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

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.

Exposure to stressful situations during childhood—bickering parents, bullies, dog attacks, Disney films—could increase the risk of childhood allergies. German über-scientists at the Helmholtz Center for Environmental Research in Leipzig (UFZ), the Helmholtz Zentrum München and the “Institut für Umweltmedizinische Forschung” (IUF) in Duesseldorf, conducted a long-term study of 234 six-year-olds.

They found stressed-out kids had higher levels of the stress-related peptide VIP (vasoactive intestinal polypeptide) in their blood than mellow kids. These peptides can turn the immune system into a hyperactive, yippy little dog that attacks pretty much anything it comes across. This, researchers say, can lead to more allergic reactions.

Link to ScienceDaily article.

A U.C. Berkeley team has rejuvenated geriatric stem cells, restoring their youthful vigor and ability to rebuild damaged muscle tissue. With a simple injection of bioengineered antibodies, crotchety mice were able to recover from strenuous exercise and injury as well as spry young mice. The trick? The antibodies modified how adult stem cells respond to natural chemical signals that trigger aging.

 Irina Conboy, assistant professor of bioengineering and an investigator at the Berkeley Stem Cell Center and at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), led the research team. She noticed that adult mice stem cells, when placed in “young” blood, behaved like young stem cells. They kicked into overdrive, dividing and repairing. Conversely, young stem cells slowed to a crawl when placed in “old” blood.

The researcher discovered that the cells were responding to two natural chemical signals via a set of receptors. The first receptor, called Notch, activates elated cell replication. The second, a receptor for the protein TGF-beta, sets off a chain reaction that slows cell division. Too much Notch and cells can divide too quickly, hastening tumor and cancer growth. Too much TGF-beta and adult stem cells slow down; cells succumb to the ravages of aging.

Conboy and her team knocked out the “aging pathway” that halts cell replication using a method of RNA interference and a custom antibody. The result: Old mice with the stem cells of young mice.

More research needs to be carried out before any such methods can be used on humans. Conboy fears that interrupting the aging pathway could lead to hyperactive cell division and increased rates of cancer. 

Link to U.C. Berkeley article.

Researchers at UC Berkeley are working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to target and eliminate (with extreme prejudice) genetic weaknesses that can cause general performance deficits in otherwise healthy people.

The team of scientists, led by researcher Nicholas Marini and molecular and cell biology prof Jasper Rine, hope to pinpoint small genetic defects that can affect the efficiency of common enzymes. These enzyme deficiencies don’t express themselves as full-blown illness, but can cause fatigue, general malaise and other mild symptoms that can really screw up your day. Once the weaknesses are identified, doctors should be able to brew customized vitamin concoctions to counteract them.

ScienceDaily recently spoke with Marini. From the interview:

“Our studies have convinced us that there is a lot of variation in the population in these enzymes, and a lot of it affects function, and a lot of it is responsive to vitamins,” Marini said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if everybody is going to require a different optimal dose of vitamins based on their genetic makeup, based upon the kind of variance they are harboring in vitamin-dependent enzymes.”

No news on whether these super serums would turn the average cubicle jockey into a superstar, but the research looks promising so far. The team injected a sampling of human genes that code for an enzyme called methylenetetrahydrofolate reductase (MTHFR) into yeast cells. The enzyme uses the B vitamin folate to build DNA nucleotides. The researchers found that some variations of the gene were better at synthesizing MTHFR than others. They were then able to add supplements to the yeast diet to make up for the differences.

Marini and Rine guess that most people have about five rare mutant enzymes that could be counteracted with proper supplementation. 

From the ScienceDaily interview:

“There are over 600 human enzymes that use vitamins or minerals as cofactors, and this study reports just what we found by studying one of them,” Rine said. “What this means is that, even if the odds of an individual having a defect in one gene is low, with 600 genes, we are all likely to have some mutations that limit one or more of our enzymes.”

With the price of genetic testing approaching an all-time low (some estimate that it’ll soon cost about 100 bucks for a full sequence), the findings seem promising.

So what’s the DARPA connection? Again, from the ScienceDaily interview:

“Our soldiers, like top athletes, operate under extreme conditions that may well be limited by their physiology,” Rine said. “We’re now working with the defense department to identify variants of enzymes that are remediable, and ultimately hope to identify troops that have these variants and test whether performance can be enhanced by appropriate supplementation.”

Link to the ScienceDaily article.

In the future, legions of centenarians will romp through fields of flowers like spry teenagers, unimpeded by the ravages of old age. Or at least that’s what pharmaceutical juggernaut GlaxoSmithKline is betting on. The drug company recently spent $720 million on Sirtris Pharmaceuticals, a young upstart in the field of anti-aging research. The burgeoning company’s premiere drug is called “resveratrol” and it mimics the preserving effects of severe calorie restriction.

Cutting back on calories has been shown to extend life spans in everything from yeast to humans. Resveratrol targets a gene that becomes active during such sparse times, reenergizing fatigued mitochondria. The cell powerhouses are susceptible to corrosive oxidation by free radicals, the destructive byproducts of burning chemical energy in our bodies. This corrosion is thought to be at the feebly beating heart of all aging-related ailments, from heart disease to dementia. Repair mitochondria and reverse aging—or so the theory goes.

Brandon Keim of Wired News spoke to David Sinclair, cofounder of  Sirtris, at the World Science Festival Monday. Sinclair said resveratrol is in phase two of clinical trials and should hit the market within four or five years. The price for virtual immortality? $4 to $5 a pill, said Sinclair.

Link to Wired Science article

Link to Sirtris Pharmaceuticals