Nanotechnology – Quantum levitation
Nanotechnology – Quantum levitation by trapping a magnetic field inside a superconductor!
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Skylar Tibbits: The emergence of “4D printing”
Skylar Tibbits: The emergence of “4D printing”
3D printing has grown in sophistication since the late 1970s; TED Fellow Skylar Tibbits is shaping the next development, which he calls 4D printing, where the fourth dimension is time. This emerging technology will allow us to print objects that then reshape themselves or self-assemble over time. Think: a printed cube that folds before your eyes, or a printed pipe able to sense the need to expand or contract.
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Leaders Of The 3D Printing Revolution
Shapeways opens up 3D printing to the masses, allowing us to design and share our ideas as well as realize them as physical objects.
The Creators Project and Shapeways have joined forces to turn your Facebook profile into a 3D work of art!
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Stronger Than Steel, Harder Than Diamonds: Researcher Developing Numerous Uses For Extraordinary ‘Buckypaper’
Stronger Than Steel, Harder Than Diamonds: Researcher Developing Numerous Uses For Extraordinary ‘Buckypaper’
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Working with a material 10 times lighter than steel — but 250 times stronger — would be a dream come true for any engineer. If this material also had amazing properties that made it highly conductive of heat and electricity, it would start to sound like something out of a science fiction novel. Yet one Florida State University research group, the Florida Advanced Center for Composite Technologies (FAC2T), is working to develop real-world applications for just such a material.
Ben Wang, a professor of industrial engineering at the Florida A&M University-FSU College of Engineering in Tallahassee, Fla., serves as director of FAC2T (www.fac2t.eng.fsu.edu), which works to develop new, high-performance composite materials, as well as technologies for producing them.
Wang is widely acknowledged as a pioneer in the growing field of nano-materials science. His main area of research, involving an extraordinary material known as “buckypaper,” has shown promise in a variety of applications, including the development of aerospace structures, the production of more-effective body armor and armored vehicles, and the construction of next-generation computer displays. The U.S. military has shown a keen interest in the military applications of Wang’s research; in fact, the Army Research Lab recently awarded FAC2T a $2.5-million grant, while the Air Force Office of Scientific Research awarded $1.2 million.
“At FAC2T, our objective is to push the envelope to find out just how strong of a composite material we can make using buckypaper,” Wang said. “In addition, we’re focused on developing processes that will allow it to be mass-produced cheaply.”
Buckypaper is made from carbon nanotubes — amazingly strong fibers about 1/50,000th the diameter of a human hair that were first developed in the early 1990s. Buckypaper owes its name to Buckminsterfullerene, or Carbon 60 — a type of carbon molecule whose powerful atomic bonds make it twice as hard as a diamond. Sir Harold Kroto, now a professor and scientist with FSU’s department of chemistry and biochemistry, and two other scientists shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of Buckminsterfullerene, nicknamed “buckyballs” for the molecules’ spherical shape. Their discovery has led to a revolution in the fields of chemistry and materials science — and directly contributed to the development of buckypaper.
Among the possible uses for buckypaper that are being researched at FAC2T:
- If exposed to an electric charge, buckypaper could be used to illuminate computer and television screens. It would be more energy-efficient, lighter, and would allow for a more uniform level of brightness than current cathode ray tube (CRT) and liquid crystal display (LCD) technology.
- As one of the most thermally conductive materials known, buckypaper lends itself to the development of heat sinks that would allow computers and other electronic equipment to disperse heat more efficiently than is currently possible. This, in turn, could lead to even greater advances in electronic miniaturization.
- Because it has an unusually high current-carrying capacity, a film made from buckypaper could be applied to the exteriors of airplanes. Lightning strikes then would flow around the plane and dissipate without causing damage.
- Films also could protect electronic circuits and devices within airplanes from electromagnetic interference, which can damage equipment and alter settings. Similarly, such films could allow military aircraft to shield their electromagnetic “signatures,” which can be detected via radar.
FAC2T “is at the very forefront of a technological revolution that will dramatically change the way items all around us are produced,” said Kirby Kemper, FSU’s vice president for Research. “The group of faculty, staff, students and post-docs in this center have been visionary in their ability to recognize the tremendous potential of nanotechnology. The potential applications are mind-boggling.”
FSU has four U.S. patents pending that are related to its buckypaper research.
