Gold Nanowire Heart Patch Helps Cardiac Tissue Rebuild Itself

Ischaemic heart disease is one of the leading cause of death all over the world causing more than 7 million deaths every year according to WHO. So it's no wonder that scientist all over the world are trying to find ways to combat against it and now Scientists at MIT may be on the best track for the solution.

Fixing cardiac tissue damaged in a heart attack is one of the great current challenges in tissue engineering. Heart cells are particularly hard to make in the lab, requiring special care to develop into the proper type of beating cells. Once they’re made, it’s difficult to seed them into a broken heart. Other efforts have also been made that encourage surrounding heart cells to grow into Heart Muscle Cells.

Electrical signals shared among calcium ions dictate when cardiomyocytes contract, making the heart beat. But tissue scaffolds are often made with materials like polylactic acid or alginate, which act as insulators, so the signals are blocked. This makes it difficult to get all the cells in a piece of tissue to coordinate their signals and beat in time, which in turn makes it difficult to build a very big or very effective heart patch.

The Cambridge-based team, led by Daniel Kohane, a professor in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, went around this problem by creating a sponge-like matrix made from alginate, a gummy organic substance that is frequently used for such tissue scaffolds. Mixed with that alginate, however, was a solution containing billions of tiny gold nanowires. As with "traditional" tissue scaffolds, it was then seeded with heart cells.

Although the alginate itself acted as an insulator, the nanowires were able to bridge the gaps between the cells, allowing electrical signals to pass between them. While heart tissue grown on pure alginate has been shown to have a conductivity of only a few hundred micrometers, the nanowire-enhanced tissue was able to conduct electricity over "many millimeters." Compared to a typical scaffold system, the gold nanowire cells’ conductivity improved by three orders of magnitude. Kohane said it was “night and day.”

The MIT researchers believe that the technology could be used not only for heart patches, but also for addressing problems with other types of muscle tissue, vascular constructs, or in neural systems.

The video below shows how tissue grown in the nanowire-alginate composite (right) is able to conduct electricity better than tissue grown using pure alginate (left).

Researchers Produce Hydrogen from Waste Water Making True Clean Energy

Production of clean energy has been an effort in progress for a long time. As the world currently runs on fossil fuels that are polluting the planet are a finite resource and unsustainable for long term. This has led to the search of alternatives and hydrogen is one of the leading contenders. The problem with hydrogen is that it is an energy carrier instead of an energy source. Pure hydrogen is not found naturally and it consumes energy ( usually generated by fossil fuels ) for production. Now researchers at Pennsylvania State University have developed a way to produce hydrogen that uses no grid electricity, is carbon neutral and could be used at anyplace where there is wastewater near sea water.

The researcher's work revolves around microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) - a technology related to microbial fuel cells (MFCs), which produce an electric current from the microbial decomposition of organic compounds. MECs partially reverse this process to generate hydrogen (or methane) from organic material but they require the some electrical input to do so.

Instead of relying on the grid to provide the electricity required for their MECs, Bruce E. Logan, Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, and postdoctoral fellow Younggy Kim, turned to reverse-electrodialysis (RED) to generate electricity using salt water from the North Sea and fresh water from the Rhine and the Penn State team's work follows the principle i.e - extracting energy from the ionic differences between salt water and fresh water.

A RED stack consists of alternating positive and negative ion exchange membranes, with each RED adding to the electrical output. Logan says that using RED stacks to generate electricity has been proposed before but, because they are trying to drive an unfavorable reaction, many membrane pairs are required. To split water into hydrogen and oxygen using RED technology requires 1.8 volts, which would require about 25 pairs of membranes, resulting in increased pumping resistance.

However, by combining RED technology with exoelectrogenic bacteria - bacteria that consume organic material and produce an electric current - the researchers were able to reduce the number of RED stacks required to five membrane pairs.

