Lifeboat Foundation

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Australian entrepreneur reveals brain-controlled telepresence robot. Teleport utilizes brain controlling interface to follow the focal point of a user’s mind and serve various fields of life.

Australian Developer has released a telepresent robot that will let the users attend school or work distantly. People, with a limited mobility of upper limb, will remotely attend tasks through this off-the-shelf mind controlling interface costing 200 UDDs.

Continue reading “Australian entrepreneur reveals ‘brain-controlled’ telepresence robot” »

Nice.

A suite of flexible and biocompatible threads, embedded with sensors and electronics, can be sutured/woven into tissue for in situ measurements of physical and chemical biomarkers.

Continue reading “Smart threads for in vitro and in vivo diagnostics” »

Another new interface method.

Engineering researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have designed ultra-flexible, nanoelectronic thread (NET) brain probes that can achieve more reliable long-term neural recording than existing probes and don’t elicit scar formation when implanted.

The researchers described their findings in a research article published in Science Advances (“Ultraflexible nanoelectronic probes form reliable, glial scar–free neural integration”).

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[Brain implant experiments] like those that let a paralyzed person swig coffee using a robotic arm, or that let blind people “see” spots of light, have proven the huge potential of computers that interface with the brain. But the implanted electrodes used in such trials eventually become useless, as scar tissue forms that degrades their electrical connection to brain cells.

[However,] tests will begin in monkeys of a new implant for piping data into the brain that is designed to avoid that problem. [Led by Harvard researchers,] the project is intended to lead to devices that can restore vision to blind people long-term…[The device will] go beneath the skull but can rest on the surface of an animal’s brain, instead of penetrating inside the organ.

A neuropeptide called orexin has been shown to prevent mice from dying from septic shock.

When and if that hurdle is overcome, the researchers say that the easily-fabricated stretchy technology could begin to find commercial applications, in devices like rubbery wrist-worn health trackers, deformable tablets and electronic wallpaper that can make huge screens out of entire walls.

“We have created a new technology that is not yet available,” says Wang. “And we have taken it one big step beyond the flexible screens that are about to become commercially available.”

The research was published in the journal ACS Nano.

Continue reading “Inkjet-printable stretchy circuits could lead to huge e-wallpaper screens” »

Real estate is a valuable commodity aboard a CubeSat, a compact satellite about the size of a shoebox, so the smaller each component can be made, the better. To that end, scientists at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and the University of Miami are developing a thin, solid-state battery, which could not only save space for more important instruments aboard satellites, but also provide power on other planets, in cars or within the walls of a home.

At less than 3 mm (0.1 in) thick, the new batteries could be incorporated into the structure of pint-sized satellites, rather than taking up room in the area designated for research instruments. The batteries are made by sandwiching a solid-state battery layer between two layers of compressed carbon fiber.

“Creating a structural battery material could revolutionize the way NASA operates small payloads,” says senior principal investigator, Luke Roberson. “Rather than placing a battery in the experiment taking up 20 to 35 percent of the available volume, the battery now resides in the payload structure, thereby opening up additional free space for researchers to perform more science.”

Continue reading “Thin, built-in batteries to free up valuable space on CubeSats” »

With Elon Musk advocating the need for humans to merge with machines and a transhumanist politician running for Governor in California, an intellectual movement that sat on the fringes throughout the 20th century is poised to hit the mainstream.

Nice.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Determining the exact configuration of proteins and other complex biological molecules is an important step toward understanding their functions, including how they bind with receptors in the body. But such imaging is difficult to do. It usually requires the molecules to be crystallized first so that X-ray diffraction techniques can be applied — and not all such molecules can be crystallized.

Now, a new method developed by researchers at MIT could lead to a way of producing high-resolution images of individual biomolecules without requiring crystallization, and it could even allow zoomed-in imaging of specific sites within the molecules. The technique could also be applied to imaging other kinds of materials, including two-dimensional materials and nanoparticles.

The findings are reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in a paper by Paola Cappellaro, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT, and others at MIT and at the Singapore University of Technology and Design.