New Robotic Technique Improves Study of Brain and Neurons:
Kodandaramaiah and his colleagues built a robotic arm that lowers a glass pipette into the brain of an anesthetized mouse with micrometer accuracy. As it moves, the pipette monitors a property called electrical impedance —a measure of how difficult it is for electricity to flow out of the pipette. If there are no cells around, electricity flows and impedance is low. When the tip hits a cell, electricity can’t flow as well and impedance goes up.
The pipette takes two-micrometer steps, measuring impedance 10 times per second. Once it detects a cell, it can stop instantly, preventing it from poking through the membrane. “This is something a robot can do that a human can’t,” Boyden says.
Once the pipette finds a cell, it applies suction to form a seal with the cell’s membrane. Then, the electrode can break through the membrane to record the cell’s internal electrical activity. The robotic system can detect cells with 90 percent accuracy, and establish a connection with the detected cells about 40 percent of the time.
The researchers also showed that their method can be used to determine the shape of the cell by injecting a dye; they are now working on extracting a cell’s contents to read its genetic profile.
Karel Svoboda, a group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm campus, says he believes the technology will be widely adopted, as it removes the barriers that have prevented more researchers from using patch-clamp recording. “Humans can do it as well as the machine, but it’s extremely dull for a person. You get tired, you start to make mistakes. The robot just keeps on going,” says Svoboda, who was not part of the research team.
(via Robotic patch-clamping automates study of neurons | KurzweilAI)
![The underground robot Library of the future
Research libraries are facing an unexpected challenge: too many books. Despite digitization, bound collections continue to grow. Some libraries house their stacks offsite, which can create multi-day delays between request and retrieval. Last June, the Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, which accumulates about 150,000 books every year, introduced a system of robotic stacks capable of holding 3.5 million volumes in one seventh the space required by conventional stacks. The trick: Librarians sort books by size and not by Dewey decimal system. Engineers from Dematic, a firm that builds automated parts and storage-retrieval systems for Boeing, Ford and IBM, designed a five-story underground storage area managed by five robotic cranes. Dematic has built 17 automated library systems worldwide, but the University of Chicago’s is the most complex. The company has three more libraries under construction.
[more]
(via futurescope)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m17g5hATn91r08k60o1_500.jpg)
The underground robot Library of the future
Research libraries are facing an unexpected challenge: too many books. Despite digitization, bound collections continue to grow. Some libraries house their stacks offsite, which can create multi-day delays between request and retrieval. Last June, the Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago, which accumulates about 150,000 books every year, introduced a system of robotic stacks capable of holding 3.5 million volumes in one seventh the space required by conventional stacks. The trick: Librarians sort books by size and not by Dewey decimal system. Engineers from Dematic, a firm that builds automated parts and storage-retrieval systems for Boeing, Ford and IBM, designed a five-story underground storage area managed by five robotic cranes. Dematic has built 17 automated library systems worldwide, but the University of Chicago’s is the most complex. The company has three more libraries under construction.
[more]
(via futurescope)
The Miraculous NASA Breakthrough That Could Save Millions of Lives
The NASA Biocapsule—made of carbon nanotubes—will be able to “diagnose” and instantly treat an astronaut without him or her even knowing there’s something amiss. It would be like having your own personal Dr. McCoy—implanted under your skin. It represents one of the most significant breakthroughs in the history of medicine, and yes, it’ll work on Earth, too.
(Source: singularitarian)
Scientists turn skin cells into neural precursors, bypassing stem-cell stage
Mouse skin cells can be converted directly into cells that become the three main parts of the nervous system, according to researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The finding is an extension of a previous study by the same group showing that mouse and human skin cells can be directly converted into functional neurons.
The multiple successes of the direct conversion method could refute the idea that pluripotency (a term that describes the ability of stem cells to become nearly any cell in the body) is necessary for a cell to transform from one cell type to another. Together, the results raise the possibility that embryonic stem cell research and another technique called “induced pluripotency” could be supplanted by a more direct way of generating specific types of cells for therapy or research.
New Imaging Technique Makes 3-D Models of Individual Proteins:
Proteins are like the workhorses of genetic biology, but they can be notoriously difficult to study. Their structure has everything to do with their function—and sometimes dysfunction—which has far-reaching implications in health and medicine. That’s why it’s such a big deal that a couple of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have more or less hacked their cryo-electron microscope to see at far greater resolutions than its manufacturer intended and produced the first 3-D images of an individual protein with enough clarity to determine its structure.