In addition to his academic and scientific responsibilities, Wang recently was named FSU’s assistant vice president for Research. In this role, he will help to advance research activities at the College of Engineering and throughout the university.
“I look forward to bringing researchers together to pursue rewarding research opportunities,” Wang said. “We have very knowledgeable and talented faculty and students, and I will be working with them to help meet their full potential for advancement in their fields.”
Source: Florida State University Date: 21 October
ScienceShot: The Ultimate Flat Screen TV
ScienceShot: The Ultimate Flat Screen TV
Figure 1: Concept and structure of the user-interactive e-skin.close
a, Schematic layout of a single pixel, consisting of a nanotube TFT, an OLED and a pressure sensor (PSR) integrated vertically on a polyimide substrate. b, Schematic diagram of an array of pixels (16 × 16) functioning as an interactive e-skin, capabl…
User-interactive electronic skin for instantaneous pressure visualization
Electronic skin (e-skin) presents a network of mechanically flexible sensors that can conformally wrap irregular surfaces and spatially map and quantify various stimuli1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Previous works on e-skin have focused on the optimization of pressure sensors interfaced with an electronic readout, whereas user interfaces based on a human-readable output were not explored. Here, we report the first user-interactive e-skin that not only spatially maps the applied pressure but also provides an instantaneous visual response through a built-in active-matrix organic light-emitting diode display with red, green and blue pixels. In this system, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are turned on locally where the surface is touched, and the intensity of the emitted light quantifies the magnitude of the applied pressure. This work represents a system-on-plastic4, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17 demonstration where three distinct electronic components—thin-film transistor, pressure sensor and OLED arrays—are monolithically integrated over large areas on a single plastic substrate. The reported e-skin may find a wide range of applications in interactive input/control devices, smart wallpapers, robotics and medical/health monitoring devices
Figure 2: Electrical characterization of carbon nanotube TFTs and OLEDs.close
a, Transfer characteristics of 20 different nanotube TFTs in the active-matrix backplane (L = 20 μm, W = 2 mm), showing uniform device properties. b, Electroluminescence spectra of red, yellow, green and blue OLEDs (measured at ~ 7 V) obtained by…
Figure 3: Flexible full-colour AMOLED display using carbon nanotube TFTs.close
a, Schematic of the AMOLED display circuitry. b, Photograph of a multi-colour AMOLED display before connecting to the supply voltage. c, Photo of a single-colour (green) AMOLED being fully turned on and bent. Voltages of −5 and 10 V are applied to at…
Sursa:Nature Materials
‘Female’ Chromosome May Leave a Mark on Male Fertility
‘Female’ Chromosome May Leave a Mark on Male Fertility
New view of X. X chromosomes are not as steady and unchanging as researchers have thought them to be. Credit: Hemera/Thinkstock
Behind every great man, the saying goes, there’s a great woman. And behind every sperm, there may be an X chromosome gene. In humans, the Y chromosome makes men, men, or so researchers have thought: It contains genes that are responsible for sex determination, male development, and male fertility. But now a team has discovered that X—”the female chromosome”—could also play a significant role in maleness. It contains scores of genes that are active only in tissue destined to become sperm. The finding shakes up our ideas about how sex chromosomes influence gender and also suggests that at least some parts of the X chromosome are playing an unexpectedly dynamic role in evolution.
Each mammal has a pair of sex chromosomes. Females have two copies of the X chromosome, and males have one, along with a Y chromosome. The body needs only one active copy of the X chromosome, so in females, the second copy is disabled. Almost 50 years ago, a geneticist named Susumu Ohno proposed that this shutdown slowed the evolution of the X chromosome, and he predicted that its genes would be very similar across most mammals. David Page, a geneticist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wanted to check if that was true between mice and humans, which are separated by 80 million years of evolution.
Although the genomes of both species had already been decoded, there were gaps and mistakes in the DNA sequence of the human X chromosome that first needed to be filled in or fixed. Using a special sequencing technique that it developed, Page’s research team determined the order of the DNA bases in those gaps—many contained multiple duplicated regions of DNA that were impossible to decipher with the technology available when the X chromosome was first sequenced. Then the researchers compared the genes in the mouse and human versions of the chromosome.
The two share a majority of their 800 or so genes, Page and his colleagues report online today in Nature Genetics. Those shared, relatively stable genes are active in both males and females and exist as single copies on the chromosomes. Mutations in these previously described genes are responsible for the so-called X-linked recessive diseases such as hemophilia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. “These are the genes of the X chromosome of textbooks,” Page says.
