Perfumery is an intricate science that takes a lot of effort to get right. Many people don’t realize the amount of work that goes into perfecting that fragrance that we so willingly splash on in the morning. With the advancement in technology over the past two decades, chemists have been able to develop techniques that create an even larger array of scents and fragrances that people have never smelled before. For the first time ever, people can actually get personalized, unique scents to wear. How much that would actually cost, is a different matter.
After a semi-painless injection between the thumb and index finger, a microchip is implanted in another employee. A cyborg is now created, and this human/machine mashup runs off to buy a smoothie using his or her new sub-dermal implant.
If that sounds futuristic, it’s because we’re conditioned to this as a sort of science fiction trope: human gets implanted, its overlords are now in control. For a Swedish company, however, the practice of implanting microchips into its employees has become routine, popular even.
A team of researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have developed technology that allows them to control the movement of turtles using human thought.
Think of it as a real life — but significantly scaled down — application of the 2009 blockbuster Avatar concept where humans control the body of an alien by remotely transferring human consciousness into another biological body. The team uses a brain-computer interface (BCI) that helps translate brain waves into commands that guide or control the movement of the turtle.
It can be impossible for humans to tell apart very similar colors. But, with a new pair of tetrachromatic glasses created by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you can never again leave the house wearing two items of black clothing that don’t quite match.
These spectacles enhance the user’s existing color vision, affording them new power to discern more distinct shades. Once developed for practical applications, they could be used to spot camouflaged targets in the field or identify counterfeit money.
In this sequence, a spinach leaf is stripped of its plant cells, a process called decellularization, using a detergent. The process leaves behind the leaf’s vasculature. Researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) were able to culture beating human heart cells on such decelluralized leaves. Credit: Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Researchers face a fundamental challenge as they seek to scale up human tissue regeneration from small lab samples to full-size tissues, bones, even whole organs to implant in people to treat disease or traumatic injuries: how to establish a vascular system that delivers blood deep into the developing tissue.
Current bioengineering techniques, including 3-D printing, can’t fabricate the branching network of blood vessels down to the capillary scale that are required to deliver the oxygen, nutrients and essential molecules required for proper tissue growth. To solve this problem, a multidisciplinary research team at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Arkansas State University-Jonesboro have successfully turned to plants. They report their initial findings in the paper “Crossing kingdoms: Using decelluralized plants as perfusable tissue engineering scaffolds” published online in advance of the May 2017 issue of the journal Biomaterials.
Imagine you could inject a special, electrically conductive fluid into a rose, which then spreads out through the plant and grows into it. Imagine creating an entire garden or forest of cyborg plants that act as a gigantic, biological computer network.
Well, imagine no more – scientists from Sweden’s Linköping University have successfully managed to perform the former, while looking forward to the latter in the future.
DNA contains information about a living organism. It codes everything in an living being. That’s why it makes sense for corporations like Microsoft to invest in research that studies how DNA can be used to store data. Unlike most of the existing data storage devices out there, DNA doesn’t degrade over time, plus it’s very compact. For example, just four grams of DNA can contain a year’s worth of information produced by all of humanity combined. Continue reading… “New Study Confirms That the Future of Data Storage Is in DNA”
Two University of Oxford biomedical researchers are calling for robots to be built with real human tissue, and they say the technology is there if we only choose to develop it. Writing in Science Robotics, Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy and Andrew Carr argue that humanoid robots could be the exact tool we need to create muscle and tendon grafts that actually work.
Right now, tissue engineering relies on bioreactors to grow sheets of cells. These machines often look like large fish tanks, filled with a rich soup of nutrients and chemicals that cells need to grow on a specialized trellis. The problem, explain Mouthuy and Carr, is that bioreactors currently “fail to mimic the real mechanical environment for cells.” In other words, human cells in muscles and tendons grow while being stretched and moved around on our skeletons. Without experiencing these natural stresses, the tissue grafts produced by researchers often have a broad range of structural problems and low cell counts.
We have learned how to manipulate the code of life. Why this hasn’t received more attention is beyond me.
Synthetic Biology is a multidisciplinary field that often defies definition. Yet despite its complexity, it is a remarkably easy field to apply once you’ve learned the science behind it. From a computer, you can input your desired genetic sequence, print it out, glue it together, put it into a cell and then watch whatever you have created sprout.
The World Health Organization says we need to step up the fight against a dozen bacteria that are growing resistant to all the antibiotics we have to treat them.
One of the scariest features of the antibiotic resistance crisis — which has been accelerated by how we overuse these drugs — is that pharmaceutical companies aren’t developing new antibiotics quickly enough. They also often place profits ahead public health when choosing which drugs to develop.
Hydrogels have shown significant potential in everything from wound dressings to soft robots, but their applications have been limited from their lack of toughness – until now. A team of scientists at Hokkaido University have developed a new set of hydrogel composites or “fiber-reinforced soft composites” that combine hydrogels with woven fiber fabric to create a material that is five times stronger than carbon steel.
Imagine that you could have superhero vision, seeing in not only what we know as the visible spectrum, but using wavelengths that allow you to see through fog, and detect black ice. Or imagine a Star Trek-like medical tricorder that could take a tiny bit of body fluid and determine what was ailing you.
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