Live Longer, Better Brains, Robot Roaches

Big News: Live longer with less

Less* cells, that is — specifically, the near-dead cells that refuse to leave your body and end up causing trouble.

New therapies may remove senescent cells and thereby increase lifespans by 35 percent.

At least, that’s how it’s worked so far in mice. Who wants to sign up for human trials?

Researchers at Mayo Clinic report that senescent cells – cells that no longer divide and accumulate with age – negatively impact health and shorten lifespan by as much as 35 percent in normal mice. Clearance of senescent cells delays tumor formation, preserves tissue and organ function, and extends lifespan without observed adverse effects.

How are they cleared? Drugs. The immune system sweeps out the senescent cells on a regular basis, but over time becomes less effective. Mayo Clinic says its researchers used a transgene that allowed for the drug-induced elimination of senescent cells from normal mice. Upon administration of a compound called AP20187, removal of senescent cells delayed the formation of tumors and reduced age-related deterioration of several organs. Median lifespan of treated mice was extended by 17 to 35 percent. They also demonstrated a healthier appearance and a reduced amount of inflammation in fat, muscle and kidney tissue.

“Senescent cells that accumulate with aging are largely bad, do bad things to your organs and tissues, and therefore shorten your life,” one Mayo doctor adds — and they also shorten “the healthy phase of your life.” He adds that “since you can eliminate the cells without negative side effects, it seems like therapies that will mimic our findings – or our genetic model that we used to eliminate the cells – that drugs or other compounds that can eliminate senescent cells would be useful for therapies against age-related disabilities or diseases or conditions.”

Not coincidently, Unity Biotechnology launched today “with a focus on preventing and reversing diseases of aging… Imagine a future in which you age, but without the diseases your parents got. Imagine a future in which it doesn’t hurt to grow old.”

The San Francisco company says it is “developing medicines to treat and eliminate age-related diseases and increase health span, or the amount of time an individual lives in good health.” Its investors include the Mayo Clinic, which says “The revenue that Mayo Clinic will receive is used to support its not-for-profit mission in patient care, education and research.”

Here is the full announcement.

Here is the company that will market the therapy.

Technology Review has more details here.

[*okay, “fewer cells,” grammar nazis. But that isn’t alliterative! I have my priorities…]

Brain signals decoded “nearly at speed of perception”

Electrodes implanted in the temporal lobes of awake patients let scientists decode brain signals at nearly the speed of perception, the University of Washington reports.

Also, “analysis of patients’ neural responses to two categories of visual stimuli – images of faces and houses – enabled the scientists to subsequently predict which images the patients were viewing, and when, with better than 95 percent accuracy.”

Computational neuroscientists at the university say it could lead toward building “a communication mechanism for patients who are paralyzed or have had a stroke and are completely locked-in.”

Here is the full announcement.

3D model of folds in the brain

“What ultimately causes the brain to fold is a simple mechanical instability associated with buckling.”

That’s the conclusion of Harvard researchers who made a three-dimensional gel model of a smooth fetal brain, based on MRI images, that shows the “distinctive troughs and crests of the human brain”

These brain folds “are not present in most animals; highly folded brains are seen only in a handful of species,” Harvard says, “including some primates, dolphins, elephants and pigs. In humans, folding begins in fetal brains around the 20th week of gestation and is completed only when the child is about a year and a half.”

Folded brains likely evolved to fit a large cortex into a small volume with the benefit of reducing neuronal wiring length and improving cognitive function, the report adds. “This simple evolutionary innovation, with iterations and variations, allows for a large cortex to be packed into a small volume, and is likely the dominant cause behind brain folding, known as gyrification.”

Understanding how the brain folds could help unlock the inner workings of the brain and unravel brain-related disorders, Harvard notes.

Here is the full announcement.

Collar to prevent brain trauma

A degenerative brain disease is believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. Now a device modeled after woodpeckers and bighorn sheep may help prevent chronic traumatic encephalopathy in athletes.

