Biju Dharmapalan, Science Communicator

Assistant Professor & Head, School of Biosciences, Mar Athanasios College for Advanced Studies, Tiruvalla (MACFAST), Kerala- 68910. E-mail: biju@macfast.org/ biju_dharmapalan@yahoo.co.uk

On 20th May 2019 during the occasion ofthe World Metrology Day (WMD), India joined other Nations who adopted a global resolution to redefine four of the seven base units -- kilogramme, kelvin, mole and ampere. Theseare now defined in terms of physical constants rather than an object or phenomenon. The decision to redefine of the four SI base units was taken in 16th November 2018 when metrologists and policy-makers from 60 countries around the world met at the General Conference on Weights and Measures in Versailles, France. For the first time all of the basic units of measurement will be officially defined in terms of atomic properties and fundamental physics constants, rather than specific, human made objects.

When the woman they helped tripped over a step, an upset Mihika decided to design a stick to help people to walk safely by themselves. The Smart Stick uses vibrating alerts, a water sensor, LED lights and a camera with AI to recognise and track obstacles.

Mihika said: “I was so excited to be shortlisted, and I can’t believe I’ve won! My brother Arnav was a part of the Tech4Good awards in 2016 and that really inspired me to start thinking more about how technology can help other people. I can’t wait to work with BT to develop the Smart Stick further so that we reach more people who really need it.”

Mihika’s mother, Manisha, entered her young daughter into the Primary Engineer Leaders’ Awards based on her idea. Winning the whole competition and beating over 3,000 other entries brought Mihika into contact with University College London’s (UCL) Department for Electronic & Electrical Engineering (EEE).

For patients with kidney failure who need dialysis, removing fluid at the correct rate and stopping at the right time is critical. This typically requires guessing how much water to remove and carefully monitoring the patient for sudden drops in blood pressure. 

Currently there is no reliable, easy way to measure hydration levels in these patients, who number around half a million in the United States. However, researchers from MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital have now developed a portable sensor that can accurately measure patients’ hydration levels using a technique known as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) relaxometry.

More than 15 million colonoscopies are performed in the United States every year, and in at least 20 percent of those, gastroenterologists end up removing precancerous growths from the colon. Eliminating these early-stage lesions, known as polyps, is the best way to prevent colon cancer from developing.

To reduce the risk of tearing the colon during this procedure, doctors often inject a saline solution into the space below the lesion, forming a “cushion” that lifts the polyp so that it’s easier to remove safely. However, this cushion doesn’t last long.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital have used a novel gene-editing approach to salvage the hearing of mice with genetic hearing loss, and have succeeded in doing so without any apparent off-target effects as a result of the treatment.

The animals — known as Beethoven mice — were treated for the same genetic mutation that causes progressive hearing loss in humans, culminating in profound deafness by the mid-20s.

The new approach, described online July 3 in Nature Medicine, involves an optimized, more precise version of the classic CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system that is better at recognizing the disease-causing mutation seen in Beethoven mice. The refined tool allowed scientists to selectively disable the defective copy of a hearing gene called Tmc1, while sparing the healthy copy.

A reusable breast cancer treatment device created by a group of students at Johns Hopkins University offers a low-cost alternative for women in low-income and low-resource countries.

The tissue-freezing probe uses cryoablation, a method that kills cancerous tissue by exposing it to extremely cold temperatures, and employs carbon dioxide, a widely available and affordable alternative to argon, the current industry standard.

A study detailing the tool's success in animal studies was published in PLOS One.

Biomedical engineers at Duke University have developed a low-cost, portable optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanner that promises to bring the vision-saving technology to underserved regions throughout the United States and abroad.

Thanks to a redesigned, 3D-printed spectrometer, the scanner is 15 times lighter and smaller than current commercial systems and is made from parts costing less than a tenth the retail price of commercial systems—all without sacrificing imaging quality.

In its first clinical trial, the new OCT scanner produced images of 120 retinas that were 95 percent as sharp as those taken by current commercial systems, which was sufficient for accurate clinical diagnosis.

Robots and prosthetic devices may soon have a sense of touch equivalent to, or better than, the human skin with the Asynchronous Coded Electronic Skin (ACES), an artificial nervous system developed by a team of NUS researchers.

The new electronic skin system has ultra-high responsiveness and robustness to damage, and can be paired with any kind of sensor skin layers to function effectively as an electronic skin.

The innovation, achieved by Assistant Professor Benjamin Tee and his team from NUS Materials Science and Engineering, was first reported in prestigious scientific journal Science Robotics on 18 July 2019. 