But his team’s search uncovered a different, wilder side to this chromosome as well. There are 144 human X chromosome genes with no counterparts in mice, and 197 such mice genes are unique. Of the 144 human ones, 107 exist in multiple copies in the newly sequenced duplicated regions of the X and seem to be changing rapidly. Based on such evidence, Page concludes that these genes have appeared since the ancestors of mice and humans split off from each other.
“I am surprised by the large number of unshared genes between the human X and mouse X,” says Jianzhi Zhang, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, who was not involved with the work. “The finding suggests that X chromosome gene content is probably changing all the time.”
When genes change, they have the opportunity to influence evolution, and Page thinks that the new X chromosome genes may be particularly potent. Some previously identified X chromosome genes, for example, seem to have played a role in mouse speciation. He and his colleagues surveyed eight human male and female tissues to begin to see what the genes do. Unlike the textbook X genes, “in many cases these [unshared] genes are not even expressed in females,” Page says. Instead, they are active in the testis, primarily in tissue destined to become sperm, Page’s team reports. “We think the X chromosome is leading a double life,” he says, with one part being stable and behaving as the textbooks say, and another part changing and influencing male traits.
Elsewhere in the genome, duplicated regions “are already known to be of immense biomedical significance” in cancer and other diseases, Page says. He is hoping that other researchers will start looking more closely at whether genes in the duplicated regions of the X chromosome are likewise important, particularly with respect to male fertility and testis cancer.
Zhang is cautious. “We must first know the function of these genes,” he says, to understand their impact on health and on speciation. One thing is for certain, however: “People will start paying attention to the recent evolution of the X chromosome.”
Sursa: news.sciencemag.org
The Future of Free Energy is here now! The end of oil, coal and nuclear …
The Future of Free Energy is here now! The end of oil, coal and nuclear
Inside the industry supplying millions of mutant mice
Inside the industry supplying millions of mutant mice
It’s often said that in a city, you’re never far from a rat. Today’s UK government figures for the numbers of laboratory animals used annually in England, Scotland and Wales reveals the extent to which researchers, too, are surrounded by rats and other rodents. In all 4 million animals were used, a 9 per cent increase on 2011. Most of these – 3.3 million – were rodents. Some 2200 primates were used, mainly in pharmaceutical safety tests.
The majority of the rodents – 1.77 million mice – were mutant, “knockout” mice: animals with a specific gene turned off, helping scientists to understand what that gene does. “It’s a bit like trying to understand a car engine without a plan – piece by piece you pull parts out and then see how this contributes to the car not working,” says David Adams of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK.
Supplying these lab animals is a large and lucrative global industry. Around 100 scientists in North America and Europe are involved in the International Knockout Mouse Consortium (IKMC) – a group working to knock out each of the 20,000 mouse genes by 2016. The IKMC has been funded to the tune of $150 million by the US National Institutes of Health and the European Union.
“We’re doing this to really understand human biology and disease,” said Bill Skarnes, one of the leaders of IKMC, which supplies animals to labs at cost price.
“Mice are small and furry – we’re large and not very furry, but inside we are very similar,” says Steve Brown of the UK’s Medical Research Council Centre for Mouse Genetics. Despite advances in cell culture, animals remain an important part of research, he says. “If you think of glucose metabolism, this involves the pancreas, liver and muscle, which you can’t replicate in a culture dish.”
Making a knockout mouse
When a researcher wants a mouse with a particular gene turned off, the IKMC suppliers turn to a gene library of embryonic stem cells, each carrying a known mutation. The relevant mutant stem cells are selected, and injected into the embryo of a normal mouse, which is then implanted into a surrogate mouse mother. Her pups are chimeras because they are a mixture of normal and mutant cells. Mice bred from these chimeras eventually end up with one whose germ line is founded from a mutant cell. From these you can breed mice that are made only of mutant cells: knockout mice.
It’s a fairly routine process, but it’s not cheap. A bespoke knockout mouse will cost around $45,000, says Doron Shmerling of Polygene near Zurich, Switzerland. Phil Simmons of Sage Labs, St Louis, Missouri, another commercial supplier of knockout animals, estimates that the industry’s annual turnover is $50 million, worldwide. “There’s room for both academic and commercial partners, and in fact we often work together very closely,” he says.
