Liquipel's nano-coat makes this so not a problem.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever dropped your smartphone in the toilet. Don’t feel bad, according to Danny McPhail, president of Santa Anna, California-based startup Liquipel, that’s how 50 percent of smartphones meet a watery demise. For these and the other 50 percent who have had to fork over another few hundred dollars after being caught in the rain, pushed into a pool, or had beer knocked over onto their smartphones, McPhail and his company have a solution. Liquipel offers a nano-coating a thousand times thinner than a human hair that will make your new iPhone 4S water-resistant. The coating is so thin, they claim, that you won’t know the difference – in feel or function – from an untreated phone. Liquipel is actually playing it safe with the “resistant” qualifier. At least for the iPhones in the videos below, a complete dunking seems to be no problem at all. And the woman’s non-reaction to being splashed with water leads me to believe that she’s been treated as well.

The second video shows you how the coating process works. They put the phone into a chamber, create a vacuum, then pump in their special coating gas. The gas permeates the phone, inside and out, and the gas molecules bind through some magic process that only Liquipel is privy to. So water actually gets inside the phone, but beads up and harmlessly rolls of the circuit board, McPhail told the AFP at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas during a recent demonstration.

Liquipel’s main goal at the show was to cut a deal with manufacturers so that the coating treatment could be part of the manufacturing process. For now, the water-weary can send their smartphones to Liquipel and have it treated for $59, shipping not included. Right now the company has approved the coating for 11 different devices: the iPhone 3g and s, iPhone 4 and 4s, HTC Evo 4G, HTC Evo Shift 4G, HTC MyTouch 4G, HTC Thunderbolt, Motorola Droid X and X2, and Samsung Charge.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Perhaps water-proofing your smartphone doesn’t qualify as a necessity, but I personally know a few people for which the 59 bucks would have been a very smart investment.

[image credits: Liquipel]
[video credits: liquipel via YouTube]
images: Liquipel
video 1: Liquipel 1
video 2: Liquipel 2

For twenty five years the Foresight Institute has been one of the leading proponents of nanotechnology, and 2011 was no exception. A 25th anniversary conference in June gathered visionary minds like Moon Express’ Barney Pell, IBM’s Thomas Theis, and CalTech’s William Goddard. Foresight’s ongoing Dinner Lecture series exposed Silicon Valley locals to legends in the field. Their outreach program brought experts like Ralph Merkle to educational groups like Singularity University and UC Berkeley’s NanoClub. Members of Foresight’s leadership also appeared (or will soon be seen) at major conferences (like the Singularity Summit), on TV, in documentary films, and tons of online/print media.

Foresight wants to continue building momentum to propel them into 2012 and you can help. A special $30,000 Challenge Grant is running now through January 15th. Every dollar you donate to Foresight will be matched, and you can give easily online.

While the world has no lack of philanthropic groups, the Foresight Institute stands out as one of the few, and most far-reaching, focused on nanotechnology. They inspire research with prizes, the excite and engage the public with lectures and conferences, and by attracting like minded innovators to the same space, they provide a rare sort of incubation:

“The entrepreneurial spirit of Silicon Valley is an integral part of Foresight’s spirit. Dozens of partnerships, collaborations and startups (some rather well known now) got their start at the bottom of a glass on a table napkin in the late night aftermath of a Foresight gathering.”
—Larry Milltein, incoming President Foresight 2012

Still not convinced you should give to Foresight? I’ll leave with this 2010 appeal from outgoing president and co-founder Christine Peterson:

Click here to start the donation process!

[image and videos courtesy the Foresight Institute]

An early Sprite prototype. Don't lose it!

We knew to expect a paradigm shift with the end of the space shuttle program, but this is ridiculous. Mason Peck and his group of forward-thinking engineers are taking NASA’s slogan of Faster, Better, Cheaper to the extreme. Their spacecraft will cut down travel time to Alpha Centauri from thousands of years to just a few hundred, and instead of the $1.7 billion it takes to build a space shuttle, Peck’s ships can be built for an amazing $33.

