Eideard

Insects have served as the inspiration for a number of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) that could be deployed to monitor hazardous situations without putting humans in harm’s way. Now researchers at the University of Michigan College of Engineering are proposing using actual live insects enhanced with electronic sensors to achieve the same result. The insect cyborgs would use biological energy harvested from their body heat or movements to potentially power small sensors implanted on their bodies in order to gather vital information from hazardous environments.

To harvest energy from insects, the researchers have designed a spiral piezoelectric generator that converts the kinetic energy from the insect’s wing movements into electricity. This power would be used to prolong the battery life of devices implanted on the insect, such as a small camera, a microphone or a gas sensor. The prototype piezoelectric generator was fabricated from bulk piezoelectric substrates and was designed to maximize the power output in a limited area.

“Through energy scavenging, we could potentially power cameras, microphones and other sensors and communications equipment that an insect could carry aboard a tiny backpack,” said Professor Khalil Najafi, the chair of electrical and computer engineering at the U-M College of Engineering. “We could then send these ‘bugged’ bugs into dangerous or enclosed environments where we would not want humans to go…”

Getting the insects to go where their handlers want them to is another part of the puzzle that needs to be solved before insect cyborgs can be deployed. But DARPA has been working on this, having put out a call some years back for research proposals for Hybrid-Insect-Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) interfaces to control the movement of living insects. Combining the two technologies could be just the thing to take insect cyborgs to the next level and see them used to monitor hazardous situations in the not to distant future.

Two thoughts immediately come to mind:

Can we trust the insect cyborgs to be loyal to their new human masters – or will they become double agents on behalf of the Dark Side.

Cartilage wounds can be very difficult to treat. While they may eventually heal on their own, the resulting tissue often won’t take the same form – or allow for the same function – as the original. Cartilage injuries are often treated with a process known as ACI (autologous chondrocyte implantation), in which a patient’s own cells are injected at the wound site to form new tissue. The procedure doesn’t always work, as the cells are just injected loosely, with no carrier to transport them or help them get established. Now, however, a scientist from the University of Michigan has developed a technique in which cells are delivered to wounds via injectable nanofiber spheres, and the results are said to be very promising.

Professor Peter Ma’s process starts with star-shaped biodegradable polymers that self-assemble into hollow nanofiber microspheres. Cells, which are slightly smaller than the spheres, are then inserted into them.

Because they are very porous, the spheres allow nutrients to reach and nourish the cells, mimicking the cellular matrix in which the cells would normally be located. Once they reach the wound site, the spheres biodegrade, producing little in the way of byproducts that could affect cell development. Because of the protected environment they were in, the cells will have already started to grow by this point, and so are better able to integrate themselves into the wound site.

In small animal tests, wounds treated with the microspheres grew as much as three to four times the amount of tissue as a control group. Ma and his colleagues at U Michigan now plan on moving the tests up to larger animals, with human patients as their ultimate goal.

Bravo! I realize it wil be a spell before results grow to more than promising; but, these especially are the sort of injuries that nag at an athlete or simply anyone who’s happy with a vigorous outdoor life. Nothing but good news, so far.

For decades cranberry juice has enjoyed a reputation as an effective way to prevent bladder infections. Scientists have doggedly tried to confirm this well-known folk truth with dozens of studies, some in test tubes and some in people.

The latest results are now in, and the answer is conclusive: This field is all bogged down. Har!

Some older studies found the juice worked. Some found it didn’t. All were too small to be definitive. In 1998 a substance presumed to be the active component in the cranberry was identified with some fanfare, and two years ago another study suggested that a cranberry extract containing this substance was almost as powerful as an antibiotic.

Now a large, impeccably designed and executed study of cranberry juice has found that the presumed active compound apparently has no effect. And yet the newest study closed no doors. It may simply mean that the juice works, but by an unknown mechanism.

How can one little berry be so difficult to pin down?

For one thing, the cranberry contains more than 200 active substances in addition to vitamin C, citric acid and an array of other acids…Researchers have repeatedly shown that the juice does effectively prevent some species of bacteria from adhering to the cells that line the urinary tract. More to the point, urine from both mice and people who drank modest amounts of cranberry juice also prevented bacterial adherence…

The questions asked – continue. There are so many variables, including the ingredients used in the placebo side of substances devised to imitate cranberry juice that researchers haven’t even decided which class of components may govern the success replicated in some aspects of the studies.

Like, the placebo used to imitate cranberry juice in one portion of the study resulted in diminished recurrence of infection.

Every autumn, as predictably as falling leaves, flu season descends upon us. Every spring, just as predictably, the season comes to a close. This cyclical pattern, common in temperate regions, is well known, but the driving forces behind it have been in question.

Do existing strains die off each spring, only to be replaced each fall by new founding strains from other parts of the world, or does a “hidden chain of sickness” persist over the summer, seeding the next season’s epidemic?

A genetic analysis by University of Michigan postdoctoral fellow Trevor Bedford and colleagues at U-M, Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Florida State University reveals that in the United States, not all strains of influenza die off at the end of winter; some move southward to South America, and some migrate even farther.

