Laser Hole Punch Turns Hair Into Forensic Time Machine

Punching Holes in Human Hair with Laser

You are whatever your hair says you are, and that’s not a statement about style. Your hair stores within it a chemical record of what you’ve been eating (and you are, as we all know, what you eat). A new laser-based method of chemical analysis can produce an hour-by-hour record of what you’ve been eating from a single strand of hair, making your ‘do into a detailed forensic record.

There are existing methods of testing hair samples for carbon clues, but they tend to destroy small samples within the hair and they certainly don’t give time-based measurements. That is, they can distinguish what’s in your diet, but have trouble creating a chronology of when you ate what, much less an accurate hour-by-hour record.

The new method, developed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, uses an ultraviolet laser that is careful to break up materials in the hair rather than scorch them as other lasers typically do. Once broken apart, the particles can be fed into a mass spectrometer for analysis.

From that analysis of carbon isotopes, researchers can reconstruct a forensic record of the person to whom the sample belonged. Specifically, they can see what and when you’ve been eating (and from that perhaps deduce where you’ve been eating as well).

But while carbon betrays what a person has been eating, other elements could paint an even more detailed portrait of his or her life. Oxygen isotopes are tied to the water cycle and sulfur to bedrock, while nitrogen could help further specify exactly what a person has been consuming. As such, the PNNL team is now adapting their laser technique to analyze those isotopes as well.

See some small-scale laser ablation below.

Source: PopSci via Wired

A Sensor Made of Jell-O and Foil Detects Acute Pancreatitis In an Hour and Costs Less Than A Buck

If there were a distinction one could earn for practicing smart medicine on a shoestring, a UT grad student would be high in the running. Using a aluminum foil, gelatin, milk protein, and a cheap LED light--items that collectively sell for under a buck--he’s created a fast, one-hour test for acute pancreatitis.

This test is way faster than existing diagnostics for acute pancreatitis, a condition in which sudden inflammation of the pancreas can cause a good deal of pain, fever, shock, and occasionally death. The sensor is basically a battery with a two-tiered, enzyme selective switch. To test for acute pancreatitis, a bit of blood extract is dropped on a layer of gelatin and milk protein. If there’s enough trypsin--an enzyme that exists in elevated levels in patients with the condition--it eats right through the gelatin/protein mix.

At this point a drop of sodium hydroxide is added. If the trypsin has truly eaten through the gelatin, the sodium hydroxide is exposed to a layer of foil below, where it will begin eating a hole. With both the gelatin and the foil dissolved, a circuit is able to form between an iron salt at the cathode and a magnesium anode, lighting up the LED. If the LED lights up in less than an hour, the patient has acute pancreatitis.

“We’ve turned Reynold’s Wrap, Jell-O and milk into a way to look for organ failure,” Brian Zaccheo, the UT grad student behind the sensor, told Texas Science. Perhaps best of all, it’s the size of a quarter, costs less than a dollar, and requires no external electricity source (in fact, it is a battery). That means it could go virtually anywhere, providing a cheap means of diagnosing acute pancreatitis in the developing world or in out-of-the-way locales.

Source: Popsci Via Texas Science

First 'practical nanogenerator' developed

Tiny devices that turn bodily movements — such as the snap of one's fingers — into electricity for a cellphone or MP3 player are now much closer to making the leap from the laboratory into everyday life.

Called nanogenerators, these devices are made of so-called piezoelectric materials that generate a current of electricity when stretched or strained. So far, however, nanogenerators have not been able to crank out enough power to be useful.

Now, researchers have boosted the voltage and power output of these tiny generators to the point where they can power electronic components, including a light-emitting diode and a liquid crystal display.

"In the past, our voltage was less than one volt, so we could not power anything," said lead researcher Zhong Lin Wang, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "But now we can achieve three volts or even as high as five to 10 volts so that we can store the generated charge and use it to power those small devices."

The nano-scale chargers could be ready for commercial use in five years, Wang said.

