Science Ahead

X-ray cameras inevitably bring to mind the beautiful in human body in all its glorious nakedness. If that’s what you have in mind, read no further. But if guns and weapons are what you want your x-ray camera to detect ThruVision’s T5000 will delight you.

If the recent news about suicide bombers has scared you out of your wits, T5000 will be your faithful buddy and detect weapons, drugs and of course explosives from as far as 25 meters. The camera detects something called t-rays (natural electromagnetic or Terahertz frequencies) bouncing off of human bodies and uses a software to check for non emitting objects. So that’s the key to finding all those nasty objects that infamous people like to carry under their clothes.

Ever wondered how it would be like to stay in a world as shown in the Matrix, a world where the difference between human beings and machines is almost null. It seems like we are heading towards the best science fiction world of our imagination in approximately 21 years. By 2029, we will have machines implanted in our brains to make us more intelligent, as discussed by a panel of technology experts at American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boston.

Ray Kurzweil, a US inventor, says that machines have always been developed to make our life easier and to help us overcome our physical and mental constraints. He predicts machines getting artificially and emotionally intelligent by the predicted year 2029, when a child would require to insert a chip or a nanobot to his brain to understand a sum. This chip will be inserted via our capillaries and stimulate the biological neurons to understand and see things more precisely and act accordingly. The nanobots will adapt themselves to the virtual world through human nervous system.

Coking and crying almost become synonymous when the dish in question involves onion. This is all about change, albeit in some years to come. Scientists have used the wonders of Genetic modification to create a new race of “tear-free” onions.

Crop and Food, a research institute in New Zealand has used gene silencing to end cooking woes once and for all. Dr Colin Eady, with his collaborators in Japan, is behind this GM onion and he claims that these would not only be tear-free but will also be healthier and tastier.

There is some good news for the world of medicinal technology. Korean scientists have come up with a three-dimensional map that depicts a protein that is related to pneumonia. The development of this breakthrough map is expected to be of great help in the discovery of such antibiotics that would be able to fight the viruses that have become resistant to present treatment procedures, more effectively.

The team of scientists, led by Kim Eun-kyung, senior researcher at the biomedical research center of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), have, for the first time ever, been able to develop a three-dimensional map of the FabK protein related to the pneumonia virus, using X-rays.

In what seems to be achieving the impossible, British scientists have managed to reverse the laws of nature by developing sperm cells from female human embryo. Prof Karim Nayernia, Professor of Stem Cell Biology at Newcastle University has achieved this feat. The primary difference between the sperm cell and the female embryonic cells is that the former contains the Y-chromosomes along with the X chromosomes while the latter contains only the X chromosomes. To make the primitive sperm cells developed from female embryo functional the challenge that lies ahead of the scientists is to make the primitive sperm cells undergo meiosis so that they contain the correct genetic materials capable of fertilization.

This new development has raised hope among lesbian couples desiring to have their own biological children. However, to develop babies from the method would take years. There will be a number of biological as well as ethical issues in developing babies through unnatural ways. The biological impediment would involve developing healthy humans from this method without any genetic defect. In an earlier experiment, Prof Nayernia had developed sperms from male embryonic stem cells, used them to fertilize egg cells, and developed seven mice pups. Six of these mice survived adulthood but had severe defects.

For long, animal rights activists had been demanding a ban on animal tests by pharmaceutical companies that they consider unethical. More often, the animal specimens are not exact replicas of the human biological features and drugs tested in labs on animal specimens always do not produce the desired result in humans.

However, animal testing might soon become a matter of past if chips developed by Professor Jonathan Dordick of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Douglas Clark of the University of California are accepted by the researchers. The product developed by the duo consists of two glass slides. The first glass slide is called the MetaChip that contains an array of little blots containing human liver enzymes. The DataChip is the other glass slide, which, depending on the test, contains blots of bladder or liver or kidney, heart, skin, or lung cell cultures. When pressed together the two chips show the human body’s reaction to the testing compound.

With more than 5.2 million people affected by asthma in the UK alone, and 9 million U.S. children diagnosed with the chronic disease on average, the Georgia Tech Research Institute researchers have come with relief for the sufferers – a sensor system that can monitors the air around persons prone to asthma attacks continuously.

If an asthma patient wears the new battery-powered sensor that easily fits in the pockets of a vest, it could help understand the causes of asthma attacks as well — thus avoid them. This is a welcome development, especially when it is not possible to fully understand why certain people get asthma. It is only that, once a person has it, their lungs can overreact to environmental stimuli, leading to chest tightness or breathlessness or asthma attack.

Call it ‘a landmark achievement’ or a ‘stunning advance’, however, you can’t refute that the new development, occurred on the health front, is no less than a science fiction coming true. Hats off to the laborious task carried out by the experts at the University of Minnesota resulting in a beating rat heart, developed in a laboratory.

In the chase to produce a beating heart, experts used decellularization process for washing away existing cells from the hearts of dead rats while leaving the basic collagen structure intact.This gelatin-like scaffold was left in the laboratory to grow after it was injected with nutrient-rich solution; including heart-cells form newborn rats. During this process pacemaker was also used to coordinate the contraction and just eight days after the heart started to pump, leaving all the experts agape.

