Science & Technology News

Fighting Bacteria with Bacteria: “Living Medicine” Treats Lung Infections

January 31, 2023

This shows a cross-section of a mouse lung infected with Pseudonomas aeruginosa. The mouse was treated with a version of Mycoplasma pneumoniae that is able to produce therapeutic molecules such as pyocins specifically-designed to combat P. aeruginosa. This therapeutic version of M. pneumoniae acts like a ‘living medicine’ reducing the effects of the infection and preserving air in the alveoli. [Rocco Mazzolini/CR

Some researchers are thinking outside the box to try to combat the growing antibiotic resistance crisis. One of the innovations has been the development of “living medicines” which use one living bacterium to kill another. In a new study, researchers developed a modified (non-pathogenic) version of Mycoplasma pneumoniae that attacks Pseudomonas aeruginosa—which is resistant to many types of antibiotics and is a common source of infections in hospitals. The modified M. pneumoniae was used in combination with low doses of antibiotics that would otherwise not work on their own.

The M. pneumoniae treatment significantly reduced lung infections in mice and doubled mouse survival rate compared to no treatment. Administering a single, high dose of the treatment showed no signs of toxicity in the lungs. And, once the treatment had finished its course, the immune system cleared the modified bacteria in a period of four days.

This research is published in Nature Biotechnology in the paper, “Engineered live bacteria suppress Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection in mouse lung and dissolve endotracheal-tube biofilms.”

P. aeruginosa infections are difficult to treat, in part, because the bacteria forms biofilms which have an increased resistance to antibiotics.

One particularly challenging infection occurs when biofilms grow on the surface of endotracheal tubes used by critically-ill patients who require mechanical ventilators to breathe. This causes ventilator-associated pneumonia (VAP), a condition that affects one in four (9–27%) patients who require intubation. The incidence exceeds 50% for patients intubated because of severe COVID-19. VAP can extend the duration in the intensive care unit for up to thirteen days and kills up to one in eight patients (9–13%).

Robots, Science & Technology News

boston dynamics’ humanoid robot ‘atlas’ effortlessly helps on construction sites

January 26, 2023

BOSTON DYNAMICS ON ‘ATLAS’ INTERACTING WITH OBJECTS

Boston Dynamics’ handy helper and humanoid robot Atlas can maneuver obstacles, seamlessly join a choreographed dance party, or jog on its own in the park, and today, he can effortlessly work on construction sites. In the recently released video by the group, Atlas manipulates the world around it as the humanoid robot interacts with objects and modifies the course it is on.

Atlas tests its locomotion, sensing, and athleticism by delivering a bag of tools to a person waiting at the top of a multi-story scaffold and even pushing a cargo box from his position. Atlas grasps, carries, and tosses the tool bag, climbs stairs, jumps between levels, and tips over a large wooden block out of its way before dismounting with an inverted 540-degree flip that project engineers have dubbed the ‘Sick Trick.’

Atlas control lead Ben Stephens says that parkour and dancing were examples of what might be extreme locomotion, and now the team is trying to build upon that research to also do more robotics manipulation. ‘It’s important to us that the robot can perform these tasks with a certain amount of human speed. People are very good at these tasks, so that has required some pretty big upgrades to the control software,’ he says.

drones, Science & Technology News

A European planemaker built a pilotless aircraft to power the world’s first ‘cargo drone airline’ — meet Black Swan

December 31, 2022

Black Swan.

By Taylor Rains

Bulgarian manufacturer Dronamics will soon debut a pilotless cargo aircraft the size of a delivery van, named Black Swan.

The plane boasts 50% lower costs than competing aircraft, a 770-pound payload, and a 1550-mile range.

The company will operate the aircraft as the world’s first “cargo drone airline” starting in 2023.

A new cargo aircraft is getting ready to hit the market.

European manufacturing company Dronamics will soon debut the Black Swan — a pilotless drone certified to carry freight in the European Union starting in 2023.

The concept is the brainchild of Bulgarian brothers Konstantin and Svilen Rangelov. Speaking with Insider, the latter said the pair started looking into the market in 2013 when Amazon began dabbling in drone deliveries.

Green Friendly, Science & Technology News

Water-splitting device solves puzzle of producing hydrogen direct from seawater

December 17, 2022

BY VICTORIA ATKINSON

A combined desalination–electrolysis system that can produce green hydrogen directly from seawater has been developed by a team in China. This integrated process uses a low-energy method to purify seawater, making it one of the first viable approaches to use salt water as a source of hydrogen. The purification step uses phase transitions to remove impurities and could have additional applications in wastewater treatment and resource recovery.

Splitting water with electricity has been experimented with for over 200 years and the reactions involved are well-understood: at the cathode, H+ ions gain electrons to form hydrogen gas whilst OH- loses electrons at the anode to form oxygen. But despite the simplicity of the underlying chemistry, effective electrolysis is a particularly complicated process. Water splitting is thermodynamically unfavourable and requires both specifically designed catalytic electrodes and a significant input of energy to drive the reaction. Even trace impurities can damage the delicate structure of the cell, leading to membrane pores becoming blocked, expensive electrodes corroded and unwanted byproducts formed.

