DNA Nanobots Could Deliver the Future of Medicine

Built from molecules, this “DNA Nanocage” (sounds cool because it is) was designed by researchers, but self-assembled from the human “body’s own molecules.” The hope, while far off, is that the Nanocages could be ingestible in pill form, containing medicine to effectively trap diseases or cancers at the molecular level.

Mashable spoke to Biomedical Engineering Post Doctoral Associate Sissel Juul, Ph.D., about how the DNA Nanocage works and why it matters. He has been working on this project at Duke University since 2008. Juul told us that DNA structures are not new and are based on the core principles of DNA binding. DNA has four bases: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (g) and thymine (T). Each base naturally pairs with a certain other base (always in pairs; A with T and C with G). “So the sequence of the DNA, which molecule comes after which molecule, will tell us how it will assemble,” said Juul.

As for what’s next, Juul doesn’t think the idea of a pill full of these things to deliver targeted medicine is all that far-fetched. “There are a lot of drug delivery mechanisms, [but] making a pill is most desirable. You don't have to open anything except your mouth."

Near-term, however, they’re working on attaching something else to the DNA cage. “Some cancer cells have specific receptors that recognize a specific molecule. So if you can add that to the cage, only the cancer cell would take it up.”

In essence, it’s the nano-sized version of the Trojan horse. The cancer cell sees an attractive molecule riding on friendly human DNA, having no idea that inside that DNA latticework is a drug that can wipe it out.

Juul believes “we will see commercial targeted non-viral drug delivery soon.” And when is that? “The question is whether a DNA based vehicle will win the ‘race’ over other nanorobots,” wrote Juul in an email. “I can't really give you a specific timeframe —sorry. It is also a matter of clinical trials and FDA approvals, which tend to take a really long time. So even if the technology is there, it might take a while.”

More details on the study can be found here.

Source: http://mashable.com/2013/12/04/researchers-build-dna-nanocage/

Amazon: drones as delivery vehicles

Jeff Bezos: These generations of vehicles, it could be a 10-mile radius from a fulfillment center. So, in urban areas, you could actually cover very significant portions of the population. And so, it won’t work for everything; you know, we’re not gonna deliver kayaks or table saws this way. These are electric motors, so this is all electric; it’s very green, it’s better than driving trucks around. This is…this is all an R&D project.

Amazon's Jeff Bezos looks to the future

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazons-jeff-bezos-looks-to-the-future/

Jeff Bezos: I think, I, I am, I’m an optimist Charlie. I know it can’t be before 2015, because that’s the earliest we could get the rules from the FAA. My guess is that’s, that’s probably a little optimistic. But could it be, you know, four, five years? I think so. It will work, and it will happen, and it’s gonna be a lot of fun.

Source: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazons-jeff-bezos-looks-to-the-future/

In Sweden, 100 driverless cars to take to the streets

In conjunction with Swedish officials, Volvo plans to send 100 autonomous cars out on to the streets of Gothenburg.

The Swedish automaker says that 100 autonomous vehicles will be piloted under the project name "Drive Me -- Self-driving cars for sustainable mobility." In 2017, the cars will drive approximately 30 miles around the streets of Gothenburg in a number of frequent driver conditions, including around residential areas, moving pedestrians, motorways and queues. The vehicles will also be expected to park themselves.

Volvo's pilot is meant to show how autonomous vehicles could improve road safety and transport efficiency, as well as research what changes to city infrastructure would be necessary to accommodate autonomous cars.

Working alongside the Swedish Transport Administration, The Swedish Transport Agency, Lindholmen Science Park and the City of Gothenburg, the now Chinese-owned firm will begin planning next year, starting with customer research and technological development.

Source: http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/in-sweden-100-driverless-cars-to-take-to-the-streets/

Finding blood clots before they wreak havoc - MIT News Office

Finding blood clots before they wreak havoc. Simple urine test developed by MIT engineers uses nanotechnology to detect dangerous blood clotting.

The noninvasive diagnostic, described in a recent issue of the journal ACS Nano, relies on nanoparticles that detect the presence of thrombin, a key blood-clotting factor.

Lead authors of the paper are Kevin Lin, a graduate student in chemical engineering, and Gabriel Kwong, a postdoc in IMES. Other authors are Andrew Warren, a graduate student in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and former HST postdoc David Wood.

Bhatia and her colleagues developed their new test based on a technology they first reported last year for early detection of colorectal cancer. “We realized the same exact technology would work for blood clots,” she says. “So we took the test we had developed before, which is an injectable nanoparticle, and made it a thrombin sensor.”

The system consists of iron oxide nanoparticles, which the Food and Drug Administration has approved for human use, coated with peptides (short proteins) that are specialized to interact with thrombin. After being injected into mice, the nanoparticles travel throughout the body. When the particles encounter thrombin, the thrombin cleaves the peptides at a specific location, releasing fragments that are then excreted in the animals’ urine.

Once the urine is collected, the protein fragments can be identified by treating the sample with antibodies specific to peptide tags included in the fragments. The researchers showed that the amount of these tags found in the urine is directly proportional to the level of blood clotting in the mice’s lungs.

Bhatia says she envisions two possible applications for this kind of test. One is to screen patients who come to the emergency room complaining of symptoms that might indicate a blood clot, allowing doctors to rapidly triage such patients and determine if more tests are needed. 

Another application is monitoring patients who are at high risk for a clot — for example, people who have to spend a lot of time in bed recovering from surgery. Bhatia is working on a urine dipstick test, similar to a pregnancy test, that doctors could give patients when they go home after surgery. 

The technology could also be useful for predicting recurrence of clots, says Henri Spronk, an assistant professor of biochemistry at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. 

Bhatia plans to launch a company to commercialize the technology, with funding from MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation. Other applications for the nanoparticle system could include monitoring and diagnosing cancer. It could also be adapted to track liver, pulmonary, and kidney fibrosis, Bhatia says.

The research was funded by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Fund, the Kathy and Curt Marble Cancer Research Fund, the Mazumdar-Shaw International Oncology Fellows Program, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, and the Deshpande Center.

Source: Finding blood clots before they wreak havoc - MIT News Office

Qualcomm to Build Neuro-Inspired Chips

World’s largest smartphone chipmaker offers to custom-build very efficient neuro-inspired chips for phones, robots, and vision systems.

Qualcomm CTO Matt Grob said that by next year his company would take on partners to design and manufacture such chips for applications ranging from artificial vision sensors to robot controllers and even brain implants. The technology might also lead to smartphones that can sense and process information far more efficiently.

Qualcomm has already developed new software tools that simulate activity in the brain. These networks, which model the way individual neurons convey information through precisely timed spikes, allow developers to write and compile biologically inspired programs. Qualcomm is using this approach to build a class of processors called neural processing units (NPUs). It envisions NPUs that are massively parallel, reprogrammable, and capable of cognitive tasks like classification and prediction. “What we’re talking about is scale, making it into a platform,” said Grob during his talk. “We want to make it easier for researchers to make a part of the brain.”

For several years Qualcomm and Brain Corp, a separate company it has invested in, have been working on hardware and algorithms that attempt to mimic the processes of the human brain. The company calls the overall program Zeroth, borrowing from the science fiction author Isaac Asimov’s “Zeroth Law of Robotics” (which specifies that robots must not harm humanity).

