Impact Lab – Page 359 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

This ceramic ink can 3D-print bones directly into a patient’s body. Here’s how

April 29, 2021

A newly discovered 3D-printing method could be revolutionary for bone cancer treatment.

How can patients recover from surgery that removes parts of their bones?
Up to now the answer has been to build a ceramic replica in a laboratory.
But now scientists have invented a way to 3D-print bone tissue inside the body.
Ceramic material that mimics bone structure is mixed with living cells.
Its inventors say it will reduce suffering and speed up recovery.

A new 3D printing process which can be used inside the human body is offering hope to trauma and cancer patients who need bone replacements, reducing pain and speeding up recovery time.

The treatment of bone cancers can lead to sections of bone being removed and accident victims may require extensive bone repairs. Up to now, 3D bone printing has involved producing material outside the patient’s body.

But now a new technique developed at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, offers the prospect of doctors being able to create new bone tissue exactly where it is needed during a surgical operation.

Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

Scientists Create First Human-Monkey Embryos That Could Potentially Produce Organs for Transplants

April 28, 2021

The part-human, part-monkey embryos were kept alive for 20 days, giving researchers enough time to learn about how animal and human cells communicate

By Georgia Slater

Scientists have successfully created the first embryos containing both human and monkey cells, an important step in helping researchers find ways to produce organs for transplants.

The results of the groundbreaking experiment, published Thursday in the journal Cell, describe the first mixed-species embryos known as chimeras.

The research team in China was led by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, who has previously experimented with human and pig embryos. The team injected 25 human stem cells into the embryos of macaque monkeys.

Elon Musk, Science & Technology News

ELON MUSK’S STARLINK INTERNET WILL BE ‘FULLY MOBILE’ SERVICE LATER THIS YEAR

April 28, 2021

Service uptime, bandwidth & latency are improving rapidly. Probably out of beta this summer’, Mr Musk tweeted

Adam Smith

Elon Musk has revealed that Starlink, SpaceX’s internet service, is likely to move out of beta testing this summer.

“Service uptime, bandwidth & latency are improving rapidly. Probably out of beta this summer”, Mr Musk tweeted. The change could mean more people will be able to sign up to the service, which currently has over 10,000 users.

In a subsequent post, Mr Musk said that it will also be “fully mobile later this year, so you can move it anywhere or use it on an RV or truck in motion.”

He added: “We need a few more satellite launches to achieve compete coverage [and] some key software upgrades.”

Genetics, Science & Technology News

Scientists are on a path to sequencing 1 million human genomes and use big data to unlock genetic secrets

April 27, 2021

BY XAVIER BOFILL DE ROS

The first draft of the human genome was published 20 years ago in 2001, took nearly three years and cost between US$500 million and $1 billion. The Human Genome Project has allowed scientists to read, almost end to end, the 3 billion pairs of DNA bases – or “letters” – that biologically define a human being.

That project has allowed a new generation of researchers like me, currently a postdoctoral fellow at the National Cancer Institute, to identify novel targets for cancer treatments, engineer mice with human immune systems and even build a webpage where anyone can navigate the entire human genome with the same ease with which you use Google Maps.

The first complete genome was generated from a handful of anonymous donors to try to produce a reference genome that represented more than just one single individual. But this fell far short of encompassing the wide diversity of human populations in the world. No two people are the same and no two genomes are the same, either. If researchers wanted to understand humanity in all its diversity, it would take sequencing thousands or millions of complete genomes. Now, a project like that is underway.

Genetics, Science & Technology News

Scientists Have Just Successfully Made A Human-Monkey Hybrid

April 27, 2021

By DOUG NORRIE

You’ve seen Planet of the Apes right? Did you like how that movie turned out in the end? I’ll give you the cliff notes. The apes won. Well, it appears scientists didn’t get the memo about what happens when we start supercharging primates or just start combining human-related things with monkeys. And sure, I know that monkeys and apes aren’t the same thing, but for our dystopian sci-fi purposes let’s just call it a wash. Because this latest news is pretty groundbreaking. According to a journal article published in The Cell, it turns out that scientists have successfully combined human and monkey embryos for the first time. Good luck world, I think we know how this ends.