Chloride ions in seawater are a particular problem and undergo competing oxidation at the anode to produce chlorine. Not only does this side reaction reduce the electrochemical efficiency of the cell, but chlorine is an extremely corrosive gas which rapidly degrades the electrodes and inactivates the cell. ‘Approaches to suppress corrosion by coating catalysts have had modest success,’ explains Heping Xie, an energy chemist at Shenzhen University in China. ‘But the composition of seawater changes [with] location, season [and] human behaviour so electrolysers can’t be universally compatible.’ With an average salt concentration of around 3.5%, the chloride content of seawater makes direct electrolysis unfeasible.

drones, Science & Technology News

Swoop Aero to create ‘world’s largest’ drone delivery network in Queensland

December 17, 2022

By Bruce Crumley

Melbourne-based international drone delivery company Swoop Aero is ending 2022 on a high note in its domestic market, receiving an Australian government grant to extend its operation in Southern Queensland into what the firm says will be the world’s largest aerial logistics network of its kind.

The development comes as part of a wider national government effort to improve various kinds of transport in Queensland, which features both traffic-clogged cities and smaller towns separated by what are often vast spaces. Officials are providing a total $1.8 million to help finance Swoop Aero extend its existing drone logistics and delivery activity into a network covering 175,000 square kilometers, and capable of spreading to a full 400,000 square kilometers.

The project is open to all kinds of partners – including commercial businesses – though the initial focus will primarily be on using Swoop Aero’s delivery drones to speed and improve healthcare services across Southern Queensland.

Continue reading…Swoop Aero to create ‘world’s largest’ drone delivery network in Queensland“

AI, Science & Technology News

AI learns to write computer code in ‘stunning’ advance

December 17, 2022

Snippets of code in white come from the AlphaCode artificial intelligence system, whereas the purple code snippets were written by humans trying to solve similar problems.

BY MATTHEW HUTSON

DeepMind’s AlphaCode outperforms many human programmers in tricky software challenges.

Software runs the world. It controls smartphones, nuclear weapons, and car engines. But there’s a global shortage of programmers. Wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could explain what they want a program to do, and a computer could translate that into lines of code?

A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called AlphaCode is bringing humanity one step closer to that vision, according to a new study. Researchers say the system—from the research lab DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company)—might one day assist experienced coders, but probably cannot replace them.

“It’s very impressive, the performance they’re able to achieve on some pretty challenging problems,” says Armando Solar-Lezama, head of the computer assisted programming group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

AlphaCode goes beyond the previous standard-bearer in AI code writing: Codex, a system released in 2021 by the nonprofit research lab OpenAI. The lab had already developed GPT-3, a “large language model” that is adept at imitating and interpreting human text after being trained on billions of words from digital books, Wikipedia articles, and other pages of internet text. By fine-tuning GPT-3 on more than 100 gigabytes of code from Github, an online software repository, OpenAI came up with Codex. The software can write code when prompted with an everyday description of what it’s supposed to do—for instance counting the vowels in a string of text. But it performs poorly when tasked with tricky problems.

Science & Technology News, Space

SPACE STAYCATION

December 9, 2022

INSIDE MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR PLAN TO BUILD A TOWN ON THE MOON USING LUNAR DUST

By Jona Jaupi

ONE 3D-printing company has revealed plans to build towns on the Moon’s surface.

Nasa has given 3D printing firm Icon $57.2 million to develop a plan that could help build infrastructure on the lunar surface.

Types of infrastructure would include landing pads, habitats, and roads on the lunar surface.

Not only would the developments be built for Nasa but for commercial companies, as well.

Icon, based in Austin, previously displayed its cutting-edge technology by 3D printing a 1,700-square-foot simulated Martian habitat.

The habitat dubbed Mars Dune Alpha was presented at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Nasa’s contract will help Icon research and develop space-based construction systems, specifically for its project Olympus.

This project will help to support the planned exploration of the Moon and beyond.

It’s also intended to be a multi-purpose construction system primarily using local lunar and Martian resources as building materials to further the efforts of NASA as well as commercial organizations to establish a sustained lunar presence.

“In order to explore other worlds, we need innovative new technologies adapted to those environments and our exploration needs,” said Niki Werkheiser, director of technology maturation in Nasa’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD).

Robots, Science & Technology News

Pickle Robot raises $26 million to develop robotics for unloading trucks

November 27, 2022

Pickle Robot, a startup developing robotic automation systems that unload trucks, says it has “live pilot implementations” which are unloading tens-of-thousands of packages per month at customer sites in the greater Los Angeles area.

BY MARK ALLINSON

The company says it has also raised $26 million in series A funding led by Ranpak, JS Capital, Schusterman Family Investments, Catapult Ventures, and Soros Capital.

