Now appearing at China Daily Mail! The world’s largest structure is more like a self-contained world than a mall, complete with its own beach and even and artificial sun!
Cyberwars: America’s Secret Cyber Command
Recent revelations provided by Edward Snowden have set many people’s teeth on edge. After years of controversy surrounding the use of domestic, warrantless surveillance, things have only gotten worse with the revelation of PRISM and the NSA’s collection of metadata. But as with all things relating to espionage and government secrets, plumbing the depths only seems to reveal greater depths and bigger secrets.
Case in point: the life and times of General Keith Alexander, the undisputed master of America’s cyberwars and intelligence gathering operations. A four-star Army general with active units under his command, he is also a member of the National Security Agency, chief of the Central Security Service, and commander of the US Cyber Command.
When discussing his reasons for going public, Snowden indicated that he was appalled by:
[The] hypocrisy of the U.S. government when it claims that it does not target civilian infrastructure, unlike its adversaries.
What he was referring to was ongoing accusations by the US government that sources within China – particularly Unit 61398, a hacking force within the PLA that is located in Shanghai – had been stealing terabytes from data from the US since 2006. As it turns out, the US has its own super-secret cyberwarfare division, one which exists as nominally independent from the NSA.
Located inside Fort Meade, Maryland, this top-secret installation is more of a self-contained city. Tens of thousands of people live here, a city of 50 buildings with its own post office, fire department, and police force and is surrounded by electrified fences and heavily armed guards, protected by antitank barriers, monitored by sensitive motion detectors, and watched by rotating cameras.
To block any telltale electromagnetic signals from escaping, the inner walls of the buildings are wrapped in protective copper shielding and the one-way windows are embedded with a fine copper mesh. Keith Alexander is responsible for building this place up for the past eight years, insisting that the US’s inherent vulnerability to digital attacks required that he and those like him assume more authority over the data zipping around the globe.
To hear him tell it, the threat is so paramount that it only makes sense that all power to control the flow of information should be concentrated in as few hands as possible, namely his. In a recent security conference held in Canada, Alexander expressed the threat in the following, cryptic way:
What we see is an increasing level of activity on the networks. I am concerned that this is going to break a threshold where the private sector can no longer handle it and the government is going to have to step in.
If this alone were not reason enough to put people on edge, there are also voices within the NSA who view Alexander as a quintessential larger-than-life personality. One former senior CIA official who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity, claimed:
We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander—with good cause, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets. We would sit back literally in awe of what he was able to get from Congress, from the White House, and at the expense of everybody else.
In this respect, he is not unlike Herbert Hoover, the overbearing bureaucrat who established the FBI and maintained a stranglehold over the nation’s law enforcement for years, even go so far as to blackmail multiple presidents.
In its tightly-controlled PR, the NSA has focused attention on the threat of cyberattack against the US, particularly against critical infrastructure like power plants and water systems, the susceptibility of the military’s command and control structure, the dependence of the economy on the internet. Defense against these threats is cited as the very reason for the NSA’s ongoing efforts and everything they do towards that end.
But there is a flip side to this equation that is rarely mentioned: which is the offensive capabilities the US military has been developing offensive capabilities. Using so-called cyber-kinetic attacks, Alexander and his forces now have the capability to physically destroy an adversary’s equipment and infrastructure, measures which he claims are crucial to 21st-century warfare as nuclear arms were in the 20th.
Their first attack was launched in the mid-2000s under the name of Stuxnet, a piece of malware that was created by the NSA, CIA and Israeli intelligence. According to Snowden, this virus – the first ever to be designed to destroy physical equipment – was aimed at Iran’s nuclear facility in Natanz. Once unleashed, this worm was able to damage about a thousand centrifuges used to enrich nuclear material.
The success of this sabotage came to light only in June 2010, when the malware spread to outside computers and spotted by independent security researchers. Despite headlines around the globe, officials in Washington have never openly acknowledged that the US was behind the attack. It wasn’t until 2012 that anonymous sources within the Obama administration took credit for it in interviews with The New York Times.
But of course, Stuxnet was only the beginning. Alexander’s agency has recruited thousands of computer experts, hackers, and engineering PhDs to expand US offensive capabilities in the digital realm over the years. And at a time when the CIA and other intelligence agencies are dealing with up to $4.4 billion in budget cuts, the Pentagon has requested $4.7 billion for “cyberspace operations”. In short, more attacks are likely in the works.