Some applications include putting the chargers in the sole of a shoe to generate electricity from foot movement. The little power plants could also go in clothing and other fabrics, such as window curtains, or even under train rails to generate large amounts of electricity from train vibrations. Still other uses include insulin pumps implanted in the body and powered by a heartbeat as well as environmental sensors that get their juice from nanogenerators bending in the breeze.

The new nanogenerator is about the size of a fingertip and consists of a sheet of plastic with embedded rows of zinc oxide wires. By using a gold electrode, the researchers integrated thousands of the zinc oxide wires in such a way that their voltage was combined.

This arrangement boosted the device’s power output by three orders of magnitude and its voltage 150 times compared to a device made a year ago. And by stacking five plastic sheets together, the researchers were able to produce one microampere output current at three volts, which is the equivalent of the power of two regular AA batteries.

Wang and his team detail their findings today (Mar. 29) at the American Chemical Society's National Meeting and Exposition in Anaheim, Calif.

Source: TechNewsDaily

Synthetic Brain Synapse Is Constructed

Synthetic Synapse

Building a synthetic brain is no easy undertaking, but researchers working on the problem have to start somewhere. In doing so, engineers at the University of Southern California have taken a huge step by building a synthetic synapse from carbon nanotubes.

In tests, their synapse circuit functions very much like a real neuron--neurons being the very building blocks of the brain. Tapping the unique properties of carbon nanotubes, their lab was able to essentially recreate brain function in a very fractional way.

Of course, duplicating synapse firings in a nanotube circuit and creating synthetic brain function are two very different things. The human brain, as we well know, is very complex and hardly static like the inner workings of a computer. Over time it makes new connections, adapts to changes, and produces new neurons.

But while a functioning synthetic brain may be decades away, the synthetic synapse is here now, which could help researchers model neuron communications and otherwise begin building, from the ground up, an artificial mimic of one of biology’s biggest mysteries.

Source: Popsci

New Graphene Material is Paper-Thin and Ten Times Stronger Than Steel

Graphene Paper

Researchers at the University of Technology Sydney have created a new material that is lighter, less dense, harder, and stronger than steel. But this material isn’t one of those breakthroughs that only sounds good on paper. It is paper, and it could be a game-changer for materials science if it can live up to researchers’ hopes.

This graphene paper is constructed of graphite reformed by chemical processes into monolayer hexagonal carbon lattices stacked as thin as a sheet of paper, and it is remarkably strong. To quote a press release from UTS:

Compared to steel, the prepared GP is six times lighter, five to six times lower density, two times harder with 10 times higher tensile strength and 13 times higher bending rigidity.

That’s no incremental improvement on the qualities of steel, but a huge leap forward in terms of overall material strength (plus, like paper, it is flexible). And because it is graphene, it is also imbued with some interesting electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties.

But perhaps best of all, graphene paper not outrageously difficult or expensive to manufacture, and as such it could have huge implications for the aviation and automotive industries, where manufacturers have already been turning to composites and carbon fiber materials to cut weight and thus increase fuel economies.

Source: Popsci via UTS

Self Healing Car Paint Now Possible

Nobody likes scratches in their car's finish. That's part of the reason why over the years, a number of research facilities have tried to develop self-healing paint. These efforts have resulted in products containing things such as microcapsulesthat burst open when scratched, elastic resins, and even a chemical derived from the exoskeletons of crustaceans. Now, scientists from the U.S. and Switzerland have developed polymers – which could be used in paint – that heal their own scratches when exposed to ultraviolet light.

The metallo-supramolecular polymers were created by a team from Cleveland'sCase Western Reserve University, the Adolphe Merkle Institute at Switzerland's University of Fribourg, and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

Newly-created polymers liquefy and fill in scratches when exposed to UV light, then resolidify once the light source is removed

Made using a process known as supramolecular assembly, the polymers are composed of relatively small molecules assembled into long chains, held together with metal ions. When exposed to intense UV light, those molecules become temporarily "unglued," transforming the material from a solid to a liquid that fills any scratches within less than one minute. Once the light source is removed, the molecules reassemble and the polymers resolidify, sans scratches. The unique properties of the metal ions are said to be the key to the reaction.