This study that landed monkey and human embryos all mixed up together started like all of these things usually do, with someone trying to solve a medical issue. Sure, fine enough. The problem, in this case, had to do with organ transplants and finding a way to better source said organs for procedures. In doing so, scientists began experimentation around cross-breeding these embryos, finding that those of the monkey allowed the process to speed up. Whether this ultimately becomes a good thing in their findings remains to be seen, but for the time being, they have at least proved it to be possible.

The article was published on April 15th as part of a larger study in which human stem cells were injected into monkey embryos. The results were nearly immediate with researchers showing signs of growth within more than 100 monkeys. They are titling this process, an ominous one called a chimeric embryo, relating to the chimera of Greek Myth. You might know this bad boy as the combination of a bunch of different animals to form one scary super animal. This isn’t an interpretation, this is something actually quoted in the study. Though they stop short of referencing the exact fire-breathing monster the Greeks came up with that’s equal part lion, goat, and serpent.

Higher Education, Science & Technology News

These 10 Colleges Have Produced The Most Billionaire Alumni

April 27, 2021

By Kenrick Cai

American universities dominate, but it’s not all Ivy Leaguers on the 2021 World’s Billionaires list.

The 2,755 people on Forbes’ 2021 World’s Billionaires list received their undergraduate degrees all over the world, from Al-Azhar University in Egypt to the Zhejiang University of Technology in China. Hundreds did not attend college at all, or left before obtaining a diploma, including a pair of Harvard dropouts who are among the five richest people in the world: Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

But among the billionaires who completed their undergraduate education, a few schools stand out. Harvard leads the way, with at least 29 billionaire alumni on the Forbes list. (We found information about the undergraduate education of a majority, but not all, of the list members.) Four other Ivy League universities make the top ten. Nine of these ten schools are located in the United States—MIT and a trio of California schools round out the American colleges—although their alumni hold diverse citizenship, from Colombia to Ireland to the Philippines. The lone non-U.S. school? The University of Mumbai, a public university in India that is one of the largest colleges in the world by enrollment. Just missing the cut are South Korea’s Seoul National University and China’s Tsinghua University.

Here are the ten colleges with the most billionaire undergraduate alumni, based on education data collected by Forbes; net worths are as of March 5, 2021.

Cancer, Science & Technology News

Innovative technique developed to destroy cancerous kidney cells

April 26, 2021

Figure 1 Cathepsin S (CS) protein expression levels are induced through the -1048 promoter fragment from the CTTS gene upon Paclitaxel or hydrogen peroxide stimulation. HEK293 and 769P cells were stimulated with increasing doses of Paclitaxel (Pac) and hydrogen peroxide (HP) and soluble lysates prepared after 24 h and equal volumes analyzed by Western blotting for cathepsin S (CS), BAX and actin expression (Panel A). Similarly, total RNA was isolated from cells stimulated for 24 h with increasing doses of Pac or HP and equal quantities of template cDNA analyzed for transcriptional expression of CS, BAX and Glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate dehydrogenase (GAP-DH, Panel B). Promoter fragments, derived from the transcriptional start site of the CTTS gene to -1048 and -564, were PCR cloned and fused to a promoter-less GFP encoding plasmid (Panel C) and evaluated for GFP expression in equal volumes of HEK293 and 769P cleared whole cell lysates (WCLs) under Pac (10 μg/mL and 5 μg/mL, respectively) or HP (5 μM) stimulatory conditions. GFP expression was also quantified, standardized and corrected against GFP expression from cells stimulated with carrier alone and is shown as a fold change over basal GFP expression (Panel D). HEK293 cells transfected with pCS-1048 or pCS-564 and stimulated with Pac (5 μg/mL) for 24 h were also fixed and visualized for GFP expression using laser scanning confocal microscopy (Panel E). The red bar indicates 1 micron. Quantified data are presented as the mean ± SEM and its significance (where p < 0.05) determined, using a two-way Student’s t-test (* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01 and *** p < 0.001).

An innovative new technique that encourages cancer cells in the kidneys to self-destruct could revolutionize the treatment of the disease, a new study in the journal Pharmaceutics reports.

During this unique study, researchers from the University of Surrey and Sechenov First Moscow State Medical Universityin Russia investigatedwhethercertain naturally occurring proteins within the body can be used treat cancer.

