In the age of technology everywhere, we are all too familiar with the inconvenience of a dead battery. But for those relying on a wearable health care device to monitor glucose, reduce tremors, or even track heart function, taking time to recharge can pose a big risk.
For the first time, researchers in Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering have shown that a health care device can be powered using body heat alone. By combining a pulse oximetry sensor with a flexible, stretchable, wearable thermoelectric energy generator composed of liquid metal, semiconductors, and 3D printed rubber, the team has introduced a promising way to address battery life concerns.
“This is the first step towards battery-free wearable electronics,” said Mason Zadan, Ph.D. candidate and first author of the research published in Advanced Functional Materials.
In their quest to make silk powerful again, not by status but rather by thread strength, scientists turned to an arachnoid. Dragline silk, the thread by which the spider hangs itself from the web, is one of the strongest fibers; its tensile strength—a measure of how much a polymer deforms when strained—is almost thrice that of silkworm silk.2
Beyond durable fashion garments, tough silk fibers are coveted in parachutes, military protective gear, and automobile safety belts, among other applications, so scientists are keen to pull on these threads. While traditional silk production relies on sericulture, arachnophobes can relax: spider farms are not a thing.
To create one-time cures for Alzheimer’s disease, researchers are investigating the application of CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing for novel therapies. Cutting and pasting genes is difficult with current technology, but CRISPR gene editing may help later stages or those individuals with hereditary mutations. Variants in the lipid transport protein apolipoprotein E (APOE4) have been associated with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease, with a three-to twelve-fold increase in risk.
Researchers engineered the Christchurch gene variation into mice bearing human APOE4 using CRISPR. After that, these mice were crossed, resulting in progeny that carried one or two copies of the modified variation.
The group discovered that mice bearing a single copy of the APOE4-Christchurch variation exhibited a partial defense against Alzheimer’s disease. The disease did not exhibit typical symptoms in mice carrying two copies. The work mimics the advantageous effects of the Christchurch mutation to propose possible treatment strategies for Alzheimer’s disease associated with APOE4.
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In this video, we explore 20 emerging technologies changing our future, including super-intelligent AI companions, radical life extension through biotechnology and gene editing, and programmable matter. We also cover advancements in flying cars, the quantum internet, autonomous AI agents, and other groundbreaking innovations transforming the future.
Awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, quantum dots have a wide variety of applications ranging from displays and LED lights to chemical reaction catalysis and bioimaging. These semiconductor nanocrystals are so small – on the order of nanometers – that their properties, such as color, are size dependent, and they start to exhibit quantum properties. This technology has been really well developed, but only in the visible spectrum, leaving untapped opportunities for technologies in both the ultraviolet and infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.
In new research published in Nature Synthesis (“Interdiffusion-enhanced cation exchange for HgSe and HgCdSe nanocrystals with infrared bandgaps”), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign bioengineering professor Andrew Smith and postdoctoral researcher Wonseok Lee have developed mercury selenide (HgSe) and mercury cadmium selenide (HgCdSe) nanocrystals that absorb and emit in the infrared, made from already well-developed, visible spectrum cadmium selenide (CdSe) precursors. The new nanocrystal products retained the desired properties of the parent CdSe nanocrystals, including size, shape and uniformity.
“This is the first example of infrared quantum dots that are at the same level of quality as the ones that are in the visible spectrum,” Smith says.
In multicellular organisms, many biological pathways exhibit a curious structure, involving sets of protein variants that bind or interact with one another in a many-to-many fashion. What functions do these seemingly complicated architectures provide? And can similar architectures be useful in synthetic biology? Here, Dr. Elowitz discusses recent work in his lab that shows how many-to-many circuits can function as versatile computational devices, explore the roles these computations play in natural biological contexts, and show how many-to-many architectures can be used to design synthetic multicellular behaviors.
About Michael Elowitz. Michael Elowitz is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and Roscoe Gilkey Dickinson Professor of Biology and Biological Engineering at Caltech. Dr. Elowitz’s laboratory has introduced synthetic biology approaches to build and understand genetic circuits in living cells and tissues. As a graduate student with Stanislas Leibler, Elowitz developed the Repressilator, an artificial genetic clock that generates gene expression oscillations in individual E. coli cells. Since then, his lab has continued to design and build synthetic genetic circuits, bringing a “build to understand” approach to bacteria, yeast, and mammalian cells. He and his group have shown that gene expression is intrinsically stochastic, or ‘noisy’, and revealed how noise functions to enable probabilistic differentiation, time-based regulation, and other functions. Currently, Elowitz’s lab is bringing synthetic approaches to understand and program multicellular functions including multistability, cell-cell communication, epigenetic memory, and cell fate control, and to provide foundations for using biological circuits as therapeutic devices. His lab also co-develops systems such as “MEMOIR” that allows cells to record their own lineage histories and tools for RNA export, and precise gene expression. Elowitz received his PhD in Physics from Princeton University and did postdoctoral research at Rockefeller University. Honors include the HFSP Nakasone Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Presidential Early Career Award, Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and election to the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers have significantly improved gene-editing techniques. This new method, called eePASSIGE, can insert or replace entire genes in human cells with much higher efficiency than previous methods. This advancement could lead to a single gene therapy for diseases caused by various mutations in a single gene, like cystic fibrosis. Traditionally, gene therapy required a different treatment for each mutation.
EePASSIGE combines prime editing, which edits small stretches of DNA, with new enzymes that insert large pieces of DNA. This allows scientists to introduce a healthy copy of a gene directly where it belongs in the genome.
“This is one of the first examples of targeted gene integration with potential for therapeutic applications,” said Dr. David Liu, senior author of the study. “If these efficiencies translate to patients, many genetic diseases could be treated.”
David is one of the world’s best-known philosophers of mind and thought leaders on consciousness. I was a freshman at the University of Toronto when I first read some of his work. Since then, Chalmers has been one of the few philosophers (together with Nick Bostrom) who has written and spoken publicly about the Matrix simulation argument and the technological singularity. (See, for example, David’s presentation at the 2009 Singularity Summit or read his The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis)
During our conversation with David, we discuss topics such as: how and why Chalmers got interested in philosophy; and his search to answer what he considers to be some of the biggest questions – issues such as the nature of reality, consciousness, and artificial intelligence; the fact that academia in general and philosophy, in particular, doesn’t seem to engage technology; our chances of surviving the technological singularity; the importance of Watson, the Turing Test and other benchmarks on the way to the singularity; consciousness, recursive self-improvement, and artificial intelligence; the ever-shrinking of the domain of solely human expertise; mind uploading and what he calls the hard problem of consciousness; the usefulness of philosophy and ethics; religion, immortality, and life-extension; reverse engineering long-dead people such as Ray Kurzweil’s father.
Researchers from Tel Aviv University (TAU) have created a new type of glass with unique and even contradictory properties, such as being a strong adhesive (sticky) and incredibly transparent at the same time. The glass, which forms spontaneously when comes in contact with water at room temperature, could bring about a revolution in an array of different and diverse industries such as optics and electro-optics, satellite communication, remote sensing and biomedicine.
The glass was discovered by a team of researchers from Israel and the world, led by PhD student Gal Finkelstein-Zuta and Prof. Ehud Gazit from the Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research at the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at TAU. The results of the research were recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature.
