Lifeboat Foundation

According to the World Health Organisation, up to a half-million people around the world suffer a spinal cord injury each year. Often caused by road traffic crashes, accidents or violence, the loss of motor control or paralysis significantly impacts quality of life and requires years of treatment and care. Spinal cord injury is also associated with lower rates of school enrollment and economic participation, and carries substantial individual and societal costs.

Current methods for spinal cord injury treatment involve cumbersome brain-machine interfaces, with many cables linking the patient and a computer to restore limited motor functions. Other methods to map brain activity, such as magnetoencephalography, require very large machinery and particularly low-temperature working conditions.

Continue reading “Can nanotechnology rewire an injured spinal cord?” »

Scientists have developed tiny elastic robots that can change shape depending on their surroundings and can swim through fluids, an advance which may help deliver drugs to diseased tissue one day.

The smart, biocompatible microrobots that are highly flexible are made of hydrogel nanocomposites that contain magnetic nanoparticles allowing them to be controlled via an electromagnetic field.

As a result, these devices are able to swim through fluids and modify their shape when needed. They can also pass through narrow blood vessels and intricate systems without compromising on speed or manoeuvrability, said the group of scientists led by Selman Sakar at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Bradley Nelson at ETH Zurich.

Continue reading “These tiny swimming robots may deliver drugs in blood vessels” »

Now researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) in South Korea have made a nanomembrane out of silver nanowires to serve as flexible loudspeakers or microphones. The researchers even went so far as to demonstrate their nanomembrane by making it into a loudspeaker that could be attached to skin and used it to play the final movement of a violin concerto—namely, La Campanella by Niccolo Paganini.

Researchers in South Korea made a tiny loudspeaker, and then used it to play a violin concerto.

Continue reading “Flexible Loudspeaker Made of Nanowires Will Stick to Your Skin and Play Music” »

Researchers have designed a flexible robot designed for drug delivery that’s small enough to flow through the bloodstream.

A recent study, affiliated with South Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) has introduced a novel targeted drug delivery system in the fight against cancer.

The past of our ancestors lives on through us: Groundbreaking research illustrates how parental experience is not only epigenetically imprinted onto offspring, but onto an unprecedented number of future generations. Rather than occurring over the elongated time scale of millions of years, genetic change can transpire in real biological time through nanoparticles known as exosomes…

Until recently, it was believed that our genes dictate our destiny. That we are slated for the diseases that will ultimately beset us based upon the pre-wired indecipherable code written in stone in our genetic material. The burgeoning field of epigenetics, however, is overturning these tenets, and ushering in a school of thought where nurture, not nature, is seen to be the predominant influence when it comes to genetic expression and our freedom from or affliction by chronic disease.

Epigenetics: the demise of biological determinism.

Continue reading “Epigenetic Memories are Passed Down 14 Successive Generations, Game-Changing Research Reveals” »

Ever since he was a young boy growing up in Bengaluru, the city home to India’s space research organisation, he dreamt of going to space one day. Now he wants to be the first human on Mars.

One would expect him to train to be an astronaut or dismiss the idea altogether. But that’s not how he plans to get to the red planet.

Meet Gadhadar Reddy, a nano-technologist from Bengaluru, who might just get to live his dream someday in the near future thanks to a new material his company is manufacturing.

Washington State University researchers have developed a novel way to deliver drugs and therapies into cells at the nanoscale without causing toxic effects that have stymied other such efforts.

University of New South Wales researchers at the Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology (CQC2T) have shown for the first time that they can build atomic precision qubits in a 3D device — another major step towards a universal quantum computer.

The team of researchers, led by 2018 Australian of the Year and Director of CQC2T Professor Michelle Simmons, have demonstrated that they can extend their atomic qubit fabrication technique to multiple layers of a silicon crystal — achieving a critical component of the 3D chip architecture that they introduced to the world in 2015. This new research was published today in Nature Nanotechnology (“Spin read-out in atomic qubits in an all-epitaxial three-dimensional transistor”).