As Chris Cooper said in the seminal movie Syriana: “You dig a 6-foot hole, you’ll find three bodies. But you dig 12, and maybe you’ll find 40.” Eventually, you have to wonder if its time to ditch the shovel. The truth is so often an ugly, frightful, shocking and disturbing thing. And personally, I’ve always felt that rather than turn away, we should hold the people who make it so in strong contempt.
Source: wired.com
The Future is Here: The AR Bike Helmet
AR displays are becoming all the rage, thanks in no small part to Google Glass and other display glasses. And given the demand and appeal of the technology, it seemed like only a matter of time before AR displays began providing real-time navigation for vehicles. For decades, visor-mounted heads-up displays have been available, but fully-integrated displays have yet to have been produced.
Live Helmet is one such concept, a helmet that superimposes information and directions into a bike-helmet visor. Based in Moscow, this startup seeks to combine a head-mounted display, built-in navigation, and Siri-like voice recognition. The helmet will have a translucent, color display that’s projected on the visor in the center of the field of vision, and a custom user interface, English language-only at launch, based on Android.
This augmented reality helmet display includes a light sensor for adjusting image brightness according to external light conditions, as well as an accelerometer, gyroscope, and digital compass for tracking head movements. Naturally, the company anticipated that concerns about driver safety would come up, hence numerous safety features which they’ve included.
For one, the digital helmet is cleverly programmed to display maps only when the rider’s speed is close to zero to avoid distracting them at high speeds. And for the sake of hands-free control, it comes equipped with a series of voice commands for navigation and referencing points of interest. No texting and driving with this thing!
So far, the company has so far built some prototype hardware and software for the helmet with the help of grants from the Russian government, and is also seeking venture capital. However, they have found little within their home country, and have been forced to crowdfund via an Indiegogo campaign. As CEO, Andrew Artishchev, wrote on LiveMap’s Indiegogo page:
Russian venture funds are not disposed to invest into hardware startups. They prefer to back up clones of successful services like Groupon, Airnb, Zappos, Yelp, Booking, etc. They are not interested in producing hardware either.
All told, they are seeking to raise $150,000 to make press molds for the helmet capsule. At present, they have raised $5,989 with 31 days remaining. Naturally, prizes have been offered, ranging from thank yous and a poster (for donations of $1 to $25) to a test drive in a major city (Berlin, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Barcelona) for $100, and a grand prize of a helmet itself for a donation of $1500.
And of course, the company has announced that they have some “Stretched Goals”, just in case people want to help them overshoot their mandate of $150,000. For 300 000$, they will include a Bluetooth with a headset profile to their helmet, and for 500 000$, they will merge a built-in high-resolution 13Mpix photo&video camera. Good to have goals.
Personally, I’d help sponsor this, except for the fact that I don’t have motorbike and wouldn’t know how to use it if I did. But a long drive across the autobahn or the Amber Route would be totally boss! Speaking of which, check out the company’s promotional video:
Sources: news.cnet.com, indiegogo.com
Drone Wars: X-47B Makes First Carrier Landing!
In any developmental milestone, the X-47B made its first arrested landing aboard an aircraft carrier yesterday. This latest test, which comes after a successful arrested landing on an airstrip and a successful deployment from an aircraft carrier, may help signal a new era for the use of unmanned aircraft in military operations.
For months now, the US Navy has been testing the Unmanned Aerial Combat Air System – the first drone aircraft that requires only minimal human intervention – pushing the boundaries in the hopes of determining how far the new autonomous air system can go. And with this latest landing, they just proved that the X-47B is capable of being deployed and landing at sea.
Aircraft landings on a carrier are a tricky endeavor even for experienced pilots, as the ship’s flight deck is hardly spacious, and rises, falls, and sways with the ocean waves. To stop their forward momentum in the shortest distance possible, carrier aircraft have a hook on the underside of the fuselage that latches onto cables stretched across the flight deck. This means that pilots need to land precisely to grab the hook and come to a complete stop in time.