In lab tests on polymer samples, the scientists found that they could treat scratches in specific areas by using a highly-focusable lamp like those used by dentists to cure fillings. Simple heat also worked, although it wasn't as easy to control as the UV light. It was also found that the exact same area could be scratched and healed over and over again, which has not been the case with some other self-healing substances.

The researchers say that there is still work to be done before the polymers could be a commercially-viable product – for one thing, it's been discovered that while polymers with the most ordered molecular structures offer the best mechanical qualities, those with the least-ordered structures are the best at healing. Once the bugs are worked out, however, the polymers could eventually find use not only in paint, but also in floor and furniture varnish, and on windows in abrasive environments.

Nanofiber spheres carry healing cells into cartilage wounds

Biodegradable nanofiber microspheres show promise as a means of transporting cells to cartilage wound sites, where they can form new tissue and speed healing 

Cartilage wounds can be very difficult to treat. While they may eventually heal on their own, the resulting tissue often won't take the same form – or allow for the same function – as the original. Cartilage injuries are often treated with a process known as ACI (autologous chondrocyte implantation), in which a patient's own cells are injected at the wound site to form new tissue. The procedure doesn't always work, as the cells are just injected loosely, with no carrier to transport them or help them get established. Now, however, a scientist from the University of Michigan has developed a technique in which cells are delivered to wounds via injectable nanofiber spheres, and the results are said to be very promising.

Professor Peter Ma's process starts with star-shaped biodegradable polymers that self-assemble into hollow nanofiber microspheres. Cells, which are slightly smaller than the spheres, are then inserted into them.

Because they are very porous, the spheres allow nutrients to reach and nourish the cells, mimicking the cellular matrix in which the cells would normally be located. Once they reach the wound site, the spheres biodegrade, producing little in the way of byproducts that could affect cell development. Because of the protected environment they were in, the cells will have already started to grow by this point, and so are better able to integrate themselves into the wound site.

In small animal tests, wounds treated with the microspheres grew as much as three to four times the amount of tissue as a control group. Ma and his colleagues at U Michigan now plan on moving the tests up to larger animals, with human patients as their ultimate goal.

Source: Popsci Via Nature Materials.

New technique for regenerating blood vessels to aid treatment of vascular disease

A new technique for regenerating blood vessels has implications for victims of coronary artery disease

Researchers at the University of Western Ontario have discovered a new strategy for helping the body make blood vessels in vulnerable or damaged tissue. The approach, which has implications for the treatment of victims of coronary artery disease, involves the use of a protein named fibroblast growth factor 9 (FGF9) to assist the "supporting" cells of new blood vessels as they are formed by the body.

Existing biological strategies of 'therapeutic angiogenesis' that aim to promote the regeneration of the patients own blood vessels have focused on the endothelial or lining cells of the artery wall.

"Unfortunately and despite considerable investigation, therapeutic angiogenesis has not as yet been found to be beneficial to patients with coronary artery disease," says Cardiologist Dr. Geoffrey Pickering, who developed the strategy in collaboration with Mathew Frontini at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry. "It appears that new blood vessels that form using approaches to date do not last long, and may not have the ability to control the flow of blood into the areas starved of oxygen."

The key innovation of the strategy of Pickering's research group is to pay more attention to the "supporting" cells of the vessel wall. FGF9 has the effect of stimulating the supporting cells in wrapping around the fragile walls of the vessels. The team found that by activating the supporting cells in mice, new vessels did not 'shrivel' and disappear but instead lasted over a year. Another advantage of the new strategy is that the redeveloped vessels were found to be surrounded by smooth muscle cells which enabled them to constrict and relax, ensuring the correct amount of blood and with it, oxygen, get to the tissues which require it so urgently.

With heart attacks and strokes being a leading cause of death, the implications of this research are far reaching.

Source: Gizmag

Human Skin Now In Production in Germany

Skin Scaffold A matrix with a vascular system, or BioVaSc (biological vascularized scaffold), on which skin cells can be cultivated at the Fraunhofer skin factory.