“This ‘neuromorphic’ hardware is biologically inspired—a completely different architecture—and can solve a very different class of problems that conventional architecture is not good at,” Grob said in an interview after his talk. “It really uses physical structures derived from real neurons—parallel and distributed.”

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520211/qualcomm-to-build-neuro-inspired-chips/

Alzheimer's breakthrough hailed as 'turning point'

The discovery of the first chemical to prevent the death of brain tissue in a neurodegenerative disease has been hailed as the "turning point" in the fight against Alzheimer's disease.

Prof Roger Morris, from King's College London, said: "This finding, I suspect, will be judged by history as a turning point in the search for medicines to control and prevent Alzheimer's disease."

The research team at the Medical Research Council Toxicology Unit, based at the University of Leicester, focused on the natural defence mechanisms built into brain cells.

The study, published in Science Translational Medicine, showed mice with prion disease developed severe memory and movement problems. They died within 12 weeks.

However, those given the compound showed no sign of brain tissue wasting away.

Lead researcher Prof Giovanna Mallucci told the BBC news website: "They were absolutely fine, it was extraordinary.

"What's really exciting is a compound has completely prevented neurodegeneration and that's a first.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-24462699

Sparing the body, breast cancer treatment via nipple injection

Today, JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, published a new technique for breast cancer treatment and prevention—injection of therapeutics via the nipple. The procedure, demonstrated on mice, offers direct access to the most common origin of breast cancer, the milk ducts, and could be used to offer cancer therapy that spares healthy regions of the body.

According to Silva, she and her colleagues have already begun experimentation in applying the method. “The authors have utilized this technique to inject a new nanoparticle-based therapeutic that inhibits a specific gene that drives breast cancer formation,” said Silva, “This targeted treatment was shown to prevent cancer progression in mice that spontaneously develop mammary tumors, [and] is currently in review in Science Translational Medicine.”

About JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments:
JoVE, the Journal of Visualized Experiments, is the first and only PubMed/MEDLINE-indexed, peer-reviewed journal devoted to publishing scientific research in a video format.
URL: www.jove.com

Source: http://www.jove.com/about/press-releases/74/sparing-the-body-breast-cancer-treatment-via-nipple-injection

Mercedes-Benz laat S500 Intelligent Drive 100km autonoom rijden

Mercedes-Benz heeft een nieuwe Mercedes in de S-klasse een autonome rit tussen twee Duitse steden laten maken, een afstand van 100km. De S500 kan al autonoom rijden in files en Mercedes-Benz verwacht dat zijn auto's rond 2020 geheel autonoom kunnen rijden.

 Volgens de autofabrikant is de r&d-afdeling erin geslaagd om de S500 zonder tussenkomst van een chauffeur van Mannheim naar Pforzheim te laten rijden: een afstand van 100km.

Volgens Mercedes-Benz kan de S500 Intelligent Drive autonoom in files rijden en zijn de systemen die nodig zijn om ook op hogere snelheden het voertuig geheel zelfstandig te laten rijden vrijwel klaar voor productie. De autobouwer durft verder de stelling aan rond 2020 geheel autonoom rijdende voertuigen op de markt te kunnen brengen, een schatting die ook door bijvoorbeeld Nissan is uitgesproken. Naast de nodige technische hindernissen moeten ook nog juridische hobbels worden overwonnen.

Source: http://tweakers.net/nieuws/91218/mercedes-benz-laat-s500-intelligent-drive-100km-autonoom-rijden.html

NYC was chosen for the Driverless City group project

Discussion on Reddit on a driverless city.

Background
Idea | Plan/Outline. We have chosen New York City as the target for our project. Our next step is to plan the content that will comprise our final products, which include:
Full written report
Financial analysis
Slideshow
Maps and photos

Parameters
NYC has completely and successfully adopted driverless car technology in the last 10 years. Regular cars have been banned and a consolidated industry of subscription public/private fleets has emerged with no major problems. NYC is the only city in the region that has fully adopted such a system. Cities just outside of NYC use a mix of driverless and normal cars.

Questions
Please post your own thoughts on what we should include in our content!

View on the future from Audi: http://www.big.dk/#projects-audi

Blog on robocars: http://ideas.4brad.com/topic/robocars and http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/

Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Driverless/comments/1lgb0d/nyc_was_chosen_for_the_driverless_city_group/

World’s Smallest Drone Autopilot System Goes Open Source

The Lisa/S chip, perched on the front of an aerial drone. Photo: 1bitsquared

The Lisa/S chip is 4 square-centimeters — about the same size as a Euro coin. But this 1.9-gram sliver of silicon includes everything you need to autopilot an aerial drone.

It’s the world’s smallest drone autopilot system — over 30 grams lighter than its predecessor — according to the chip’s designers at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. And best of all, both the hardware and the software is open source, meaning anyone can copy and use it — for free.

“The main reason we chose open source is that we want to make it available for society,” says the project’s leader, Bart Remes. “My vision is that within a few years, every fireman [will have] a drone in his pocket.”

The Lisa/S is the MAV Laboratory’s latest project. The chip’s software is based on Paparazzi, an open source drone autopilot system.

The chip was designed with the help of a U.S.-based electronics company called 1Bitsquared, which will sell Lisa/S chips starting in January 2014. But since both the hardware and software is open source, Remes says any company will be able to sell chips based on the technology.

Source: http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/drone-autopilot/

Miniature 'human brain' grown in lab

Miniature "human brains" have been grown in a lab in a feat scientists hope will transform the understanding of neurological disorders.

The pea-sized structures reached the same level of development as in a nine-week-old foetus, but are incapable of thought.

The study, published in the journal Nature, has already been used to gain insight into rare diseases.

Scientists at Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences have now reproduced some of the earliest stages of the organ's development in the laboratory.

One of the researchers, Dr Juergen Knoblich, said: "What our organoids are good for is to model development of the brain and to study anything that causes a defect in development.

"Ultimately we would like to move towards more common disorders like schizophrenia or autism. They typically manifest themselves only in adults, but it has been shown that the underlying defects occur during the development of the brain."

Prof Paul Matthews, from Imperial College London, told the BBC: "I think it's just mindboggling. The idea that we can take a cell from a skin and turn it into, even though it's only the size of a pea, is starting to look like a brain and starting to show some of the behaviours of a tiny brain, I think is just extraordinary.

"It's a long way from conscience or awareness or responding to the outside world. There's always the spectre of what the future might hold, but this is primitive territory” according to Dr Zameel Cader.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-23863544

Nissan Promises to Deliver Autonomous Car by 2020

Nissan just got serious about autonomous cars. The automaker is promising to deliver the first “commercially-viable” self-driving system by 2020, and it won’t just be limited to a single model — Nissan says several vehicles will come equipped with its Autonomous Drive technology.

Nissan has begun working with dozens of research and educational institutions to make autonomous vehicles a reality, including MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Virginia Tech, and nearly every major university in Japan.

“In 2007 I pledged that – by 2010 – Nissan would mass market a zero-emission vehicle,” Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn said in the announcement. “Today, the Nissan LEAF is the best-selling electric vehicle in history. Now I am committing to be ready to introduce a new ground-breaking technology, Autonomous Drive, by 2020, and we are on track to realize it.”

“Nissan’s autonomous driving will be achieved at realistic prices for consumers,” the automaker stated in its release. “The goal is availability across the model range within two vehicle generations.” That’s ambitious. But it’s best not to bet against Ghosn and Co.

Source: http://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/08/nissan-autonomous-drive/

3D graphene could replace expensive platinum in solar cells

One of the most promising types of solar cells has a few drawbacks. A scientist at Michigan Technological University may have overcome one of them.

Dye-sensitized solar cells are thin, flexible, easy to make and very good at turning sunshine into electricity. However, a key ingredient is one of the most expensive metals on the planet: platinum. While only small amounts are needed, at $1,500 an ounce, the cost of the silvery metal is still significant.

Yun Hang Hu, the Charles and Carroll McArthur Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, has developed a new, inexpensive material that could replace the platinum in solar cells without degrading their efficiency: 3D graphene.

The researchers determined that the 3D honeycomb graphene had excellent conductivity and high catalytic activity, raising the possibility that it could be used for energy storage and conversion.

The cell with the 3D graphene counter electrode converted 7.8 percent of the sun’s energy into electricity, nearly as much as the conventional solar cell using costly platinum (8 percent).

Source:
http://www.mtu.edu/news/stories/2013/august/story94626.html
http://www.kurzweilai.net/3d-graphene-could-replace-expensive-platinum-in-solar-cells

Nanoparticles reprogram immune cells to fight cancer

Researchers at the University of Georgia are developing a new treatment technique that uses nanoparticles to reprogram immune cells so they are able to recognize and attack cancer.

“What we are working on is specifically geared toward breast cancer,” said Shanta Dhar, the study’s co-author and an assistant professor of chemistry in the UGA Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.

Effective immune stimulation

“Our paper reports for the first time that we can stimulate the immune system against breast cancer cells using mitochondria-targeted nanoparticles and light using a novel pathway.”

A new cancer vaccine

She cautions that the results are preliminary, and the approach works only with certain forms of breast cancer. But if researchers can refine the process, this technology may one day serve as the foundation for a new cancer vaccine used to both prevent and treat disease.

“We particularly hope this technique could help patients with advanced metastatic disease that has spread to other parts of the body,” said Dhar, who also is a member of the UGA Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center, Cancer Center and Center for Drug Discovery.

Source: http://www.kurzweilai.net/nanoparticles-reprogram-immune-cells-to-fight-cancer

New rechargeable flow battery enables cheaper, large-scale energy storage

MIT researchers have engineered a new rechargeable flow battery that doesn’t rely on expensive membranes to generate and store electricity. The device, they say, may one day enable cheaper, large-scale energy storage.

“This technology has as much promise as anything else being explored for storage, if not more,” says Cullen Buie, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Contrary to previous opinions that membraneless systems are purely academic, this system could potentially have a large practical impact.”

Buie, along with Martin Bazant, a professor of chemical engineering, and William Braff, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, have published their results this week in Nature Communications.

“Here, we have a system where performance is just as good as previous systems, and now we don’t have to worry about issues of the membrane,” Bazant says. “This is something that can be a quantum leap in energy-storage technology.”

Possible boost for solar and wind energy 

Low-cost energy storage has the potential to foster widespread use of renewable energy, such as solar and wind power. To date, such energy sources have been unreliable: Winds can be capricious, and cloudless days are never guaranteed. With cheap energy-storage technologies, renewable energy might be stored and then distributed via the electric grid at times of peak power demand.

According to preliminary projections, Braff and his colleagues estimate that the membraneless flow battery may produce energy costing as little as $100 per kilowatt-hour — a goal that the U.S. Department of Energy has estimated would be economically attractive to utility companies.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/rechargeable-flow-battery-enables-cheaper-large-scale-energy-storage-0816.html

Researchers have identified key signaling molecules that are part of the advance teams that tumors form to ready the lung for cancer spread

Cancer metastasis requires tumor cells to acquire properties that allow them to escape from the primary tumor site, travel to a distant place in the body, and form secondary tumors.

Now, researchers in Japan and the United States have discovered that the signaling protein calcineurin upregulates another molecule, Ang-2 that promotes angiogenesis.
In their study, published in Cell Reports, the researchers found that hyperactivation of calcineurin in genetically altered mice led to increased lung metastases. Inhibition of calcineurin or Ang-2, however, blocked metastases in lung cells of the mice.

The researchers will now investigate whether calcineurin is important for metastases in other organs or whether this pathway is specific for lung metastases.

The article can be found at: Minami et al. (2013) The Calcineurin-NFAT-Angiopoietin-2 Signaling Axis In Lung Endothelium Is Critical For The Establishment Of Lung Metastases.

Bron: http://www.asianscientist.com/in-the-lab/tumors-advance-teams-ready-lungs-spread-cancer-2013/

Grow your own meat

Building a $325,000 Burger

MAASTRICHT, the Netherlands — As a gastronomic delicacy, the five-ounce hamburger that Mark Post has painstakingly created here surely will not turn any heads. But Dr. Post is hoping that it
 will change some minds.
The hamburger, assembled from tiny bits of beef muscle tissue grown in a laboratory and to be cooked and eaten at an event in London, perhaps in a few weeks, is meant to show the world — including potential sources of research funds — that so-called in vitro meat, or cultured meat, is a reality.

“Let’s make a proof of concept, and change the discussion from ‘this is never going to work’ to, ‘well, we actually showed that it works, but now we need to get funding and work on it,’ “ Dr. Post said in an interview last fall in his office at Maastricht University.

Given the difficulties, Modern Meadow is first focusing on creating cultured leather. Its process does not use stem cells but rather skin fibroblasts, specialized cells that produce collagen. “There are a lot of parallels to cultured meat, except that it is a lot less controversial because you’re not going to eat it,” Dr. Forgacs said. “But if we can convince the universe that we can build leather, it will be much easier to convince the universe that we can build meat.”

In his work on cultured meat, Dr. Post uses a type of stem cell called a myosatellite cell, which the body itself uses to repair injured muscle tissue. The cells, which are found in a certain part of muscle tissue, are removed from the cow neck and put in containers with the growth medium. Through much trial and error, the researchers have learned how best to get the cells to grow and divide, doubling repeatedly over about three weeks.

“But we need billions,” said Anon van Essen, the technician in Dr. Post’s lab.

Other researchers are studying different kinds of stem cells that, unlike myosatellite cells, can reproduce indefinitely, ensuring a “livestock-autonomous” supply of cells to make cultured meat. Dutch researchers at Utrecht University are trying to isolate embryonic stem cells from pigs and cows. And Nicholas Genovese of the University of Missouri is trying to develop a type of stem cell that is “induced” from a regular adult cell. So a skin cell from a pig, perhaps, could be turned into a stem cell that could reproduce indefinitely and differentiate into muscle tissue to create cultured pork.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/14/science/engineering-the-325000-in-vitro-burger.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&

Datum: 20-Feb-2012

Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger


Lab-grown meat is first step to artificial hamburger

Dutch scientists have used stem cells to create strips of muscle tissue with the aim of producing the first lab-grown hamburger later this year. At a major science meeting in Canada, Prof Mark Post said synthetic meat could reduce the environmental footprint of meat by up to 60%.

"We would gain a tremendous amount in terms of resources," he said.

Professor Post's group at Maastricht University in the Netherlands has grown small pieces of muscle about 2cm long, 1cm wide and about a mm thick.

Lab-grown meat could eventually become more efficient than producing meat the old fashioned way, according to Prof Post. Currently, 100g of vegetable protein has to be fed to pigs or cows to produce 15g of animal protein, an efficiency of 15%. He believes that synthetic meat could be produced with an equivalent energy efficiency of 50%.

Dr Steele, who is also a molecular biologist, said he was also concerned that unhealthily high levels of antibiotics and antifungal chemicals would be needed to stop the synthetic meat from rotting.

Bron: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16972761

Datum: 13-Jan-2012

Grow your own meat

Grow your own meat

Instead of getting meat from animals raised in pastures, he wants to grow steaks in lab conditions, directly from muscle stem cells. If successful, the technology will transform the way we produce food. "We want to turn meat production from a farming process to a factory process," he explained.
Prof Post is not the first to dream this dream. In the mid 20th Century, Dutchman Willem van Eelen - back then a budding medical student - dreamt of creating meat without killing animals, by using stem cells.

Bron BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15402552

Proton Therapy radiation treatment for cancerous tumors

The National Association for Proton Therapy (NAPT) is a non-profit organization supported by proton center members and is the Voice of the Proton Community. The NAPT promotes education and public awareness for the clinical benefits of proton beam radiation therapy. Founded in 1990, NAPT is an advocate for the advancement of proton therapy. It serves as a resource center for patients, physicians and health care providers, universities, academic medical centers, hospitals, cancer centers, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and other health care agencies, the U.S. Congress and staff, and the news media.

We are strong advocates for patient access to proton therapy as a superior form of radiation treatment for cancerous tumors that can result in less morbidity and minimum to no side effects.

Sources:
http://www.proton-therapy.org/
http://www.nu.nl/binnenland/3539951/vier-umcs-mogen-protonentherapie-aanbieden.html

The teenage scientist revolutionising cancer detection

Pancreatic cancer 's high death rate is partly blamed on the difficulty of early detection. Teenage scientist Jack Andraka has come up with a cheap and simple way to test for it.

Pancreatic cancer is a killer – and one that is very hard to detect. One of the reasons its survival rate is so poor that it has few symptoms in the early stages.

Partly spurred by the death of his uncle, 16-year-old scientist and researcher Jack Andraka vowed to find a quick and cheap way to test for signs of the disease.

Andraka's research – incuding writing to 200 science professors – led to him developing  a dipstick diagnostic test which searches for a biomarker for pancreatic cancer. It can also be used to test for lung and ovarian cancer.

He tells BBC Future about his quest.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130701-perfecting-early-cancer-detection

William Li: Can we eat to starve cancer

http://www.ted.com/talks/william_li.html?utm_source=twitter&source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=ios-share

Better diagnosis and treatment of cancer

Novel quantum dot-based technique sees 100 different molecules in a single cell.

Better diagnosis and treatment of cancer could hinge on the ability to rapidly map out networks of dozens of molecules in individual tumor cells.

New research from the University of Washington offers a more comprehensive way of analyzing a single cell’s unique behavior and could reveal patterns that indicate why a cell will or will not become malignant.

Xiaohu Gua and graduate student Pavel Zrazhevskiy have used an array of distinctly colored quantum dots to illuminate 100 biomarkers, a ten-fold increase from the current research standard, to help analyze individual cells from cultures or tissue biopsies.

Other approaches have measured multiple biomarkers in a single cell, but what makes this technique promising is that it reuses the same precious tissue sample in a cyclical process to measure 100 biomolecules in groups of ten.

The investigators then inject a solution of ten of these antibody-quantum dot pairs onto a tissue sample and use a fluorescence microscope to quantify which of the constructs bind at the single cell level.

Once the measurement is complete, they then wash the tissue sample with a fluid of detergents at low pH to get rid of the antibodies and quantum dots without degrading the tissue sample, and repeat the staining step for different target molecules
The two investigators have shown that they can repeat this process at least ten times without producing any signs of tissue damage.

The researchers note that because this methodology uses commercially available enzymes and standard fluorescence microscopes, it is relatively low cost. They also plan to automate the procedure using microfluidics and automated image processing technologies.

This work, which was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute, is detailed in an open access paper in Nature Communications.

Pavel Zrazhevskiy, Xiaohu Gao, Quantum dot imaging platform for single-cell molecular profiling, Nature Communications, 2013, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms2635 (open access)

Source: http://www.kurzweilai.net/novel-quantum-dot-based-technique-sees-100-different-molecules-in-a-single-cell

New theory uncovers cancer’s deep evolutionary roots

Authors predict that if cancer cells are saturated with oxygen but deprived of sugar, it will slow them down or even even kill them.

A new way to look at cancer — by tracing its deep evolutionary roots to the dawn of multicellularity more than a billion years ago — has been proposed by Paul Davies of Arizona State University’s Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science in collaboration with Charles Lineweaver of the Australian National University.

Their view of cancer is outlined in the article “Exposing cancer’s deep evolutionary roots,” written by Davies (available free with registration). It appears in a special July issue of Physics World devoted to the physics of cancer.

The new theory predicts that as cancer progresses through more and more malignant stages, it will express genes that are more deeply conserved among multicellular organisms, and so are in some sense more ancient. Davies and Lineweaver are currently testing this prediction by comparing gene expression data from cancer biopsies with phylogenetic trees going back 1.6 billion years, with the help of Luis Cisneros, a postdoctoral researcher with ASU’s Beyond Center.

“It is clear that some radically new thinking is needed,” Davies states. “Like aging, cancer seems to be a deeply embedded part of the life process. Also like aging, cancer generally cannot be cured but its effects can certainly be mitigated, for example, by delaying onset and extending periods of dormancy. But we will learn to do this effectively only when we better understand cancer, including its place in the great sweep of evolutionary history.”

Paul Davies, Exposing cancer's deep evolutionary roots, Physics World, 2013 (requires free registration)

Source: http://www.kurzweilai.net/new-theory-uncovers-cancers-deep-evolutionary-roots

Scientists Tailor Make Anti-Cancer Agent

Scientists at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Australia and their collaborators have tailor-made a new chemical compound that blocks a key cancer protein. The development of the compound, called WEHI-539, is an important step towards the design of a potential new anti-cancer agent.

The researchers designed the compound WEHI-539 to bind and block the function of a protein called BCL-XL that normally prevents cells from dying. BCL-XL has been linked to poor responses to treatment in cancer patients.

The death and elimination of abnormal cells in the body is an important safeguard against cancer development. But cancer cells often acquire genetic changes that allow them to escape cell death, which also reduces the effectiveness of anti-cancer treatments such as chemotherapy.

Cancer cells can become long-lived by producing high levels of BCL-XL protein, and high levels of BCL-XL are also associated with poorer outcomes for patients with lung, stomach, colon and pancreatic cancer.

Dr. Guillaume Lessene, who led the research team in collaboration with Genentech, said the development of WEHI-539 was an important milestone on the way to creating potential anti-cancer agents that act to restore cell death by inhibiting BCL-XL.