Science & Technology News, Wearables

Wearable biofuel cells could generate electricity from sweat

April 26, 2021

Scientists develop biofuel cells that can power wearable electronics purely by using human sweat.

By Tokyo University of Science –

It cannot be denied that, over the past few decades, the miniaturization of electronic devices has taken huge strides.

Today, after pocket-size smartphones that could put old desktop computers to shame and a plethora of options for wireless connectivity, there is a particular type of device whose development has been steadily advancing: wearable biosensors.

These tiny devices are generally meant to be worn directly on the skin in order to measure specific biosignals and, by sending measurements wirelessly to smartphones or computers, keep track of the user’s health.

Although materials scientists have developed many types of flexible circuits and electrodes for wearable devices, it has been challenging to find an appropriate power source for wearable biosensors.

Science & Technology News, Space Flight

DARPA Taps Blue Origin for Nuclear-Powered Rocket

April 26, 2021

By Ryan Whitwam

Blue Origin, the private spaceflight firm founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is still trying to get its New Shepard rocket ready for commercial launches, but it just accepted a contract to design something new. The contracts from the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) direct Blue Origin, as well as Lockheed Martin and General Atomics, to design a nuclear thermal propulsion system that could accelerate human spaceflight—literally.

Our current rocket technology relies mostly on chemical power, such as the liquid-fueled engines on a Falcon 9 or the upcoming SLS. These rockets have very high thrust, but they’re less efficient than electrically powered engines. Missions that need to travel a very long distance often use electric propulsion such as ion engines because they can remain active for long periods at low thrust. So, they’re efficient but slower.

A nuclear rocket engine could offer unique advantages by using a small reactor to heat and accelerate fuel. That could theoretically give a nuclear thermal rocket high thrust like chemical rockets and high efficiency like electric ones. The agency calls this the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program, and these first awards cover just Phase 1 of the program, which is expected to last 18 months.

brain hacking, Science & Technology News

Neuralink Could Implant Chips Into Human Brains ‘Later This Year,’ Says Musk

April 25, 2021

This video grab made from the online Neuralink livestream shows a drawing of the different steps of the implantation of a Neuralink device seen during a presentation on August 28, 2020 Photo: Neuralink

By Nica Osorio

KEY POINTS

Musk’s Neuralink was founded in 2016
Neuralink is a neurotech company developing implantable brain-machine interfaces
The company developed a surgical robot a few years a

Billionaire and Tesla CEO Elon Musk mentioned that his brainchild, Neuralink, could implant a chip into a human brain later this year.

Neuralink, a brain-computer-interface company, could soon transition from studying and operating on monkeys to human trials within 2021, according to Musk. In a Twitter conversation following the release of Neuralink’s latest video, a follower reached out to the business magnate in the hope of getting the chance to be one of the subjects of the company’s clinical studies.

Driverless cars, Science & Technology News

WeRide’s cars to go fully driverless in California

April 25, 2021

By Song Jingli

The firm plans to roll out driverless mobility services for passengers in the US.

Guangzhou-based WeRide received approval from the California Department of Motor Vehicles on Monday to test driverless vehicles on public roads in San Jose, two and a half months after Baidu was granted a permit to do the same.

WeRide has been testing autonomous vehicles with safety drivers since 2017. The company will run trials without that precaution, using two cars that are confined to designated streets, the DMV said on its website. The vehicles will operate on roads with posted speed limits not exceeding 45 miles per hour, but not during heavy rain or foggy conditions.

Science & Technology News, Space

NASA CONSIDERING REALITY TV SHOW FILMED ON SPACE STATION

April 25, 2021

WHO’S GOING TO BE AN ASTRONAUT?

by VICTOR TANGERMANN

New Deal

NASA has signed paperwork to explore the prospect of letting a company film what would be the first reality show set in space Space.com reports.

The show, titled “Space Hero,” claims to be “the world’s first ever global casting show where contestants compete for a trip to the International Space Station,” according to a statement, with flights being offered up by Axiom Space.

Despite the agreement, nothing is set in stone just yet. The document signed by NASA this week “does not authorize a private astronaut mission to the International Space Station,” as a NASA spokesperson told Space.com. Instead, it’s meant to facilitate “initial cooperation and information sharing between NAS and Space Hero.”