Self-healing 3D-printed gel has a future in robots and medicine

Robots might be a little more appealing -- and more practical -- if they're not made of hard, cold metal or plastic, but of a softer material. Researcher at Brown University believe they've developed a new material that could be ideal for "soft robot...

Morphing Braille tablets offer graphics to the blind

You can use voice dictation and feedback to navigate a phone or tablet if you're blind, but that doesn't really answer all your needs. What if you need to read charts or other graphics? The University of Michigan has an answer. It's developing a B...

UCSB sensor sniffs explosives through microfluidics, might replace Rover at the airport (video)

UCSB sensor sniffs explosives through microfluidics, might replace Rover at the airport video

We're sure that most sniffer dogs would rather be playing fetch than hunting for bombs in luggage. If UC Santa Barbara has its way with a new sensor, those canines will have a lot more free time on their hands. The device manages a snout-like sensitivity by concentrating molecules in microfluidic channels whose nanoparticles boost any spectral signatures when they're hit by a laser spectrometer. Although the main technology fits into a small chip, it can detect vapors from explosives and other materials at a level of one part per billion or better; that's enough to put those pups out of work. To that end, the university is very much bent on commercializing its efforts and has already licensed the method to SpectraFluidics. We may see the technology first on the battlefield when the research involves funding from DARPA and the US Army, but it's no big stretch to imagine the sensor checking for drugs and explosives at the airport -- without ever needing a kibble break.

Continue reading UCSB sensor sniffs explosives through microfluidics, might replace Rover at the airport (video)

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Via: Gizmag

Source: UCSB

Jellyfish-mimicking device could snatch cancer cells right out of the bloodstream

Jellyfishlike microchip scoops cancer cells right out of the blood stream

If you think the picture above looks like droplets of blood being snared in a sticky tentacle, then you have a scarily active -- but in this case accurate -- imagination. It's actually a microfluidic chip that's been coated with long strands of DNA, which dangle down into the bloodstream and bind to any cancerous proteins floating past -- directly imitating the way a jellyfish scoops up grub in the ocean. If required, the chip can release these cells unharmed for later inspection. According to the chip's designers at Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital, the catch-and-release mechanism can be put to both diagnostic and therapeutic use in the fight against Big C, and can also be used to isolate good things, like fetal cells. The next step will be to test the device on humans -- at which point we may owe an even greater debt of gratitude to our gelatinous friends.

[Image credit: Rohit Karnik and Suman Bose]

Continue reading Jellyfish-mimicking device could snatch cancer cells right out of the bloodstream

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Jellyfish-mimicking device could snatch cancer cells right out of the bloodstream originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 14 Nov 2012 07:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink IEEE Spectrum  |  sourceProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Discovery News  | Email this | Comments

Harvard stores 704TB in a gram of DNA, may have us shopping for organically-grown storage (video)

Harvard stores 704TB in a gram of DNA, may have us shopping for organicallygrown storage video

Early research has had DNA making circuits and little factories. We haven't really seen DNA used as a storage medium, however, and it's evident we've been missing out. A Harvard team led by George Church, Sriram Kosuri and Yuan Gao can stuff 96 bits into a DNA strand by treating each base (A, C, G, T) as though it's a binary value. The genetic sequence is then synthesized by a microfluidic chip that matches up that sequence with its position in a relevant data set, even when all the DNA strands are out of order. The technique doesn't sound like much on its own, but the microscopic size amounts to a gigantic amount of information at a scale we can see: about 704TB of data fits into a cubic millimeter, or more than you'd get out of a few hundred hard drives. Caveats? The processing time is currently too slow for time-sensitive content, and cells with living DNA would destroy the strands too quickly to make them viable for anything more than just transfers. All the same, such density and a lifespan of eons could have us turning to DNA storage not just for personal backups, but for backing up humanity's collective knowledge. We're less ambitious -- we'd most like to know if we'll be buying organic hard drives alongside the fair trade coffee and locally-sourced fruit.

Continue reading Harvard stores 704TB in a gram of DNA, may have us shopping for organically-grown storage (video)

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Harvard stores 704TB in a gram of DNA, may have us shopping for organically-grown storage (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Aug 2012 01:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink ExtremeTech  |  sourceHarvard University  | Email this | Comments