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.

Link to UC Berkeley Article

A team of researchers from UC Berkeley, Switzerland, and Spain, have found that exposure to exhaust fumes thickens arteries and could increase the chances of cardiovascular disease.

The study looked at people in the Los Angeles area who live within 100 meters of a highway. It found that their arteries thickened by 5.5 micrometers – one-twentieth the thickness of a human hair – per year, more than twice the average.

“For the first time, we have shown that air pollution contributes to the early formation of heart disease, known as atherosclerosis, which is connected to nearly half the deaths in Western societies and to a growing proportion of deaths in the rapidly industrializing nations of Asia and Latin America,” said study co-author Michael Jerrett, UC Berkeley associate professor of environmental health sciences. “The implications are that by controlling air pollution from traffic, we may see much larger benefits to public health than we thought previously.”

Even more reason to bring the age of roaring internal-combustion engines to a close. Which is a bummer, because I happen to really like the roar of a Chevy V8 with a lumpy cam. Oh well, bring on the age of humming electric cars!

Link to UC Berkeley article

More than 2.5 million people are afflicted with Multiple Sclerosis. It’s a nasty disease, one that slowly eats away the brain and nervous system. Thankfully, there are many treatments to lessen its effects, but there is no cure. Italian doctor Paolo Zamboni, however, thinks he may have found one.

When Zamboni’s wife was diagnosed with MS, he dove into every piece of research he could find. While searching some old medical texts, he found some research that suggested MS is caused by buildup of iron in the brain. The theory goes something like this: Iron blocks blood vessels, which then rupture. Blood and immune cells flow into the spinal-cerebral fluid. Immune cells attack the nervous system, triggering MS. After reading this, Zamboni did a few tests on his wife and other MS patients. He found an excess buildup of iron in nearly every case.

Zamboni immediately ordered a simple surgery to clear the iron blockage from two of his wife’s main arteries (the ones leading to the brain). Within days of the procedure, there was marked improvement.

The doctor went on to try the procedure on 65 other MS patients. Seventy three percent of them are completely free of symptoms two years after the treatment.

More studies are underway, but the quick procedure could improve the lives of millions.

Link to Gizmag article

The glue on spider webs is extremely sticky. Just ask a fly.

A team at University of Wyoming has isolated two genes responsible for producing the proteins that make spider glue so sticky. From Gizmag:

Supported by the National Science Foundation, a team led by Omer Choresh from the University of Wyoming has in fact recently reported on an extensive study involving the DNA sequencing of the orb-weaving spiders Nephila clavipes andAraneus gemmoides. The group identified two sophisticated proteins that have evolved over millions of years and are believed to be responsible for the glue’s strength.

The plan now is to stick the genes into bacteria that will then spit out spider-web glue in quantity. The glue could be a valuable alternative to surgical glues or Elmer’s.

Link to Gizmag article

In the real world, if your estranged father slices off your hand with a white-hot blade of light, you can’t just hop aboard the nearest medical vessel and have a perfect cybernetic replacement attached to your stump. You’ll likely end up with a hook, or if you’re lucky, a gruesome, pallid rubberized mechanical hand that opens and shuts like a crab claw. The engineers at SmartHand are trying to change that. Their latest bionic hand replacement, called SmartHand of course, delivers fine motor movement and even touch sensitivity to amputees.

The SmartHand has 40 sensors that relay information to nerve ends, giving users the sensation of touch. The latest SmartHand has been grafted to Swedish amputee Robin af Ekenstam. According to a TV interview, Ekenstam says he can feel the things he grasps with the SmartHand.

“I am using muscles which I haven’t used for years. I grab something hard, and then I can feel it in the fingertips, which is strange, as I don’t have them anymore. It’s amazing.”

Amazing indeed. For now, the SmartHand resembles a sleek Terminator unit, but the engineers are working on a more lifelike Luke version for the future.

Link to Gizmag article

When I was 14, I tried to launch my mountain bike skyward in a fit of blind rage and teenage angst. For the briefest of instants, I broke free of gravity’s grip, soared over the pavement in silence. Then I plowed into the blacktop at 25 miles per hour, crashing in a tangle of steel and bone. My left ankle lodged between the bicycle’s frame and the ground and shattered. It took two surgeries and a sack full of titanium hardware to put it back together and it still gives me trouble to this day. Maybe if they had used worm glue, I wouldn’t walk with a limp.

Scientists at the University of Utah are re-creating the glue of the sandcastle worm, an undersea worm that glues sand, rocks, and bits of shell around itself to form a protective shell. The glue is strong—stronger than Super Glue—and, of course, works underwater.

So far they’ve managed to make a glue that passes human toxicity tests. Now the trick is engineering the glue to degrade over time at the same rate bones heal. Presently, the glue holds fast for far too long. Still, it holds great promise for fools like me who shatter their bones. Strong glue would’ve saved me two surgeries—the initial second reconstruction surgery and the third surgery to remove all the metal they stuck in during the first two. The gluing procedure also would’ve been less invasive, preventing damage to muscles and tendons.

Link to Gizmag article

You’re exhausted. The world is veiled in haze, your thoughts plod aimlessly like zombies in a B movie. Sleep deprivation curtails cognitive function. It kills focus and learning, zaps memory, and slows critical thinking to a crawl. No amount of caffeine can reverse the effects of sleep deprivation and more powerful stimulants can make things even worse. There simply is no substitute for sleep. Or so we thought.