Previous work with MECs showed that, by themselves, they could produce about 0.3 volts of electricity, but not the 0.414 volts needed to generate hydrogen in these fuel cells. Adding less than 0.2 volts of outside electricity released the hydrogen. Now, by incorporating 11 membranes - five membrane pairs that produce about 0.5 volts - the cells produce hydrogen.

"The added voltage that we need is a lot less than the 1.8 volts necessary to hydrolyze water," said Logan. "Biodegradable liquids and cellulose waste are abundant and with no energy in and hydrogen out we can get rid of wastewater and by-products. This could be an inexhaustible source of energy."

While Logan and Kim used platinum as the catalyst on the cathode in their initial experiments, subsequent experimentation showed that a non-precious metal catalyst, molybdenum sulfide, had 51 percent energy efficiency.

The Penn State researchers say their results, which are published in the Sept. 19 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, "show that pure hydrogen gas can efficiently be produced from virtually limitless supplies of seawater and river water and biodegradable organic matter."

Next Generation Lithium Ion Battery will be Flexible and Cheaper

Next Generation lithium ion batteries could be flexible and cheaper thanks to a new polymer gel developed by scientists from University of Leeds. For some time now there has been advancement in the development and research on batteries as our dependency on more powerful and smaller portable devices continue to increase, we can see that there has been development of extremely small batteries as well as transparent batteries. Thus making it quite possible the way technology is progressing that we might start seeing flexible electronics like the paper-phones in the near future. 

Lithium-ion batteries have certainly been a boon to electronic devices, offering much longer run times than their alkaline counterparts. There is still room for improvement, however. Existing lithium batteries can short circuit, they don't stand up to damage, and they can only be made in a limited variety of shapes. Now, due to the development of the new polymer gel that could be used to make lithium batteries there will be none of these shortcomings.

Traditional lithium-ion batteries consist of sealed cells that each contain a porous polymer film separator and a liquid chemical electrolyte. The pores in that separator allow charged lithium ions to flow between the electrodes, while acting as a barrier that keeps those electrodes from contacting one another and shorting out.

That separator isn't needed with the new gel. In a patented high-speed extrusion/lamination process, the gel is sandwiched between an anode and a cathode. The result is a highly-conductive strip, that is nanometers thick. It is flexible, damage-tolerant, and can be cut to any size. Its fully-automated production process is said to be cost-effective and safe, as it doesn't result in any excess flammable solvents or liquid electrolytes.

The gel itself contains about 70 percent liquid electrolyte which is mixed with a polymer. The two liquids are mixed with hot water, and set into a gelatinous consistency as they cool.

The technology was developed by Ian Ward, a Research Professor of Physics at Leeds. It has been licensed to American company Polystor Energy Corporation, which is in the process of conducting trials in preparation for commercialization.

Signal that Triggers Hair Growth Found By Yale Researchers

In news that offers hope to millions of males everywhere worrying about baldness. Yale researchers have made a discovery that could lead to new treatments for baldness by triggering hair growth naturally. While men with male pattern baldness still have stem cells in follicle roots, they need signals from within the skin to grow hair. Until now, the source of those signals that trigger hair growth has been unclear, but the Yale researchers claim to have now discovered it.

When hair dies, the researcher team led by Valerie Horsley, assistant professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology, observed that the layer of fat in the scalp that comprises most of the skin's thickness shrinks. When hair growth begins, the fat layer expands in a process called adipogenesis. They identified a type of stem cell - adipose precursor cells - within the skin's fatty layer that is involved in the creation of new fat cells. They showed that these cells' production of molecules called PGDF (platelet derived growth factors), was necessary to spur hair regrowth in mice.

Horsley's team is trying to identify other signals produced by adipose precursor stem cells that may play a role in regulating hair growth. She also wants to know whether these same signals are required for human hair growth.

"If we can get these fat cells in the skin to talk to the dormant stem cells at the base of hair follicles, we might be able to get hair to grow again," said Horsley.

The Yale team's research is published in the September 2 issue of the journal Cell.