The emerging field of synthetic biology—designing new biological components and systems—is revolutionizing medicine. Through the genetic programming of living cells, researchers are creating engineered systems that intelligently sense and respond to diverse environments, leading to more specific and effective solutions in comparison to current molecular-based therapeutics.

At the same time, cancer immunotherapy—using the body’s immune defenses to fight cancer—has transformed cancer treatment over the past decade, but only a handful of solid tumors have responded, and systemic therapy often results in significant side effects. Designing therapies that can induce a potent, anti-tumor immune response within a solid tumor without triggering systemic toxicity has posed a significant challenge

The next ‘enchanted ring’ could be found with obafluorin, a broad spectrum antibiotic from nature

Understanding how antibiotic scaffolds are constructed in nature can help scientists prospect for new classes of antibiotics through DNA sequencing and genome mining. Researchers have used this knowledge to help solve the X-ray crystal structure of the enzyme that makes obafluorin — a broad spectrum antibiotic agent made by a fluorescent strain of soil bacteria. The new work from Washington University in St. Louis and the University at Buffalo was published July 31 in the journal Nature Communications.

A multi-part enzyme called a nonribosomal peptide synthetase produces the highly reactive beta-lactone ring that is responsible for obafluorin’s antimicrobial activity.

Imagine if plants could be engineered to produce vaccines, pharmaceuticals, proteins and enzymes for medical, agricultural and industrial applications at a fraction of their current cost.

A new Cornell-led study describes a major advancement in the field, literally.

The market for such biologically derived proteins is forecast to reach $300 billion in the near future. Industrial enzymes and other proteins are currently made in large, expensive fermenting reactors, but making them in plants grown outdoorscould reduce production costs by three times.

A newly developed material that is so perfectly transparent you can barely see it could unlock many new uses for solar heat. It generates much higher temperatures than conventional solar collectors do — enough to be used for home heating or for industrial processes that require heat of more than 200 degrees Celsius (392 degrees Fahrenheit).

The key to the process is a new kind of aerogel, a lightweight material that consists mostly of air, with a structure made of silica (which is also used to make glass). The material lets sunlight pass through easily but blocks solar heat from escaping. The findings are described in the journal ACS Nano, in a paper by Lin Zhao, an MIT graduate student; Evelyn Wang, professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering; Gang Chen, the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor in Power Engineering; and five others.

As a cucumber plant grows, it sprouts tightly coiled tendrils that seek out supports in order to pull the plant upward. This ensures the plant receives as much sunlight exposure as possible. Now, researchers at MIT have found a way to imitate this coiling-and-pulling mechanism to produce contracting fibers that could be used as artificial muscles for robots, prosthetic limbs, or other mechanical and biomedical applications.

While many different approaches have been used for creating artificial muscles, including hydraulic systems, servo motors, shape-memory metals, and polymers that respond to stimuli, they all have limitations, including high weight or slow response times. The new fiber-based system, by contrast, is extremely lightweight and can respond very quickly, the researchers say. The findings are reported in the journal Science.

The sophisticated technology that powers face recognition in many modern smartphones someday could receive a high-tech upgrade that sounds — and looks — surprisingly low-tech. 

This window to the future is none other than a piece of glass. University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers have devised a method to create pieces of “smart” glass that can recognize images without requiring any sensors or circuits or power sources. 

Researchers have created a new type of tiny 3D-printed robot that moves by harnessing vibration from piezoelectric actuators, ultrasound sources or even tiny speakers. Swarms of these “micro-bristle-bots” might work together to sense environmental changes, move materials – or perhaps one day repair injuries inside the human body.

The prototype robots respond to different vibration frequencies depending on their configurations, allowing researchers to control individual bots by adjusting the vibration. Approximately two millimeters long – about the size of the world’s smallest ant – the bots can cover four times their own length in a second despite the physical limitations of their small size.

DNA molecules are well known as carriers of huge amounts of biological information, and there is growing interest in using DNA in engineered data storage devices that can hold vastly more data than our current hard drives. But new research shows that DNA isn’t the only game in town when it comes to molecular data storage.

A study led by Brown University researchers shows that it’s possible to store and retrieve data stored in artificial metabolomes — arrays of liquid mixtures containing sugars, amino acids and other types of small molecules. For a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE, the researchers showed that they could encode kilobyte-scale image files into metabolite solutions and read the information back out again

Salt is power. It might sound like alchemy, but the energy in places where salty ocean water and freshwater mingle could provide a massive source of renewable power. Stanford researchers have developed an affordable, durable technology that could harness this so-called blue energy.

The paper, recently published in American Chemical Society’s ACS Omega, describes the battery and suggests using it to make coastal wastewater treatment plants energy-independent.