Scientists Teach Spine Nerves To Regenerate

i09:

“Is science about to revolutionize treatment for spinal cord injuries? Researchers in San Diego may have figured out a way to do what was previously thought impossible, and train the nerves to regenerate themselves properly.

Scientists at UC San Diego have proven that if they combine the use of a biological chemical called neurotrophin-3 (NT-3) with a “cell bridge” on the area of injury and stimulating the body’s regenerative genes, severed spinal cord nerves will regenerate. This doesn’t mean that the injury would be completely healed, as the scientists still need to work out how to create functioning nerve connections, as UC San Diego’s Centre for Neural Repair director, Professor Mark Tuszynski, explains:

While our findings are very encouraging… they also highlight the complexity of restoring function in the injured spinal cord.

If only someone had thought to explain that to DC Comics in the mid-90s…”

Progress in treatment of spine injuries [Independent.co.uk]

Scientists Find Way to Mass Produce Human Skin

Cyborg skin?

Neatorama:

“This development from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Science Institute in Germany has made the creation of human skin much cheaper:

The basic skin production system, which Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft hopes to start selling next year, can produce 5,000 little swatches of human skin a month, for a total of over 600 square inches of mass-produced tissue. Each 0.12-square-inch section of skin would cost around $49 to produce, far less than the current cost.

The system, which should be available in 2010, is fully automated, with computers controlling the solution that the skin grows in, monitoring the vats for infection, guiding the blade that cuts the swatches, and even testing the quality of the final product. So far, this project has generated 19 patents for Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft.

Potential applications include not only helping burn victims, but replacing lab animals in product safety testing. Also, robots probably won’t have to forage as much for the taste of human flesh.”

Link

New Nanotechnology Breakthrough Is A Working Nano-Gear, 1.2nm Across

io9:

“Nano-scale robotics is getting closer and closer. Scientists at A*STAR in Singapore have created a nano-gear that’s 1.2 nanometers across, or a few atoms wide. That’s ten thousand times smaller than the ones pictured here, next to a dust mite.

The gear is made of carbon compounds and can freely rotate around a central axis. The A*STAR team can control the rotation of the molecular gear using a Scanning Tunneling Microscope. It’s the smallest molecular gear yet made, and since its rotation is controlled and not random, scientists are calling it a break-through in nanotechnology.

This first step could lead to limitless possible applications, including complex robots no larger than a grain of sand. Or maybe this is just another step towards the inevitable “gray goo” panic. Either way, this discovery could mean working robots that are only a few molecules across or machines that can travel along strands of DNA in the near future.”

A*STAR Scientists Invent The World’s Only Controllable Molecule-Gear Of Minuscule Size Of 1.2nm [A*STAR]
Paper abstract [Nature]

Pentagon Closer To Creating Liquid Metal Terminators [Mad Science]

i09:

“Progress continues on a Pentagon-backed fringe science project to develop matter that can assemble itself into 3D forms (such as weapons) and flow like mercury through barriers. We all know where this leads, don’t we?

Wired’s Danger Room blog rounds up the progress reports on the Programmable Matter project, in which teams at Harvard and MIT, backed by Pentagon research arm DARPA, are creating modular sheets and strands that can be programmed to fold themselves origami-style into shapes or build themselves into Lego-like solids. The project is already five months into its second phase, with a number of simple shape-shifting solids expected to be ready by next spring.

Meanwhile, Intel is doing its own Programmable Matter research, with the idea of creating hologram-like models for demonstration purposes, only the models would be physical objects that can be touched and manipulated.

The DARPA scientists are, of course, looking at the defense applications of this technology — morphing blobs of goo into instant weapons, building robots that can squeeze through barriers or tight spaces and then reassemble themselves. This may sound frighteningly close to Terminator territory, but the Intel app , with its suggestion of tactile virtual reality, implies a more hedonistic use for the technology. As with other Pentagon-spawned innovations (like, say, the Internet), what started as a military tool will probably end up as porn.”

Stem Cell Contact Lenses Cure Blindness in Less Than a Month

Gizmodo: “Here’s something that people with poor or no vision will be excited
about: three patients had their sight restored in less than a month by contact lenses cultured with stem cells.

All three patients were blind in one eye. The researchers extracted stem cells
from their working eyes, cultured them in contact lenses for 10 days,
and gave them to the patients. Within 10 to 14 days of use, the stem
cells began recolonizing and repairing the cornea.

Of the three patients, two were legally blind but can
now read the big letters on an eye chart, while the third, who could
previously read the top few rows of the chart, is now able to pass the
vision test for a driver’s license. The research team isn’t getting
over excited, still remaining unsure as to whether the correction will
remain stable, but the fact that the three test patients have been
enjoying restored sight for the last 18 months is definitely
encouraging. The simplicity and low cost of the technique also means
that it could be carried out in poorer countries.

This is incredible and potentially game changing. It’s stuff like
this that makes you realize that we live in the future, and it’s
awesome.”

[UNSW via The Australian via GizMag]

The End of the World Begins: Cyberdyne Develops Robotic Suit

/Film:

“Did you know that Cyberdyne is a real robotics company? Have they
developed a robotic suit that will likely evolve into self-aware
robots, Judgment Day and the end of the world as we know it?

Cyberdyne, which takes its name from the fictional company responsible for creating the supercomputer Skynet within the Terminator
films, is developing a Hybrid Assistive Limb (or HAL… get it?). The
suit is s a cyborg-type robot that can expand and improve physical
capability. It was designed to help paralyzed people walk again and
participate in daily activities.