Additionally, Pickle Robot has added growth-oriented industry veterans to its leadership team to accelerate commercialization of the company’s flagship robotic unload systems.

Founded in 2018, Pickle Robot tackled a number of warehouse challenges using industrial robots built on core AI software, computer vision, and advanced sensors.

The company says it is “laser-focused” on applying its technology to one of the most labor-intensive, physically demanding, and highest turnover work areas in logistics operations: truck unloading.

3D Printer, Science & Technology News

Surgeons Grow 3D-Printed Nose on Patient’s Arm

November 26, 2022

And then grafted it onto the patient’s face.

The ENT and Cervico-Facial surgery teams of the Toulouse University Hospital and the Claudius Regaud Institute carried out a surgical intervention at the Toulouse-Oncopole University Cancer Institute consisting in completely reconstructing a patient’s nose from a synthetic graft previously implanted in the patient’s forearm to pre-vascularize it.

The patient had been treated in 2013 for nasal cavity cancer (squamous cell carcinoma) by radiotherapy and chemotherapy. As a result of this treatment, the patient lost a large part of their nose as well as the front part of their palate.

For more than four years, the patient lived without a nose, facing failures in nasal reconstruction by skin flap grafting and difficulty coping with wearing a facial prosthesis.

The patient was thus offered a nasal reconstruction using custom-made biomaterial, based on a surgical procedure carried out in two stages by Prof. Agnès Dupret-Bories and Dr. Benjamin Vairel.

This type of reconstruction had never before been performed on such a fragile and poorly vascularized area and was made possible thanks to the collaboration of the medical teams with the company Cerhum, a Belgian manufacturer of medical devices specializing in bone reconstruction . This new technique also makes it possible to overcome certain limitations presented by other techniques.

Science & Technology News, Space

FCC Proposes New “Space Bureau” to Meet the Challenges of Commercial Space

November 19, 2022

By Daniel Pereira

On November 3, 2022, at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced a plan to reorganize the agency to better support the needs of the growing satellite industry, promote long-term technical capacity at the FCC, and navigate 21st-century global communications policy.

Under this plan, Chairwoman Rosenworcel will work to reorganize the FCC’s International Bureau into a new Space Bureau and a standalone Office of International Affairs. These changes will help ensure that the FCC’s resources are better aligned so that the agency can continue to fulfill its statutory obligations and keep pace with the rapidly changing realities of the satellite industry and global communications policy.

“The satellite industry is growing at a record pace, but here on the ground, our regulatory frameworks for licensing them have not kept up. Over the past two years, the agency has received applications for 64,000 new satellites. In addition, we are seeing new commercial models, new players, and new technologies coming together to pioneer a wide range of new satellite services and space-based activities that need access to wireless airwaves,” said Chairwoman Rosenworcel.

NASA, Science & Technology News

Out of this world! NASA will launch a huge flying saucer-like inflatable heat shield into space THIS WEEK – and it could help humans land safely on Mars one day

November 14, 2022

By SAM TONKIN and SHIVALI BEST

The Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) is scheduled for launch on Wednesday
NASA’s test will see a huge 20ft inflatable heat shield launched into low Earth orbit on an Atlas V rocket
Once it reaches low-Earth orbit, the heat shield will inflate before descending back to the Earth’s surface
In the future, the heat shield could be used to slow down a spacecraft to survive atmospheric entry on Mars

If humans are to one day land safely on Mars, engineers are going to have to invent a spacecraft that can slow down enough to survive atmospheric entry.

Known as the ‘seven minutes of terror’, in 2021 NASA’s Perseverance rover emerged unscathed after making its descent to the Red Planet using a basic parachute.

But the landing process is trickier for larger payloads, such as rockets with humans on board.

Robots, Science & Technology News

Sky’s The Limit For World’s First High-Rise Robot Window Cleaner

November 3, 2022

IT SAVES LIVES, IT’S THREE TIMES FASTER, AND IT NEVER MISSES A SPOT

By John Jeffay

Robots using the technology that powers driverless cars are cleaning the windows of some of the world’s tallest buildings.

They can work around the clock, they don’t leave streaks, and unlike their human counterparts they never miss a spot.

But more important than all of that… they save lives.

The “dirty, dull and dangerous” job of cleaning steel and glass skyscrapers has cost thousands of lives, according to Michael Brown, CEO & chairman of Skyline Robotics, based in Tel Aviv. “The problem, put simply, is that cleaning windows at height is extremely dangerous.”

Robots do the job much better, they can do it at least three times quicker, and they mean lives are no longer being put at risk.

Other companies have experimented with automated window cleaning solutions, mostly using rollers, like a car wash. But they’re hit-and-miss in terms of actually getting the windows clean and they’re not designed for buildings over 10 stories.

Skyline proudly describes its machine, called Ozmo, as “the world’s first high-rise window-cleaning robot”.

Continue reading…Sky’s The Limit For World’s First High-Rise Robot Window Cleaner“