I might mention that there’s no room for astronauts. In fact, if one were to try and board these spacecraft they would crush it.

Okay, maybe Peck’s Sprites, as they’re called, aren’t going to be the next manned space vehicle, but they could be the first of a new breed of satellites that are so cheap and innovative – they don’t need fuel – they could be an important addition to our satellite-based efforts to study the universe.

In stark contrast to the present approach of sending satellites costing tens or hundreds of millions of dollars for single missions, Peck’s team at Cornell’s School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering envision a swarm of wafer-sized spacecraft that sense their surroundings together and send data back to the earth in aggregate.

The spacecraft are called Sprites and they weigh about 10 grams each. Integrated circuits 3.8 cm on a side, they’re literally spacefaring computer chips. This past May the space shuttle Endeavour brought three Sprite prototypes to the International Space Station. Fixed to the station’s exterior, they are currently in the early days of a two year test to see how they stand up to the harsh elements of space.

Compared to your typical satellite the faculties of a single miniscule Sprite are severely limited. The Sprites at the station right now are equipped with seven tiny solar cells, a microprocessor with a built-in radio, an antenna, an amplifier, and special circuitry that activates the microprocessor when the solar cells have stored up enough energy to emit a single radio-frequency “beep.” The beeps not only tell operators on Earth that the Sprites are still functional, they’re data that can be used to estimate the angle of sunlight hitting the chip as an oblique angle will take longer to charge the solar cells than direct light that hits at a right angle. Not the most revolutionary sort of space exploration, it’s a proof-of-principle that will show the Sprites can sense their surroundings as a population of individual sensors – albeit a population of three. When they do it will be first tiny steps towards a new paradigm of distributed space exploration.

NASA astronaut Andrew Feustel, STS-134 mission specialist, installs and photographs the experimental module that includes three Sprites.

The Sprites of the future will do more. As Peck describes in an IEEE article, semiconductors will fit the solar cells, energy-storing capacitors, and “all the memory and processing capability you could want” onto a single chip. These will support experimental payloads such as spectrometers that break down the light emitted by stars and planets, for example, and use it to determine the chemicals that make up those stars and planets. A chip equipped with load sensors would be able to measure impacts made by space particles. Chemical sensors and simple CMOS cameras – essentially your common digital camera – can also be added. With these sorts of eyes and ears, tens of thousands of Sprites could explore space in ways impossible with conventional satellites. Peck describes a scenario in which Sprites in orbit between the Earth and the sun would send a signal when the local magnetic field or the number of charged particles that hit the spacecraft exceed some preset value. Each Sprite will be a single detector and provide just one data point. “But a network of these scattered chips could produce 3-D snapshots of space weather, something no traditional spacecraft, no matter how sophisticated, could ever do on its own.”

But don’t expect the Sprite swarm to be anything like the self-organizing nanobots of Michael Crichton’s Prey that were able to take a car ride in the shape of a human. Sprites simply won’t have the power for realtime communication – each will be acting on its own. Sprite swarms should be achievable, however, by harnessing the grouping power of space’s gravitational eddies and currents. The Interplanetary Transport Network is the vast array of virtual highways that arise from the gravitational pull of the planets and other celestial bodies. In the same way the interplanetary satellites of old were flung around Jupiter and Saturn in a gravity assist slingshot, a much smaller spacecraft could be ferried between planets along the much weaker gravitational forces that exist between planets. Another propulsion source is provided by the light given off by the sun. Photons that are continually expelled by the sun carry momentum. Just as they strike dust particles at the speed of light and blow them out of the solar system, photons could strike the dust-like Sprites and push them to the orbits of Jupiter or Saturn and beyond. Yet another way to steer the Sprites is to use a planet’s magnetic field. A charged particle that is moving will feel the tug of a magnetic field. A Sprite isn’t normally charged, but it could give itself a well-timed electrical charge to change its course of direction. If it found itself in the presence of a very large magnetic field, such as Jupiter’s which is 20,000 times as strong as Earth’s, it could literally follow in the paths of the Voyager and Pioneer satellites and get a particle accelerator-type planetary assist rather than a gravity assist.

