, Eran Hornstein and Omer Barad of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel – developed a new distributed computing algorithm using their findings. The resulting network was shown to have qualities that are well suited for networks in which the number and position of the nodes is not completely certain including wireless sensor networks, such as environmental monitoring, or where sensors are dispersed. They also believe this could be used in systems for controlling swarms of robots.

“The run time was slightly greater than current approaches, but the biological approach is efficient and more robust because it doesn’t require so many assumptions,” Bar-Joseph said. “This makes the solution applicable to many more applications.”

The research was supported in part by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Researchers attempting to clone

a mammoth by 2017

The last known mammoth lived around 4,500 years ago, but if scientists in Japan are successful then we might be able to meet one soon! Research to resurrect these awesome creatures was shelved when cell nuclei taken from a sample from Siberia were found to be too badly damaged, however a scientific breakthrough in Kobe successfully cloned a mouse from sixteen year old deep frozen tissue, and the research began again in earnest …

Mammoths are a species of the extinct genus Mammuthus, and closely related to modern elephants today. As anyone who’s been awed and amazed by a mammoth skeleton would know, some had long-curved tusks, and in colder regions, long shaggy hair. The last known mammoths died out 4,500 years ago, but in 1997 researchers at Kyoto University began to try and extract DNA from the tissue of a preserved mammoth carcass found in the Siberian permafrost.

Their efforts were thwarted however by damage caused by ice crystals that rendered the cells unviable. The breakthrough came in 2008 when scientist Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama from the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan, developed a new technique, and successfully managed to clone a mouse from tissue that had been deep frozen for sixteen years.

Now emeritus professor Akira Iritani and his team at Kyoto University are making preparations to fulfill their goal of cloning a live mammoth. They successfully extracted mammoth egg cell nuclei without damage, and used elephant egg cells to fill the gaps.

“Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

In the summer, Iritani will travel to Siberia to search for good mammoth samples. There are an estimated 150 million mammoth remains in Russia’s Siberian permafrost, some whole frozen specimens, others in pieces of bone, tusk, tissue and wool. If he is unsuccessful he will apply to Russian scientists to give him a sample.

If a mammoth embryo is successfully cloned then it will be transplanted into a surrogate African elephant, the mammoth’s closest living relative. Then will follow a gestation period of 22 months, the longest of any land animal.

“The success rate in the cloning of cattle was poor until recently but now stands at about 30 per cent, I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years.” said Iritani.

There are other considerations however; “If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before transplanting it into the womb, how to breed [the mammoth] and whether to display it to the public,” Iritani told the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper. “After the mammoth is born, we’ll examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors.”

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Smart Tape Like Gecko Feet

Inspired by the gecko feet, University of California, Berkeley have created a new kind of tape.

Conventional adhesive tape sticks when pressed on a surface. A new gecko-inspired synthetic adhesive (GSA) does not stick when it is pressed into a surface, but instead sticks when it slides on the surface. A similar directional adhesion effect allows real geckos to run up walls while rapidly attaching and detaching toes. The gecko-inspired adhesive uses hard plastic microfibers. The plastic is not itself sticky, but the millions of microscopic contacts work together to adhere. The number of contacts automatically increases to handle higher loads. A feature of the hard plastic gecko-inspired adhesive is that no residue is left on surfaces as is left by conventional adhesive tapes.

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Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Scientists claim breakthrough

in antimatter hunt

Photo released by CERN on November 18, 2010 shows an image taken by the ALPHA annihilation detector showing untrapped antihydrogen atoms annihilating on the inner surface of the ALPHA trap. Photo: AP/CERN

Scientists claimed a breakthrough Thursday toward solving one of the biggest riddles of physics, trapping an “anti-atom” for the first time in a quest to understand what happened to all the antimatter that has vanished since the Big Bang.

An international team of physicists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, managed to keep atoms of anti-hydrogen from disappearing long enough to demonstrate that they can be studied in the lab.

“For us it’s a big breakthrough because it means we can take the next step, which is to try to compare matter and antimatter,” the team’s spokesman, American scientist Jeffrey Hangst, said Thursday.

“This field is 20 years old and has been making incremental progress toward exactly this all along the way,” he added. “We really think that this was the most difficult step.”

Researchers have puzzled for decades over why antimatter seems to have disappeared from the universe.

Theory posits that matter and its opposite, antimatter — both are defined as having mass and taking up space — were created in equal amounts at the moment of the Big Bang, which spawned the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. While matter went on to become the building block of everything that exists, antimatter has all but disappeared except in the lab.

Hangst and his colleagues, who included scientists from Britain, Brazil, Canada, Israel and the United States, trapped 38 anti-hydrogen atoms individually for more than one tenth of a second, according to a paper published online Wednesday by the journal Nature.

Since their first success, the team has managed to hold the anti-atoms even longer.