“We found that although China and Southeast Asia play the largest role in the influenza A migration network, temperate regions — particularly the USA — also make important contributions,” Bedford said. Rather than dying off at the end of our flu season, many strains simply move on to more favorable environments.

Growing knowledge about patterns of flu migration eventually may make it possible to tailor vaccines to particular locations, Bedford said.

“We found, for instance, that South America gets almost all of its flu from North America. This would suggest that rather than giving South America the same vaccine that the rest of the world gets, you could construct a vaccine preferentially from the strains that were circulating in North America the previous season. As we gather more data from other regions, this could be done for the entire world.”

All the more reason to develop a universal flu vaccine – even if it needs to be tailored geographically.

More than one in four elderly Americans lacked the capacity to make their own medical care decisions at the end of life, according to a study…published April 1 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Those who had advance directives – including living wills or durable powers of attorney for healthcare – received the care they wanted most of the time, says lead author Maria Silveira, M.D…

None of them needed to use Republican Death Panels.

“Prior to our study, no one knew how many elderly adults might need others to make complex medical decisions on their behalf at the end of life,” says Silveira. “Our research shows that a substantial number of older adults need someone else to make decisions about whether aggressive, limited, or comfort care should be provided at the end of life.”

“This study underscores the need to prepare oneself and one’s family for the often emotional and difficult medical decisions that can arise at the end of life. It also suggests that the time spent to craft a living will and appoint a durable power of attorney for health care can be worthwhile.”

“Folks with a living will or durable power of attorney for health care were less likely to die in a hospital or to get aggressive care — but that is what most of them wanted,” she says. (Silveira recommends this site for planning ahead.)…

One interesting finding suggests the importance of having both a living will as well as an appointed surrogate decision-maker. The study showed that among the handful of subjects who indicated a preference for aggressive care, half did not receive it.

“Given this, some might conclude that advance directives are used to deny wanted health care, but our study showed that a preference for aggressive care had a very strong association with receiving such care, when compared to those who did not state a preference for it. It’s just that at the end of life, aggressive treatment is often not an option; limited care and comfort care are always an option, ” Silveira says.

Of course, nutballs on the teabagger right will call this handing your life over to the government. Making important decisions while you’re still capable doesn’t appeal to fools incapable of making a well-informed decision in the first place.

In the ruins of a city that was once Rome’s neighbor, archaeologists last summer found a 1,000-pound lead coffin.

Who or what is inside is still a mystery, said Nicola Terrenato, the University of Michigan professor of classical studies who leads the project—the largest American dig in Italy in the past 50 years.

The sarcophagus will soon be transported to the American Academy in Rome, where engineers will use heating techniques and tiny cameras in an effort to gain insights about the contents without breaking the coffin itself.

“We’re very excited about this find,” Terrenato said. “Romans as a rule were not buried in coffins to begin with and when they did use coffins, they were mostly wooden. There are only a handful of other examples from Italy of lead coffins from this age—the second, third or fourth century A.D. We know of virtually no others in this region…”

“It’s a sheet of lead folded onto itself an inch thick,” he said. “A thousand pounds of metal is an enormous amount of wealth in this era. To waste so much of it in a burial is pretty unusual…”

“It’s hard to predict what’s inside, because it’s the only example of its kind in the area,” Terrenato said. “I’m trying to keep my hopes within reason…”

One of the most rewarding ways a student, a researcher, can spend their vacation time. Volunteering for an archaeological dig is truly an adventure in time.

In findings that took the experimenters three years to believe, University of Michigan engineers and their collaborators have demonstrated that light itself can twist ribbons of nanoparticles.

Matter readily bends and twists light. That’s the mechanism behind optical lenses and polarizing 3-D movie glasses. But the opposite interaction has rarely been observed, said Nicholas Kotov, principal investigator on the project…

While light has been known to affect matter on the molecular scale—bending or twisting molecules a few nanometers in size—it has not been observed causing such drastic mechanical twisting to larger particles. The nanoparticle ribbons in this study were between one and four micrometers long. A micrometer is one-millionth of a meter.

“I didn’t believe it at the beginning,” Kotov said. “To be honest, it took us three and a half years to really figure out how photons of light can lead to such a remarkable change in rigid structures a thousand times bigger than molecules.”

Kotov and his colleagues had set out in this study to create “superchiral” particles—spirals of nano-scale mixed metals that could theoretically focus visible light to specks smaller than its wavelength. Materials with this unique “negative refractive index” could be capable of producing Klingon-like invisibility cloaks, said Sharon Glotzer, a professor…also involved in the experiments. The twisted nanoparticle ribbons are likely to lead to the superchiral materials, the professors say…

The light twists the ribbons by causing a stronger repulsion between nanoparticles in them.

The twisted ribbon is a new shape in nanotechnology, Kotov said. Besides superchiral materials, he envisions clever applications for the shape and the technique used to create it…

This newly-discovered twisting effect could also lead to microelectromechanical systems that are controlled by light. And it could be utilized in lithography, or microchip production.

I’d love to see this in stop-motion. Might also help me to understand. Descriptive geometry is one of my least-favorite subjects.