Impact Lab – Page 277 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Robots

Worldwide, more than a billion people suffer from vision impairment and entirely avoidable blindness. Cataracts — and the surgery to correct them — is one of the most common surgical procedures in the world, with more than 28 million performed worldwide, every year. The problem is, even though the surgery is relatively simple, there aren’t enough surgeons, and not enough money to pay those surgeons, especially in developing countries. ForSight Robotics wants to address that issue and just raised a $55 million Series A to continue develop its surgery robots. The round comes around 18 months after its seed round.

The surgery robot platform is called Oryom, which means “daylight” in Hebrew. It leverages cutting-edge technologies (pun intended) in microsurgical robotics, computer vision and machine learning. The platform aims to automate ophthalmic surgeries that treat diseases underlying preventable blindness. With the power of robotics on its side, the company claims to be 10 times more accurate than the human hand.

Robots

Florida county rolls out BeBot, a beach-cleaning robot with a message for humans

July 31, 2022

A remote-controlled robot named BeBot rolls over a patch of sand in Indian Shores during a cleanup demonstration on Thursday, July 14, 2022. BeBot is part of a campaign by Keep Pinellas Beautiful to raise awareness about debris left by humans that lurks under the beach surface and eventually winds up in the Gulf of Mexico. (Aya Diab/TNS)

By Chris Kuo, Tampa Bay TimesTribune News Service

A new solar-powered, beach-cleaning robot has arrived in Pinellas County, drawing attention to all the debris lurking just beneath the beach surface.

Overseen by Keep Pinellas Beautiful, BeBot will visit 14 locations this month, from Clearwater to St. Pete Beach. The remote-controlled robot collects small pieces of litter — cigarette butts, plastic straws, bottle caps, food wrappers and more.

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of trash that we found. It’s astonishing,” said Patricia DePlasco, executive director of Keep Pinellas Beautiful, a nonprofit that focuses on environmental cleanup. “We look across the beach and we think we have a nice clean beach and we don’t realize what’s under that top layer of sand.”

DePlasco and a team of about 30 volunteers gathered Thursday at an Indian Shores beach to watch a BeBot demonstration.

Stem cells

Scientists aim to grow billions of stem cells aboard the International Space Station

July 31, 2022

This is the latest effort to overcome one of the key hurdles for widespread stem cell therapies.

By Chris Young

Scientists from Cedars-Sinai Medical in Los Angeles are investigating how to grow large batches of a specific type of stem cell.

Their mission has taken them orbital — to the International Space Station — and it could help unlock a whole host of stem cell therapies to combat deadly diseases.

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One of the researchers, Dhruv Sareen, even donated his own stem cells for the experiment, a press statement reveals. If all goes to plan, the scientists hope to eventually grow billions of stem cells in space.

Farming

Dubai is now home to the largest vertical farm in the world

July 30, 2022

The building will produce 2 million pounds of greens per year, in a country that currently imports nearly all of its food.

BY ADELE PETERS

If you walk into a grocery store in Dubai, the spinach on the shelves will probably be from Europe—or even from as far away as the United States. Because of limited arable land and water, the United Arab Emirates imports about 90% of its food. But inside a warehouse-like building near the Dubai airport, a new vertical farm is now beginning to grow more than 2 million pounds of local leafy greens per year.

Stem cells

Time-Lapse Footage Shows Neural Stem Cells Grow in 3D Scaffolds

July 30, 2022

Watch as primordial neural cells dance across, grow into, and even move 3D scaffolds engineered to heal brain injury from stroke and other trauma. Decorating the scaffold with various nutrients and biochemical signals allow researchers to control what types of brain tissues they become. Credit: Katrina Wilson and Ken Kingery, Duke University.

Researchers at Duke University have captured days-long time-lapse videos of young neural cells moving and growing within a novel 3D synthetic biocompatible structure. By literally watching how the cells respond to natural biochemical signals embedded within the material, biomedical engineers hope to develop biogels that can repair and regrow brain tissue after a stroke or other trauma.

The results appear online June 22 in the journal Advanced Materials.

Repairing and regrowing brain tissue is a difficult task. Left to its own devices, the brain does not regenerate lost synapses, blood vessels or other structures after suffering an injury, such as from a stroke. Dead brain tissue is instead absorbed, leaving behind a cavity devoid of anything recognizable as healthy brain tissue.

But that hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to regenerate damaged brains anyway. One common approach used by biomedical engineers is to provide a new medium for the diverse pieces of brain tissue to move into, loaded with various nutrients and biological instructions to encourage growth.

While scientists in the field have historically reached for a homogenous, gelatinous biomaterial to support neural regrowth, Tatiana Segura, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, has developed a different approach. Her biomaterial built to encourage all types of healing and growth is made of millions of tiny gelatinous spheres packed together to form a stable scaffold.

quantum computing

Photonic Link Could Spark an All-Silicon Quantum Internet, Scalable Quantum Devices

July 30, 2022

BY MATT SWAYNE

UNIVERSITY RESEARCH NEWS — Researchers at the Simon Fraser University report on research, published in Nature today, that they say could pave the way toward an all-silicon quantum internet and quantum computers that can tackle real-world computational challenges. That internet theoretically will be much more secure and much more powerful than today’s version.

