Lifeboat Foundation

Research at IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) has led to the revolutionary development of an artificial liquid retinal prosthesis to counteract the effects of diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa and age-related macular degeneration that cause the progressive degeneration of photoreceptors of the retina, resulting in blindness. The study has been published in Nature Nanotechnology.

The study represents the state of the art in retinal prosthetics and is an evolution of the planar artificial retinal model developed by the same team in 2017 and based on organic semiconductor materials (Nature Materials 2017, 16: 681–689).

The ‘second generation’ artificial retina is biomimetic, offers high spatial resolution and consists of an aqueous component in which photoactive polymeric nanoparticles (whose size is 350 nanometres, thus about 1/100 of the diameter of a hair) are suspended, and will replace damaged photoreceptors.

Vikki was born without her right hand and says her “life has changed forever” after receiving a Hero Arm. Vikki’s bionic arm was funded by generous donors, and there’s more funding available now for upper limb amputees from low-income families! Apply here: http://www.openbionics.com/sign-up 😍😍😍.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

The ability to restore sight to the blind is one of the most profound acts of healing medicine can achieve, in terms of the impact on the affected patient’s life — and one of the most difficult for modern medicine to achieve. We can restore vision in a limited number of scenarios and there are some early bionic eyes on the market that can restore limited vision in very specific scenarios. Researchers may have taken a dramatic step towards changing that in the future, with the results of a new experiment to design a bionic retina.

The research team in question has published a paper in Nature detailing the construction of a hemispherical retina built out of high-density nanowires. The spherical shape of the retina has historically been a major challenge for biomimetic devices.

Humans have always looked for ways to work smarter. With a boost from AI, we can achieve more than ever before.

DARPA is developing bioelectronic devices that would dwell in the gut and produce therapeutic drugs on demand.

One of the biggest challenges for renewable energy research is energy storage. The goal is to find a material with high energy storage capacity and energy storage material with high storage capacity that can also quickly and efficiently discharge a large amount of energy. In an attempt to overcome this hurdle, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have proposed a brand-new carbon nanostructure designed to store energy in mechanical form.

Most portable energy storage devices currently rely on storing energy in chemical form such as batteries, however this proposed new structure, made from a bundle of diamond nanothread (DNT) does not suffer from the same limiting properties as batteries, such as temperature sensitivity, or the potential to leak or explode. I have previously written about carbon nanotubes, and their applications in everything from Batman-like artificial muscle, to an analogy of the fictional element Vibranium, but a lot of research around carbon nanotubes is already focused on energy harvesting and energy storage applications.

What makes this energy storage method different is the method by which energy is stored, and also the related increased robustness of the resultant material. Dr Haifei Zhan and his team at the QUT Centre for material science used computer modelling to propose the structure of these ultra-thin one-dimensional carbon threads. The theory is that these threads should be able to store energy when they are twisted or stretched, similar to the way we store energy in wind-up toys. By turning the key, we force the spring inside into a tight coil. Once the key is released, the coil wishes to release the extra tension held within it and begins to unfurl. In doing so it transfers that mechanical energy into the movement of the toy’s wheels.

A superficial treatment of Transhumanism by CNN.

Photographer David Vintiner’s portraits feature subjects identifying as “transhuman,” including a man with bionic ears and a woman who can “feel” earthquakes.

Good news.

In a paper published last week in Nature, though, researchers from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology devised a way to build photosensors directly into a hemispherical artificial retina. This enabled them to create a device that can mimic the wide field of view, responsiveness, and resolution of the human eye.

“The structural mimicry of Gu and colleagues’ artificial eye is certainly impressive, but what makes it truly stand out from previously reported devices is that many of its sensory capabilities compare favorably with those of its natural counterpart,” writes Hongrui Jiang, an engineer at the University of Wisconsin Madison, in a perspective in Nature.

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