Cataloging the shapes and structures of proteins is fairly routine science at this point. Pharmaceutical companies dealing in biologic drugs do so all the time as they search for protein therapies that might relieve one condition or another. But it’s not easy, and these conventional protein models are averages of the analyses of many thousands of molecules because it’s simply too difficult to get the resolutions necessary to image the features of an individual protein.
Until now. Gang Ren and Lei Zhang are reporting in the journal PLoS One the creation of their own brand of electron microscopy that they are calling “individual-particle electron tomography,” or IPET. Their images are still a bit fuzzy, but they are good enough for researchers to define a protein’s structure. Moreover, by creating a novel method of keeping their samples extremely cold (flash-frozen-in-liquid-nitrogen-to-negative-292-degrees cold) and tilting them up to 140 degrees while under the lens, they can generate more than a hundred images in a matter of a couple of hours.
Once stitched together those images inform each other, creating not only 3-D depth but helping to focus in on the subject protein and remove noise from the imagery. The result is the best structural imagery of an individual protein that we’ve ever heard about, one with the potential to go far in pharmaceutical research and in informing our fundamental understanding of protein dynamics.
Using Peroxide-Fueled “Nanorockets” to Deliver Medications:
Doctors [are] experimenting with a new method of delivering medicine to the bloodstream via tiny nanotubes powered by rocket fuel. By storing healing meds within the platinum-coated metal tubes, doctors have been able to propel the tiny vessels up to 200 times their own length per second — faster than swimming bacteria. It works as such: by introducing a hydrogen peroxide/water solution, the platinum reacts, sending it zipping forward and catalyzing the peroxide into water and oxygen.
(via Researchers say nanorockets could deliver medicine quickly within the blood — Engadget)
How Dolphins Could Help Us Communicate with Aliens
“There are many sentient species on our own planet, and that would probably be a good model to start looking at how we might communicate with extra-terrestrial species,” says Denise Herzing, founder and Director of the Wild Dolphin Project.
Herzing has worked for three decades documenting the daily exchanges of a community of free-ranging Spotted dolphins off the coast of the Bahamas in hopes of finding a dolphin version of the Rosetta Stone.
Herzing and her team spend their days at sea, observing, filming, and occasionally interacting with dolphins. Then, they digitize and index the raw data, searching for patterns that would give insight into the animals’ “complicated and understudied” cognitive processes. (They’ve even created an underwater keyboard to facilitate two-way communication.)
Like humans, dolphins have societal rules, responsibilities, and alliances, says Herzing. They teach their young new skills and forming bonds with parents and siblings. And yet, “there is probably not a more alien social species.”
Deciphering the language of their sounds and behavior could therefore give us insight into the evolution and expressions of a mind that is entirely unlike a human being’s, shedding light on our own cognitive biases as well as, “potentially, how to overcome them.” This, she believes, is the key to building a shared exchange across species.
Progress in Quantum Computing
Computer scientists have built a superconducting number cruncher with a Von Neumann architecture that paves the way for a new era of quantum computation(via First Quantum Computer With Quantum CPU And Separate Quantum RAM - Technology Review)
(via futuramb)
Gumdrop-sized Microscope Lets Scientists Study Animal Brains in Motion
The development of the device was driven by researchers’ desire to study how the brain directs movement, an endeavor that requires a microscope that can study brain cells while animals move and behave naturally.
Schnitzer’s team had previously developed a small, flexible microscope in which light was delivered to the brain via a fiber-optic cable. But this approach limits the animal’s movement and captures activity in only a very small region of the brain. It’s also expensive, with the optical and electronics components costing $25,000 to $50,000.
The new device has a larger field of view, and all the optical components are integrated into the housing that sits on the animal’s head. “The advancement in being able to make a fluorescent scope this compact is really significant,” says Daniel Fletcher, a bioengineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the research. “For the animal to be able to carry the whole microscope along with it opens a lot more possibilities in studying behavior.”
(via Fingertip Microscope Can Peek Inside a Moving Animal - Technology Review)
Computer Chip-Sized Spacecraft Will Explore Space In Swarms
We knew to expect a paradigm shift with the end of the space shuttle program, but this is ridiculous. Mason Peck and his group of forward-thinking engineers are taking NASA’s slogan of Faster, Better, Cheaper to the extreme. Their spacecraft will cut down travel time to Alpha Centauri from thousands of years to just a few hundred, and instead of the $1.7 billion it takes to build a space shuttle, Peck’s ships can be built for an amazing $33.
(via singularitarian)
