Lifeboat Foundation

The human microbiome, the huge collection of microbes that live inside and on our body, profoundly affects human health and disease. The human gut flora in particular, which harbor the densest number of microbes, not only break down nutrients and release molecules important for our survival but are also key players in the development of many diseases including infections, inflammatory bowel diseases, cancer, metabolic diseases, autoimmune diseases, and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Most of what we know about human–microbiome interactions is based on correlational studies between disease state and bacterial DNA contained in stool samples using genomic or metagenomic analysis. This is because studying direct interactions between the microbiome and intestinal tissue outside the human body represents a formidable challenge, in large part because even commensal bacteria tend to overgrow and kill human cells within a day when grown on culture dishes. Many of the commensal microbes in the intestine are also anaerobic, and so they require very low oxygen conditions to grow which can injure human cells.

A research team at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering led by the Institute’s Founding Director Donald Ingber has developed a solution to this problem using ‘organ-on-a-chip’ (Organ Chip) microfluidic culture technology. His team is now able to culture a stable complex human microbiome in direct contact with a vascularized human intestinal epithelium for at least 5 days in a human Intestine Chip in which an oxygen gradient is established that provides high levels to the endothelium and epithelium while maintaining hypoxic conditions in the intestinal lumen inhabited by the commensal bacteria. Their “anaerobic Intestine Chip” stably maintained a microbial diversity similar to that in human feces over days and a protective physiological barrier that was formed by human intestinal tissue. The study is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

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Computer simulations and custom-built quantum analogues are changing what it means to search for the laws of nature.

Approximately every two Earth years, when it is summer on the southern hemisphere of Mars, a window opens: Only in this season can water vapor efficiently rise from the lower into the upper Martian atmosphere. There, winds carry the rare gas to the north pole. While part of the water vapor decays and escapes into space, the rest sinks back down near the poles. Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) in Germany describe this unusual Martian water cycle in a current issue of the Geophysical Research Letters. Their computer simulations show how water vapor overcomes the barrier of cold air in the middle atmosphere of Mars and reaches higher atmospheric layers. This could explain why Mars, unlike Earth, has lost most of its water.

Billions of years ago, Mars was a planet rich in water with rivers, and even an ocean. Since then, our neighboring planet has changed dramatically. Today, only small amounts of frozen water exist in the ground; in the atmosphere, water vapor occurs only in traces. All in all, the planet may have lost at least 80 percent of its original water. In the upper atmosphere of Mars, ultraviolet radiation from the sun split water molecules into hydrogen (H) and hydroxyl radicals (OH). The hydrogen escaped from there irretrievably into space. Measurements by space probes and space telescopes show that even today, water is still lost in this way. But how is this possible? The middle atmosphere layer of Mars, like Earth’s tropopause, should actually stop the rising gas. After all, this region is usually so cold that water vapor would turn to ice. How does the Martian water vapor reach the upper air layers?

In their current simulations, the Russian and German researchers find a previously unknown mechanism reminiscent of a kind of pump. Their model comprehensively describes the flows in the entire gas envelope surrounding Mars from the surface to an altitude of 160 kilometers. The calculations show that the normally ice-cold middle atmosphere becomes permeable to water vapor twice a day—but only at a certain location, and at a certain time of year.

This amazing microchip can heal any part of your body with a single touch.

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A technology behind 3D holograms might encrypt data for quantum computers.

The world’s first virtual reality gym just opened in San Francisco, offering a next-generation workout via a computer games-based distraction technique that aims to put the fun back into exercising.

Black Box VR promises a gym experience like no other by giving users a full-body workout while virtually immersed in another world that requires them to fight battles and beat their opponent.

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Videogames show us how digital media in general lend themselves easily to flow. For flow experiences often depend on repetitive actions, which contribute to the feeling of engagement and absorption that Csikszentmihalyi describes, and videogames—like all interactive computer interfaces, indeed like virtually all computer programs—operate on the principle of repetition. The user becomes part of the event loop that drives the action: her inputs to the controller, mouse, or keyboard are processed each time the computer executes the loop and are displayed as actions on the screen. The user not only experiences flow, she actually becomes part of the program’s flow. This is true, if in different ways, for applications throughout digital culture, such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.

The most prominent and popular social media platforms appeal to their hundreds of millions of users in part through the mechanism of flow. The stereotype, which contains some grain of truth, is that flow culture is youth culture. Young people spend their days immersed in flows of text messages, tweets, Facebook posts, and streaming music, while older adults prefer to experience their media one at a time. For example, a Pew Research survey from 2012 showed that almost half of all adults between ages 18 and 34 use Twitter, whereas only 13 percent of adults over age 55 do. The younger you are, the more likely you are to multitask: those born after 1980 do so more than Generation X, which does so much more than the baby boomers.

Each of the genres of social media provides a different flow experience. YouTube, for example, remediates television and video for the World Wide Web. A typical YouTube session begins with one video, which the user may have found through searching or as a link sent to her. The page that displays that video contains links to others, established through various associations: the same subject, the same contributor, a similar theme, and so on. Channel surfing on traditional television can be addictive, but the content of one channel tends to have little to do with that of the next. YouTube’s lists of links and its invitation to search for new videos give the viewer’s experience more continuity, with the opportunity to watch an endless series of close variants.

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A rise in the number of game developers, adoption of brain computer technology to enhance the complete gaming experience is triggering the growth of BCI market. The BCI application in 2017 has also influenced the smart home control sector and is believed to grow rapidly during the forecast period of 2018 to 2025. The high living standards across U.S and Canada are held responsible for the demand of BCI in smart home control system industry.

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a technology that agree to communicate between a human-brain with an external technology. The term can be referred to an interface that takes signals from the brain to an external piece of hardware that sends signals to the brain. There are different brain-computer interface technologies developed, through different methods and for diversified purposes, including in virtual reality technology.

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Majorana particles are very peculiar members of the family of elementary particles. First predicted in 1937 by the Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, these particles belong to the group of so-called fermions, a group that also includes electrons, neutrons and protons. Majorana fermions are electrically neutral and also their own anti-particles. These exotic particles can, for example, emerge as quasi-particles in topological superconductors and represent ideal building blocks for topological quantum computers.

Going to two dimensions

On the road to such topological quantum computers based on Majorana quasi-particles, physicists from the University of W\xFCrzburg together with colleagues from Harvard University (USA) have made an important step: Whereas previous experiments in this field have mostly focused on one-dimensional systems, the teams from W\xFCrzburg and Harvard have succeeded in going to two-dimensional systems.

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