The device works by increasing the volume of blood in the skull, Technology Review reports, “cushioning the brain and preventing the “sloshing” effect that produces CTE lesions.”

The collar works by applying pressure to the jugular veins to slightly reduce the amount of blood that flows out of the skull every heartbeat. The increased pressure prevents the “sloshing” effect, the article notes, in which the brain bangs up against the interior of the skull.

It may be marketed soon by Q30 Innovations.

Here is the full article.

Paraplegics walk with a budget exoskeleton

A 27-pound frame allows paraplegic people to walk 1.1 mph on level ground. Dubbed the Phoenix, it’s $40,000 from Berkeley-based SuitX.

Wearers still need to use crutches or a walker to balance, Fast Company reports. But it costs 2–4 times less than competitors and is among the lightest exoskeletons in the world, the article adds. “What makes the Phoenix so different from its predecessors is its Spartan design, born from biomechanics rather than the practices of industrial robot construction and the benchmarks of military contracts.”

Here is the full article.

Light-based modem in space

A new light-based modem may transmit data up to 100 times faster than radio signals, NASA claims.

The first integrated-photonics modem “will employ an emerging, potentially revolutionary technology that could transform everything from telecommunications, medical imaging, advanced manufacturing to national defense,” the space agency adds. The modem will be tested aboard the International Space Station beginning in 2020. The cell phone-sized device incorporates optics-based functions, such as lasers, switches, and wires, onto a microchip — “much like an integrated circuit found in all electronics hardware.”

Using lasers to encode and transmit data at rates 10–100 times faster than today’s communications equipment, requiring significantly less mass and power then current systems, NASA adds. “Such a leap in technology could deliver video and high-resolution measurements from spacecraft over planets across the solar system — permitting researchers to make detailed studies of conditions on other worlds, much as scientists today track hurricanes and other climate and environmental changes here on Earth.”

Here is the full announcement.

Internet from solar-powered drones

Super-fast 5G Internet from solar-powered drones? That’s what Google is planning to deliver, according to a news report in the Guardian.

The company has been testing out the “Skybender” project in New Mexico. It has the potential to transmit 40 times more data than 4G LTE wireless services. The SkyBender system is being tested with a “Centaur” aircraft and solar-powered drones made by Google Titan, a division formed when Google acquired New Mexico startup Titan Aerospace in 2014, the Guardian reports.

Like the Starry project covered here last week, Skybender will use high-frequency millimeter waves.

Here is the full article.

Fabricating thinner chips

MIT reports its researchers have developed a new chip-fabrication technique that could allow for thin, flexible, transparent computing devices, which could be laminated onto other materials.

While computer chips today are built by stacking layers of different materials and etching patterns into them, the new approach enables significantly different materials to be deposited in the same layer. The experimental chip uses two materials with very different lattice sizes: molybdenum disulfide and graphene, which is a single-atom-thick layer of carbon, yielding layers between one and three atoms thick.

The technique also has implications for the development of the ultralow-power, high-speed computing devices known as tunneling transistors, MIT adds, and potentially for the integration of optical components into computer chips.

Here is the full announcement.

Robots to roam like Cockroaches

Researchers at UC Berkeley report “outfitting a robot with a rounded shell helps it scoot through clutter as easily as a cockroach.”

Thanks, Science.

With the goal of emulating cockroaches’ maneuverability, the scientists found the “simple streamlined shape allowed them to easily roll and slip through gaps in a clutter of objects, such as grass and leaves on a forest floor,” UCB says. Adding shells of various types to a cockroach-like robot showed “a similarly rounded, oval carapace allowed the robot to slip through gaps, while typical box-like robots are often stopped dead in their tracks.”

The robot may inspire the design of future terrestrial robots to use in a wide variety of scenarios, from monitoring the environment to search and rescue operations, the university adds.

Here is the full announcement.