The larger research centres house more than 100,000 mice at any one time. Knockout mice are also kept in frozen storage as sperm or embryos. Scientists can get these frozen stocks to use as they want.
Although individual research teams will have specific experiments in mind for their knockout mice, the idea is that all such mice will also be profiled in a standard way to determine how they are affected by having a gene knocked out.
This is where the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium (IMPC) comes in. “Each knocked-out mouse is put through a full medical and health screen for up to 16 weeks,” says Adams – well into a mouse’s middle age.
Most knocked-out mice appear normal. “It’s very, very unusual to see any deformities,” says Adams.
Like the IKMC, the IMPC is a major undertaking. It cost $200 million to set up, and another $300-400 million will be needed to analyse all knockout mice, Brown says.
- Updated 17:08 16 July 2013 by Mark Viney
- For similar stories, visit the GM Organisms Topic Guide
Antibody wakes up T-cells to make cancer vanish
Antibody wakes up T-cells to make cancer vanish
Tumours in several people with an advanced form of skin cancer have completely disappeared after treatment with one of three drugs that force tumour cells out of hiding. The patient’s own immune system can then recognise the cancer and destroy it.
Double dose: T-cells target tumours (Image: Steve Gshmeisserner/Science Photo Library)
These immunotherapies highlight a promising new strategy in the war against cancer – rebooting the immune system so that it can keep cancers in check whatever tricks they spring on us.
Despite evolving throughout a person’s life to control and destroy life-threatening intruders, the immune system is regularly outfoxed by cancer. This is often because tumour cells find ways to camouflage themselves from the immune system.
Results presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago show how three antibodies can blow cancer’s cover.
Cancer cells should normally be spotted by T-cells – immune cells that recognise and destroy foreign material in the body. But tumour cells evolve a way of hiding themselves from T-cells by sprouting a surface molecule called a ligand. The ligand binds to and activates a receptor on the T-cell called PD-1. When PD-1 is activated the T-cell fails to recognise the cancer cell as foreign, fooling the immune system into mistaking tumours for normal tissue.
Unmasking cancer
All three of the antibodies can unmask the cancer cell by blocking the ligand’s interaction with PD-1, allowing the immune system to get to work on the cancer cells.
In 54 of 135 people with advanced melanoma – the most deadly form of skin cancer – tumours more than halved in volume after treatment with the first of the antibody therapies, called Lambrolizumab. Tumours disappeared altogether in six of the 57 people who were given the highest dose of this drug, developed by Antoni Ribas of the University of California at Los Angeles and colleagues (The New England Journal of Medicine, doi.org/mqm).
Results were equally impressive with Nivolumab, a second antibody drug. Tumours more than halved in size and significantly decreased in number in 21 of 53 people with advanced melanoma who took the drug alongside another drug. Cancer vanished completely within 12 weeks in three of the 17 people who received the highest dose.
“Many effects happened very quickly, sometimes within three weeks,” says Jedd Wolchok of the Memorial-Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who led the trial.
Wolchok says that what makes the antibody therapies so exciting is that unlike conventional cancer treatments, such as radio and chemotherapy, they work by reviving the power of the patient’s own immune system – something that has evolved to efficiently dispose of infectious, foreign or abnormal tissue. “They treat the patient, not the tumour,” he says.
A third antibody, which unlike the previous two blocks the cancer cell ligand rather than the PD-1 receptor, produced equally impressive results in a small number of people who had other types of cancer, including lung and kidney. All three drugs are now entering larger trials involving people with skin, kidney, lung and brain cancers.
Revive immune system
Wolchok says the antibody therapies, alongside other emerging strategies for reviving the immune system, are opening up a fresh chapter in cancer treatment, one that could rapidly expand the number of people being cured of the disease. “The immune system can sculpt itself around the spectrum of changes that is part of the genetic instability of cancers,” he says.
Other promising immune therapies include genetically engineering a patient’s own T-cells to recognise and destroy cancer cells. Earlier this year, one person with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia was cured in just eight days after their T-cells were engineered to attack any cell with a surface molecule called CD19, which is unique to the cancerous cells.
A company called Kite Pharma in Los Angeles was recently formed to develop this technique for many other cancers.