The factory can produce 5,000 penny-sized discs of whitish translucent tissue every month. The designers say it can also come in shades of brown. Each disc will cost about $72, a bit more than expected when the project was in its planning stages two years ago. The German newspaper Der Spiegel took a tour of the facility with its director, Heike Walles; check out their coverage here.

Robots and computers control the skin-making process, which takes place in a sterile, climate-controlled setting. The skin broth is closely monitored for any signs of infection and computers guide the lasers and blades that cut swatches of skin. The goal is to pave the way for factory-produced human tissue, complete with blood vessels, that could be used to treat injuries or various medical conditions.

As Der Spiegel puts it, Walles believes factories like this one will be the only way to efficiently produce new tissue like bladders, tracheas, cartilage and even human organs. She and others have successfully produced engineered tissue for human transplantation, but the process is hugely expensive and labor-intensive. An automated manufacturing facility could make it cheaper and simpler, she says.

For now, the tissue is being used in animal testing and could even be used for products like cosmetics, but it is still a long way from being transplanted. European Union regulations require several stages of animal testing before it could be used in a clinical setting, Der Spiegel reports.

Source: Popsci via Der Spiegel

Researchers Succeed in Quantum Teleportation of Light Waves

This is a Teleportation Device The setup Noriyuki Lee and colleagues used to teleport quantum light.

In a real-life use of Schrödinger's theoretical paradoxical cat, researchers report that they were able to quickly transfer a complex set of quantum information while preserving its integrity. The information, in the form of light, was manipulated in such a way that it existed in two states at the same time, and it was destroyed in one spot and recreated in another. The new breakthrough is a major step toward building safe, effective quantum computers.

No felines were harmed in the making of this experiment, which actually studied wave packets of light that existed in a state of quantum superposition, meaning they existed in two different phases simultaneously. This phenomenon is described in Erwin Schrodinger’s quantum mechanics thought experiment, in which a cat is simultaneously dead and alive, depending on the state of a subatomic particle.

In this experiment, researchers in Australia and Japan were able to transfer quantum information from one place to another without having to physically move it. It was destroyed in one place and instantly resurrected in another, “alive” again and unchanged. This is a major advance, as previous teleportation experiments were either very slow or caused some information to be lost.

The team employed a mind-boggling set of quantum manipulation techniques to achieve this, including squeezing, photon subtraction, entanglement and homodyne detection. The photo above depicts their device, nicknamed the Teleporter, in the lab of Akira Furusawa at the University of Tokyo.

The results pave the way for high-speed, high-fidelity transmission of information, according to Elanor Huntington, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia who was part of the study.

“If we can do this, we can do just about any form of communication needed for any quantum technology,” she said in a news release.

Instead of using ones and zeroes, quantum computers store data as qubits, which can represent one and zero simultaneously. This superposition enables the computers to solve multiple problems at once. The new, faster teleportation process means scientists can move blocks of this quantum information around within a computer or across a network, Huntington said.

Optics researcher Philippe Grangier at the Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau, France, said it was a major breakthrough.

“It shows that the controlled manipulation of quantum objects has progressed steadily and achieved objectives that seemed impossible just a few years ago,” he wrote in an editorial that accompanies the study.

The results were published today in the journal Science.

Source: Popsci via Science

“Optical Battery” to generate solar power without solar cells

It has long been thought that, even though light has electric and magnetic components, the effects of the magnetic field are so weak that they could effectively be ignored. Now researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) have discovered that under the right conditions, a light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than previously expected. The researchers say the discovery paves the way for the creation of an "optical battery" that could harness power from the sun without the use of solar cells.


Stephen Rand, a professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Applied Physics, and his colleagues found that if light focused to an intensity of 10 million watts per square centimeter (W/cm2) is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, such as glass, the light field can generate magnetic effects with the strength equivalent to a strong electric effect.

"This could lead to a new kind of solar cell without semiconductors and without absorption to produce charge separation," Rand said. "In solar cells, the light goes into a material, gets absorbed and creates heat. Here, we expect to have a very low heat load. Instead of the light being absorbed, energy is stored in the magnetic moment. Intense magnetization can be induced by intense light and then it is ultimately capable of providing a capacitive power source."