The test flight began when the drone took off from the Naval Air Station at Patuxent River, Md. and then flew to meet the USS George H.W. Bush at sea, a flight which took 35 minutes. Upon reaching the carrier, the same which it took off from this past May, it touched down and caught the 3 wire with its tailhook at a speed of 145 knots, coming to a dead stop in less than 350 feet. After the first landing, it was launched from the Bush’s catapult and then made a second arrested landing.
The Navy tweeted about the success shortly after it happened, and Ray Mabus – Secretary of the Navy – followed that up with a press statement:
The operational unmanned aircraft soon to be developed have the opportunity to radically change the way presence and combat power are delivered from our aircraft carriers.
Naturally, there is still plenty of testing likely to be done before such drones can be considered ready to go into combat zones. For example, perhaps, automated drone-to-drone refueling is scheduled for some time in 2014, another aspect of the UCAS the Navy is determined to try before deploying them in actual operations. Still, for fans and critics alike, this was a major step.
Which brings us to the darker side of this latest news. For many, a fleet of semi or fully-automated drones is a specter that induces serious terror. Earlier this year, the Obama administration sought to allay fears about the development of the X-47 and the ongoing use of UAVs in combat operations by claiming that steps would be taken to ensure that when it came to life and death decisions, a human would always be at the helm.
But of course, promises have been broken when it comes to the use of drones, which doesn’t inspire confidence here. Just eight days after the Obama Administration promised to cease clandestine operations where drones were used by the CIA to conduct operations in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, one such drone was used to kill Wali ur-Rehman – the second in command of the Pakistani Taliban. This was a direct violation of Obama’s promise that UAVs would be used solely against Al-Qaeda and other known anti-US terrorist groups outside of Afghanistan.
What’s more, the development of unmanned drones that are able to function with even less in the way of human oversight has only added to many people’s fear about how, where, and against whom these drones will be used. Much has gone on that the public is now aware of thanks to the fact that only a handful of people are needed to control them from remote locations. If human agency is further removed, what will this mean for oversight, transparency, and ensuring they are not turned on their own citizens?
But of course, it is important to point out that the X-47B is but an experimental precursor to actual production models of a design that’s yet to be determined. At this point, it is not farfetched to assume that preventative measures will be taken to ensure that no autonomous drone will ever be capable of firing its weapons without permission from someone in the chain of command, or that human control will still be needed during combat phases of an operation. Considering the potential for harm and the controversy involved, it simply makes sense.
But of course, when it comes to issues like these the words “trust us” and “don’t worry” are too often applied by those spearheading the development. Much like domestic surveillance and national security matters, concerned citizens are simply unwilling to accept the explanation that “this will never be used for evil” anymore. At this juncture, the public must stay involved and apprised, and measures instituted from the very beginning.
And be sure to check out this video of the X-47B making its first arrested landing. Regardless of the implications of this latest flight, you have to admit that it was pretty impressive:
Source: news.cnet.com
The Future is Here: Smart Skin!
When it comes to modern research and development, biomimetics appear to be the order of the day. By imitating the function of biological organisms, researchers seek to improve the function of machinery to the point that it can be integrated into human bodies. Already, researchers have unveiled devices that can do the job of organs, or bionic limbs that use the wearer’s nerve signals or thoughts to initiate motion.
But what of machinery that can actually send signals back to the user, registering pressure and stimulation? That’s what researchers from the University of Georgia have been working on of late, and it has inspired them to create a device that can do the job of the largest human organ of them all – our skin. Back in April, they announced that they had successfully created a brand of “smart skin” that is sensitive enough to rival the real thing.
In essence, the skin is a transparent, flexible arrays that uses 8000 touch-sensitive transistors (aka. taxels) that emit electricity when agitated. Each of these comprises a bundle of some 1,500 zinc oxide nanowires, which connect to electrodes via a thin layer of gold, enabling the arrays to pick up on changes in pressure as low as 10 kilopascals, which is what human skin can detect.
Mimicking the sense of touch electronically has long been the dream researchers, and has been accomplished by measuring changes in resistance. But the team at Georgia Tech experimented with a different approach, measuring tiny polarization changes when piezoelectric materials such as zinc oxide are placed under mechanical stress. In these transistors, then, piezoelectric charges control the flow of current through the nanowires.