“All you need is an identifier for tumour cells and it doesn’t make any difference how the tumour evolves after that,” says Aya Jakobovits, co-founder of Kite Pharma. “With our approach, you overcome all challenges of tumour biology because you go back to a fully functioning immune system.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “Skin cancer ‘cured’ by waking up T-cells”
- 17:07 04 June 2013 by Andy Coghlan
- Magazine issue 2920. Subscribe and save
- For similar stories, visit the Cancer Topic Guide
Immunotherapy past and present. A possible cause of tumour remission “miracles”?
Immunotherapy past and present. A possible cause of tumour remission “miracles”?
What is immunotherapy? The concept of using the immune system as a force to beat cancer goes back to the 1890′s. Dr William Coley tried with some success with his Coley’s Toxins. These were a mixture of two species of killed bacteria, and were still available until about 1990.
Since the discovery of immunity, we have come a long way. Edward Jenner‘s incredible use of cowpox to vaccinate against smallpox (most of his early trial patients were members of his own family) showed there was something in the body that could fight and defend against infection. But we have not come as far as we would like.
Despite Coley’s early work – he was a surgical oncologist – attempts have been made with BCG and various other immune stimulation methods, but cancer has been the winner thus far.
This is because cancer’s that spread locally and throughout the body (metastasis) have already broken through the immunosurveillance that the body has to keep rogue cells in check. The understanding of this series of processes increases incrementally.
We know billions of cell divisions take place in the body daily, which time and chemicals distort. How do cells become immune to the immune system? These cells need to pass on the information as to how they have broken out of the immunosurveillance. How they do this is a possible entry point for new anti-cancer treatments.
Once out in the wild these cells can grow, some types quickly others slowly. Some remain localised and are generally classified benign, and others spread through adjoining tissue and the body, malignancy and metastasis.
What of the abstract below.
Think of a molecule that can stimulate the immune system to recognise a tumour cell and then deliver a virus based payload that kills the tumour cell, and you have the general sense of what the study authors have demonstrated.
Whilst this is definite progress, it is still a long way from being a standard tool in oncology, though we all hope that it will become more mainstream as our knowledge of tumour immunology increases.
The immune system may also account for cases of tumour remission that some people regard as miraculous. Could an opportunistic infection with a virus at a time that the immune system is recognising tumour antigens, be a way of nature doing what the study has demonstrated?
We know that viruses are taken up by immune cells as part of the immune response to infection; occasionally due to a perfect storm of the right virus, the right tumour, the right immune response at the right time may account for the unexpected remission of advanced cancer.
Just a thought. Abstract. Converting the immunosuppressive tumor environment into one that is favorable to induction of antitumor immunity is indispensable for effective cancer immunotherapy. Here we strategically incorporate a pathogen (i.e., Flagellin)-derived, NF-kappaB-stimulating ‘danger’ signal into the large stress protein or chaperone Grp170 that was previously shown to facilitate antigen cross-presentation. This engineered chimeric molecule (i.e., Flagrp170) is capable of transporting tumor antigens and concurrently inducing functional activation of dendritic cells. Intratumoral administration of adenoviruses expressing Flagrp170 induces a superior antitumor response against B16 melanoma and its distant lung metastasis compared to unmodified Grp170 and Flagellin. The enhanced tumor destruction is accompanied with significantly increased tumor infiltration by CD8+ cells as well as elevation of IFN-gamma and IL-12 levels in the tumor sites. In situ Ad.Flagrp170 therapy provokes systemic activation of CTLs that recognize several antigens naturally expressing in melanoma (e.g., gp100 and TRP2). The mechanistic studies using CD11c-DTR transgenic mice and Batf3-deficient mice reveal that CD8+ DCs are required for the improved T cell cross-priming. Antibody neutralization assays show that IL-12 and IFN-gamma are essential for the Flagrp170-elicited antitumor response, which also involves CD8+ T cells and NK cells. The therapeutic efficacy of Flagrp170 and its immune stimulating activity are also confirmed in mouse prostate cancer and colon carcinoma. Together, targeting the tumor microenvironment with this chimeric chaperone is highly effective in mobilizing or restoring antitumor immunity, supporting the potential therapeutic use of this novel immune modulator in the treatment of metastatic diseases.
Corresponding Author:
Xiang-Yang Wang, Human and Molecular Genetics, Virginia Commonwealth University, 401 College St, PO Box 980035, Richmond, VA, 23298, United States xywang@vcu.edu
- Received May 3, 2012.
- Revision received December 10, 2012.
- Accepted January 4, 2013.
- Copyright © 2013, American Association for Cancer Research
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