NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Tooth Tattoo Diagnoses Oral Health

To put it lightly, I'm not a huge fan of going to the dentist, and I'm willing to bet you aren't either.

Wouldn't it be great if we could tattoo our teeth with sensors that monitor our oral health and maybe keep the dentist away a little bit longer? Plus, we would know exactly what we're getting into when we make that dentist appointment.

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Thankfully, Michael McAlpine and his research team at Princeton University are looking into that very technology. Their research has shown that a graphene sensor "tattooed" onto a tooth can be used to detect bacteria and wirelessly monitor oral hygiene.

The graphene is printed onto water-soluble silk and can be "bio-transferred" onto tooth enamel. (Does that require going to the dentist, too? Hmmmm.) Once the film is applied to the tooth, the silk dissolves in water, leaving only the sensor in place. It uses antimicrobial peptides and a resonant coil, so bacteria cells can be detected without needing an on-board power supply.

On top of that, the sensor is equipped with a radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that can provide additional monitoring.

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As bacteria binds with the peptides, a small electric current occurs in the graphene because of tiny electric charges in bacterial cell membranes. An antenna can be used to receive the sensor's current and the bacterial pathogen can be diagnosed.

With his penchant for tattoos, Grillz and a staggering sweet tooth that's been the root of major dental surgery, Lil' Wayne might be the perfect mouth piece to launch this technology into consumers of pop culture. Who knows, he might even spit forth a mix tape espousing the importance of oral hygiene.

via Gizmag

Credit: Michael McAlpine

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Bar-Coded Condoms Track Where You Have Sex

Who would have thought, in this day and age, that our national conversation on sex -- and for that matter, women's reproductive rights -- could be so stunted that it's enough to make 2012 feel downright feudal? Need proof? How about the recent U.S. congressional hearing on birth control whose panel included absolutely no women.

Call me a feminist -- no really, I prefer you do -- but when the opposition gives a thumbs down to health insurance covering contraceptives for women and a thumbs up to Viagra being covered, forgive me if I say that kind of logic sounds a little...cockeyed.

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So here's a story to remind us all that, yes indeed, it is actually the 21st Century: Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest (PPGNW) recently distributed 55,000 condoms with QR codes that track, through their website, WhereDidYouWearIt.com, when and where people have had sex.

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"Condoms are an essential tool in preventing unintended pregnancy and stopping the spread of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), including HIV,” PPGNW New Media Coordinator, Nathan Engebretson, said in a press release. “We hope the site promotes discussions within relationships about condoms and helps to remove perceived stigmas that some people may have about condom use. "Where Did You Wear It" attempts to create some fun around making responsible decisions."

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Distributed around community colleges and universities, the condom's bar code can be scanned by smart phones that connect users to the website and allows them to upload their location, along with general details and anonymous reviews of their sexual experience. Users can rate their rolls in the hay on a scale from "things can only improve from here" to "ah-maz-ing -- rainbows exploded and mountains trembled."

PPGNW compares the application to Foursquare and Facebook places, saying their site allows people to anonymously "check-in" their safe sexual activity.

"Planned Parenthood wants users to be part of the solution and to be smart, sexy and responsible -- not just during National Condom Week -- but every week," added Engebretson.

(via GizMag)

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Sensor Powered by Rap Music, Yo

Implantable medical devices are usually powered with batteries. But now there’s one powered by rap music.

The device is a small pressure sensor. The power comes from a tiny cantilever, made of a ceramic material that it generates current when it is compressed. The material, known as piezoelectric material, is pretty common. They already exist in push-start gas grills or in some models of electric-acoustic guitars. The sensor is outlined in a paper by doctoral student Albert Kim and two research scientists, Teimour Maleki and Babak Ziaie, at Purdue University.

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When vibrations between 200 and 500 hertz hit the cantilever, it sends current to the sensor. The charge is stored in a tiny capacitor. Once the vibrations fall outside of that range, the capacitor discharges and the sensor sends a radio signal with the pressure data. The frequencies also happen to be in the same range as a lot of rap music -- largely the driving bass rhythm. That bass sound can penetrate human body tissue more easily (think of the thumping feeling in your chest when that guy with the massive sound system drives by).