In a recent news release, lead author Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering said:
Any mechanical motion, such as the movement of arms or the fingers of a robot, could be translated to control signals. This could make artificial skin smarter and more like the human skin. It would allow the skin to feel activity on the surface.
This, when integrated to prosthetics or even robots, will allow the user to experience the sensation of touch when using their bionic limbs. But the range of possibilities extends beyond that. As Wang explained:
This is a fundamentally new technology that allows us to control electronic devices directly using mechanical agitation. This could be used in a broad range of areas, including robotics, MEMS, human-computer interfaces, and other areas that involve mechanical deformation.
Not the first time that bionic limbs have come equipped with electrodes to enable sensation. In fact, the robotic hand designed by Silvestro Micera of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland seeks to do the same thing. Using electrodes that connect from the fingertips, palm and index finger to the wearer’s arm nerves, the device registers pressure and tension in order to help them better interact with their environment.
Building on these two efforts, it is easy to get a glimpse of what future prosthetic devices will look like. In all likelihood, they will be skin-colored and covered with a soft “dermal” layer that is studded with thousands of sensors. This way, the wearer will be able to register sensations – everything from pressure to changes in temperature and perhaps even injury – from every corner of their hand.
As usual, the technology may have military uses, since the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is involved. For that matter, so is the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Knowledge Innovation Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences are all funding it. So don’t be too surprised if bots wearing a convincing suit of artificial skin start popping up in your neighborhood!
Source: news.cnet.com
The Future is Here: Power Shorts!
Big public events are often used to showcase new technology: the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the Bett Show in London, and now the Glastonbury outdoor festival in England, where early last the mobile phone company Vodafone chose to showcase a new line: the Power Shorts, an item of clothing that turns motion and even body heat into electricity.
The shorts were naturally a big hit, and quite appropriate for the venue since they use motion (like dancing), to boost the battery life of your mobile devices. Created with help from scientists at the University of Southampton, the shorts incorporate a Power Pocket that contains foam-like ferroelectret materials with pockets of permanently charged surfaces. When the material gets squashed or deformed through movement, kinetic energy gets produced.
But for those who are looking for a way to charge their gear without exertion, Vodafone is also working on a Recharge Sleeping Bag. This bag apparently harvests body heat via the “Seebeck effect,” a process that produces a voltage from the temperature differences across a thermoelectric module.
These modules are printed on the fabric of the sleeping bag, which supposedly can transform an 8-hour snooze into 11 hours of smartphone battery life. As Stephen Beeby, a professor of electronic systems at the University of Southampton who worked on the innovations explained:
One side of that is cold and the other is hot, and when you get a flow of heat through it you can create a voltage and a current. Voltage and current together equals electrical power.
And this is not the first time that Vodafone chose to unveil something new and innovative that just happens to take advantage of the principles of piezoelectricity during a musical event. For those who attended the Isle of Wight Festival last year, the Vodafone Booster Brolley, a prototype parasol that keeps your phone charged while it keeps you dry might ring a bell.
These are by no means the only examples of kinetic energy devices these days. For example, a piezoelectric rubber material produced by Princeton and Caltech a few years back, is already being considered for shoes and other mobile devices as a means of recharging personal electronics.
And remember Pavegen, the rubber panels that turned runners steps at the finishing line of the Paris Marathon into actual electricity? This technology is already being adapted to provide electricity for a Grammar School in Kent, England, utilizing the thousands of steps students take everyday to keep the lights on.
Such concepts are likely to be powering just about all our devices in the not-too-distant future, at least in part. And beyond personal electronics, piezoelectric motors are also sure to be turning up in buildings and public spaces in the near future. In addition to stairways, hallways, and sidewalks, any surface in the city that moves or is touched on a regular basis could be converted to providing power.
Very clean, and very renewable. People still do a great deal of getting around by foot these days, and if we can convert that motion into energy, so much the better!
Source: news.cnet.com, blog.vodafone.co.uk
A Musical Tribute to Game of Thrones
For fans of George RR Martin, there are few things more controversial about his work than his tendency to kill off beloved characters. From King Robert, to Ned Stark, to Khal Drogo, to the Red Wedding – and that’s just what’s been showcased by the miniseries thus far – it seems no one is safe, regardless of how much we may like them.
