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There are almost limitless possibilities when it comes to 3D printing. Design your own color-changing jewelry? Fine. Fabricate your own drugs? No problem. Print an entire house in under 24 hours? Sure! Now, researchers have come up with a fast and easy way to print palm-sized models of individual human brains, presumably in a bid to advance scientific endeavours, but also because, well, that’s pretty neat.

In theory, creating a 3D printout of a human brain has been done before, using data from MRI and CT scans. But as MIT graduate Steven Keating found when he wanted to examine his own brain following his surgery to remove a baseball-sized tumour, it’s a slow, cumbersome process that doesn’t reveal any important areas of interest.

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The mind boggling discovery that time crystals were real happened just last year, and already scientists are demonstrating possible uses for them, including their potential to revolutionize quantum computer systems.

Physicists have invented a flux capacitor and, while it might not run a ‘Back to the Future’ inspired time machine, they say it will have important applications in communication technology and quantum computing.

The team from The University of Queensland, RMIT University and ETH Zurich have proposed a device which uses the quantum tunnelling of magnetic flux around a capacitor which they say can break time-reversal symmetry.

UQ Professor Tom Stace said the research proposed a new generation of electronic circulators – devices that control the direction in which microwave signals move.

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Swedes have gone on to be very active in microchipping, with scant debate about issues surrounding its use, in a country keen on new technology and where the sharing of personal information is held up as a sign of a transparent society.

Ms Ulrika Celsing, 28, is one of 3,000 Swedes to have injected a microchip into her hand to try out a new way of life.

To enter her workplace, the media agency Mindshare, she simply waves her hand on a small box and types in a code before the doors open.

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Tesla’s Elon Musk and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg each aim to create the world’s first brain-computer interface, but a start-up called Nuro could beat them to the punch with a simpler piece of software.

Business Insider UPDATED : Friday, 25 May 2018, 3:02PM

Unlike other ingestible chips, this new version by MIT contains millions of genetically engineered living cells to act as sensors, designed to light up when they detect bleeding.

It’s the latest advance in a growing field of sensors that can be swallowed or worn to monitor our health.

Pills equipped with cameras, thermometers and acidity gauges already look for disease and track digestion.

Continue reading “Swallowable ‘bacteria on a chip’ could help diagnose colon cancer, bowel disorders and gut ulcers” »

Based on complex simulations of quantum chromodynamics performed using the K computer, one of the most powerful computers in the world, the HAL QCD Collaboration, made up of scientists from the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science and the RIKEN Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) program, together with colleagues from a number of universities, have predicted a new type of “dibaryon”—a particle that contains six quarks instead of the usual three. Studying how these elements form could help scientists understand the interactions among elementary particles in extreme environments such as the interiors of neutron stars or the early universe moments after the Big Bang.

Particles known as “baryons”—principally protons and neutrons—are composed of three quarks bound tightly together, with their charge depending on the “color” of the quarks that make them up. A dibaryon is essentially a system with two baryons. There is one known dibaryon in nature—deuteron, a deuterium (or heavy-hydrogen) nucleus that contains a proton and a neutron that are very lightly bound. Scientists have long wondered whether there could be other types of dibaryons. Despite searches, no other dibaryon has been found.

The group, in work published in Physical Review Letters, has now used powerful theoretical and computational tools to predict the existence of a “most strange” dibaryon, made up of two “Omega baryons” that contain three strange quarks each. They named it “di-Omega”. The group also suggested a way to look for these strange particles through experiments with heavy ion collisions planned in Europe and Japan.

Imec, the world-leading research and innovation hub in nano-electronics and digital technologies, presents this week at its technology forum ITF 2018 (Antwerp, May 23–24), a novel organ-on-chip platform for pharmacological studies with unprecedented signal quality. It fuses imec’s high-density multi-electrode array (MEA)-chip with a microfluidic well plate, developed in collaboration with Micronit Microtechnologies, in which cells can be cultured, providing an environment that mimics human physiology. Capable of performing multiple tests in parallel, the new device aims to be a game-changer for the pharmaceutical industry, offering high quality data in the drug development process.

Every year a handful of new drugs make it to the market, but in their wake tens of thousands of candidate drugs didn’t make the cut. Nevertheless, this journey will have taken a decade and costs billions. The fact that drug development is so time-consuming and costly, is because of the insufficiency of the existing methodologies for drug screening assays. These current assays are based on poor cell models that limit the quality of the resulting data, and result in inadequate biological relevance. Additionally, there is a lack of spatial resolution of the assays, resulting in the inability to screen single cells in a cell culture. Imec’s novel organ-on-chip platform aims to address these shortcomings and challenges.

Imec’s solution packs 16,384 electrodes, distributed over 16 wells, and offers multiparametric analysis. Each of the 1,024 electrodes in a well can detect intracellular action potentials, aside from the traditional extracellular signals. Further, imec’s chip is patterned with microstructures to allow for a structured cell growth mimicking a specific organ.

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A chance lab discovery is opening up the possibility for wide-scale improvements in drug screening, application of selective painkillers, and selectively nuking cancer cells. The mystery material? Graphene, a semi-metal that’s composed of a single layer of carbon atoms. It’s already being used to make flexible OLED displays and reduce the energy costs of desalination, but its potential benefits for the medical field look promising too.

It began with a theory — scientists at the University of California knew graphene could convert light into electricity, and wondered whether that electricity had the capacity to stimulate human cells. Graphene is extremely sensitive to light (1,000 times more than traditional digital cameras and smartphones) and after experimenting with different light intensities, Alex Savchenko and his team discovered that cells could indeed be stimulated via optical graphene stimulation.

“I was looking at the microscope’s computer screen and I’m turning the knob for light intensity and I see the cells start beating faster,” he said. “I showed that to our grad students and they were yelling and jumping and asking if they could turn the knob. We had never seen this possibility of controlling cell contraction.”

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