No doubt, experts are very hopeful regarding their new achievement; still, they are in no hurry to let their findings go haywire due to excessive response that it has got worldwide. And this is the result why they believe that it’s just a small step taken in their way to achieve the final goal - developing a heart that could be replaced with a dying one.This could be marked a major achievement against serious heart problems, including heart attack that kills around 5 million people annually, with 550,000 new cases diagnosed each year in the United States alone.

Source

It has always been a challenge for researchers to develop a material that can be used to bend optical signals around corners that could be used for developing integrated circuits, which can be used in more advanced telecommunication circuits and to produce lasers that are more efficient. The polymers that have so long been worked upon by a number of research groups due to their low-refractive indices have failed to completely trap light beams that fall on them and have not produced the desired result.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign led by materials scientist Paul Braun have developed a 3-D optical wave-guide capable of bending focused laser light. The group has arranged silica beads to form photonic crystals.

Futuristic devices are the only hope for physically disabled people to lead a close to healthy life. Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) through the non-interventional and interventional devices help physically challenged individuals to control artificial limbs, steer wheel wheelchairs and type messages by arousing neural impulses. Typical brain computer devices that are currently prevalent use electrodes in skull cap to sense brain waves with an EEG machine.

The greatest obstacle of the current available technology is that to activate the brain computer interface device an individual has to rely on external help to turn on and off the EEG-based devices. This means that the physically disabled people are still dependent on external aid that is by no means appealing to their desired independence.

Researchers at Graz University of Technology are working on a BCI device that would use other biological signals to trigger the brain impulses that requires no external help. In a study, the researchers led by Reinhold Scherer tested whether individuals could use voluntary spikes in their hearts to send signals that could turn on a BCI device. The subjects in the trial produced the spikes by breathing rapidly for a short period to activate a BCI, used a prosthetic hand, and then switch it off again.

The results from the trial was quite satisfactory but further study is required before switching over to the new BCI devices that could be activated by manipulating the heart beat.

Source:new scientist
Image:electric wheelchair

Stem cell research received a major boost, when scientists announced a major through. The researchers in Massacheusetts led by Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass announced that they have created colonies of human embryonic stem cells without harming the embryos, from which they were derived! The new technique involves removal of a single cell from a newly formed eight-cell embryo and coaxing that cell to divide repeatedly, until it forms a self-replenishing colony of embryonic stem cells.

While the researchers are excited over the new development, as they expect the breakthrough to receive funding from the U.S government, critics are rising question on the embryos’ safety. This can be confirmed only when embryos are implanted again in women�s womb and the resulting babies are found healthy.

Genetic Engineering can reverse evolutionary history of species. This has been proved recently in a work by US scientists who produced hybrids of blind cave fish with partial vision. Blind cavefish are descendents of surface fish with sight. They were isolated from the surface fish and took refuge inside dark caves for nearly one million years and their evolutionary trait made them loose their capacity for vision.

In their study, published in the current issue of the journal Current Biology, researchers crossbred four species of the blind fish living in the northeast Mexican caves. To the delight of the scientists, they found that the hybrids were not only capable of developing their capacity of vision, but could also connect to the brain for proper information processing!

The scientists have, in the past, expressed grave concern over the possibilities of Avian flu outbreaks leading to epidemics. Researches are conducted to determine the cause for this virus getting transferred from birds to humans. Many theories are proposed in this direction; with the latest theory falsifying the previous ones.

Flu viruses come in many strains. Of these, the H5 strain of virus is known to be found only in birds. However, those affected by the Avian flu showed the virus H5N1, a modified form of the H5 virus. This virus, when found in humans, is said to have very high fatality rates. It is known that a virus can attack and infect any individual only when it attaches itself to the receptor cells of the body. It is recently, a team of MIT researchers have come up with spotting a difference between flu viruses, which infect birds and humans.

We have seen beautiful handicrafts of gold. But can you imagine a real living creature with sparkling gold on the body? Bizarre as it might sound but this is exactly what scientists at Vietnam�s National University�s College of Science have done. They have produced genetically modified seahorses with golden stripes on the body.

The scientists combined light emitting genes of jellyfish with grains of gold and injected the combination into the seahorse egg cells. The outcome was seahorses with sparkling gold on the body.

This is a great achievement in the world of luxury. Now aquariums will flaunt gold seahorses � a new designer item. Soon other creatures will be genetically modified to incorporate gold in their bodies and we will have golden pets and who knows if the craze of designer babies picks up we will have humans born with gold on the body � requirements for gold jewelries might cease after all.

Source & image:trendhunter

People with scars on the face and other exposed parts of the body will no longer face any embarrassment from those ugly marks and they will no longer need to undergo painful skin grafting, where a slice of the thigh skin is removed to cover the scars. Fraunhofer Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology in Leipzig and the euroderm GmbH have been granted license to grow dermal tissue for grafting on chronic wounds.

The most interesting portion of the new therapy is perhaps the source of the dermal tissue � hair follicles. We are used to seeing the hairs growing out of the skin but from now, skin will grow from hair. The hair roots will be the source of the stem cells to be precise. The new technique is known as EpiDex.