As such, it seems fitting that the ladies of Not Literally are back with another pop culture-parodying video honoring those characters who died in GOT season 1. Set to the tune of Goyte’s “Somebody that I Used to Know”, they address their grievances to George RR Martin through a musical row known as “A Character I Used to Know.”
And really, they’ve only covered season 1 here. Now that the Red Wedding has been shown, I’m sure these ladies are off fashioning the remix of the song, angrier, longer, and more angst-ridden! Either that or they are curled up in a ball somewhere, rocking back and forth and sucking their sums to the tune of “The Rains of Castamere”.
Enjoy!
News From Space…X!
Forgive the pun, but it was just too easy! Yes, SpaceX is once again making news with its Grasshopper reusable rocket system, which set the record for highest altitude ascended. On its sixth jump, which took place on June 14th, the rocket made it to a height of 325 meters (1066 feet) above the Earth and remained airborne for a minute and 8 seconds.
With each jump and new record set, Grasshopper and its inventors are bringing the age of affordable, commercial space flight that much closer. Seeing as how the goal is to send a rocket into orbit it and bring it back in one piece, this latest milestone might sound modest. But a quick look at each successive jump clearly shows that the Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing (VTVL) rocket is making serious progress, and in a short stretch of time.
Consider the first jump which took place in September of 2012, where the rocket reached a height of 1.8 meters (6 feet) and remained aloft for three seconds. Sounds pretty meager, no? But less than two months later, the rocket was able to remain in the air for 8 seconds and reached a height of 5.4 meters (17.7 feet).
On its third run, performed in December of 2012, the rocket got 40 meters (131 feet) into the air, remained there for 29 seconds, and happened to be the first test flight where a cowboy mannequin was strapped to the rocket. On the fourth and fifth try, which were performed in March and April of this year, the rocket reached a height of 80 and then 250 meters (262 and 820 feet), remaining airborne for 34 and then 61 seconds.
This not only confirms that the rocket’s progress is exponential when it comes to height, but that its thrust-to-weight ratio has been improving vastly. Another big milestone here was the fact that for the first time, the rocket made use of its full navigation sensor suite with the F9-R closed loop control flight algorithms.
In previous tests, the rocket relied on other rocket sensors which were not as accurate, but this time around, SpaceX was directly controlling the rocket based on these new sensor readings, a move which has increased the level of accuracy in sensing the distance between Grasshopper and the ground.
To quote Nietzsche: “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk.” At this rate, averaging for the total rate of increase, I’d say the Grasshopper should be reaching Low-Earth Orbit (2000 km above sea level) by its 11th or 12th jump. And using the same figures, I figure the jump will be taking place sometime in May 2014. Somebody ought to be organizing a pool!
Source: IO9.com, SpaceX.com
Climate Crisis: City Farms
Hello again, folks. As you all know, this summer has brought some rather dire news on the climate front as unpredictable weather patterns have led to flooding in many parts of the world. And as climatological researchers and scientists have predicted, this is just the tip of the iceberg, as rising global temperatures will lead to melted icecaps, higher sea levels, severe droughts, wildfires and coastal storms.
But as I always like to point out, there are solutions to these problems, or at least ways to mediate them. Given the central role played by overpopulation and urban sprawl in climate change, many of these proposed solutions have to do with finding new ways to house, feed, and provide from future generations – ones which emphasize sustainability and clean energy.
When it comes to feeding future generations of people, the question of what will be on the menu and where it comes from are paramount. In recent decades, massive crop failures, protracted droughts, and numerous food-borne disease outbreaks caused by microbes such as salmonella, E. coli, toxoplasma and listeria have forced people to contemplate where their food comes from and how it is produced.
The proposed solution is to rethink farming, moving out of the old paradigm of farming the lands around human settlements and moving them inside. These city-based agricultural projects include rooftop gardens, rooftop greenhouses, planting beds, empty lots as farmland, and vertical farms that occupy tall buildings and abandoned warehouses. Collectively, these examples show the validity of growing food in the city. Not only could be they be carried out efficiently, but they could also operate without the pollution associated with outdoor farming.
In truth, the concept is not entirely new, as “victory gardens” or other variants have been a means of producing agricultural goods whenever national farms found themselves overburdened. These were all the rage in Britain, Canada, the US and Germany during World War I and II when naval blockades and military demand forced people to plant their own vegetables in their backyards.