Here is more info. (Such as “Cockroaches intrude everywhere by exploiting their soft-bodied, shape-changing ability... Cockroaches withstood forces nearly 900 times body weight without injury, explaining their robustness to compression.”)

80 million degrees — Hot Hydrogen Plasma

The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics generated hydrogen plasma in its experimental nuclear fusion — with a temperature of 80 million degrees and a lifetime of a quarter of a second.

Discovery reports the Wendelstein reactor has since October been performing trial runs with helium plasma “at a mere 6 million degrees Celsius. Breezy!”

The production of the hydrogen plasma is part of “a long-range plan to build nuclear fusion power plants that generate energy in much the same manner as the sun and other stars.”

Here is the full article.

Here's more information.

AI, Advanced Medicine, Faster Connectivity

AI: Google beats Go

It’s being touted as another milestone on the road to artificial intelligence: Google’s Deep Mind computer defeated a master of the ancient Chinese game of Go.

What’s most interesting: not only is the victory a decade ahead of prognostications, but the neural network trained itself to win. “The program’s victory marks the rise not merely of the machines but of new methods of computer programming based on self-training neural networks,” Spectrum adds. “The program conducted its own research through a trial-and-error approach that involved playing millions of games against itself. In this fashion it discovered, one by one, many of the rules of thumb that textbooks have been imparting to Go students for centuries.”

Here is the full article.

Energy-friendly Eyeriss chip to boost AI

A new chip designed specifically to implement neural networks is 10 times as efficient as a mobile GPU, “so it could enable mobile devices to run powerful artificial-intelligence algorithms locally, rather than uploading data to the Internet for processing,” MIT reports.

MIT researchers believe neural networks are now “complex, and are mostly run on high-power GPUs. You can imagine that if you can bring that functionality to your cell phone or embedded devices, you could still operate even if you don’t have a WiFi connection. You might also want to process locally for privacy reasons. Processing it on your phone also avoids any transmission latency, so that you can react much faster for certain applications.”

The new chip, “Eyeriss,” has 168 cores, roughly as many as a mobile GPU. But “the key to Eyeriss’ efficiency is to minimize the frequency with which cores need to exchange data with distant memory banks, an operation that consumes a good deal of time and energy. Whereas many of the cores in a GPU share a single, large memory bank, each of the Eyeriss cores has its own memory. Moreover, the chip has a circuit that compresses data before sending it to individual cores.”

Here is the full announcement.

Neural network uses “brain-like chips”

Not just a brain-like neural network — but one built from brain-like plastic memristors rather than silicon.

That’s the work of scientists at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. The chips remember previous electrical resistance, and so can “effectively work like brain synapses,” Engadget reports. “They're ideal for creating "true" neural networks where signal transfers create long-lasting effects.”

Here is the full article.

Nanowerk has more information here.

Bio-printing: Acoustic tweezers move cells safely

Carnegie Mellon University reports it researchers demonstrated acoustic tweezers that non-invasively move and manipulate single cells along three dimensions.

The tool may provide “a promising new method for 3D bio-printing.”

3D bio-printing may “recreate the complex, multicellular architecture of biological tissues,” CMU adds. “Researchers have been using a combination of approaches, but have yet to develop a single method that has the high level of precision, versatility, multiple dimensionality and single cell resolution needed to form complex multicellular structures while maintaining cell viability, integrity and function.”

Why is it needed? “Multicellular structures within living things are complex and delicate, which makes recreating these structures a daunting task,” Carnegie says. “For example, the human heart contains more than 2 billion muscle cells. Each of these cells must properly interact with one another and with their environment to ensure that the heart functions properly. If those cells aren’t placed correctly, or are damaged, it could potentially result in any of a variety of heart conditions.”

Here is the full announcement.

Flexible transparent pressure sensor

Doctors may someday detect tumors by hand using gloves with pressure sensors that wrap around and conform to the shape of the fingers while still accurately measuring pressure distribution, Kurzweil reports.

