Lifeboat Foundation

Protective coatings are common for many things in daily life that see a lot of use. We coat wood floors with finish; apply Teflon to the paint on cars; even use diamond coatings on medical devices. Protective coatings are also essential in many demanding research and industrial applications.

Now, researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have developed and tested an atomically thin graphene coating for next-generation, electron-beam accelerator equipment—perhaps the most challenging technical application of the technology, the success of which bears out the potential for “Atomic Armor” in a range of applications.

“Accelerators are important tools for addressing some of the grand challenges faced by humanity,” said Hisato Yamaguchi, member of the Sigma-2 group at the Laboratory. “Those challenges include the quest for sustainable energy, continued scaling of computational power, detection and mitigation of pathogens, and study of the structure and dynamics of the building blocks of life. And those challenges all require the ability to access, observe and control matter on the frontier timescale of electronic motion and the spatial scale of atomic bonds.”

Scanning for Memories

At the time there was almost no evidence of this from neuron studies. But in 2006, Ma, Pouget and their colleagues at the University of Rochester presented strong evidence that populations of simulated neurons could perform optimal Bayesian inference calculations. Further work by Ma and other researchers over the past dozen years offered additional confirmations from electrophysiology and neuroimaging that the theory applies to vision by using machine learning programs called Bayesian decoders to analyze actual neural activity.

Neuroscientists have used decoders to predict what people are looking at from fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans of their brains. The programs can be trained to find the links between a presented image and the pattern of blood flow and neural activity in the brain that results when people see it. Instead of making a single guess — that the subject is looking at an 85-degree angle, for instance — Bayesian decoders produce a probability distribution. The mean of the distribution represents the likeliest prediction of what the subject is looking at. The standard deviation, which describes the width of the distribution, is thought to reflect the subject’s uncertainty about the sight (is it 85 degrees or could it be 84 or 86?).

A team of engineers and neurosurgeons developed a state-of-the-art brain sensor that could greatly enhance the treatment of cancer and epilepsy, according to a press statement from the University of California San Diego.

The new apparatus can record electrical signals from the brain’s surface in a never-before-seen resolution for such a device.

Continue reading “Novel Ultra-Thin Sensor Records Brain Activity in Record-Breaking Resolution” »

And it took less than a full workday. Stanford Medicine scientists and their collaborators have engineered a new genome sequencing technique that can diagnose rare genetic diseases in an average of eight hours. This is a record-breaking time frame that is leap and bounds ahead of other current advanced technologies.

Gene sequencing is crucial to advancing science! Check out why cutting time and cost is key.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham and the University of Huddersfield, UK, have developed a new 3D bioprinting technique that can be used to treat chronic wounds.

Named Suspended Layer Additive Manufacturing (SLAM), the approach enables the printing of a novel biomaterial that accurately simulates the structure of mammalian skin.

In fact, according to the researchers, the biomaterial is the first of its kind to simulate all three of the major layers found in skin – the hypodermis, the dermis, and the epidermis – making it a unique tri-layered skin equivalent. Early experiments suggest that the 3D bioprinted skin can be placed at the site of a wound to induce healing, reducing scar tissue in the process.

A new biosensor chip can observe direct electrical measurements of single-molecule interactions. This could enable faster and cheaper DNA sequencing, disease surveillance, and precision medicine on portable devices.

Japan’s government is expanding a quasi-state of emergency aimed at containing the coronavirus. Infections are surging nationwide at an unprecedented pace, largely fueled by the Omicron variant.

Officials confirmed more than 60,000 new cases on Tuesday. The figure is a record high. A total of 444 people are in serious condition, up five from the day before.

More than half of Japan’s 47 prefectures reported record case counts, including Tokyo.

The first molecular electronics chip has been developed, realizing a 50-year-old goal of integrating single molecules into circuits to achieve the ultimate scaling limits of Moore’s Law. Developed by Roswell Biotechnologies and a multi-disciplinary team of leading academic scientists, the chip uses single molecules as universal sensor elements in a circuit to create a programmable biosensor with real-time, single-molecule sensitivity and unlimited scalability in sensor pixel density. This innovation, appearing this week in a peer-reviewed article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), will power advances in diverse fields that are fundamentally based on observing molecular interactions, including drug discovery, diagnostics, DNA sequencing, and proteomics.

“Biology works by single molecules talking to each other, but our existing measurement methods cannot detect this,” said co-author Jim Tour, Ph.D., a Rice University chemistry professor and a pioneer in the field of molecular electronics. “The sensors demonstrated in this paper for the first time let us listen in on these molecular communications, enabling a new and powerful view of biological information.”

The molecular electronics platform consists of a programmable semiconductor chip with a scalable sensor array architecture. Each array element consists of an electrical current meter that monitors the current flowing through a precision-engineered molecular wire, assembled to span nanoelectrodes that couple it directly into the circuit. The sensor is programmed by attaching the desired probe molecule to the molecular wire, via a central, engineered conjugation site. The observed current provides a direct, real-time electronic readout of molecular interactions of the probe. These picoamp-scale current-versus-time measurements are read out from the sensor array in digital form, at a rate of 1,000 frames per second, to capture molecular interactions data with high resolution, precision and throughput.

US medical drone delivery specialist Spright extends partnership with Germany’s Wingcopter to use its eVTOL UAV exclusively in its fleets.

German drone company Wingcopter and US medical UAV services provider Spright have deepened their relationship with a new deal for electric vertical takeoff and (eVTOL) aerial delivery craft valued at $16 million dollars.

Continue reading “Wingcopter, Spright ink $16 million eVTOL drone delivery deal” »