According to Cyberdyne’s website,
the suit works by detecting very weak biosignals on the surface of the
skin, after nerve signals are sent from the brain to the muscles via
motoneuron.

“HAL catches these signals through a
sensor attached on the skin of the wearer. Based on the signals
obtained, the power unit is controlled to move the joint unitedly with
the wearer’s muscle movement, enabling to support the wearer’s daily
activities. This is what we call a ‘voluntary control system’ that
provides movement interpreting the wearer’s intention from the
biosignals in advance of the actual movement. Not only a ‘voluntary
control system’ “HAL” has, but also a ‘robotic autonomous control
system’ that provides human-like movement based on a robotic system
which integrally work together with the ‘autonomous control system’.
“HAL” is the world’s first cyborg-type robot controlled by this unique
Hybrid System.”

The future begins…”

Scientists Extract Dino Blood from Ancient Bones

Neatorama:

“Paleontologist
Mary Schweitzer of North Carolina State University and colleagues
apparently have never watched Jurassic Park. Why else would she extract
dino “blood” from ancient bones?

A dinosaur bone buried for 80 million years has
yielded a mix of proteins and microstructures resembling cells. The
finding is important because it should resolve doubts about a previous
report that also claimed to have extracted dino tissue from fossils.

… Schweitzer took a look at the pristine leg bone of a
plant-eating hadrosaur that had been encased in sandstone for 80
million years. She and colleagues exhaustively tested the sample,
sequencing the proteins they found with a new and better mass
spectrometer and sending samples to two other labs for verification.

Now they report recovering not just collagen – which conveys
little evolutionary information because it is the same in almost all
animals – but also haemoglobin, elastin and laminin, as well as
cell-like structures resembling blood and bone cells. The proteins
should reveal more about dinosaur evolution because they vary much more
between species.

This can’t possibly end well”: Link

Parasitic twin erupts from 30-year-old man’s belly button

Boing Boing:

“Gavin Hyatt of Witney, Oxfordshire went to the hospital with a bleeding belly button. The doctor said “It was like something from Alien. I didn’t believe Gavin when he said something was coming out of his belly button until I saw him.” That something was a 4cm parasitic twin that had been stuck inside Hyatt for the last 30 years. Hyatt told The Sun:

“At first I thought I had been stung by something due to the burning pain in my belly button.

“But there was no sign of anything on the skin. Then I felt a large lump just above my navel, which was so painful that I nearly passed out.

“I couldn’t sleep and made an emergency appointment with the GP the next day.

“There was a red patch around the area which was hot to the touch. Dr Santos felt it and said it was a hernia.”

Hyatt is keeping his twin in a small plastic jar. Parasitic twin erupts from 30-year-old man’s belly button (Via Arbroath)

Scientists Erase Painful Memories Without Drugs

i09: “A new study shows that people’s painful or frightening memories can be erased. A group of cognitive scientists have revealed that people can forget pain if they are exposed to specific stimuli during “memory reconsolidation,” the hour or so after you recall a memory.

The researchers first proved this using rats. According to ABC News:

[Neuroscientist Marie Monfils'] team first taught rats to associate a musical tone with a slight electric shock. Playing the tone with no shock generally causes rats to freeze in fear. When her team played the tone over and over again, 19 times, the rats displayed less and less fear. This is standard extinction therapy. However, a month later their fear of the tone returned, strong as ever.

To make the effect permanent, Monfils team jogged other rats’ memories of shocks just once, waited an hour for memory reconsolidation to begin, and then played the tone over and over.

“It’s very simple and almost naïve to think it would work,” Monfils says. But the fearful memories disappeared permanently.

Later, another research group tried the same test on humans, teaching subjects to associate the sight of a blue square with a shock. Using this therapy, they halted the humans’ fear responses (measured in sweating) to the blue square. They were also able to retrain the people to fear a yellow square, but not the blue one. This sounds like something straight out of a dystopian 1970s movie, where giant computers would train humans to fear glowing blue squares and glowing yellow squares in order to force them to polish strangely bulbous plastic furniture.”

via ABC

MIT builds battery from bacterial virus, humans to power machines by 2012

Engadget:

“We’ve been tracking MIT professor Angela Belcher’s attempt to build batteries and nano-electronics from viruses since 2006. Scientifically speaking, the so-called “virus” is actually a bacteriophage, a virus that preys only on bacteria while leaving humans of diminishing scientific knowledge alone to doubt that claim. Now, in a new report co-authored by Belcher, MIT research documents the construction of a lithium-ion battery (pictured after the break) with the help of a biological virus dubbed M13. M13 acts as a “biological scaffold” that allows carbon nanotubes and bits of iron phosphate to attach and form a network for conducting electricity. Specifically, MIT used the genetically engineered material to create the battery’s negatively charged anode and positively charged cathode. Best of all, MIT’s technique can be performed at, or below room temperature which is important from a manufacturing perspective — a process that MIT claims will be “cheap and environmentally benign.” Already MIT has constructed a virus-battery about the size of that found in a watch to turn on small lights in an MIT lab. Belcher claims that just a third of an ounce (about 10 grams) of the viral battery material could power an iPod for 40 hours. In time and with enough effort MIT expects to scale the technology to power electronic vehicles. Remember, when the time comes choose the red pill.”

[Via Scientific American, Thanks James]