The transparent, bendable, and sensitive pressure sensor was developed at the University of Tokyo. It uses carbon nanotubes and graphene, and is about 8 micrometers thick. It can measure pressure in 144 locations at once, and “maintain its sensing accuracy even when bent over a radius of 80 micrometers, equivalent to just twice the width of a human hair.”

Here is the full article.

Smart Wearable senses sweat

Sweat contains dozens of chemical compounds that could reveal your body’s response to disease, drugs, diet, injury, and stress, Spectrum notes — and now a wearable sensor can measure levels of specific molecules in sweat and then wirelessly relay the data to a smartphone.

Developed at the University of California, Berkeley, the smart wristband combines chemical sensors with a flexible circuit board, and measures two electrolytes, potassium and sodium ions, and two metabolites, glucose and lactate. It’s the first to measure more than one analyte at a time.

Here is the full article.

Handheld microscope can spy cancer cells

With a new handheld microscope, neurosurgeons could “differentiate cancerous from normal brain tissue at cellular level in real time in the operating room and determine where to stop cutting,” Kurzweil reports.

The miniature microscope uses dual-axis confocal microscopy to illuminate and more clearly see through opaque tissue. It can capture details up to a half millimeter beneath the tissue surface, where some types of cancerous cells originate.

Even doctors in their offices could distinguish cancerous cells, using the new tech developed by engineers at the University of Washington.

Researchers expect to begin testing it as a cancer-screening tool in clinical settings next year.

Here is the full article.

Faster online connectivity via airwaves

Are you getting slow and costly connectivity through optical fiber, cable, and even copper wiring? Soon, wireless access may provide a better way: Start-up Starry claims it’s deploying the world’s first millimeter wave band active phased array technology as an alternative to fixed wireline broadband for consumer internet communications. In other words, Internet connectivity over the airwaves that is faster than broadband.

Using “underutilized high-frequency spectrum,” the company plans to offer a nationwide broadband network “capable of delivering internet speeds of up to one gigabit wirelessly to the home.” Consumers will be able to install Starry’s products themselves “and connect to the internet in minutes, without onerous contracts, data caps, or having to wait for an installer.”

The overall costs will be lower, the company adds: “Today it costs roughly $2,500 per home to deploy traditional broadband service. With Starry Internet, it will cost about 1/100th of that.”

But if you live in the country, don’t get your hopes up yet: The service reportedly requires hubs at 1-mile intervals for its line-of-sight transmission. (Popular Mechanics notes that “high-frequency waves are very, very bad at going through things, for example. They can't even penetrate a window. That means in order for this sort of thing to work, you'd need a device pipes the internet through your wall into your home and apartment.”)

Starry will launch in the Boston area this summer. Its WiFi station has a 3.8-inch capacitive touchscreen, and will sell for $350.

The promo video is here.

Nanowire may improve solar cells

Nanowire chips may be ideal for solar panels, lasers, LEDs, and other technologies— but making them isn’t easy.

Now scientists at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland developed a simple and affordable method to grow the wires by manipulating fluids with microcircuits on a nanometer scale. (That doesn’t sound too simple…)

This now-standardized method for growing nanowires from perovskites can be automated on an industrial scale to fabricate chips, the scientists report.

Here is Engadget’s article.

Here's more information.

Concrete clears itself of ice

New conductive concrete carries enough electrical current to melt ice during winter storms.

Developed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the concrete has steel shavings and carbon particles that are warm enough to melt ice but “remain safe to the touch.”

It’s being demonstrated for the Federal Aviation Administration, and in further testing may be integrated into the tarmac of a major U.S. airport.

It’s already been tested in a bridge in Lincoln: 52 conductive slabs successfully de-iced its surface during a five-year trial run.

Here is the full announcement.

