Lifeboat Foundation

Engineers at the University of California, San Diego developed a new technology that uses an oscillating electric field to easily and quickly isolate drug-delivery nanoparticles from blood. The technology could serve as a general tool to separate and recover nanoparticles from other complex fluids for medical, environmental, and industrial applications.

Nanoparticles, which are generally one thousand times smaller than the width of a human hair, are difficult to separate from plasma, the liquid component of blood, due to their small size and low density. Traditional methods to remove nanoparticles from plasma samples typically involve diluting the plasma, adding a high concentration sugar solution to the plasma and spinning it in a centrifuge, or attaching a targeting agent to the surface of the nanoparticles. These methods either alter the normal behavior of the nanoparticles or cannot be applied to some of the most common nanoparticle types.

“This is the first example of isolating a wide range of nanoparticles out of plasma with a minimum amount of manipulation,” said Stuart Ibsen, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of NanoEngineering at UC San Diego and first author of the study published October in the journal Small. “We’ve designed a very versatile technique that can be used to recover nanoparticles in a lot of different processes.”

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Nanoscale liposomes (orange) containing TRAIL protein (green) attach to the surface of white blood cells (blue), bump into cancer cells (brown), and program them to die (credit: Cornell University)

Cornell biomedical engineers have developed specialized white blood cells they call “super natural killer cells” that seek out cancer cells in lymph nodes with only one purpose: to destroy them, halting the onset of cancer tumor cell metastasis.

“We want to see lymph-node metastasis become a thing of the past,” said Michael R. King, the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Professor of Biomedical Engineering and senior author of a paper in the journal Biomaterials.

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The G-Cans project is the largest flood protection in the world. Its official name is Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, but it is most known as G-Cans Underground Temple because of its support pillars and interior that reminds the visitor of a giant cave. The purpose of this facility is to protect the city of Tokyo from floods. The northern edge of G-Cans touches Kasukabe, a city located in Saitama Prefecture, 30 km north of Tokyo. The necessity of building such facility originated from the danger of overflowing of the rivers and main waterways during typhoons and rain periods.

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I had read about Singapore in genetic engineering way back in the 90’s. I think they were 1st or 2nd in making immortal skin cells at the time.

Singapore scientists have unravelled a mystery that could pave the way for turning back the clock on ageing.

A recent study led by Dr Ng Shyh Chang of the Genome Institute of Singapore at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) has found a gene in human egg cells that suppresses an enzyme causing cells to age.

Continue reading “Uncovering the secret of turning back time” »

“Companies around the world are bracing themselves for an avalanche of cyber security regulation, as governments scramble to introduce rules forcing corporate groups to build stronger defences against catastrophic hacks.”

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There’s filtration and then there’s filtration. Engineers in the US have been working on the latter, coming up with a new markedly more energy-efficient way of taking the salt out of seawater, which could deliver huge advantages in terms of providing people with access to drinking water and help combat problems like drought.

The researchers have developed a material that allows high volumes of water to pass through extremely tiny holes called ‘nanopores’ while blocking salt and other contaminants. The material they’re using – a nanometre-thick sheet of molybdenum disulphide (MoS2) riddled with these nanopore holes – is the most efficient of a number of thin-film membranes that the engineers modelled, filtering up to 70 percent more water than graphene.

“Even though we have a lot of water on this planet, there is very little that is drinkable,” said Narayana Aluru, a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois and leader of the study. “If we could find a low-cost, efficient way to purify sea water, we would be making good strides in solving the water crisis.”

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According to the Mayo Clinic, the Nerve regeneration is a complex process, because of its complexity, regrowth of nerves after injury or disease is extremely rare. Nerve damages more often than not are incurable and cause permanent disability, but now the scientist has proved that Advanced 3D printing methods could hold a possible cure for such patients.

To prove the proof of concept, a physically disabled rat was chosen as a test subject. The scientist used a specially designed 3D scanners and 3D Printers to create a custom silicone guide, 3D-printed chemical cues were added to the guide to promote both motor and sensory nerve regeneration. This was then implanted into the rat with surgically grafting it to the cut ends of the nerve. The operation was a extremely successful and the rat showed tremendous improvement in the way it walked within 10 to 12 weeks.

Continue reading “3D Printed Guide for Nerve Regeneration successfully tested on Animals, Clinical testing on humans to begins soon” »

Researchers from the University of South Florida College of Engineering have proposed a new form of computing that uses circular nanomagnets to solve quadratic optimization problems orders of magnitude faster than that of a conventional computer.

A wide range of application domains can be potentially accelerated through this research such as finding patterns in social media, error-correcting codes to Big Data and biosciences.

In an article published in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology, “Non Boolean computing with nanomagnets for computer vision applications,” authors Sanjukta Bhanja, D.K. Karunaratne, Ravi Panchumarthy, Srinath Rajaram, and Sudeep Sarkar discuss how their work harnessed the energy-minimization nature of nanomagnetic systems to solve the quadratic optimization problems that arise in computer vision applications, which are computationally expensive.

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Can black phosphorous rival #graphene?

A new experimental revelation about black phosphorus nanoribbons should facilitate the future application of this highly promising material to electronic, optoelectronic and thermoelectric devices. A team of researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has experimentally confirmed strong in-plane anisotropy in thermal conductivity, up to a factor of two, along the zigzag and armchair directions of single-crystal black phosphorous nanoribbons.

“Imagine the lattice of black phosphorous as a two-dimensional network of balls connected with springs, in which the network is softer along one direction of the plane than another,” says Junqiao Wu, a physicist who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Our study shows that in a similar manner heat flow in the black phosphorous nanoribbons can be very different along different directions in the plane. This thermal conductivity anisotropy has been predicted recently for 2D black phosphorous crystals by theorists but never before observed.”

Continue reading “Is black phosphorous the next big thing in materials?” »