New Sutureless Method for Joining Blood Vessels Developed by Scientists

Infant Blood Vessel Cross Section

For the past couple of decades medicine has advanced considerably with new techniques and methods being developed for nearly all areas of expertise in medicine thus increasing life expectancy. But one of the most commonly used practice of joining severed blood vessels have mostly remained the same way today- with sutures, as it was 100 years ago, when the French surgeon Alexis Carrel won a Nobel Prize for advancing the technique. Now, a team of researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine has developed a sutureless method that appears to be a faster, safer and easier alternative.

In animal studies, a team led by Stanford microsurgeon Geoffrey Gurtner, MD, used a poloxamer gel and bioadhesive rather than a needle and thread to join together blood vessels, a procedure called "vascular anastomosis". 

The problem with sutures as explained by Gurtner is that they are difficult to use on blood vessels less than 1 millimeter wide, which he faced when attempting to reattach the digit of a 10 month old infant in 2002

"We struggled with reattaching the digit because the blood vessels were so small — maybe half a millimeter. The surgery took more than five hours, and at the end we were only able to get in three sutures." told Gurtner "Everything turned out OK in that case," he continued. "But what struck me was how the whole paradigm of sewing with a needle and thread kind of falls apart at that level of smallness."

Sutures can lead to complications, such as intimal hyperplasia, in which cells respond to the trauma of the needle and thread by proliferating on the inside wall of the blood vessel, causing it to narrow at that point. Thus increasing the likely hood of production of blood clot which then may cause obstruction of blood flow. Sutures can also trigger an immune response causing inflammation and thus increased chances of a blockage.

So shortly after arriving at Stanford in 2005, Gurtner approached fellow faculty member Gerald Fuller, PhD, professor of chemical engineering and the Fletcher Jones II Professor in the School of Engineering, about whether they knew of a substance that could be turned easily from a liquid to a solid and back to a liquid again, and that would also be safe to use in vascular surgery. Fuller immediately suggested a FDA approved thermoreversible poloxamer called Poloxamer 407.

Fuller teamed up with Jayakumar Rajadas, PhD, director of the Stanford Biomaterials and Advanced Drug Delivery Laboratory, to modify the poloxamer so that it would become solid and elastic when heated above body temperature but dissolve harmlessly into the bloodstream when cooled. The poloxamer then was used to distend both openings of a severed blood vessel, allowing researchers to glue them together precisely.

In tests on animals, the technique was found to be five times faster than the traditional hand-sewn method, with considerably less inflammation and scarring after two years. The method even worked on extremely thin vessels only 0.2 mm wide.

Dermabond, a surgical sealant, was used to attach the ends of the blood vessels together.

Although further testing on large animals is required before human trials can begin, they note that all of the components used in the technique are already approved by the FDA.

"This technology has the potential to progress rapidly from the 'bench to bedside,'" they write.

 Souce: Stanford University Medical Center

Comex (Hacker) responsible for JailbreakMe.com Hired By Apple as Intern

As the trend continues nowadays another hacker gets hired by a major corporation. This time Comex, the hacker responsible for JailbreakMe.com, is joining Apple as an intern. JailbreakMe.com was the easiest and simplest hassle free solution for iOS users to jailbreak their devices simply by visiting a website. Unlike more older, difficult and time consuming ones. Like Apple iOS 4.3.5 Jailbreak

He announced the hiring on Twitter:

"It's been really, really fun, but it's also been a while and I've been getting bored. So, the week after next I will be starting an internship with Apple."

Comex was first unmasked by Forbes as Nicholas Allegra, a 19-year old Brown University student from Chappaqua, NY. Allegra's latest jailbreak utilized an exploit in Apple's PDF renderer to run custom software to crack iOS devices. Apple patched the bug after little more than a week, but the elegant solution, and the complete ease with which it allowed users jailbreak their phones, illustrate the talent that Allegra has.