More Memories, Brain Implants, Improved 3D Printing

Brain memory capacity 10 times higher

“It’s a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience,” and you’re potentially smarter than you might’ve guessed: The Salk Institute reports the human brain’s memory capacity is in the petabyte range — 10x larger than previously thought.

The institute says it’s “achieved critical insight into the size of neural connections, putting the memory capacity of the brain far higher than common estimates.”

They’ve also answered “how the brain is so energy efficient” which could help engineers “build computers that are incredibly powerful but also conserve energy… We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power.”

Here is the full announcement.

Teleport memories

Move memories? Maybe: Electromechanical oscillators and superconducting circuits could teleport the internal quantum state and center-of-mass motion state of a microorganism. (Erp.)

At least, that’s according to physicists at Purdue University and Tsinghua University, who say this version of quantum teleportation could instantly transport memory.

They propose an electromechanical membrane oscillator integrated with a superconducting circuit that could prepare a bacterium for a quantum superposition state. “With a strong magnetic field gradient, the internal states of a microorganism, such as the electron spin of a glycine radical, can be entangled with its center-of-mass motion and be teleported to a remote microorganism,” according to the report at Eureka Alert. “Since internal states of an organism contain information, this proposal provides a scheme for teleporting information or memories between two remote organisms.”

Here is the full article.

Low-cost DNA test for cancer

Most cancer can be cured if caught early enough, and now the inventor of a DNA test for Down syndrome says the technology can be used to screen for cancer as well, Technology Review reports.

The Hong Kong scientist says screening for signs of cancer from a simple blood draw could cost as little as $1,000, the Review adds.

The test works by studying DNA released into a person’s bloodstream by dying tumor cells. The new method looks for changes in methylation, as cancer cell genes widely lose their methylation marks, and so they “can be reliably spotted using less sequencing.”

Image: Sequenom licensed the Down syndrome test.

Here is the full article.

“Bridging the Bio-Electronic Divide”

That’s the stated goal for a new program from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency: develop an implantable neural interface able to provide unprecedented signal resolution and data-transfer bandwidth between the human brain and the digital world.

The interface would serve as a translator, DARPA adds, converting between the electrochemical language used by neurons in the brain and the ones and zeros that constitute the language of information technology. The goal is to achieve this communications link in a biocompatible device no larger than one cubic centimeter in size, roughly the volume of two nickels stacked back to back.

The program, Neural Engineering System Design, stands to dramatically enhance research capabilities in neuro-technology and provide a foundation for new therapies. “Today’s best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem,” says the program manager. “Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics.”

Neural interfaces currently approved for human use squeeze a tremendous amount of information through just 100 channels, with each channel aggregating signals from tens of thousands of neurons at a time, Darpa notes. The result is noisy and imprecise. In contrast, the NESD program aims to develop systems that can communicate clearly and individually with any of up to one million neurons in a given region of the brain.

Here's more information.

Electronic implants melt in the brain

Maybe DARPA should talk with these guys: Tiny electronic implants can monitor brain injury, then melt away, claim researchers at the University of Illinois.

The school says its new class of small, thin electronic sensors can monitor temperature and pressure within the skull – crucial health parameters after a brain injury or surgery. As they are constructed out of “bio-resorbable materials,” they “melt away when they are no longer needed, eliminating the need for additional surgery to remove the monitors and reducing the risk of infection and hemorrhage.”

“This is a new class of electronic biomedical implants,” adds one of the developers. “These kinds of systems have potential across a range of clinical practices, where therapeutic or monitoring devices are implanted or ingested, perform a sophisticated function, and then resorb harmlessly into the body after their function is no longer necessary.”

Here is the full announcement.

Radar hears heartbeats

Would you want to measure your pulse and other health signs throughout the day?