In addition, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba found itself in a serious agricultural crisis. As a result, they turned to a vast network of ‘organoponicos’ – growing food for city dwellers in spare plots. These miniature agricultural operations not only staved off starvation and malnutrition during times of shortages, but became a model for sustainable local efforts that are currently being used around the world.
For example, in Wilcox, Arizona, their is the EuroFresh Farms indoor-operation – a 318 acres (1.3 square km) of one-storey-high hydroponic greenhouses that supplies fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. Similarly, the FarmedHere operation in Bedford Park, Illinois consists of a 8,360 square meter (90,000 square foot) empty warehouse that is several storeys tall that produces tilapia, a variety of leafy green vegetables, and several value-added products.
And in Sweden, the company known as Plantagon is building a vertical farm in the city of Linkoping, and has partnered with a Chinese company to research similar methods for the state of China. In addition, limited forms of vertical farming also exist in Japan, Korea, Singapore, the United States, and Canada, with new farms being planned for a number of cities in the United States.
As always, technological innovation is assisting in the process. This includes such things as grow lights that have replaced expensive fluorescent fixtures with light-emitting diodes that can be adapted to emit light spectra tailored for growing green plants. In addition to costing less to run, their yields are demonstrably higher, especially where leafy greens and tomatoes are concerned.
Another concept which is being embraced is aquaculture – indoor fish hatcheries – which could provide meat protein to go with all these vegetables. Such operations include Hazorea Acquatics, a koi farming operation, as well as the carp and mullet farm pictured below, both of which are located in Israel . Similar operations are popping up in the US, Netherlands, Denmark, Scotland and Canada, where barramundi, sturgeon, tilapia, eels, catfish, trout and salmon are being raised.
Looking to the long-run, urban agriculture has the potential to become so pervasive within our cities that by the year 2050 they may be able to provide its citizens with up to 50% of the food they consume. In doing so, ecosystems that were fragmented in favor of farmland could be allowed to regain most of their ecological functions, forests could recover, and the impact on the environment would very beneficial, for the planet as well as humanity.
In addition to ensuring that the greatest consumers of CO2 – trees and other flora – could re-advance on the landscape, allowing natural spaces to recover from the damages of agriculture would also bring countless species back from the brink of extinction. Loss of habitat is one of the chief causes of wildlife becoming endangered, and farm runoff is one of the greatest factors effecting our rivers and fish stocks.
Combined with water treatment and recycling that also happens on-site, solar, wind and peizoelectric power, and carbon capture that can turn CO2 into biofuel, skyscrapers and urban environments may very well advance to become at the forefront of the sustainability, environmental and clean energy movement. What was once the problem would thus become the solution. Truly innovative…
Source: bbc.com/future
The Future of Medicine: Engineered Viruses, Nanoparticles and Bio-Absorbable Circuits
The future that is fast approaching us is one filled with possibilities, many of which were once thought to be the province of science fiction. Between tricorders and other new devices that can detect cancer sooner and at a fraction of the cost, HIV vaccines and cures, health monitoring tattoos and bionic limbs, we could be moving into an age where all known diseases are curable and physical handicaps will be non-existent.
And in the past few months, more stories have emerged with provide hope for millions of people living with diseases, injuries and disabilities. The first came just over three weeks ago from University of California, Berkley, where researchers have been working with an engineered virus which they claim could help cure blindness. As part of a gene therapy program, this treatment has been shown to effectively correct a rare form of inherited blindness.
For the past six years, medical science has been using adeno-associated viruses (AAV) as part of a gene therapy treatment to correct inherited retinal degenerative disease. However, the process has always been seen as invasive, since it involves injected the AAVs directly into a person’s retina with a needle. What’s more, the rpocess has shown itself to be limited, in that the injected virus does not reach all the retinal cells that need repair.
But as Professor David Schaffer, the lead researcher on the project, stated in an interview with Science Translational Medicine:
[D]octors have no choice because none of the gene delivery viruses can travel all the way through the back of the eye to reach the photoreceptors – the light sensitive cells that need the therapeutic gene.
Building on this and many more years of research, Prof David Schaffer and his colleagues developed a new process where they generated around 100 million variants of AAV and then selected five that were effective in penetrating the retina. They then used the best of these, a strain known as 7m8, to transport genes to cure two types of hereditary blindness on a group of mice.
In each case, the engineered virus delivered the corrective gene to all areas of the retina and restored retinal cells nearly to normal. But more importantly, the virus’ ability to penetrate the retina on its own makes the process far less invasive, and will likely be far more cost-effective when adapted to humans. And the process is apparently very convenient:
[W]e have now created a virus that you just inject into the liquid vitreous humor inside the eye and it delivers genes to a very difficult-to-reach population of delicate cells in a way that is surgically non-invasive and safe. It’s a 15-minute procedure, and you can likely go home that day.
Naturally, clinical trials are still needed, but the results are encouraging and Professor Schaffer indicated that his team are busy at work, now collaborating with physicians to identify the patients most likely to benefit from this gene-delivery technique.
Next up, there was the announcement back at the end of May that researchers from North Carolina State and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill had found yet another medical use for nanoparticles. In there case, this consisted of combating a major health concern, especially amongst young people today: diabetes.
In a study that was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, the collaborating teams indicated that their solution of nanoparticles was able to monitor blood sugar levels in a group of mice and released insulin when their sugar levels got too high. Based on the results, the researchers claim that their method will also work for human beings with type 1 diabetes.
Each of the nanoparticles have a core of insulin that is contained with a degradable shell. When glucose levels in the blood reach high concentrations spike, the shell dissolves, releasing insulin and lowering the subject’s blood sugar. The degradable nano-network was shown to work in mice where a single injection kept blood glucose levels normal for a minimum of 10 days.
While the exact cause of this kind of diabetes is unknown, the effects certainly are. Patients living with this genetically-acquired form of the disease require several shots of insulin a day to keep their blood sugar levels under control. And even then, blindness, depression and even death can still result. What’s more, if the insulin shots are specifically calculated for the individual in question, side-effects can occur.
Hence the genius behind this new method. Not only would it relieve people who have type 1 diabetes from constantly injecting themselves, it would also remove the need to monitor their own blood sugar levels since the nanoparticles would be controlling them automatically.
In a study published recently in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Zhen Gu, lead author of the study claimed that the technology functions essentially the same as a pancreas. Hence another benefit of the new method, in that it could make pancreatic transplants – which are often necessary for patients with diabetes – unnecessary.
And last, but certainly not least, comes from the University of Illinois where John Rogers are developing a series of bio-absorbable electronic circuits that could help us win the war on drug-resistant bacteria. As part of a growing trend of biodegradable, flexible electronic circuits that operate wirelessly, fighting “superbugs” is just one application for this technology, but a very valuable one.
For some time now, bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics has been spreading, threatening to put the clock back 100 years to the time when routine, minor surgery was life-threatening. Some medical experts are warning that otherwise straightforward operations could soon become deadly unless new ways to fend off these infections are found. And though bacteria can evolve ways of evading chemical assaults, they are still vulnerable to direct assault.
This is how the new bio-absorbable circuits work: by heating up the virus. Each circuit is essentially a miniature electric heater that can be implanted into wounds and powered wirelessly to fry bacteria during healing before dissolving harmlessly into body fluids once their job is done. While this might sound dangerous, keep in mind that it takes only a relatively mild warming to kill bugs without causing discomfort or harm to surrounding tissues.
To fashion the circuits, Rogers and his colleagues used layers of utra-thin wafers and silk, material so thin that they disintegrate in water or body fluids or (in the case of silk) are known to dissolve anyway. For the metal parts, they used extra-thin films of magnesium, which is not only harmless but in fact an essential nutrient. For semiconductors, they used silicon membranes 300 nanometres thick, which also dissolve in water.
In addition to deterring bacteria, Rogers says that implantable, bio-absorbable RF electronics could be used to stimulate nerves for pain relief, and to stimulate bone re-growth, a process long proven to work when electrodes are placed on the skin or directly on the bone. Conceivably they could also be used to precisely control drug release from implanted reservoirs.
In other words, this is just the beginning. When it comes to the future of medicine, just about any barrier that was once considered impassable are suddenly looking quite porous…
Sources: sci-news.com, stm.sciencemag.org, singularityhub.com, bbc.com/future
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