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

1…..Ecstasy

Anton Köllisch developed 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine as a by-product of research for a drug combating abnormal bleeding. It was largely ignored for around 70 years until it became popular in  dance clubs of the early 80s. It was only when the Rave party culture of the late 80s adopted Ecstasy as its drug of choice that MDMA became one of the top four illegal drugs in use killing an estimated 50 people a year in the UK alone. Its inventor died in World War I.

2…Concentration camps

Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts set up “safe refugee camps” to provide refuge for civilian families who had been forced to abandon their homes for one  reason or another related to the Boer War. However, when Lord Kitchener succeeded Roberts as commander-in-chief in South Africa in 1900, the British Army introduced new tactics in an attempt to break the guerrilla campaign and the influx of civilians grew dramatically as a result. Kitchener initiated plans to- “flush out guerrillas in a series of systematic drives, organized like a sporting shoot, with success defined in a weekly ‘bag’ of killed, captured and wounded, and to sweep the country bare of everything that could give sustenance to the guerrillas, including women and children.” Of the 28,000 Boer men captured as prisoners of war, 25,630 were sent overseas. The vast majority of Boers remaining in the local camps were women and children. Over 26,000 women and children were to perish in these concentration camps.

3…ROCKETS

Despite a lifelong passion for astronomy and a dream that rockets could be used to explore space, Wernher von Braun’s talents were used to produce the Nazi V2 rocket which killed 7,250 military personnel and civilians and an estimated 20,000 slave laborers during construction. Later in the US he developed a series of ICBM rockets capable of transporting multiple nuclear warheads around the globe before redeeming his reputation with the Saturn V rocket that put men on the moon

4…NUCLEAR FUSION

Sir Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant was the first to discover that heavy hydrogen nuclei could be made to react with each other . This fusion reaction is the basis of a hydrogen bomb. Ten years later, American scientist Edward Teller would press to use Oliphant’s discovery in order to build the hydrogen bomb. However, Oliphant did not foresee this – “We had no idea whatever that this fusion reaction would one day be applied to make hydrogen bombs. Our curiosity was just curiosity about the structure of the nucleus of the atom”.

5…SARIN GAS

Dr. Gerhard Schrader was a German chemist specializing in the discovery of new insecticides, hoping to make progress in the fight against world hunger. However, Dr. Schrader is best known for his accidental discovery of nerve agents such as sarin and tabun, and for this he is sometimes called the “father of the nerve agents”.

6…LEADED PETROL

Thomas Midgley discovered the CFC Freon as a safe refrigerant to replace the highly toxic refrigerants such as ammonia in common use. This resulted in extensive damage to the Ozone Layer. His other famous idea was to add tetraethyl lead to gasoline to prevent “knocking” thus causing worldwide health issues and deaths from lead poisoning. He is considered to be the man that – “had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth’s history.”

7…TNT

Joseph Wilbrand was a German chemist who discovered trinitrotoluene in 1863 to be used as a yellow dye. It wasn’t until after 1902 that the devastating power of TNT as it is better known was fully realized and it was utilized as an explosive in time for extensive use by both sides in World War I, World War II. It is still in military & industrial use today.

8…GATLING GUN

Richard Jordan Gatling invented the Gatling gun after he noticed the majority of dead from the American Civil War died from infection & illness, rather than gunshots. In 1877, he wrote: “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease would be greatly diminished.” The Gatling gun was used most successfully to expand European colonial empires by ruthlessly mowing down native tribesmen armed with basic primitive weapons.

9…AGENT ORANGE

Arthur Galston developed a chemical that was meant to speed the growth of soybeans and allow them to be grown in areas with a short season. Unfortunately in high concentrations it would defoliate them and it was made into a herbicide even though Galston had grave concerns about its effects on humans. It was supplied to the US government in orange striped barrels and 77 million litres of Agent Orange were sprayed on Vietnam causing 400000 deaths and disabilities with another 500000 birth defects. Service personnel to some extent were also affected

10…ZYKLON B

Fritz Haber was a Nobel Prize winning Jewish scientist who created cheap nitrogen fertilizer and also made chemical weapons for the German side in World War I. It was his creation of an insecticide mainly used as a fumigant in grain stores that was responsible for the deaths of an estimated 1.2 million people. His Zyklon B became the nazis preferred method of execution in gas chambers during the Holocaust.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Tiny video cameras mounted on the end of long thin fiber optic cables, commonly known as endoscopes, have proven invaluable to doctors and researchers wishing to peer inside the human body. Endoscopes can be rather pricey, however, and like anything else that gets put inside peoples’ bodies, need to be sanitized after each use. A newly-developed type of endoscope is claimed to address those drawbacks by being so inexpensive to produce that it can be thrown away after each use. Not only that, but it also features what is likely the world’s smallest complete video camera, which is just one cubic millimeter in size.