“Unfortunately I can’t tell you how long, because we haven’t published the number yet,” Hangst said. “But I can tell you that it’s much, much longer than a tenth of a second. Within human comprehension on a real clock.”

Scientists have long been able to create individual particles of antimatter such as anti-protons, anti-neutrons and positrons — the opposite of electrons. Since 2002, they have also managed to create anti-atoms in large quantities, but until recently none could be trapped for long enough to study them, because atoms made of antimatter and matter annihilate each other in a burst of energy upon contact.

“It doesn’t help if they disappear immediately upon their creation,” said Hangst. “So the big goal has been to hold onto them.”

Two teams had been competing for that goal at CERN, the world’s largest physics lab best known for its $US10 billion smasher, the Large Hadron Collider. The collider, built deep under the Swiss-French border, wasn’t used for this experiment.

Hangst’s ALPHA team got there first, beating the rival ATRAP team led by Harvard physicist Gerald Gabrielse, who nevertheless welcomed the result.

“The atoms that were trapped were not yet trapped very long and in a very usable number, but one has to crawl before you sprint,” he said.

Many new techniques painstakingly developed over five years of experimental trial and error preceded the successful capture of anti-hydrogen.

To trap the anti-atoms inside an electromagnetic field and to stop them from annihilating atoms, researchers had to create anti-hydrogen at temperatures less than half a degree above absolute zero.

“Think of it as a marble rolling back and forth in a bowl,” said Hangst. “If the marble is rolling too fast (i.e. the anti-atom is too hot) it just goes over the edge.”

Next, scientists plan to conduct basic experiments on the anti-atom, such as shining a laser onto it and seeing how it behaves, he said.

“We have a chance to make a really precise comparison between a matter system and an antimatter system,” he said, “That’s unique, that’s never been done. That’s where we’re headed now.”

Hangst downplayed speculation that antimatter might someday be harnessed as a source of energy, or to create a powerful weapon, an idea popularised in Dan Brown’s best-selling novel “Angels and Demons”.

“It would take longer than the age of the universe to make one gram of antimatter,” he said, calling the process “a losing proposition because it takes much more energy to make antimatter than you get out of it.”

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Nature’s Insect Repellents Discovered

Science (July 17, 2010) — In the battle between insect predators and their prey, chemical signals called kairomones serve as an early-warning system. Pervasively emitted by the predators, the compounds are detected by their prey, and can even trigger adaptations, such a change in body size or armor, that help protect the prey. But as widespread as kairomones are in the insect world, their chemical identity has remained largely unknown. New research by Rockefeller University’s Joel E. Cohen and colleagues at the University of Haifa in Israel has identified two compounds emitted by mosquito predators that make the mosquitoes less inclined to lay eggs in pools of water.

The findings, published in the July issue of Ecology Letters, may provide new environmentally friendly tactics for repelling and controlling disease-carrying insects.

Many animals use chemicals to communicate with each other. Pheromones, which influence social and reproductive behaviors within a particular species, are probably the best known and studied. Kairomones are produced by an individual of one species and received by an individual of a different species, with the receiving species often benefiting at the expense of the donor.

Cohen and his Israeli colleagues focused on the interaction between two insect species found in temporary pools of the Mediterranean and the Middle East: larvae of the mosquito C. longiareolata and its predator, the backswimmer N. maculata. When the arriving female mosquitoes detect a chemical emitted by the backswimmer, they are less likely to lay eggs in that pool.

To reproduce conditions of temporary pools in the field, the researchers used aged tap water with fish food added as a source of nutrients. Individual backswimmers were then placed in vials containing samples of the temporary pools, and air samples were collected from the headspace within the vials. The researchers used gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to analyze the chemicals emitted by the backswimmers.

Cohen and his colleagues identified two chemicals, hydrocarbons called n-heneicosane and n-tricosane, which repelled egg-laying by mosquitoes at the concentrations of those compounds found in nature. Together, the two chemicals had an additive effect.

Since the mosquitoes can detect the backswimmer’s kairomones from above the water’s surface, predator-released kairomones can reduce the mosquito’s immediate risk of predation, says Cohen. But they also increase the female mosquito’s chance of dying from other causes before she finds a pool safe for her to lay her eggs in.

“That’s why we think these chemicals could be a useful part of a strategy to control the population size of mosquitoes,” says Cohen, who is the Abby Mauzé Rockefeller Professor and head of the Laboratory of Populations. “We started this work from very basic curiosity about how food webs and predator-prey interactions work, but we now see unexpected practical applications. These newly identified compounds, and others that remain to be discovered, might be effective in controlling populations of disease-carrying insects. It’s far too soon to say, but there’s the possibility of an advance in the battle against infectious disease.”

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Hop, Jump and Stick;

Robots Designed With Insect Instincts

Science (June 28, 2010) — A swarm of flying robots soars into a blazing forest fire. With insect-like precision and agility, the machines land on tree trunks and bound over rough terrain before deploying crucial sensors and tools to track the inferno and its effects. This is a scenario that Mirko Kovac, from EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, thinks may not be so far off.