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have pinpointed one of the chemical pathways in the brain that causes the cognitive deficits associated with sleep deprivation. They found, in mice, that sleep deprivation leads to increased levels of the enzyme PDE4 and reduced levels of the molecule cAMP in the brain. cAMP is key to forming new synaptic connections in the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with learning.

The team injected the mice with a PDE4 inhibitor. Miraculously, the mice recovered their lost cognitive abilities (which no doubt involves maze-running). Biologist Ted Able with the university says he and his team plan to refine the inhibitor and look for other possible sleep-deprivation treatments in the future.

“Millions of people regularly obtain insufficient sleep,” Abel said. “Our work has identified a treatment in mice that can reverse the cognitive impact of sleep deprivation. Further, our work identifies specific molecular changes in neurons caused by sleep deprivation, and future work on this target protein promises to reveal novel therapeutic approaches to treat the cognitive deficits that accompany sleep disturbances seen in sleep apnea, Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia.”

Unfortunately, Sleep in a Pill is still years away and will likely only be available via prescription. Still, it’s exciting to think how it could help the sleep deprived (especially new parents) be more productive, creative, and generally in a better mood.

Link to University of Pennsylvania article

Québécois researchers have created solar-powered cyborg nanobots that use bacterial swarms to navigate Petri dishes.

Sylvain Martel and his team at the NanoRobotics Laboratory at the École Polytechnique de Montréal built a tiny solar-powered machine approximately 300 microns square that indirectly manipulates a swarm of bacteria that’s naturally sensitive to magnetic fields. The nanobot contains a pH sensor and a simple transmitter that sends electromagnetic pulses to an external computer. The computer reads the signals and adjusts a magnetic field to direct the bacteria. The machine is swept along in the swarm, moving from low to high pH areas in the dish.

It isn’t the researchers’ first foray into cyborg nanobot construction. They initially attached bacteria directly to the robots. But bacteria only have a lifespan of a few hours, making the symbiosis impractical. With the new method, fresh bacteria can be injected into the dish to revive the propulsion system.

The researchers say the method of propulsion could be used to guide tiny medical devices in the future.

Link to Technology Review article

Researchers at the University of San Diego have created hunter-killer nanoparticles that seek out and destroy cancer cells. The particles stick to the fast-growing blood vessels that feed cancerous growths and release chemotherapy drugs at the site, killing the vessels and starving the cancer cells of oxygen. 

Biologist David Cheresh and his team developed the particles, essentially nanocapsules coated in a protein that sticks to the quickly multiplying blood vessels. Each capsule contains a dose of the chemotherapy drug doxorubicin (Dox), which was developed in the ’50s based on a toxin in soil fungus. Dox is still used to treat cancer, but in very low doses. Fighting cancer with Dox is similar to carpet bombing a village to get a single enemy soldier. The drug is potent, but it tends to wreak havoc on the entire body. Side effects of the drug include nausea and heart failure.

Cheresh and his team injected the nanoparticles into mice with pancreatic and renal tumors that had spread throughout the rodents’ systems. The nanoassassins reduced the size of original tumors by 35 percent and the secondary tumors by 91 percent. Cheresh hopes to refine the particles and eventually use them to treat cancer in humans.

Link to NewScientist article.

Before swarms of nanites can organize to eradicate the human race, they’ll need a leader. Engineers in Japan have made the first steps in creating such a microscopic overlord, building a nanomachine that imitates human brain cells. The tiny machine can receive information from the macro world and transmit it to a small cadre of its companions. Working in concert, teams of the molecular contraptions could do everything from terminate tumors to crunch vast amounts of data in the blink of an eye.

Dr. Anirban Bandyopadhyay of the International Center for Young Scientists, in Tsukuba, Japan, led the team that developed the nanobrain. It’s made from 17 molecules of an compound called duroquinone, 16 arranged in orbit around one. The whole thing is held together by weak hydrogen bonds. Using a scanning electron microscope, Bandyopadhyay was able to send electrical impulses to the central molecule to change its configuration or state. The lead molecule then transfers its state to the other 16, like dominoes falling one after another.

It’s basically parallel processing on a micro scale, the same kind of number crunching that our brains are capable of. In fact, Bandyopadhyay modeled the microbrain on human glial cells, which pass info between neurons in the brain. They call it “one-to-many computation” and it’s key to parallel processing.

So what can it do? Bandyopadhyay estimates that the simple assembly is capable of generating more than 4 billion different outcomes from one input instruction. There’s no comparing true parallel processing to current processors, which crunch computations linearly. Parallel processors can take on millions of lines of instruction at once. That’s the kind of computing power that can keep Moore’s Law of exponential computing growth chugging away into stratospheric heights. 

And it’s not just powerful—the nanocomputer would represent a completely new way of computing. It’s purely visual, using patterns to replace the differential equations that are at the heart of current computing.

There’s also a potential to manufacture billions of molecules of a custom drug with just one instruction. Imagine a single drop of water hitting a placid pool. Waves radiate out from the site of impact, quickly covering the entire surface. A single instruction dropped into a field of similar nanomachines would spread in the same manner.

Bandyopadhyay is currently working to create more complex versions of his nanobrain and hopes to have a functional computer within a few years. The trick is finding something other than a massive tunneling electron microscope to interact with the machines. Bandyopadhyay hopes other control methods will be developed, including optical readers for the nanocomputers, or chemical triggers for the medical nanofactories.

Link to MSNBC article.

Link to BBC article.