If you picture a Sprite right now as something akin to a powerless piece of dust being capriciously pushed and pulled by the wind then you’re thinking along the lines of Peck and his team. “The idea goes back at least 15 years, and it has its origins in “smart dust” – tiny microelectromechanical sensor systems that can be used to measure light and temperature, register movement and location, and detect chemical and biological substances.” He and his graduate student, Justin Atchison, set out to see if they could explore space in new ways, and do it way cheaper. Space shuttle payloads costed about $10,000 per pound to fly. And putting a satellite in orbit costs between $50 and $400 million. At 10 grams each, 10,000 Sprites would weigh 100 kg – negligible as far as space payloads go. And Peck wants to get them down between 5 and 50 milligrams so that photons and magnetic fields could propel them that much faster.

If he succeeds in miniaturizing them further, Sprites may just be our ticket to the stars. At such small sizes the Sprites could travel at speeds fast enough to reach our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, in a few hundred years. That may not sound very fast, but our next best option at the moment – solar sails – would take at least a thousand years to get us there, more than likely longer.

The Sprites represent a paradigm shift in space exploration. Their materialization was made possible by advances in integrated circuit and superconductivity technologies. As these technologies advance further and are manufactured on the nanometer scale, spacecraft like Sprites will become faster and more powerful. It’s hard to say right now what their role in space exploration will be in the coming decades, but one can only expect that role to be as unorthodox as the Sprites themselves.

[image credits: NASA and investors.com]
image 1: Sprite
image 2: Astronaut

"Very nice, but the last taste was 0.0024% more buttery."

Robots get to have all the fun. In this case what I’m calling a robot is the electronic tongue created by Spanish scientists to taste test the country’s wine. Better than your snobby cousin, this ‘robot sommelier’ raises its electronic pinky in the air and accurately differentiates between three different types of wine.

The wine under study is Cava. Produced in the northeast corner of the country, it’s a sparkling wine that derives its name from the Catalan word for the cave-like cellars where the wine is stored during fermentation. Cava is an ideal wine with which to test the electronic tongue palette because types are categorized according to the amount of sugar added: ‘brut nature’ only has residual sugar while ‘sweet’ has at least 50 gL of sugar. ‘Extra brut,’ ‘brut,’ and ‘extra dry’ have intermediate and increasing amounts of sugar. That a single ingredient can be used to distinguish between the different types makes the task feasible.

The electronic tongue was created by the Group of Sensors and Biosensors at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Just as with a real tongue, the biologically-inspired electronic tongue is activated by binding to tastant molecules – in this case sugar molecules. It’s an array of voltammetric sensors that sends an electronic signal with a particular pattern that corresponds to the sugar concentration. Like the electrical signals passed on through neurons from the tongue to the brain, the signals generated by the electronic tongue have to be interpreted. For that the group used an artificial neural network that mathematically models biological neural network function. Just like real neuronal networks, the artificial network needs to learn to do its job correctly. The scientists, led by professor Manel del Valle, put the system through repeated training trials so it could correctly associate network patterns with sugar concentrations and type of wine. De Valle explains to the Daily Mail, “It’s a complex training system. You need to show it samples – teach it like you would a child and, once trained, it tells you what a new sample looks like or resembles. Then it can be trained for almost any situation.” At the time they published their paper the electronic tongue successfully discriminated three of the Cava wines. They plan to continue training until they can identify all types of Cava on the market.

So why the need for an electronic tongue? Their intention is not solely to threaten the job security of human sommeliers, but to improve winemaking by detecting defects during the wine elaboration process.