Millimeter-wave spread-spectrum radar can measure heartbeats remotely with as much accuracy as electrocardiographs, Phys Org reports. Researchers at the Kyoto University Center of Innovation and Panasonic say their unique signal analysis algorithm that identify signals from the body offers “a way to monitor their body in a casual and relaxed environment,” as opposed to electrocardiographs, with which “taking measurements with sensors on the body can be stressful and troublesome.”

Here is the full article.

Electricity as dental anesthetic

No  more needles and Novocain at the dentist: instead a small electric current could numb your nerves.

Researchers at the University of São Paulo say their work “could help improve dental procedures and bring relief to millions of people who are scared of needles,’ Alpha Galileo reports. “It would also save money and avoid contamination and infection, they say."

Actually, the iontophoresis process does not eliminate anesthetics — but it does make them more effective, and may eliminate the need for needles: topical application could suffice.

Here is the full article.

Here's more information.

Sequence DNA with Graphene

Rapid and accurate gene sequencing may be possible by pulling a DNA molecule through a tiny, chemically activated hole in graphene and detecting changes in electrical current.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology propose that the method “could identify about 66 million bases — the smallest units of genetic information — per second, with 90 percent accuracy and no false positives,” NIST reports. The method could turn out to “…ultimately be faster and cheaper than conventional DNA sequencing, meeting a critical need for applications such as forensics.”

Here's more information.

"4d" Printing blossoms

Materials science and mathematics combine to enable the printing of shapeshifting architectures that mimic the natural movements of plants, Harvard University reports. Scientists at its Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering “evolved their microscale 3D printing technology to the fourth dimension, time.”

The “4D” printed hydrogel composite structures change shape upon immersion in water. The work is “inspired by natural structures like plants, which respond and change their form over time according to environmental stimuli.” It represents “an elegant advance in programmable materials assembly.” The hydrogel composites contain cellulose fibrils that are derived from wood and are similar to the microstructures that enable shape changes in plants.

The 4D printing “enables the design of almost any arbitrary, transformable shape from a wide range of available materials with different properties and potential applications, truly establishing a new platform for printing self-assembling, dynamic microscale structures that could be applied to a broad range of industrial and medical applications.”

Here is the full announcement.

3D printer: additive manufacturing alternative

Engineers at the University of Bristol developed a new type of 3D printing that can print composite materials, which are used in products such as tennis rackets, golf clubs, and airplanes, the school reports.

The new method uses ultrasonic waves to “position millions of tiny reinforcement fibers as part of the 3D printing process,” the university adds. The fibers form a microscopic reinforcement framework that is placed using a laser beam, “which locally cures the epoxy resin and then prints the object.”

Also, the ultrasonic system can be added cheaply to an off-the-shelf 3D printer, “which then turns it into a composite printer.”

Here is the full announcement.

Affordably printing metals and alloys

Another new 3D printing process creates metallic objects: Northwestern University says its technique uses liquid inks and common furnaces, “resulting in a cheaper, faster, and more uniform process.”

The method works for an extensive variety of metals, metal mixtures, alloys, and metal oxides and compounds, the school adds. “Our method greatly expands the architectures and metals we’re able to print, which really opens the door for a lot of different applications.”

A liquid ink (made of metal or mixed metal powders, solvents, and an elastomer binder) is printed using a syringe-extrusion process. It “instantaneously solidifies and fuses with previously extruded material, enabling very large objects to be quickly created and immediately handled.” The powders are fused in a furnace.

Here is the full announcement.

Drones dodge obstacles

Creating real-time flight plans that avoid obstacles and handle surprises like wind and weather means that getting drones to fly around without hitting things is no small task, MIT reports. “Obstacle-detection and motion-planning are two of computer science’s trickiest challenges.”

Now the school’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory demonstrated software that allow drones to “stop on a dime to make hairpin movements over, under, and around” 26 distinct obstacles.

With the software, a small quadrotor can do “donuts and figure-eights through an obstacle course of strings and PVC pipes” and fly at “speeds upwards of 1 meter per second.”

The algorithms are available online.

Here is the full announcement.