Ziaie said in a statement that rap seemed to be the best because it uses a lot of bass rhythm, but other genres would do it -- thumping dance club music, for instance. But why design a sensor this way? Ziaie noted that a simple tone would also do the job, but that would be annoying to listen to for more than a minute or so.

The pressure sensor was tested on a water-filled balloon, but it could be used for conditions such as treating incontinence or aneurisms. In the former, one needs to check bladder pressure and then stimulate the nerves that close the sphincter muscles, and this kind of device could do that. In the latter, knowing the pressure on blood vessels is key to making sure further damage doesn’t occur.

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A big advantage to powering any medical device this way is that it can be deeper inside the body. Many medical devices are powered via induction with a battery outside the body. But the device then has to be pretty close to the surface, usually no more than a centimeter or so. That limits the options for placing it. The sound-powered sensor doesn’t have that problem.

The team will be presenting their findings during an IEEE conference this week in Paris.

Image: Terrence Jennings/Retna Ltd./Corbis

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Spray-on Skin Kit Could Heal Wounds Faster

The idea of spray-on skin conjures up memories of Halloween costumes past. But in the case of ReCell, it’s actually a kit that can do a lot of good. The ReCell Kit has been developed by Avita Medical to treat burns, wounds, and hyper or hypo pigmentation caused by disease, and to improve the look of scars. It works by harvesting a patient’s keratinocytes and melanocytes, the building blocks of skin cells, and putting them in a suspension solution that allows them to multiply. Because the cells are from the same patient, there is no risk of rejection or disease.

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An area about 80 times as large as the original sample can be produced in under a half hour. After that, the new cells are sprayed over the burn, where they will multiply even more. The company claims this type of application will result in less scarring (as compared with skin grafts) and make the skin look as if it were never damaged, especially in younger patients. The kit has been approved for use in Europe, Australia and Canada, but is still undergoing clinical trials in the United States.

Via: Gizmodo

Credit: Avita Medical

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Networking Website Matches People by Gut Bacteria

eHarmony says they match you according to your personality and Facebook lets you connect with others according to common interests. MyMicrobes wants to match you according to your gut bacteria.

A non-profit operation, MyMicrobes is asking people to sign up and get their gut bacteria sequenced. Yes, you have to provide a stool sample, but you can also use the site to share your stories of digestive distress.

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This sounds like an opener to comedy skit, but there is a serious purpose. The research team is part of the Metagenomics of the Human Intestinal Tract (MetaHIT) Consortium. They published a paper in Nature that says people seem to fall into three "enterotypes" -- basically three categories of gut bacteria. It's rather like dividing the world into different biomes or habitats.

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What makes this important? Your gut bacteria respond to different drugs or diets. Finding a way to classify the kind of gut bacteria you have -- essentially figuring out what is "normal" for a given type of person -- will go a long way to helping diagnose problems. And those bacteria are important. They perform many functions that people need, extracting useful nutrients such as vitamins.

People certainly do want answers. Peer Bork, a biochemist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory and a co-founder of the site told Nature he got the idea for MyMicrobes after getting nearly 100 emails from people concerned about their digestive problems. Plainly people are seeking answers.

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Hence MyMicrobes. To join up you pay $2,100, which seems steep -- Facebook is free, after all -- but it covers the cost of sequencing the genomes of the critters in your guts. Members get a stool-sample kit. The sample gets sent to a lab in Paris, where the DNA is extracted. The DNA goes to Bork's lab in Germany.

There are about 100 participants so far, and the researchers' estimate is that they need about 5,000 to perform more meaningful studies. It's possible gut bacteria might show responses to non-digestie ailments as well. In the small sample that was cited in the Nature paper there were 12 genes in the gut bacteria that correlated well with age, for instance. 

Via Nature.

Image: Wikimedia Commons via National Institutes of Health

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Top 10 Accidental Inventions

A chest x-ray of a person with a pacemaker. (Source: Don Farrall/Getty Images)

In honor of the show "JUNKies" the Science Channel is celebrating the other side of science –- the, um, not so scientific kind –- the unplanned kind. They've counted down the Top 10 Accidental Inventions of all time. It's a good reminder of the cruel world of scientific invention, but also a good reminder that life-changing science can happen to any of us, anytime, anywhere.