However, This isn't the first time Apple has hired from the jailbreak community. Earlier this year MobileNotifier developer Peter Hajas was picked up as an Apple summer intern and we all know that we wanted a better notification system in iPhone so it was a good thing. But Unlike Hajas, however, Allegra has actually been responsible for some of the tools that have made jailbreaking possible on the iPhone.

So does that mean that the future of jailbreaking has gotten a lot weaker with one of the most important person behind jailbreaking has not infact just left jailbreaking but infact joined Apple to probably prevent it. Only time will tell.

Steve Jobs resigns from Apple, Cook becomes CEO !

Founder of Apple, Steve Jobs on Wednesday resigned as chief executive of Apple Inc ending his 14-year reign at the technology giant he co-founded in a garage.

"I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come," said Steve Joba in a brief letter announcing his resignation.

As a result Apple shares immediately fell by 7%

Steve Jobs who survived pancreatic cancer and came back for a short while from his industry leave for the debut of iPad has since been on a medical leave for an undisclosed condition since January 17, will be replaced by COO and longtime heir apparent Tim Cook.

"I will say to investors: don't panic and remain calm, it's the right thing to do. Steve will be chairman and Cook is CEO," said BGC Financial analyst Colin Gillis.

So now this is one of the biggest technology industry news in recent times.

We will definitely miss this industry changing icon.

Google +1 Button Updated and +snippets

We have been seeing the +1 button on various websites on the web for the last couple of months. However, it didn’t really do much except only adding a link to your Google+ profile's tab which hardly anyone notices. Ofcourse, that’s a nice little feature, but it’s doesn't helps you share the content that you like with your friends

But now google has finally paid attention to it and have made the +1 button useful. Now when anyone clicks on the +1 button now, it will show a pop-up box asking the user if they want to share this with their Circles on Google+. Whatever the user decides to type in will be published directly to a user’s news Stream on Google’s constantly evolving social network Google+.

This update also brines along a new feature called +snippets. Google describes this as a “way to jumpstart conversations with the people you care about,” but it’s actually just another way os using the +1 process. Just like when you’d add a link on Facebook or Google+ manually, the user hits the +1 button and a brief description, photo and title are automatically formatted for sharing.

But thats not all the best thing for the webmasters is that Google has given them the opportunity for customizing the look to know exactly what appears when a user tries to share their content. How many times have you tried to share an item on Facebook, and some odd photo or weird text appears in the headline or description? I know i get that a lot specially when sharing from less popular websites or blogs. Sometimes, it can cause a person not to want to end up sharing the item, thus ruining another potential stream of traffic to the source.

Both of these features will be rolling out to users throughout the week.

To know more about how the +1 button and +snippets works, Check the video below:

For Google+ vs Facebook (Privacy Difference)

Air Conditioned Cooling Work Shirt For The Summer Heat

Everyone's looking for different ways to beat the summer heat and you can count on japanese to come up with another nice idea. We always like to stay in the comfort of an air conditioner in the summer so the japanese came up with the idea to have your own portable air conditioner which you can have all the time while working in the hot summer days and it's the Kuchofuku Air-Conditioned Cooling Work Shirt.

The shirt features two fans which run at high or low speeds, which can be selected on a back-mounted control box . Air circulation is 20 liters (5.28 US gallons) per second at high, and 12 liters (3.17 US gallons) per second at low. Everything is powered by two AA batteries. But there is no info on the runtime though.

Kuchofuku also makes beds, seat cushions and mats with built-in fans and this polyester T-shirt follows suit by integrating fans which will drive fresh, cooling air flow all over your body to make sure you stay cool and sweat free in the summer heat.

The T-shirt itself is made from polyester and is available only in dark grey color, comes in four sizes, and weighs about 550 grams.

It is available online from Japan Trend Shop for US$186.