Publishing in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, Dr. Lessene said WEHI-539 was the product of a sustained research program. Article link: Lessene et al. (2013) Structure-guided design of a selective BCL-XL inhibitor

Source: http://www.asianscientist.com/health-medicine/scientists-tailor-anti-cancer-agent-2013/

High-molecular-mass hyaluronan mediates the cancer resistance of thenaked mole rat

Xiao Tian Jorge Azpurua Christopher HineAmita Vaidya Max Myakishev-Rempel Julia Ablaeva Zhiyong Mao Eviatar Nevo Vera Gorbunova Andrei Seluanov

The naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) displays exceptional longevity, with a maximum lifespan exceeding 30 years^1, 2, 3. This is the longest reported lifespan for a rodent species and is especially striking considering the small body mass of the naked mole rat. In comparison, a similarly sized house mouse has a maximum lifespan of 4 years^4, 5. In addition to their longevity, naked mole rats show an unusual resistance to cancer.

We speculate that naked mole rats have evolved a higher concentration of HA in the skin to provide skin elasticity needed for life in underground tunnels. This trait may have then been co-opted to provide cancer resistance and longevity to this species.

Source: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12234.html#auth-1

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system

Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) describes a system in which plug-in electric vehicles, such as electric cars (BEVs) and plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), communicate with the power grid to sell demand response services by either delivering electricity into the grid or by throttling their charging rate.[1][2]

Vehicle-to-grid can be used with such gridable vehicles, that is, plug-in electric vehicles (BEVs and PHEVs), with grid capacity. Since most vehicles are parked an average of 95 percent of the time, their batteries could be used to let electricity flow from the car to the power lines and back, with a value to the utilities of up to $4,000 per year per car.
BMW, Continental, Daimler, Fraunhofer, RWE, Siemens, TU Dortmund and VW – the partners in the new research project “eNterop” belong to the German industrial and research scene’s elite. They are now working with domestic proponents of international standardization of “vehicle-to-grid communication” (V2G) for electric vehicle networks on the next stage: an open test platform for the interface between electric vehicles and charging infrastructures. Their goal is the rapid establishment of standards for supply and communications systems between vehicles and electric power grids.

Electric vehicles will have to be able to communicate with grids reliably and charge or supply electricity at charging stations regardless of their make.

Sources:
http://www.iff.fraunhofer.de/en/press/press-releases/2013/electric-vehicles-network-standard.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-grid

Can we detect cancer earlier?

Silicon Valley research lab found a way to identify cancer cells in a drop of blood.

Source: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/05/19/what-the-future-looks-like-inside-the-lab-that-brought-us-siri-the-mouse-and-the-internet-itself/

Related links: http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-detect-microvesicles-in-the-bloodstream-to-diagnose-and-monitor-brain-cancer

Cancer cell enzymes shown to act as 'good cops'

Enzymes released by cancerous cells have a protective function and are not one of the "bad guys", say researchers from the University of East Anglia.

Their study found the MMP-8 enzyme sent a signal to the immune system to attack the tumour.

Scientists from UEA worked with clinicians at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital to look in detail at the patterns of MMPs in breast tumours from patients.

Their study, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, reveals that the matrix metalloproteinase-8 enzyme (MMP-8) could be acting as the 'good guy' by alerting the immune system to the location of the tumour.

"They were once thought to act like 'molecular scissors' to snip away at the scaffolding structures outside cells and clear a path for the cancer cells to invade and spread to other organs.

"However, breast tumour cells that over-produce MMP-8 don't survive long-term - the enzyme stops them growing," he said.

"We now think that in tumours, MMP-8 acts as a sort of 'find me' signal to the immune system, which then becomes activated to attack the tumour, which may help to explain its protective function."

Dr Emma Smith, senior science information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: "This study provides very early clues as to how the MMP-8 protein might actually play the role of a 'good cop' and recruit immune cells to fight breast cancer.

"But these are early findings from cells grown in a lab, and more research is needed to see if the molecules found by the scientists alert immune cells to cancers in women."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22645780#

Quantum-dot solar cells have great potential for solar cells

There has been great interest in recent years in using tiny particles called quantum dots to produce low-cost, easily manufactured, stable photovoltaic cells.

Now, for the most widely used type of quantum dots, made of compounds called metal chalcogenides, researchers from MIT may have found the key: The limiting factor seems to be off-kilter ratios of the two basic components that make up the dots.

The new findings — by Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering, materials science and engineering graduate student Donghun Kim, and two other researchers — were reported this month in the journal Physical Review Letters.

There has been “a lot of excitement” about the potential for quantum dots in applications including electronic devices, lighting and solar cells, Grossman says. Among other potential advantages, quantum-dot solar cells could be made in a low-temperature process, by depositing material from a solution at room temperature, rather than the high-temperature, energy-intensive processes used for conventional photovoltaics. In addition, such devices could be precisely “tuned,” to obtain maximum conversion of specific wavelengths (colors) of light to energy, by adjusting the size and shape of the particles.

To go beyond the efficiencies achieved so far with quantum-dot solar cells, Grossman says, researchers needed to understand why the charges got trapped in the material. “We found something quite different than what people thought was causing the problem,” he says.

Giulia Galli, a professor of physics and chemistry at the University of California at Davis who was not connected with this research, says it is “quite a creative and important piece of work,” and adds that, “I'm pretty sure this will stimulate new experiments” to engineer the stoichiometry of quantum dots in order to control their properties.

In addition to Kim and Grossman, the work was carried out by former MIT postdoc Joo-Hyoung Lee, now at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea, and Dong-Ho Kim of the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) in Cambridge, Mass. The work was supported by SAIT, and is part of a larger quantum-dot solar cell program within the SAIT-MIT alliance that includes professors Vladimir Bulovic and Moungi Bawendi.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/balance-key-to-making-quantum-dot-solar-cells-work-0524.html

Cancer risk gene testing announced

A pioneering programme to test cancer patients for nearly 100 risk genes is to start in London and could represent the future of treatment in the NHS.

It will look for genes such as those which led Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie to have a double mastectomy.

The results will be used to pick targeted drugs or decide how much of the tissue around a tumour to remove.

It will also highlight patients at high risk of additional cancers, who need to be monitored closely.
Some people with BRCA gene mutations have an 80% risk of breast cancer.

The testing will be run by the Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden hospital in London.

Prof Nazneen Rahman, lead investigator of the programme said: "It is very important to know if a mutation in a person's genetic blueprint has caused their cancer.

Prof Martin Gore, the medical director of the Royal Marsden, said this would be "an exciting change of practice", which patients were ready for. "Patient's want to know. I'm asked several times a day, 'Is this hereditary?' There's no point pretending that patients don't want to know."

The test, developed by biotechnology firm Illumina, looks for 97 genes which increase the risk of cancer. More risk genes can be added to the test once they are discovered.

It is available for use in other hospitals, but the researchers say this is the first attempt at introducing mass cancer-risk gene testing as a cornerstone of treatment.

Prof Peter Johnson, Cancer Research UK's chief clinician, said: "Researchers now have a wealth of information about the inherited gene faults that increase a person's cancer risk, and this knowledge can help tailor treatments for patients whose cancers are linked to these mutations.

Dr Caitlin Palframan, from Breakthrough Breast Cancer, said: "This programme has a lot of potential as this type of testing may help lay the ground for more personalised treatment for people with breast cancer.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22599402#

Next generation of military drones

The next generation of military drones are here, and they're controlled by algorithms and designed for sea combat. On May 14, the U.S. Navy successfully launched the experimental X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System from the USS George H.W. Bush and landed the drone at a naval air base in Maryland. When complete, the X-47B will be able to both take off and land on the same aircraft carrier.

But unlike conventional UAVs, there's something different about the X-47B. The X-47B isn't only unmanned... it's autonomous, too. The drone is descended from DARPA's Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) program, which created UAV control systems that depend entirely on algorithms, sensors, and computer code. Although the X-47B still requires occasional human input, it operates mostly autonomously along pre-programmed flight routes. Humans only override the X-47B's programming if anomalies happen.

Source: http://www.fastcompany.com/3009724/inside-the-navys-historic-embrace-of-at-sea-combat-drones

Lithium-air battery four times as much energy per pound as today’s best lithium-ion batteries

Imaging reveals what happens during charging; could lead to improved batteries for electric cars.

One of the most promising new kinds of battery to power electric cars is called a lithium-air battery, which could store up to four times as much energy per pound as today’s best lithium-ion batteries.

Researchers at MIT and Sandia National Laboratories have used transmission electron microscope (TEM) imaging to observe, at a molecular level, what goes on during a reaction called oxygen evolution as lithium-air batteries charge; this reaction is thought to be a bottleneck limiting further improvements to these batteries. The TEM technique could help in finding ways to make such batteries practical in the near future.

The work is described in a Nano Letters paper by Robert Mitchell, who recently received a PhD in materials science and engineering from MIT; mechanical engineering PhD student Betar Gallant; Carl Thompson, the Stavros Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering; Yang Shao-Horn, the Gail E. Kendall Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering; and four other authors.

Faster charging

In fact, the rate of lithium peroxide oxidation in these experiments was approximately 100 times faster than the charging time for laboratory-scale lithium-air batteries, and approaches what is needed for applications. This demonstrates that if these batteries’ electron-transfer characteristics can be improved, it could allow for much faster charging while minimizing energy losses.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/real-time-charging-of-lithium-air-battery-0513.html

Study IDs key protein for cell death

Findings may offer a new way to kill cancer cells by forcing them into an alternative programmed-death pathway.

When cells suffer too much DNA damage, they are usually forced to undergo programmed cell death, or apoptosis. However, cancer cells often ignore these signals, flourishing even after chemotherapy drugs have ravaged their DNA.

A new finding from MIT researchers may offer a way to overcome that resistance: The team has identified a key protein involved in an alternative death pathway known as programmed necrosis. Drugs that mimic the effects of this protein could push cancer cells that are resistant to apoptosis into necrosis instead.

“People really used to think of necrosis as cells just falling apart, that it wasn’t programmed and didn’t require gene products to make it happen,” says Leona Samson, a member of MIT’s Center for Environmental Health Sciences and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “In the last few years it has become more clear that this is an active process that requires proteins to take place.”

In the May 10 online edition of the journal Genes and Development, Samson and colleagues report that a protein known as ALKBH7 plays a key role in controlling the programmed necrosis pathway. Dragony Fu, a former postdoc in Samson’s lab, is the paper’s lead author, and postdoc Jennifer Jordan is also an author.

In the new paper, Samson, a professor of biology and biological engineering, and her colleagues found that ALKBH7 has an unexpected effect. When the researchers lowered ALKBH7 levels in human cells grown in the lab, those cells were much more likely to survive DNA damage than cells with normal ALKBH7 levels. This suggests that ALKBH7 actually promotes cell death.

“That was a surprising finding, because previously all of these ALKBH proteins were shown to be helping the cell survive when exposed to damage,” says Fu, who is now a visiting research fellow at the University of Zurich.

Upon further investigation, the researchers found that when healthy cells suffer massive DNA damage from alkylating agents, they enter the programmed necrosis pathway. Necrosis, which can also be initiated by bacterial or viral infection, is believed to help the body’s immune system detect threats.

“When dying cells release their contents during necrosis, it serves as a warning signal for your body that there is a virus there and recruits macrophages and other immune cells to the area,” Fu says.

“The observations reported in this paper open up the possibility that novel treatments could be developed to treat tumors that are relatively resistant to killing via the apoptotic pathway,” says Ashok Bhagwat, a professor of chemistry at Wayne State University who was not part of the research team.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Cancer Society.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/study-ids-key-protein-for-cell-death-0514.html

Pilotless passenger planes prepare for take-off

“We believe that unmanned aircraft are the next big transformation in the aviation industry,” says Doug Davis, director of the unmanned aircraft programme at New Mexico State University.

Of course, the military already know this.  Automatic landing systems have been used for years to help pilots drop F-18 aircraft on to the narrow landing strips on top of aircraft carriers. Then there is the rise of drone warfare.  These planes are still flown remotely by pilots on the ground, but most have the capability to follow a predefined flight path and even land themselves if they get into serious trouble or the link between the ground is broken.

In some modern aircraft the pilot is only needed to taxi the aircraft to the runway. Everything else from take-off to landing can be automated. “The technology is here,” says Missy Cummings, an ex military pilot who is now associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

She points to the rise of so-called fly-by-wire technology, which has replaced the mechanical link between the pilot and the plane’s engines and control surfaces. “Any fly-by-wire plane can be an [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle],” she explains. “The controls are digital, not analogue, everything is done electronically so you don’t need a person in there to push a hydraulic actuator.”

To prove the point, technology company BAE Systems recently flew a converted Jetstream aircraft – known as “The Flying Test Bed” – with no pilot in UK air space.

A plane will need to be aware of its surroundings and be able to plot a new path that is not disruptive to other users of the skies - intelligence known as “sense and avoid”. Look at the rise of the autonomous car to see that computers are getting better and better at viewing an interpreting their surroundings.

Dr John Tracey, chief technology officer at Boeing, agrees. He sees no need for decisions to always be made on the ground by Air traffic Control. He believes the current system based on ground based radar, and a controller who uses voice commands to “say to the pilot ‘turn left, turn right, go up, go down,’” is very inefficient. “The new planes that we deliver already have the capabilities built into them to use GPS satellites, to allow them to fly on the most optimum flight path,” Dr Tracy says. The next step would be to allow aircraft to make more decisions for themselves and respond to other planes and weather patterns by themselves.

Professor Cummings says the data is increasingly in favour of unmanned systems. “About three years ago UAVs became safer than general aviation, meaning that more general aviation planes are crashing than UAVs, per 100,000 flight hours,” she says.  “So UAVs are actually safer than a weekend pilot, flying a small plane.”

Update from article newscientist:

Jim Scanlan, one of the designers of the world's first 3D-printed unmanned aerial vehicle is impressed. "I think it's great. It's good to see such progress in the UK – especially with the US hoping to open up its airspace to UAVs in 2015."

The main thing ASTRAEA needs to get right is that sensing and avoiding capability, says Scanlan. "That's the showstopper at the moment. Without a pilot they need a sensing system to replace the Mark 1 eyeball – one that can tell a hot-air balloon from a cloud."

Source:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130502-pilotless-planes-plan-to-take-off/1
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23521-passenger-jet-flies-800-kilometres-without-a-pilot.html

Unleashing oxygen

‘Superlattice’ structure could give a huge boost to oxygen reaction in fuel cells, increasing their power potential.

New research at MIT could dramatically improve the efficiency of fuel cells, which are considered a promising alternative to batteries for powering everything from electronic devices to cars and homes.