William Fisher, a doctoral student in applied physics at U-M, says that a previously undetected brand of "optical rectification" is what makes this possible. In traditional optical rectification, light's electric field causes a pulling apart of the positive and negative charges in a material, which sets up a voltage similar to that in a battery. This electric effect had previously been detected only in crystalline materials that possessed a certain symmetry, but Rand and Fisher found that light's magnetic field can also create optical rectification in other types of materials, under the right circumstances.

"It turns out that the magnetic field starts curving the electrons into a C-shape and they move forward a little each time," Fisher said. "That C-shape of charge motion generates both an electric dipole and a magnetic dipole. If we can set up many of these in a row in a long fiber, we can make a huge voltage and by extracting that voltage, we can use it as a power source."

Although the light must be focused through a non-conductive material to an intensity of 10 million W/cm2, which is much higher than the roughly 0.136 W/cm2 intensity of sunlight on its own, the researchers are looking for new materials that would work at lower intensities.

"In our most recent paper, we show that incoherent light like sunlight is theoretically almost as effective in producing charge separation as laser light is," Fisher said.

The researchers predict that with improved materials, they could achieve 10 percent efficiency, which is comparable to today's commercial-grade solar cells. They add that, because their technique doesn't require the extensive semiconductor processing required for traditional solar cells, it could also make solar power much cheaper.

"All we would need are lenses to focus the light and a fiber to guide it. Glass works for both. It's already made in bulk, and it doesn't require as much processing. Transparent ceramics might be even better," said Fisher.

Over the summer, the researchers will first work on harnessing power with laser light, and then sunlight.

The researcher's paper is titled, "Optically-induced charge separation and terahertz emission in unbiased dielectrics," and the University of Michigan is pursuing a patent for the technology.

Source: Gizmag

Surprisingly Simple Cure for Multiple Sclerosis By an Italian Doctor

Left: diagram from a medical text showing how MS affects the myelin sheathing of nerves. Right: MS lesions under a microscope.

An Italian doctor has been getting dramatic results with a new type of treatment for Multiple Sclerosis, or MS, which affects up to 2.5 million people worldwide. In an initial study, Dr. Paolo Zamboni took 65 patients with relapsing-remitting MS, performed a simple operation to unblock restricted bloodflow out of the brain - and two years after the surgery, 73% of the patients had no symptoms. Dr. Zamboni's thinking could turn the current understanding of MS on its head, and offer many sufferers a complete cure.


Multiple sclerosis, or MS, has long been regarded as a life sentence of debilitating nerve degeneration. More common in females, the disease affects an estimated 2.5 million people around the world, causing physical and mental disabilities that can gradually destroy a patient's quality of life.

It's generally accepted that there's no cure for MS, only treatments that mitigate the symptoms - but a new way of looking at the disease has opened the door to a simple treatment that is causing radical improvements in a small sample of sufferers.

Italian Dr. Paolo Zamboni has put forward the idea that many types of MS are actually caused by a blockage of the pathways that remove excess iron from the brain - and by simply clearing out a couple of major veins to reopen the blood flow, the root cause of the disease can be eliminated.

Dr. Zamboni's revelations came as part of a very personal mission - to cure his wife as she began a downward spiral after diagnosis. Reading everything he could on the subject, Dr. Zamboni found a number of century-old sources citing excess iron as a possible cause of MS. It happened to dovetail with some research he had been doing previously on how a buildup of iron can damage blood vessels in the legs - could it be that a buildup of iron was somehow damaging blood vessels in the brain?

He immediately took to the ultrasound machine to see if the idea had any merit - and made a staggering discovery. More than 90% of people with MS have some sort of malformation or blockage in the veins that drain blood from the brain. Including, as it turned out, his wife.

He formed a hypothesis on how this could lead to MS: iron builds up in the brain, blocking and damaging these crucial blood vessels. As the vessels rupture, they allow both the iron itself, and immune cells from the bloodstream, to cross the blood-brain barrier into the cerebro-spinal fluid. Once the immune cells have direct access to the immune system, they begin to attack the myelin sheathing of the cerebral nerves - Multiple Sclerosis develops.

He named the problem Chronic Cerebro-Spinal Venous Insufficiency, or CCSVI.

Zamboni immediately scheduled his wife for a simple operation to unblock the veins - a catheter was threaded up through blood vessels in the groin area, all the way up to the effected area, and then a small balloon was inflated to clear out the blockage. It's a standard and relatively risk-free operation - and the results were immediate. In the three years since the surgery, Dr. Zamboni's wife has not had an attack.

Widening out his study, Dr. Zamboni then tried the same operation on a group of 65 MS-sufferers, identifying blood drainage blockages in the brain and unblocking them - and more than 73% of the patients are completely free of the symptoms of MS, two years after the operation.

In some cases, a balloon is not enough to fully open the vein channel, which collapses either as soon as the balloon is removed, or sometime later. In these cases, a metal stent can easily be used, which remains in place holding the vein open permanently.

Dr. Zamboni's lucky find is yet to be accepted by the medical community, which is traditionally slow to accept revolutionary ideas. Still, most agree that while further study needs to be undertaken before this is looked upon as a cure for MS, the results thus far have been very positive.

Naturally, support groups for MS sufferers are buzzing with the news that a simple operation could free patients from what they have always been told would be a lifelong affliction, and further studies are being undertaken by researchers around the world hoping to confirm the link between CCSVI and MS, and open the door for the treatment to become available for sufferers worldwide.

It's certainly a very exciting find for MS sufferers, as it represents a possible complete cure, as opposed to an ongoing treatment of symptoms. We wish Dr. Zamboni and the various teams looking further into this issue the best of luck.

Source: Gizmag Via The Globe and Mail.

New Muscle Programming Method Uses DNA To Turn Blood Into Beating Heart Cells

Cardiomyocytes in the Sinoatrial Node This image shows a section of the sinoatrial node, a pacemaking area of the right atrium of the heart. The series of squiggly lines at bottom left, near the bulge, is a section of cardiomyocytes, which make the heart beat. Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions have figured out a new way to morph blood cells into this type of heart cell.Wikimedia Commons

A new DNA-based cell-transformation method could be a simpler, safer way to convert cells into beating heart cells, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. It involves no viruses and is a foolproof method to create cardiac cells that beat, they say.


Cardiac muscle cells, or cardiomyocytes, are what makes the heart beat. Scientists have been making cardiomyocytes from other cells for some time, usually by making induced pluripotent stem cells from some other cell, like skin cells or blood cells. The cells are reprogrammed into iPS cells by injecting virus particles that have been manipulated to carry genetic information.

But the viruses can cause mutations scientists don’t want, and in some cases, they cause cancer. It would be better to create new cells without involving viruses at all, but some scientists didn’t think this would be possible with heart muscle cells.

Cardiomyocytes are tricky to make in the lab, developing into clumps of regular, non-beating cells if they are not developed properly. Although plenty of labs have made them, there are no standardized recipes for the nutrient and growth factor broths that help them grow into properly beating cells.

Hopkins researchers went ahead and figured that out. Johns Hopkins postdoctoral scientist Paul Burridge pored through dozens of scientific papers and worked for nearly two years to develop a foolproof heart cell recipe. It worked for 11 different stem cell lines, including embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells.

“We took the recipe for this process from a complex minestrone to a simple miso soup,” said Elias Zambidis, M.D., Ph.D., an assistant professor of oncology and pediatrics at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Cell Engineering and the Kimmel Cancer Center.

To make the virus-free mutations, scientists used plasmids, which are ring-shaped molecules of double-stranded DNA that are separate from the DNA that’s found in chromosomes. They usually occur in bacteria, and can replicate inside cells but eventually degrade.

The team worked with stem cells from umbilical cord blood and gave them a slight shock, opening a gateway for a plasmid to insert seven genes into the cells. The plasmids caused the cells to turn into iPS cells. Then, Burridge fed them his specialized, simplified broth, designed to make them into heart cells. The researchers lowered oxygen levels to simulate the hypoxic environment these cells would experience when they grow inside an embryo. Nine days later, the nonviral iPS cells became functioning cardiac cells, according to Hopkins.

Such virus-free cells could eventually be used to test new cardiac drugs, or for stem cell-derived implants to help patients whose cardiomyocytes die in a heart attack, according to Hopkins.

Watch the cells pulse in the video below.

Source: Popsci

Mosquito inspires near-painless hypodermic needle

Mosquitoes are perhaps useful for something after all, besides feeding frogs. Along with his colleagues at Osaka's Kansai University, mechanical engineer Seiji Aoyagi has created an almost pain-free hypodermic needle that is based on a mosquito's proboscis. Perhaps surprisingly, the needle's patient-friendliness comes from the fact that its outer surface is jagged, not smooth.


While mosquito bites definitely do itch, the itching only occurs after the feeding is complete, due to bacteria in the anticoagulant injected by the insects. The initial "bite" itself can barely be felt. How is this possible?

A mosquito's proboscis includes an internal tubular labrum (that does the bloodsucking), which is sheathed between two serrated maxillae – one on either side. The maxillae are what first penetrate the skin and then sink into it, after which the labrum slides down between them. Because the maxillae have a jagged outer surface, they present a minimum amount of surface area to nerves in the skin. A smooth steel hypodermic needle, by contrast, makes contact with a maximum number of nerves, and is therefore uncomfortable.

Professor Aoyagi's needle, etched from silicon, mimics the labrum and maxillae. Two harpoon-like jagged-edged outer shanks first penetrate the skin, after which a smooth drug-delivering/blood-taking tube moves down between them, only touching the patient at its sharpened tip. Mosquitos vibrate their proboscis to help the maxillae ease down through the tissue, which Aoyagi has also copied – each of the three parts of his device are vibrated by tiny piezoelectric crystal motors at around 15 hertz.

The needle in its present form is tiny, at just one millimeter in length, 0.1 millimeters in diameter, and with walls a mere 1.6 micrometers thick. It is attached to a five-millimeter-wide tank, designed for storing fluids that the needle collects. To test the needle, Aoyagi's Kansai team used it to puncture silicone rubber with a skin-like resistance, underneath which was a container of red dye. The needle successfully drew the dye into its tank.

When tested on humans, the test subjects stated that it was much less painful than a traditional hypodermic, but that what discomfort there was lasted longer. Aoyagi believes that by copying more of the mosquito's seven mouthparts, including a system to steady the needle as it enters the skin, that discomfort could be further reduced in future versions.

He hopes that the needle could eventually be used to draw samples in labs, or that it could lead to the development of small wireless monitoring devices, which would be permanently attached to the bodies of people such as diabetics.

Source: Gizmag Via New Scientist

'Retina in a Dish' is the Most Complex Tissue Ever Engineered in the Lab

Researchers in Japan have grown a retina from mouse embryonic stem cells in a lab, but this isn’t just another incremental advance in tissue engineering. Scientists claim their “retina in a dish” is by no small degree the most complex biological tissue yet engineered.


If the breakthrough can be adapted to work with human cells, it could provide a retina that is safe for transplantation into human eyes, providing a potential cure for many kinds of blindness. That’s still years away, but in the meantime the lab-grown mouse tissue could provide researchers with a wealth of information on eye diseases and potential treatments for them.

The tissue developed at Kobe’s RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology is more than just a retina--it’s an entire optic cup, the two-layered organ that is composed of both the retina and an outer layer of pigmented cells that provide nutrients and support the retina and the light-sensitive cells that conduct information to the brain.

To create it in the lab, they simply put mouse embryonic stem cells in a cocktail of nutrients and proteins that pushed the cells into developing into retinal cells. But critically they also added a protein gel to support the cells and keep their structure together. At first, the stem cells simply transformed into clusters of early retinal cells, but given time they slowly generated a fully-formed optic cup just as they would in a natural embryo.