In the study, the scientists describe their observations of silicon ‘T centre’ photon-spin qubits, an important milestone that unlocks immediate opportunities to construct massively scalable quantum computers and the quantum internet that will connect them.

Quantum computing has enormous potential to provide computing power well beyond the capabilities of today’s supercomputers, which could enable advances in many other fields, including chemistry, materials science, medicine and cybersecurity. In order to make this a reality, it is necessary to produce both stable, long-lived qubits that provide processing power, as well as the communications technology that enables these qubits to link together at scale.

Past research has indicated that silicon can produce some of the most stable and long-lived qubits in the industry. Now the research published by Daniel Higginbottom, Alex Kurkjian, and co-authors provides proof of principle that T centres, a specific luminescent defect in silicon, can provide a ‘photonic link’ between qubits.

This comes out of the SFU Silicon Quantum Technology Lab in SFU’s Physics Department, co-led by Stephanie Simmons, Canada Research Chair in Silicon Quantum Technologies and Michael Thewalt, Professor Emeritus. “This work is the first measurement of single T centres in isolation, and actually, the first measurement of any single spin in silicon to be performed with only optical measurements,” says Stephanie Simmons.

quantum computing, Science & Technology News

Quantum encryption spacecraft closer to launch

July 29, 2022

Speqtre, an innovative secure communications cubesat, has passed a major milestone in its journey to space.

The mission, which will demonstrate quantum key distribution (QKD) from space, has passed its critical design review. This means that the team can now build and test a full model of the satellite.

AI

Smart Beehives Will Monitor their Colonies with AI

July 29, 2022

A single colony of bees can pollinate up to 300 million flowers daily. And that includes human-managed honeybees. That means that, unlike some livestock or agricultural practices, this is a human activity that is beneficial to the environment and key to the food system’s sustainability. Now, robotics, artificial intelligence, and big data will bolster the collaboration between humans and bees. That is the proposal of an Israeli startup.

Augmented Reality

AR-Powered Hotels Have Officially Arrived

July 29, 2022

Immersive technology could change the hospitality industry forever.

by Kyle Melnick

Moxy Hotels, a chain of stylish hotels owned by Marriot, today announced the Moxy Universe, Play Beyond, an augmented reality (AR) experience that allows guests to interact with the hotel in a variety of unique ways.

Starting now until the end of the year, visitors can use their mobile devices to explore 12 Moxy Hotels from Shanghai to Tokyo using a virtual avatar. Ahead of their stay, guests can use the Moxy mobile app to begin customizing their digital persona with different outfits, accessories, and hairstyles.

drones

UK to have the world’s biggest automated drone superhighway

July 28, 2022

UK to plan world’s biggest automated drone superhighway connecting cities and towns for mail package delivery

The UK is setting up the world’s biggest automated drone superhighway within two years, which will be used on a 164-mile Skyway project that will connect towns and cities.

The project, according to BBC, is part of a £273 million funding package for the aerospace sector.

Drone mail delivery to the Isles of Scilly and across Scotland is also part of other projects being planned, which will include delivering medicines to patients in remote regions.

The chief operating officer of the aviation technology company Altitude Angel, Chris Forster, said that the drone superhighway will not only be used for business logistics but will also help “police and medical deliveries of vaccines and blood samples”.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng will officially make the announcement of the project at the Farnborough International Airshow. He believes the funding will “help the sector seize on the enormous opportunities for growth that exist as the world transitions to cleaner forms of flight”.

Solar Energy

Scientists create a nearly invisible solar cell with up to 79% transparency

July 28, 2022

Here come windows that can generate power from the sun.

By Derya Ozdemir

Transparent solar cells, which have the potential to convert windows, greenhouses, glass panels of smart devices, and more into energy harvesting devices, have taken another step toward becoming a reality.

A team of scientists from the Tohoku University in Japan has created a near-invisible solar cell using indium tin oxide (ITO) as a transparent electrode and tungsten disulfide (WS2) as a photoactive layer.

Remarkably, the cell has the potential to achieve a transparency of 79 percent and can help take the TMD-based near-invisible solar cells from the basics to truly industrialized stages, according to the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Medicine

Drug that increases human lifespan to 200 years is in the works

July 28, 2022

Taken in pill form, the drug would eliminate cells in the human body that are responsible for advancing the ageing process – potentially doubling our lifespan. But is this desirable?

By Jessica Byrne

Are you ready to live an additional hundred years?

British computational biologist Dr Andrew Steele has published a new book on the longevity of human life, arguing it is entirely feasible for us to live well beyond a single century with the help of a certain kind of drug.

In the book, he states that research in the field of senolytics – drugs that work to eliminate cells that degrade tissue function – are already showing promising results and could become available on the market within the next decade.

‘I don’t think there is any kind of absolute cap on how long we can live,’ said Dr Steele. ‘I can’t see a physical or biological reason why people couldn’t live to 200 — the challenge is whether we can develop the biomedical science to make it possible.’

Once perfected, the drug would destroy ‘zombie cells’, scientifically known as senescent cells. These cells stop dividing over our lifespan, accumulate inside our bodies, and eventually release compounds that speed up processes of ageing.

In a 2020 trial, mice who were administered the drug showed improved physical function and extended health and lifespan. Given that gene functions in humans and mice are almost identical, many believe we could reap the same benefits.