Now that the MIT team has analysed LSC113/214, it may be possible to discover even better materials by conducting systematic searches, Yildiz says; the team is now working on that. “If we can crack this problem, then we can make great strides in improving the performance,” adds Tuller, a professor of ceramics and electronic materials in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/superlattice-could-boost-fuel-cell-performance-0430.html#.UYEEy6aZqe4.blogger

A different view of cancer cells

New study measures physical changes in tumor cells as they become metastatic.

Most cancer deaths are caused by metastatic tumors, which break free from the original cancer site and spread throughout the body. For that to happen, cancer cells must undergo many genetic and physical changes. Now, MIT researchers have developed a way to study three key physical properties of cancer cells — their mass, stiffness and friction — on a large scale. 

Using this system, the researchers have analyzed how changes in those traits may allow cancer cells to migrate to new sites: Scientists have previously observed that cell lines with higher metastatic potential are generally more deformable, but the MIT team found that decreased friction also appears to help cancer cells traverse narrow channels, suggesting that friction may play a role in the ability of cancer cells to travel in blood vessels and reach new tumor sites. 

“Our measurements provide an additional perspective on cell properties that may complement genomic and proteomic approaches,” says Sangwon Byun, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper describing the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 22.

The system that Byun and colleagues used to study the cancer cells is based on a device previously developed by Scott Manalis, a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and an MIT professor of biological engineering. Manalis, the senior author of the PNAS paper, has previously demonstrated that this system, known as a suspended microchannel resonator (SMR), can very accurately measure the mass and density of individual cells. 

The new MIT system is “probably the world’s most sensitive instrument for measuring a number of different biophysical properties of individual cells,” says Mehmet Toner, a professor of biomedical engineering at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School who was not part of the research team. “It’s very important to know whether metastatic cells have biophysical properties different than normal or nonmetastatic cancer cells, allowing them to go through narrow spaces.”

“When you use a specific marker to look for these cells, you find the cells that you’re looking for, but you may be missing a whole population of cells,” says Josephine Shaw, an MIT graduate student and a co-author of the paper. “It’s possible that by using a more holistic and physical approach, we may be able to find certain cells that we wouldn’t be able to find molecularly, because we wouldn’t be able to guess ahead of time what these cells would be expressing.”

Other authors of the paper are MIT postdoc Sungmin Son; Stanford University postdoc Dario Amodei; MIT grad students Nathan Cermak, Joon Ho Kang and Vivian Hecht; former MIT postdoc Monte Winslow; Tyler Jacks, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology at MIT and director of the Koch Institute; and Parag Mallick, an assistant professor of radiology at Stanford.

The research was funded by the National Cancer Institute, through MIT’s Physical Sciences Oncology Center and Stanford’s Center for Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence and Translation, and Stand Up to Cancer.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/a-different-view-of-cancer-cells-0422.html

Major boost in solar-cell efficiency

Throughout decades of research on solar cells, one formula has been considered an absolute limit to the efficiency of such devices in converting sunlight into electricity: Called the Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit, it posits that the ultimate conversion efficiency can never exceed 34 percent for a single optimized semiconductor junction.

Now, researchers at MIT have shown that there is a way to blow past that limit as easily as today’s jet fighters zoom through the sound barrier — which was also once seen as an ultimate limit.

Their work appears this week in a report in the journal Science, co-authored by graduate students including Daniel Congreve, Nicholas Thompson, Eric Hontz and Shane Yost, alumna Jiye Lee ’12, and professors Marc Baldo and Troy Van Voorhis.

Since this was just a first proof of principle, the team has not yet optimized the energy-conversion efficiency of the system, which remains less than 2 percent. But ratcheting up that efficiency through further optimization should be a straightforward process, the researchers say. “There appears to be no fundamental barrier,” Thompson says.

While today’s commercial solar panels typically have an efficiency of at most 25 percent, a silicon solar cell harnessing singlet fission should make it feasible to achieve efficiency of more than 30 percent, Baldo says — a huge leap in a field typically marked by slow, incremental progress. In solar cell research, he notes, people are striving “for an increase of a tenth of a percent.”

Solar panel efficiencies can also be improved by stacking different solar cells together, but combining solar cells is expensive with conventional solar-cell materials. The new technology instead promises to work as an inexpensive coating on solar cells.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/photon-to-electron-conversion-0418.html?utm_source=feedly

Robot truck platoons roll forward

Will this be the first step toward autonomous cars?

Convoys of wireless-linked semi-autonomous vehicles could soon be hitting our roads, giving drivers a chance to put their feet up on the morning commute.

In February this year, a similar line-up of four large trucks circled an oval test track in Tsukuba City, Japan to help get so-called “truck platooning” technology ready for real-world use. This technology aims to create semi-autonomous road trains, where convoys of vehicles enter a snaking train of vehicles under the command of the lead vehicle.

“We think that this new technology can also lead to a reduction in the amount of road space used by vehicles, which would help to reduce traffic congestion,” says Nobuo Iwai, senior researcher on the project. In fact, some estimates suggest it could double the capacity of existing highways.

Platoon prototype

The Japanese demonstration was the latest of a couple of projects set up to trial and develop the technology. A couple of years ago a project at RWTH Aachen University in Germany operated a platoon of four trucks spaced at 10m (33ft) intervals. In the US, research at the University of California, Berkeley put three-truck caravans on the road with spacing from 3 to 6m. And last year, the Scania Transport Laboratory in Swedentested aspects of truck platooning on a 520km (325 miles) shipping route between the cities of Sodertalje and Helsingborg.

In addition, a recently completed European project led by Volvo calledSafe Road Trains for the Environment (Sartre) has explored using cars and lorries simultaneously. Its platoons cruised at 85 km/h (50mph) with a gap between each vehicle of 6m. The study vehicles put in some 10,000 km (6,200 miles) of road, and – like the Japanese study – indicated that platooning could offer substantial benefits.

Engineers and planners working on the technology that road trains could be cruising highways sometime in the next decade. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, you yourself will commute to work on a robotic conga line, along with a line up of other drivers not paying attention to driving.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130409-robot-truck-platoons-roll-forward/2

'Aggressive' prostate cancer gene find

The BRCA2 gene is linked to hereditary breast cancer, as well as prostate and ovarian cancer.

Now scientists say that as well as being more likely to get prostate cancer, men with BRCA2 are also more likely to develop aggressive tumours and have the poorest survival rates.

They say these men should be treated quickly to save lives.

Prof Ros Eeles and colleagues at The Institute of Cancer Research in London and The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust found prostate cancers spread more quickly and were more often fatal in men who had inherited a faulty BRCA2 gene than in men without the faulty gene.

Prof Eeles said: "It is clear from our study that prostate cancers linked to inheritance of the BRCA2 cancer gene are more deadly than other types.

"It must make sense to start offering affected men immediate surgery or radiotherapy, even for early-stage cases that would otherwise be classified as low-risk.

Men with a significant family history of breast and/or ovarian cancer in addition to prostate cancer can be offered BRCA1/2 testing at diagnosis, but it is not routinely offered to all patients diagnosed with prostate cancer in the UK.

Dr Julie Sharp of Cancer Research UK, said: "This study shows that doctors need to consider treating men with prostate cancer and a faulty BRCA2 gene much sooner than they currently do, rather than waiting to see how the disease develops.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22065289

Scientists track leukaemia's origins 'back to the womb'

Scientists say they have traced the root genetic cause of leukaemia back to early life in the womb. "It told us for the first time that this is the key mutation that starts the whole process of leukaemia” said Researcher Prof Mel Greaves.