What’s unclear is whether or not this lab-grown version would actually transmit the proper impulses to a mouse brain, and naturally that’s what the next phase of research aims to find out. If so, the leap to generating human retinal tissues from human embryonic stem cells is not prohibitively large

In the meantime, a wealth of new retinal tissue in the lab gives researchers an opportunity to identify the molecular defects that cause different eye diseases and to test potential treatments. But further, it could inform the larger pursuit of better engineered tissues. A retina in a dish proves that given the right prodding, embryonic stem cells can spontaneously generate even the body’s most complex tissues.

Source: Popsci via Nature

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While your online presence with Randomtn, the IP address used to access the site will be logged along with the dates and times of access. This information is purely used to track and analyze website statistics, trends, users interests and gather broad demographic information for internal administrative usage. Any recorded IP addresses or information are not linked to personally identifiable information.

Third Party Website Links

On Randomtn, it is unavoidable to included links to other Third Party Website for your use and reference. We are not responsible for the privacy policies on these websites. While leaving Randomtn, to visit those third party links, you should be aware that the privacy policies of these sites may differ from our own.

Privacy Policy Changes

Randomtn reserved the right to improve, amend and alter the contents of this Privacy Policy statement at any time. If you have any queries, questions or concerns regarding our Privacy Policy at Randomtn, you are most welcomed to Contact Us.

Content Policy

Randomtn is about sharing information and ideas about technology. Its articles covers a broad range of technology topics. Each article is written, compiled and formatted specifically and specially for the use of Randomtn visitors only. For this reason, we have created a content policy to cover various aspects of our content.

While Randomtn respect its users ownership of and responsibility for the content they choose to share. It is our belief that censoring this content is contrary to a service that bases itself on freedom of expression.

Therefore, in order to uphold these values, we need to curb abuses that threaten our ability to provide this service and the freedom of expression it encourages. As a result, there are some boundaries on the type of content that are available with Randomtn. The boundaries we have defined are those that both comply with legal requirements and that serve to enhance the service as a whole.

All posts, articles, and other online content featured on Blogrockets.com are not to be copied or published elsewhere. Articles may be paraphrased or used along side an original article for opinion / response pieces. All partial uses of our articles and / or interviews must redirect to the original and full location of the entire article. This helps to ensure that our articles are being read at our site.

Blogger Content Policy

Randomtn is hosted by Blogger, a service for communication, self-expression and freedom of speech. We believe Blogger increases the availability of information, encourages healthy debate, and makes possible new connections between people. Randomtn maintain a strongly compliance with Blogger Content Policy too.

Comments Policy

Randomtn do not pre-moderate any comments and welcome all kinds of thoughts either supportive, dissenting, critical or otherwise, while logged in or anonymously.

Randomtn really value your words and sentiments, therefore we do not delete or censor comments unless they have content that:

•   is abusive

•   is off-topic

•   contains ad-hominem attacks

•   promotes hate of any kind

•   uses excessively foul language

•   is blatantly spam

All comments are filtered through spam filtering technology; the kind we uses varies over time, but currently Randomtn is using a the default spam filtering mechanism proved by Google Blogger. The spam-filtering technology is not perfect and from time to time it flags legitimate emails (false positives).

Although at Randomtn, we take great care to provide human review to every individual comment. If you find that your comments are not immediately showing up, it may have been erroneously flagged as spam. If so, please Contact Us to follow up on the status of your comment if it has not shown up after 24 hours and we will do our best to sort it out.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) Policy

Please note that Randomtn do not host any copyrighted content on its website. The content that we provide do not resize on servers owned by Randomtn.

However, we offer a service to remove content from our website if the copyright holder of the content requests so. These removal requests are only valid if:

•   You are, or your company is, the copyright holder of the content in question.

•   You provide the exact URLs to the downloads, no complete (sub)categories or search queries.

•   You provide the complete name(s) of the content in question.

•   You provide full contact information (including the name and phone number of the contact person), not a general anti-piracy mail address.

If your request complies with all of these rules, include your message below and submit only once. Please keep the correspondence polite as we operate outside of the realm of DMCA and are not obliged to comply legally.

We remove postings as soon as we can, usually within 24 hours. Keep in mind that we can only handle removal requests that comply with the rules mentioned above.