The prototype endoscope was designed at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration, in collaboration with Awaiba GmbH and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering.

Ordinarily, digital video cameras consist of a lens, a sensor, and electrical contacts that relay the data from the sensor. Up to 28,000 sensors are cut out from a silicon disc known as a wafer, after which each one must be individually wired up with contacts and mounted to a lens.

In Fraunhofer’s system, contacts are added to one side of the sensor wafer while it’s still all in one piece. That wafer can then be joined face-to-face with a lens wafer, after which complete grain-of-salt-sized cameras can be cut out from the two joined wafers. Not only is this approach reportedly much more cost-effective, but it also allows the cameras to be smaller and more self-contained – usually, endoscopic cameras consist of a lens at one end of the cable, with a sensor at the other.

The new camera has a resolution of 62,500 pixels, and it transmits its images via an electrical cable, as opposed to an optical fiber. Its creators believe it could be used not only in medicine, but also in fields such as automotive design, where it could act as an aerodynamic replacement for side mirrors, or be used to monitor drivers for signs of fatigue.

They hope to bring the device to market next year.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

world’s smallest video camera

Medigus has developed the world’s smallest video camera at just 0.039-inches (0.99 mm) in diameter. The Israeli company’s second-gen model (a 1.2 mm / 0.047-inch diameter camera was unveiled in 2009) has a dedicated 0.66×0.66 mm CMOS sensor from TowerJazz that captures images at 45K resolution (approximately 220 x 220 pixels) and no, it’s not destined for use in tiny mobile phones or covert surveillance devices, instead the camera is designed for medical endoscopic procedures in hard to reach regions of the human anatomy.

The miniature cameras are made with bio-compatible compnents and are suitable for diagnostic and surgical procedures. Potential applications include cardiology, bronchoscopy, gastroenterology, gynecology, and orthopedic and robotic surgery.

“Medical procedures that have not been possible until now become possible with the world’s smallest camera,” said Dr. Elazar Sonnenschein, CEO for Medigus Ltd.

The camera will be integrated into Medigus’ own disposable endoscopic devices as well as sold to third-party manufacturers.

Medigus says it will begin supplying camera samples to US and Japanese manufacturers in coming weeks.

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for machines to read thoughts

Nicky Phillips SCIENCE

January 29, 2011

Rolling debate … experts are undecided about what brain scans can reveal.

BEFORE the US presidential election in 2008 scientists reported they had, quite literally, peered into the minds of swinging voters.

When a group of people were shown the words ”Democrat” or ”Republican” while undergoing a brain scan they showed high levels of activity in a region called the amygdala.

The scientists concluded that because this region was associated with anxiety, the participants felt that way about the political parties.

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The conclusion was strongly resisted by a group of rival neuroscientists who published a response to the study several days after it was reported in The New York Times.

It was not possible to determine whether a person was anxious simply by looking at the activity in a particular brain region, they said. ”This is because brain regions are typically engaged by many mental states, and thus one-to-one mapping between a brain region and a mental state is not possible.”

This stand-off typifies the rolling debate over what brain scans can really show.

To date, many studies claim to have found the regions of the brain for things as diverse as love, sarcasm, sex drive and even voting choice, fuelling the idea that the brain is made up of modules and individual parts.

Brain scans are generally taken with functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, which has, for the first time, allowed scientists to watch the flow of activity in the brain in real time without cutting open the skull.

But despite the clarity that comes with fMRI, it does not take photographs.

An American psychologist, Diane Beck, said the highlighted region of the brain in an fMRI did not show not a direct measure of that region’s activity.

”The construction of the colourful images we see in journals and magazines are considerably more complicated, and considerably more processed, than the photo-like quality of the images might lead one to believe,” said Dr Beck, of the University of Illinois.

So has fMRI really bridged human understanding of how the thoughts, emotions and feelings of our mind are linked to the soggy, 1.5-kilogram mass of tissue inside the skull?

The debate around fMRI’s powers for probing the mind came to a head in 2009 when an American review found almost half of fMRI studies of emotion and personality had overstated their data linking a specific brain region to an emotion or personality trait.

In a recent article published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science, an American psychologist Gregory Miller agreed. ”The rush in recent decades to construe a host of psychological events as being biological events is, at best, premature,” he wrote.

Ulrich Schall, a psychiatrist and psychologist at the University of Newcastle, said fMRI did not directly measure brain activity; instead it measured blood flow in the brain, which increased as neurons became active, and was therefore an indirect measure of their activity.

When someone was performing a specific mental task it was not possible to clearly identify the biological basis of that task in the brain, Associate Professor Schall said. That was just the interpretation of a scientist.

And unless studies were well designed, he said, the interpretation might be meaningless.

But fMRI clearly had a role in studying the brain. It was good for measuring brain development and studying people with mental disorders, he said.

Associate Professor Schall said scientists were confident of the function of primary processing regions of the brain, such as the areas associated with speech, vision and movement.

But scientists were still far away from understanding the basis of more complex cognitive functions such as numeracy, social interactions, intentions of people and planning, he said. ”These things are certainly not localised and need the combination of many parts of the brain.”

Like many scientists, he believed everything that people experienced in their minds, such as thoughts and feelings, had a physical or biological origin.

”But I use the word believe because I don’t have final proof of that,” he said.

Sourced & publ;ishd  by Henry Sapiecha

promises bionic capabilities

for everyone

January 22, 2008 It’s not often in this era of rampant technological innovation that a fundamentally new concept surfaces – with almost no limitations to what can be achieved with the myriad new technologies coming to market over the last few years, fundamentally new ideas of this magnitude are becoming increasingly rare, much less technologies with groundbreaking societal implications. Such a technology emerged this week when it was announced that engineers at the University of Washington have used microscopic scale manufacturing techniques to combine a flexible contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

Though in its infancy, the combination of a wearable contact lens with embedded optoelectronic and electronic devices promises many things, most notably this could well be the beginning of the Computer Human Interface of the future.

The trend towards miniaturization of computers has now reached a roadblock due to our inability to adequately display the information they provide on smaller screens – the main limiting factor in relation to the ever-shrinking size of computers and telephones has become the size of the display – if it gets any smaller, we can’t read it.

Currently, the most obvious solutions for further reduction in size of wearable computer-based devices are miniature projectors and externally worn heads up displays.

The amount of investment in miniaturized projector technologies bears testimony to the prospects for this market and we have seen numerous prototypes showcased recently by the likes of Microvision, 3M, Texas Instruments, Explay, Neochroma,Digislide, Light Blue Optics and from research labs such as the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems . Though the microprojection area promises the ability to project a large screen on any flat surface, we have yet to see commercially available products and the technology won’t suit everyone, partially because they’re still not quite small enough, and partially because of privacy issues – projecting delicate company information onto an airport terminal wall, for example, might not be a good idea.

Similarly, those heads up displays that have come to market are either prohibitively expensive or do not yet offer high resolution screens of sufficient clarity and stability to avoid the attendant migraine headaches. The promise is there for the near future, but one of the major drawbacks to mass adoption of these products is that not everybody wishes to look like a cyborg.

Accordingly, the University of Washington’s contact lens offers the promise of a viable large screen display alternative for connecting users with their mobile devices. Project head and Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering Babak Parviz envisages that his team’s electronic contact lens will offer the ability to superimpose a transparent high resolution display over the field of vision of one, maybe both eyes of the wearer .

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” says Parviz.

Apart from the expectation of eventually offering a large screen display for our wearable and micro computers, PDAs and phones, the heads-up aspect of the contact lens leaves the way open for a democratization of Augmented Reality.

Unlike Virtual Reality, where the user’s field of view is completely replaced with an artificial visual environment, Augmented Reality uses head tracking in conjunction with augmented vision to overlay complimentary information on the user’s view.

The system can tell which direction the user is looking and adjusts the displayed image accordingly, displaying new and appropriate information for the scene being viewed. For example, when viewing a map, it may be beneficial to orient the map to the user’s field of view so that the user can identify landmarks in the real world by their proximity to landmarks on the map.

Augmented Reality is already in use in a wide range of industrial applications due to the work of companies such as Arkiva which is used by technicians doing extremely complex work, enabling them to overlay instructions, circuit diagrams, mechanical drawings and the like over real-world tangles to ensure they get it right.

If the tools were readily available and in mass usage, a plethora of new applications for augmented reality would almost certainly come to light.

In tourism, for example, Augmented Reality would offer the ability to see the ancient ruins in Rome, overlayed with what the buildings originally looked like and for buildings to be labeled in a real/virtual mixed tour.

At a sporting event, players might be labeled, the ball/puck tracked, distances marked, and for certain professions, such as a surgeon, vital organs, veins and arteries could be delineated. Obviously, such capabilities would require additional technologies to come into play, but with wireless networking becoming ubiquitous, it’s a possibility for the mid-term future.

Another aspect of AR is displaying vital information to someone who is actively involved in doing something where the need to refocus on a dashboard or set of instruments would impair that person’s ability to perform their task. The heads up display was pioneered and significantly evolved in jet fighters, and has been trailed in Formula One and there are now commercially available systems on the market for racing drivers, motorcyclists and bicycle riders.

The Parviz team’s contact lens would enable pervasive heads up displays in automobiles, which would significantly reduce accidents, even if it only helped people tune their radio or find the album they wanted on their iPod whilst driving.

Taking wireless technologies and the evolution of the UW Contact Lens even further, there’s significant promise of using the contact lens displays in coordinating groups of people to work more effectively in teams, the most likely first up usage for this being for military personnel on the battlefield and for disaster response teams in a crisis where saving time and doing things efficiently means saving lives.

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle’s speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

“People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about. Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it’s safe,” said Parviz, who heads a multi-disciplinary UW group that is developing electronics for contact lenses.

Bionic Zoom Vision

One of the aspects of the UW Contact Lens most likely to capture the imagination of the public is its promise of bionic vision, popularized in mass market science fiction such as the Terminator movie series where Arnold Schwarzenegger’s cyborg character and his cyborg combatants demonstrated the ability to zoom in on distant objects, as did Lee Majors’ character Steve Austin in the Six Million Dollar Man television series.

“Using nanotechnology you can extend the sophistication of the contact lens as far as you like,” says Parviz. “There is interest in including cameras on the contact lens and incorporating other lenses so that, for example, if you were looking at something very small, you would be able to zoom in to get a closer look. Similarly, if something is far away, you would be able to zoom in.”

With an array of lenses wirelessly connected to a wearable computer, there’s obviously the capability of “recording images” says Parviz. We prompt him on the possibility of recording in real time what we see, and he adds that there are many uses for the technology they are developing that have not yet been explored, and indeed, that there are uses they almost certainly haven’t even thought of.

Once again, the military and law enforcement domains are the most likely to pony up the dollars for real-time recording of critical encounters, but the possibilities are almost endless once someone is wearing such a contact lens – could it be that at some point in the future, those “this conversation could be recorded for training purposes” on-hold telephone announcements (warnings) might be applicable to every conversation with a customer service representative?

With the ability to record everything we see, which the UW Contact lens will ultimately enable, the concept of privacy, instant recall and a whole host of new capabilities come into play – remember that reliable, solid state data storage is becoming more cost effective by the day. A decade from now, recording everything we say and do is now a distinct possibility.

Bio-sensing and a wearable health monitoring system

Perhaps the most left-field aspect to the UW study is the promise of a wearable health monitoring system. “The second big area that we are looking at is bio-sensing, because on the surface of the contact lens there are a lot of biomarkers already present that are important for monitoring health care,” explains Parviz.

“We recognized that if we could have a contact lens that incorporated biosensors that could sample the biology of the eye we could constantly report it outside, and hence have a non-invasive way of putting people on continuous health monitoring.”

Whatsmore, the system also has the capability of displaying the key indicators in real time to the wearer or a relevant third party as a personal dashboard via their heads up display.

How the project began

“The way this whole thing started,” says Assistant Professor Babak Parviz, “was that we were looking at conventional contact lenses and we noticed that they were straightforward polymer structures. They do something useful in vision correction, but the structure of the system is simple – it’s just one material.”

“The expertise we have in our group surrounds nanotechnology and microfabrication which enables us to make a lot of very small, very useful devices, so we thought that if we could migrate all these devices onto a contact lens, we could get a lot more functionality out of this simple object that’s used by millions of people. The contact lens is safe to use and people are quite comfortable with using them.”

“We had a few things in mind. The first was that we could display some information – the level of the sophistication of the display would obviously be dependent on the sophistication of the technology we used. At its simplest, it might just be a single pixel that switched on and off and indicated something that’s important to the user. Going several levels beyond that, it might be a high resolution display.”

“There are a variety of applications in that domain once you have a reasonable degree of resolution in a display, such as augmented reality and computer generated images that you could superimpose over the outside world.”

“Going beyond that, we could incorporate all sorts of optical devices on a contact lens. Obviously it needs to be remotely powered and it would communicate with outside devices via a wireless link.”

“A fully functional high resolution display is still some way off,” he says, explaining that the existing prototype lens contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, and have been tested on rabbits with no adverse effects.

“Our immediate goal is to have a display that has only a few pixels to demonstrate the viability of the concept and after that we will work upwards towards increasing the resolution of the display but it will be some time yet before we have a fully functional hires display.”

“This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.”

“So those are all doable things that are on our agenda”, says Parviz, referring to the array of technological possibilities mentioned elsewhere in this article, “but they’re not easy to implement so they’re all in the future still.”

“What’s interesting and encouraging is that a lot of these things have already been demonstrated independently so there are lots of different micro-lens designs already.”

“These are lens that are exactly the right size, but they have never been incorporated into a contact lens so what’s really encouraging is that a lot of these things exists and one of our hopes is that we have opened the venue of the contact lens to microelectronics – people thinking about contact lenses as a place where we can put elecronics and optoelectronics.”

Building the lenses was a challenge because materials that are safe for use in the body, such as the flexible organic materials used in contact lenses, are delicate. Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across. They then sprinkled the grayish powder of electrical components onto a sheet of flexible plastic. The shape of each tiny component dictates which piece it can attach to, a microfabrication technique known as self-assembly. Capillary forces – the same type of forces that make water move up a plant’s roots, and that cause the edge of a glass of water to curve upward – pull the pieces into position.

The prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer’s vision, but the technique could be used on a corrective lens, Parviz said. And all the gadgetry won’t obstruct a person’s view. Ideally, installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out, and once installed the wearer would barely know the gadget was there, Parviz said.

“There is a large area outside of the transparent part of the eye that we can use for placing instrumentation,” Parviz said. Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens, Parviz said.

The results of the project to date were presented last week at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz’s now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors were Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW’s electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center’s ophthalmology department.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

Could virtual sex be the Kinect’s killer app? (NSFW)

Once open source drivers for Microsoft’s Kinect were created, it was inevitable the device would be put to use in a virtual sex game. With it around a month since such drivers started appearing, ThriXXX, a company responsible for a range of 3D sex games that are already compatible with a number of sex toy peripherals, has now produced a video demo of a Kinect being used to virtually fondle a number of computer generated ladies. Read More

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha

uncovered

MRI scans show a woman’s brain lights up like a Christmas tree during an orgasm.

Scientists have observed for the first time what goes on inside a woman’s brain during orgasm, and it is as complicated as many men suspected.

Neuroscientists in New Jersey have used MRI scanners to discover that 30 different parts of a woman’s brain fire up during orgasm and the pleasure is so great it can stop the lucky lady from feeling pain. This is due to parts of her nervous system shutting down, making the woman less aware of pain sensations.

Volunteers brought themselves to orgasm inside an MRI machine, which scanned the brain during the process. For some this took 20 minutes, while most achieved their goal in under five.

Brain areas responsible for emotion, touch, satisfaction and memory are involved.

Perth based clinical psychologist and sex therapist Danielle Hannington said she was not surprised by the findings.

She said female sexuality was incredibly complex, with at least one in seven women unable to climax.

“For women to orgasm it’s like we need a series of catalysts to get us over the mountain,” she said.

“There are a lot of women who experience difficulty with orgasm. It doesn’t mean they don’t enjoy sex, though.”

Orgasm always involved the mind, and having an orgasm did not necessarily mean a woman was enjoying sex, she said.

“For us as women it’s not the goal of orgasm, it’s the goal of pleasure or a connection.”

The notion that orgasm could stifle pain was not new, with orgasm during child birth something that researchers were interested in.

There are hopes the research may lead to developments in treatment of libido problems and sexual dysfunction.

The researchers have said they plan to move on to men in a follow-up study.

Sourced & published by Henry Sapiecha