Google is Going to Buy Motorola Mobility for US$12.5 billion

Google has announced today that it's planning to purchase Motorola Mobility for a worth of US$40 per share, that adds up to a complete quantity of US$12.5 billion. Taking Google's patent wars under consideration, Motorola's portfolio of 17000 patents might have been a vital factor behind the deal. in keeping with a blog post by Google's CEO Larry Page, Motorola are going to be run as a separate business, whereas Android can stay an open platform.

More than one hundred fifty million devices running Google's Android are activated worldwide and this range is increased by 550,000 new devices each day, Larry Page says. whereas Motorola has been committed to the Android platform since 2008, with, as an example, the DROID line of smartphones, Larry Page calls the acquisition a "natural fit" adding that it is a way to improve the Android ecosystem and to boost competition on the market.

The transaction, however, desires regulatory approvals from the U.S., the eu Union, as well as Motorola Mobility's stockholders, and is predicted to be closed by "the end of 2011 or early 2012," in keeping with the press release.

Motorola Mobility was formed in January 2011, when Motorola Inc. split into 2 corporations. Motorola Solutions has been centered on enterprise-tailored solutions, whereas Motorola Mobility on cell phones and tablets. the company has definitely contributed to the development of the mobile industry generally, like by having released the world's 1st moveable cellular telephone and also the StarTAC clamshell, and by being a founding member of the Open Handset Alliance.

According to a recent comScore report, in June 2011 Motorola was ranked the third mobile OEM within the U.S., with 14.5 % of mobile subscribers using its devices (smartphone and non-smartphone), behind LG and Samsung, whereas globally Motorola was ranked seventh in 2010, with simply a 2.4 % market share, in keeping with Gartner.

Students Love Technology [infographic]

Technology advancement has affected each and every walk of life, leaving its effects on all generations. Out of all, Students are considered to be more stirred than anyone else.

Instead of pencils and registers what we see now are tablets and other gadgets. These tech-obsessed students are mostly from age group of 18 – 22.

OnlineEducation.net has plotted following facts in one infographic that depicts how tech-savvy our students are.

White iPhone 4 vs Black iPhone 4 Comparison: Similarities and Differences

Apple iPhone 5 Release Date is about to be announced, but a lot of Apple iPhone user are still happy with their Apple iPhone 4 phones. Its not bad if we provide a summery White iPhone 4 vs Black iPhone 4 Comparison, their Similarities and Differences for some of you who are still interested in Apple iPhone 4. These images shows the comparison between both versions of the iPhone 4.

Originally slated for release in June 2010, the white version of Apple iPhone 4 fell prey to delay after delay, and it was not able to hit the sales stores until late April 2011. Apple never released an official statement specifying what took it so long to release White iPhone 4, but there is not any shortage of rumors and speculations on this account too, as with almost any matter where Apple is involved.


White iPhone 4 vs Black iPhone 4 Comparison: Similarities and Differences

Before we go into these pictures, please keep in mind that the latest White iPhone 4 features an extended proximity sensor above the receiver of the front panel rather than the little hole of Black iPhone 4 version. Whereas other minor changes include black interior coating of 30-pin connector as well as 3.5mm audio jack. Other than that, there is no significant difference in Features, Specs and Price when we talk about White iPhone 4 vs Black iPhone 4, with color being the most prominent and significant difference.


White iPhone 4 vs Black iPhone 4 Comparison in Camera Module Results

There is a plenty of debate on the White iPhone 4 vs Black iPhone 4 Camera Results. Starting with an early tear-down of the white iPhone 4, as soon as it White iPhone 4 was released, a Japanese blog revealed that the camera module in it was noticeably different from the one found in the black iPhone 4. The camera lens in the White iPhone 4 version, looked to be a bit more recessed, possibly to reduce the distance between the glass and the sensor and eliminate or reduce the light leakage issue. For serious photography guys these tweaks in the camera module means a lot of difference in the image results, for others like me, its just the same or almost same to be on safe side.

So guys, I guess its good to cut the long story short and directly jump into watching this pictorial White iPhone 4 vs Black iPhone 4 Comparisons: