Wounds suck. No, wait, suck on your wounds. This funky vacuum device applies suction to minor wounds and reportedly speeds up healing. Neat. It was invented by MIT student Danielle Zurovcik. She says the device will only cost $3 U.S. to make. She’s testing it right now in Haiti and hopes to get it to Rwanda in the near future.
How does it work? Scientists aren’t totally sure, but they think the negative pressure draws bacteria and puss away from wounds, making healing easier. I think it may also draw extra blood to the wound, feeding cells more oxygen and building materials. But I’m no biologist.
Those strips of pretty gold ribbon were made to “melt” onto the surface of your brain, forming a customized network of electrodes that can be used to monitor or even control functions of the brain. The real question is: Will it let you play Pong with your mind?
The implant was actually developed to monitor and control seizures and eventually send signals around damaged spinal cords to the rest of the body. It’s mostly made of silk, with fine electrodes embedded in polymide (a type of plastic). This new implant has an order of magnitude more electrodes than older needle-like implants (yowza). That means neurologists can monitor more brain functions and see interactions between vast networks of neurons.
The new implant can be set to dissolve over time or remain in the skull as long as needed.
Neurologists are excited about the implant, hoping it can lead to better treatments for seizures and spinal injuries. I just keep thinking about mind-computer interfaces, fully immersive VR environments, and electronic cognitive enhancements. Bring on the cyborgs! I’m ready for post-humanity!
In Frank Herbert’s masterpiece Dune, Spice is life. The mysterious drug extends life, provides immunity to certain poisons, and much, much more. It’s a mystery, a complex chemical that can’t be synthesized and can only be found within the giant worm-infested sands of the desert planet Arrakis. Now scientists have found something like it in the soil of Easter Island.
Rapamycin is a biproduct of soil bacteria. It reportedly extends life in mammals, and could even reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. From a study published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry:
Rapamycin treatment lowered levels of amyloid-beta-42, a major toxic species of molecules in Alzheimer’s disease. These molecules, which stick to each other, are suspected to play a key role in the early memory failure of Alzheimer’s . . . The fact that we are seeing identical results in two vastly different mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease provides robust evidence that rapamycin treatment is effective and is acting by changing a basic pathogenic process of Alzheimer’s that is common to both mouse models. This suggests that it may be an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s in humans, who also have very diverse genetic makeup and life histories.
Rapamycin is already approved for treating organ rejection in transplant patients, but this discovery means it could be prescribed for those who suffer from Alzheimer’s. I wonder if I could get a prescription. It might make me a better blogger.
Biologists at Arizona State University have tweaked some cyanobacteria—aka algae—to produce and exude biofuel.
The genetically modified bacteria overproduce oily lipids that seep out through pores in their cell walls. The oil floats to the top of the vat, where it’s scooped up for refinement.
The two masterminds behind the algae, Xinyao Liu and Roy Curtiss, are working on increasing the algae’s output for better efficiency.
Either this whole algae biofuel thing is going to save us, or it’s just another way to distract us from the impending Peak Oil apocalypse. I want to do some more digging to find out, but things look bright for now.
We’ve know for a long time that single-cell organisms like bacteria can survive without oxygen. But multicellular life, we thought, always needed good old O2. Au contraire mon frère! A team of scientists have discovered some creepy little multicellular lifeforms thriving in the oxygen-free muck of the Mediterranean Ocean. The mud at the bottom of the L’Atalante basin is so salty that there’s no oxygen to be found. Despite this, Danish researchers discovered these funky critters living and thriving. From sciencemag.org:
The animals took up radioactively tagged leucine (an amino acid), and a fluorescent probe that labels living cells, evidence that they were alive when they were collected. The researchers also found examples of individuals that contained eggs and evidence of apparent molting, which led them to conclude that the animals spend their whole lives in the harsh sediments. The creature’s cells apparently lack mitochondria, the organelles that use oxygen to power a cell. Instead they are rich in what seem to be hydrogenosomes, organelles that can do a similar job in anaerobic (or oxygen free) environments. The find could help scientists understand what life might have looked like in the earth’s early oceans, which also had very little oxygen.
No mitochondria?! Gadzooks! The discovery has given scientists and Sci-Fi geeks new hope that complex life is surviving and thriving in other harsh environments out there in the universe.
See that? It’s a shrimp. Swimming in a hole. Under 600 feet of ice. Twelve miles from the ocean. NASA scientists found it in Western Antarctica, and they’re totally freaking out about it.