Swarm robotics is offering innovative solutions to real-world problems by creating a new form of artificial intelligence based on insect-like instincts. Mirko Kovac, from EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, is a young robotics engineer who has already made leaps forward in the field with his grasshopper-inspired jumping robot. He and his collaborators have created an innovative perching mechanism where the robot flies head first into the object, a tree for example — without being destroyed — and attaches to almost any type of surface using sharp prongs. It then detaches on command. The goal is to create robots that can travel in swarms over rough terrain to come to the aide of catastrophe victims.

“We are not blindly imitating nature, but using the same principles to possibly improve on it,” explains Kovac, who recently finished his doctoral studies as EPFL. “Simple behavioral laws such as jumping, flying and perching lead to complex control over movement without the need for high computational power.”

Jumping, gliding and perching allow for mobility over rocky territory or destroyed urban areas. This new form of AI takes its inspiration from the insect world, but is more as an abstract reflection on their instincts and design principles than merely imitating their morphology. This simplicity allows for greater mobility since the robots are not bogged down with heavy batteries. Kovac imagines swarms of his robots equipped with different sensors and small cameras that could be deployed over devastated areas to transmit essential information back to rescue command centers.

The labs most recent innovation, perching a robot, saves valuable energy by allowing the robot to rest like insects or birds do. Many previous perching mechanisms include a complicated swooping maneuver to decrease momentum and land on legs, often without the ability of detaching. The mechanism developed by Dr Kovac and Jürg Markus Germann, recently published in the Journal of Micro-Nano Mechatronics, avoids this problem by using two spring-loaded arms fitted with pins that dig into the surface, whether it is wood or concrete. The snapping of the arms creates a forward momentum, allowing for a soft deceleration of the glider and avoiding mechanical damage. A remotely controlled mini-motor then detracts the pins and allows the robot to continue on its way.

“I am fascinated by the creative process,” says Kovac, “and how it is possible to use the sophistication found in nature to create something completely new.” The perching mechanism can be easily adapted to other robots. His previous robot, a quarter-gram jumping robot that can achieve heights of up to four and a half feet, could now be fitted with the new perching mechanism as well as wings, thus creating a hybrid creature that gets around much like a flying grasshopper.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

VORTEX2 Tornado Scientists Hit the Road Again

VORTEX2 researchers trailed this Wyoming twister during last spring’s expedition. Credit: Josh Wurman, CSWR

(PhysOrg.com) — In the largest and most ambitious effort ever made to understand tornadoes, more than 100 scientists and 40 support vehicles will hit the road again this spring.

The project, VORTEX2–Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes–is in its final season: May 1st through June 15th, 2010.

VORTEX2 is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Scientists from more than a dozen universities and government and private organizations will take part. International participants are from Italy, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and Australia.

The questions driving VORTEX2 are simple to ask but hard to answer, says lead scientist Josh Wurman of the Center for Severe Weather Research (CSWR) in Boulder, Colo.

• How, when, and why do tornadoes form?
• Why are some violent and long-lasting while others are weak and short-lived?
• What is the structure of tornadoes?
• How strong are the winds near the ground?
• How exactly do they do damage?
• How can we learn to forecast tornadoes better?

“Current warnings have only a 13-minute average lead time, and a 70 percent false alarm rate,” says Brad Smull, program director in NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences. “Can we issue reliable warnings as much as 30, 45 or even 60 minutes ahead of tornado touchdown?”

VORTEX2 scientists hope to find the answers.

They will use a fleet of instruments to literally surround tornadoes and the supercell thunderstorms that form them.

An armada will be deployed, including:

• Ten mobile radars such as the Doppler-on-Wheels (DOW) from CSWR;
• SMART-Radars from the University of Oklahoma;
• the NOXP radar from the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL);
• radars from the University of Massachusetts, the Office of Naval Research and Texas Tech University (TTU);
• 12 mobile mesonet instrumented vehicles from NSSL and CSWR;
• 38 deployable instruments including Sticknets (TTU);
• Tornado-Pods (CSWR);
• 4 disdrometers (University of Colorado (CU);
• weather balloon launching vans (NSSL, NCAR and SUNY-Oswego);
• unmanned aircraft (CU);
• damage survey teams (CSWR, Lyndon State College, NCAR); and
• photogrammetry teams (Lyndon State Univesity, CSWR and NCAR).

“VORTEX2 is fully nomadic with no home base,” says Wurman. Scientists will roam from state to state in the U.S. Plains following severe weather outbreaks.

“When we get wind of a tornado,” says Wurman, “we spring into action.”

More information: VORTEX2 Project: http://www.vortex2.org

Provided by National Science Foundation (news : web)

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 7th June 2010