The Institute of Cancer Research experts analysed the entire three billion letter sequence of DNA-coding in identical twins to reveal what sets off the disease.

They hope the findings, published in PNAS journal, could lead to new drugs to fight the condition at source.

It is already known that multiple faulty genes are linked to the condition and that environmental factors probably act as triggers along the way. But the precise sequence of events leading up to a diagnosis of ALL is unclear.

By comparing blood and bone marrow samples of the twins in later childhood, the researchers found one genetic mutation identical in both twins - a common leukaemia-causing gene called ETV6-RUNX1.

Study co-author Prof Greaves said: "We were able to sequence the entire human genome. It told us for the first time that this is the key mutation that starts the whole process of leukaemia. The other mutations must have happened after birth."

Dr Julie Sharp of Cancer Research UK said: "This interesting research shows how studying the DNA of twins can shed light on the genetic mistakes that first initiate cancer in children and the subsequent faults that occur as the cancer evolves.

"Studies like this could reveal new ways to target the very roots of cancer and help us better understand how the disease develops over time. Survival rates have increased significantly over the past decades thanks to research, but there is still more to do to make treatments better with fewer side-effects."

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22062616

Radical roads drive robot cars

A lot is written about the rise of autonomous cars, such as those developed by Google, but these vehicles will also change our highways forever.

Los Angeles in California has just finished installing $400m of technology to synchronise its traffic lights. The Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control system uses an array of cameras and sensors in the road to measure traffic flow, and a centralised computer system to make constant tweaks and changes to the city’s 4,400 lights to keep traffic running as smoothly as possible. In theory, it is now possible to cross the city without ever stopping.

“By schronising our traffic signals we will spend less time waiting, and less time polluting,” says Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. It is estimated to increase travel speeds by 16% and cutting journey times by 12%.

The figures are impressive, but other congested cities looking on in envy may do well to wait a few more years before rethinking their own traffic systems. While the LA system may seem cutting edge now, it could seem as outdated as a traffic officer guiding traffic with white gloves in a few years time. That is because engineers are planning a radical rethink of our streets that will change just about every aspect of how we drive – including who is in control of the vehicle.

Autonomous cars

In this new world, cars are packed nose to tail travelling at speeds in excess of current limits. They weave their way through unmarked junctions, with no traffic lights. Lane markings are non-existent, and stretches of road switch from being one-way in one direction, to the opposite, with no warning. Perhaps most alarming of all, very few of the “drivers” have even passed a driving test.

It may sound like an impossibly chaotic scene, where accidents are inevitable. But this is one future based on predictions about the uptake of autonomous cars.

In the United States the Instititute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) predicts that driverless cars will account for 75% of all vehicles on the roads by 2040. Vehicles, such as Google’s self driving car,  are already leading the way.  And small-scale trials of linked-up roads are being conducted in some cities.

 “In the future smart intersections may not need lights,” says Azim Eskandarian, director of the IEEE’s Center for Intelligent Systems Research.  “These intersections will very efficiently harmonise and synchronise speeds in one direction, and then the other.” The groundwork for this is already being laid in the US by the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration Consortium, a group of car manufacturers trying to develop specific applications and protocols for a system.

The hub of the future will take this to an extreme - accumulating all the data across a metropolis and plan traffic loads and optimise routes accordingly. It will also send commands back to the vehicles about when to safely enter an intersection, and what speed to hold to minimize stop-start driving.

Meanwhile the cars will also talk to each other, using vehicle-to-vehicle communication, constantly checking their environments and positions relative to other cars around them.

Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is already in development.  In 1999, the United States Congress set aside a region of the 5.9 GHz radio frequency band – already used for wireless – specifically for the purpose. And a host of manufacturers are already developing applications.

Cars that talk to each other can also match their speeds, and drive more closely together without risk of the car in front suddenly braking. As a result, many envisage the idea of “car platooning” that will link together cars on high-speed highways to travel faster, more safely, and using less space. Various trails of this technology are already taking place, with one of the most advanced run by an EU consortium called Satre, which demonstrated trains of vehicles travelling at speeds of up to 90km/h sometimes travelling just 4m apart.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130405-radical-roads-drive-robot-cars

Study reveals how melanoma evades chemotherapy

Nitric oxide (NO), a gas with many biological functions in healthy cells, can also help some cancer cells survive chemotherapy. A new study from MIT reveals one way in which this resistance may arise, and raises the possibility of weakening cancer cells by cutting off their supply of NO.

The findings, presented today at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research, focus on melanoma — a cancer that is difficult to treat, especially in its later stages. The prognosis is generally worse for patients whose tumors have high levels of NO, says Luiz Godoy, an MIT research associate and lead author of the study. Godoy and his colleagues have unraveled the mechanism behind melanoma’s resistance to cisplatin, a commonly used chemotherapy drug, and, in ongoing studies, have found that cisplatin treatment also increases NO levels in breast and colon cancers.

“Now we have a mechanistic link between nitric oxide and the increased aggressiveness of melanoma,” says Douglas Thomas, an assistant professor of medicinal chemistry and pharmacognosy at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who was not part of the research team. “It certainly would be worth exploring whether this mechanism is also present in different tumor types as well.”

The MIT researchers also found in some cancer cells, NO levels were five times higher than normal following cisplatin treatment. Godoy is now investigating how cisplatin stimulates that NO boost, and is also looking for other proteins that NO may be targeting.

Researchers in Wogan’s lab also plan to start testing cisplatin in combination with drugs that block NO production in animals.

The research was funded by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The research team also published its findings in a November 2012 article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Other authors of that paper were graduate student Chase Anderson, postdoc Rajdeep Chowdhury and technical associate Laura Trudel.

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/how-melanoma-evades-chemotherapy-0407.html

How to minimize the side effects of cancer treatment

Measuring enzyme levels in patients may reveal healthy cells’ ability to survive chemotherapy.

New research from MIT may allow scientists to develop a test that can predict the severity of side effects of some common chemotherapy agents in individual patients, allowing doctors to tailor treatments to minimize the damage.

The study focused on powerful cancer drugs known as alkylating agents, which damage DNA by attaching molecules containing carbon atoms to it. Found in tobacco smoke and in byproducts of fuel combustion, these compounds can actually cause cancer. However, because they can kill tumor cells, very reactive alkylating agents are also used to treat cancer. 

The new paper, which appears in the April 4 issue of the journal PLoS Genetics, reveals that the amount of cellular damage that alkylating agents produce in healthy tissues can depend on how much of a certain DNA-repair enzyme is present in those cells. Levels of this enzyme, known as Aag, vary widely among different tissues within an individual, and among different individuals.

Leona Samson, a member of MIT’s Center for Environmental Health Sciences and the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, is the senior author of the paper. She has previously shown that when alkylating agents damage DNA, the Aag enzyme is called into action as part of a DNA-repair process known as base excision repair. Aag cuts out the DNA base that is damaged, and other enzymes cleave the DNA sugar-phosphate backbone, trim the DNA ends and then fill in the empty spot with new DNA. 

Source: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2013/chemotherapy-side-effects-cancer-0404.html