The shrimp is a complete surprise. Scientists didn’t expect to find anything more than bacteria that deep in the ice. Instead, they found not one, but two three-inch-long shrimp. From the AP:
“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate.”
“We were just gaga over it,” he said of the 3-inch-long, orange critter starring in their two-minute video. Technically, it’s not a shrimp. It’s a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is distantly related to shrimp.
It’s in incredible discovery, and it immediately got everybody thinking about the possibility of life in other hostile habitats. If a complex animal like a shrimp can survive under 600 feet of ice, there might be life on Europa, Jupiter’s big frozen moon. Or on other planets in other solar systems.
The scientists have no idea how the shrimp is able to survive, yet. They plan to study the animal and its ecosystem to see what it eats and how ekes out a living. They have a lot of ground to cover. The Antarctic ice sheet is 14 million square kilometers and contains 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. It holds 60 percent of the earth’s fresh water.
Researchers at UC Berkeley just gave everybody permission to conk out for a few Zs. They found that an hour-long nap can make you smarter in spades.
The team, lead by assistant professor of psychology Matthew Walker, tested the effects of a nap on 39 healthy people. Everyone in the study took a rigorous learning test. Then half the group took a nap while the other half stayed awake. Later in the day they took another learning test. Those who had stayed up were considerably worse than those who had a snooze.
Walker thinks sleep is needed to clear short-term memory storage to make room for new data. Without sleep, there simply isn’t enough space to learn and store new facts. From a UC Berkeley article:
In the latest study, Walker and his team have broken new ground in discovering that this memory-refreshing process occurs when nappers are engaged in a specific stage of sleep. Electroencephalogram tests, which measure electrical activity in the brain, indicated that this refreshing of memory capacity is related to Stage 2 non-REM sleep, which takes place between deep sleep (non-REM) and the dream state known as Rapid Eye Movement (REM). Previously, the purpose of this stage was unclear, but the new results offer evidence as to why humans spend at least half their sleeping hours in Stage 2, non-REM, Walker said.
Makes me wonder why we give up nap time after Kindergarden.
In their quest to transform mild-manered scientists into technology wielding superheroes, researchers at Cornell have created a device that could let them walk on walls.
The device uses the surface tension of water for adhesion. It’s inspired by a beetle that can stick to a leaf with 100 times its own weight. Basically you’ve got a small plate drilled with hundreds of micron-scale holes on top of a water reservoir. Current is applied to the plate via a 9-volt battery, which pushes the water up through the holes to form tiny bumps or droplets of water. The surface tension of those droplets makes the plate stick to virtually any surface. Reverse the current and the droplets retract, breaking adhesion.
It’s remarkably sticky. Researchers estimate that a one-square-inch pad would hold up to 15 pounds of weight.
Uses include shoes and gloves for walking on walls, and roll-out mats to stop bad guys in their tracks.
Any scifi fan can tell you that engineering immortal killing machines is never a good idea. Still, the Pentagon’s weird science division, DARPA, wants to bioengineer “synthetic” organisms that can live forever. Oh, unless you flip the built-in and totally reliable DNA kill switch. Riiight.
They’re calling the project BioDesign and its goal is to create organisms that will live indefinitely until you issue a self-destruct-type chemical command. Of course there’s absolutely no chance the organisms will evolve a way to ignore the command, swarm, and devour all life like unstoppable cyber locusts. Nope. Not a chance.
Thankfully, the Pentagon only gave the project $6 million to play around with. It’s doubtful that such a paltry sum would be enough to overturn the most fundamental law of nature: What lives must die. Right?
Wood is ancient history. The building material of the future is fungus. Artist and hardcore amateur mycologist Philip Ross is growing super-durable bricks of mycelium that could be used for everything from structural support to insulation.
Ross grows bricks of mycelium—wispy, spongy fungal root systems—in rusty shipping containers on his farm Far West Fungi in the California Bay Area. When dried, the bricks are stronger pound-for-pound than concrete and insulate better than fiberglass insulation.
So far Ross has constructed a single six-foot archway out of the stuff. According to the artist, he ruined several saw blades and metal files shaping the bricks—they’re that tough. He called the structure Mycotectural Alpha and it’s on display in a gallery in Germany.
Ross isn’t alone. A company called Ecovative is building at 10,000-square-foot fungi farm on Green Island, N.Y. They plan to grow a ton of fungi-based building material. Their first commercial product will be a biodegradable alternative to Styrofoam called Ecocradle.
The best thing about mushroom-based building material? Mushrooms munch waste—stuff that’s left over from food crops, like seed husks.
So don’t be surprised if you find fungus-based building material at your local Home Depot in a few years.