Forget the inventors who spend their entire lives experimenting, tinkering and building contraptions. They methodically pour over data and test hypotheses. They work in goggles and lab coats.  They dedicate their lives to a scientific pursuit. Then there are the other guys…

Isn't it time we celebrated the scientists that won the invention lottery?

While some of us forget to wash our hands before dinner and then get E. coli, these are the inventors who forget to wash their hands at dinner and discover the key to artificial sweeteners.

Not to say that some of these inventors didn't work hard, but for some of them laziness -- or unfortunate accidents -- actually made them a fortune.

And while the Science Channel calls these "accidental inventions," perhaps it's not giving enough credit where credit is due.  Louis Pasteur was certainly not referring to accidental inventions when he said, "Did you ever observe to whom the accidents happen? Chance favors only the prepared mind." But in this context, perhaps the "mind" -- prepared or not -- should still be given credit for making the best of the "accident."

It's just so much more fun, though, to think of it as pure accident, that it could happen to any of us. So the next time you accidentally explode your homework or feel too lazy to clean up your lab, remember it’s not the end of the world. In fact, you may have just cured cancer -- by accident.

See the entire list of Top 10 Accidental Inventions here.

Virtual Lab Rats to Assist in Disease Study

Despite all their rage, lab rats are still just rats in a cage, right? Well, not any more. Thanks to computational biologist, Daniel Beard, the cage door will be somewhat opened, as he and his team has found a new breed to study -- virtual rats.

Beard and his colleagues at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee will be studying integrated data sets of rat physiology to better understand how genes and environmental factors lead to disease.

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“We are working toward the grand challenge of biomedical research: understanding the complex interplay between physiological, genetic and environmental factors,” says Beard in a news release from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

Dubbing his project the "Virtual Physiological Rat," Beard hopes to glean new insight on human diseases like high blood pressure and heart failure. Live lab rats have been extensively used to study cardiovascular disease, but have been unreliable in showing how multiple genes and environmental conditions factor in to the cause of disease, primarily because these diseases can't be attributed to a single gene or lifestyle choice.

Therefore, to better their analysis and sharpen their hypotheses, Beard and his team will develop computer simulations of healthy rats, that is, after closely studying the healthy hearts, kidneys, skeletal muscles and blood vessels of live rats.

Beard ultimately hopes the "Virtual Physiological Rat" will help predict the rat's state of cardiovascular health by providing a more sophisticated database to compare a rat's genes with its molecular functions. 

"The Virtual Physiological Rat is a means to learn as much as we can from experiments,” says Beard. “I hope this will lead to much better, smarter, more efficient animal research.

[Via NewsWise]

Credit: G Robert Bishop/Getty Images

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Artificial Skin Made From Spider Silk

Spider-Man has had a rough summer. Recent news of his impending death and an overwrought, injury-prone musical have left the web-slinging community with a few black eyes. Yet like any great origin story, resurrection often rises out of the ashes. Case in point: recent news of spiders coming to the rescue of burn victims.

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Hanna Wendt, a tissue engineer in the Department of Plastic, Hand and Reconstructive Surgery at Medical School Hannover in Germany, along with her colleagues, recently published a study that suggests spider silk may hold the key to creating artificial skin for burn victims and other patients requiring skin grafts.

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Wendt says previous materials, like collagen, used to create artificial skin did not seem strong enough, so she and her team turned to a material 5 times stronger than Kevlar: spider dragline silk.

"Spider silks display excellent mechanical features that even rival man-made, high-tech fibers," the study explains.

The researchers essentially milked the silk glands of golden orb web spiders, spooling the silk fibers as they came out. Next, the dragline silk was woven onto a rectangular steel frame, 0.7 mm thick, resulting in an easy-to-handle meshwork frame that could be sterilized.

Wendt and her colleagues found that human skins cell types could flourish on these meshwork frames if they were properly nurtured with nutrients, warmth and air.

"After two weeks of cultivating single single fibroblasts, keratinocytes were added to generate a bilayered skin model, consisting of dermis and epidermis equivalents," the study states.

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Depspite being impressed by how human cells responded to spider silk, Wendt thinks the use of synthetic fibers must be considered, especially since harvesting large amounts of spider silk is not practical.

"I think in the long term, for widespread daily clinical use, synthetic silk fibers providing the same mechanical -- and cell culture -- properties will be needed," Wendt told LiveScience.

[Via TechNewsDaily]

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Heart Without Beat or Pulse Could Save Lives

For decades, the quest for the perfect artificial heart has been wrought with many technical challenges that have made it difficult to design a device that mimics the living, pumping organ.

But Drs. Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier of the Texas Heart Institute say that trying to copy the function of the living organ has been part of the problem. They've developed a non-beating, non-pumping machine that delivers blood through the body with the use of simple whirling rotors. Although such a device would leave a person without a pulse, it could work better than pumping devices, thereby prolonging the patient's life while also reducing the chance of infection or other complications.

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Inside the institute's animal research laboratory resides an 8-month-old calf. The team has removed the calf's heart and replaced it with two centrifugal pumps that 'spin' blood throughout the animal's body.

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"If you listened to her chest with a stethoscope, you wouldn't hear a heartbeat," Cohn told NPR station KUHF in Houston. "If you examined her arteries, there's no pulse. If you hooked her up to an EKG, she'd be flat-lined."

After practicing on 38 calves, in March the team tried their device on a human patient, 55-year-old Craig Lewis. Lewis was dying from amyloidosis, a disease that causes buildup of abnormal proteins that clog the organs until they stop functioning. When his heart became damaged, doctors gave Lewis 12 hours to live, so he opted to try the artificial heart.

Cohn and Frazier took two medical implants known as ventricular assist devices and joined them together. A ventricular assist device has a screw-like rotor of blades that propels the blood forward in a continuous flow.

Thousands of people, including former Vice President Dick Cheney, have one of these implanted near their hearts. But by using two, the doctors replaced both the right and left ventricles -- essentially Lewis' entire heart.

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Although Craig Lewis died a month later, due to the underlying disease attacking his kidneys and liver, doctors not only said the pumps performed flawlessly, but that continuous-flow pumps should last longer than other artificial hearts and cause fewer problems because each side has just one moving part: the constantly whirling rotor.

"These pumps don't wear out," Frazier says. "We haven't pumped one to failure to date."

The doctors will have to decide on a final design before they can bring the pulse-less, continuous-flow artificial heart to the market. As well, they will need to find a manufacturer and get approval from the  Food and DrugAdministration. But the promise of a better artificial heart could give the thousands of people on organ donor waiting lists a ray of hope.

[Via NPR]

Credit: Courtesy of the Texas Heart Institute

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Computerized Clothing Could Control Your 'Scent Bubble'

Few things are as stimulating to our memory as our sense of smell. It not only has the power to bring back vivid images and experiences, but can also manipulate our emotions in an uncanny way. And yet in our day-to-day activities, we have very limited control over the smells to which we are subjected.

A British designer, Jenny Tillotson, wants to put an end to this unruly world of haphazard stimulation and give each person a fully controllable ‘scent bubble’ that is activated with high-tech clothing.

It’s called Smart Second Skin and it might redefine how we shop for our clothes. This technology calls for a system of ‘micro pumps’ and ‘micro tubes’ that work together to produce fragrances that are pulsed electronically, giving the wearer a suitable olfactory aura.

The most basic form of this technology would generate simple aromatherapy to enhance mood but Tillotson tells Innovation News Daily that the system can be used in a more sophisticated way as a regulator. If the clothing is combined with biometrics that measure stress indicators, then soothing or calming scents could be released whenever the stress levels exceeded a certain threshold. Similarily, refreshing or alerting scents can be used to fight drowsiness. 

Perhaps more significantly, because of the strong relationship between memory and the sense of smell, the technology may one day be used to stimulate the brains of Alzheimer’s patients in a futuristic version of Reminiscence Therapy.

Credit: Jenny Tillotson

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