The UAB group aren’t the only ones using robotics to emulate human sensory function. Hossam Haick at the Israel Institute of Technology has created an electronic nose. But rather than assessing a Cava bouquet it acts as a breathalyser for detecting cancer. Because of the risk of deadly leaks aboard a space shuttle the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has developed ENose which detects the concentrations of select chemicals to which it has been trained. Both of these are great examples of bio-inspired design outperforming biology. Even though we don’t know what compounds are specifically produced by tumors, Haick’s electronic nose can still sniff the tumor out. This is due to the fact that the computer-processed chemical signature of a tumor-exposed breath will look different from the signature of a healthy individual’s breath. Human’s are incapable of detecting the tumor-specific odorants (dogs can, however). And JPL’s ENose has a dynamic range that’s far greater than that of a human nose.

Today’s humanoid robots are already equipped with some of the best available visual, auditory and tactile sensory capabilities. When electronic noses and tongues become more generalized no doubt they’ll be added to the robots’ sensory repertoire.

“Taste this. Tell me if it’s bad.”

The applications are endless for an efficient, high-throughput chemical analysis system. I know a lot of researchers who would love to never have to do another labor-intensive and inefficient mass spectrometry. I can also see a use for electronic tongues in materials manufacturing. From the detection of disease, air quality maintenance, and making a finer glass of wine, the young technology can only get better with age.

[image credits: RSC and UAB]
image 1: Nice Bouquet
image 2: Diagram

Of course, the Ustream footage of Foresight@Google is raw, meaning the following video starts well before an event actually begins. Skip to 8:30 to see emcee Sonia Arrison’s introduction to the panel discussion which follows featuring Moon Express’ Barney Pell:

Whether you’re concerned with how grant money should be allocated to best finance the rise of the next generation of nanotech, or you just want to see some cool pictures of man made molecules, the conference videos have a lot to offer you. As always, Singularity Hub eagerly awaits what the Foresight Institute has planned next. For twenty five years they’ve helped push the boundaries of what science can offer at the nanoscopic scale. I’m sure the next twenty five years will be equally amazing.

[image credit: Nanotechnology Victoria]
[video credit: Foresight Institute]
[source: Foresight Insitute]

It may be a while before nanotechnology improves human memory, but IBM's new phase-change memory could revolutionize how data is stored in computers and smart devices.

Scientists at IBM Research have created a relatively new type of memory that’s so fast and stable it may allow computers and servers to boot instantaneously, improve the overall performance of IT systems and make them more reliable. I say “relatively” because they didn’t build it from the ground up but rather made much needed improvements to what’s called phase-change memory (PCM). Just as printed circuit boards revolutionized computing, a practical PCM could usher in the next paradigm shift in data storage.

PCM is a type of non-volatile memory, meaning it doesn’t need power to store information. In this way it differs from RAM–if you shut down, whatever information is stored in RAM is lost. Right now the most ubiquitous type of non-volatile memory is Flash memory that’s found in thumb drives, digital cameras, and smart phones, among other devices. For a while now scientists have been searching for a universal, non-volatile memory technology that’s superior to Flash. The fact that their new PCM is much faster than Flash means Flash’s–and RAM’s–days might be numbered.

Phase-change memory earns its name from the special properties of its memory cells. They’re made of a versatile kind of glass that can be induced into different phases, the same way water can transition between liquid and ice. The bit data of PCM is actually stored as these different phases: one phase represents a binary 0, the other, 1. Conversely, RAM cells are stable and bits are stored in the form of electric charge: charged = 1, uncharged = 0.

Up to this point, however, those PCM cells had given scientists a headache. A major reason why PCM isn’t widely used today is the instability of its memory cells. After a time the cells would become unstable, drifting from their binary 0 or 1 phases, and cause read errors. Those ingenious IBM scientists used this drift ‘defect’ to their advantage. Rather than nail the PCM cells to one phase or the other they were able to attain two distinct phase states intermediate to 0 and 1, allowing them to store four bit combinations in all: 00, 01, 10, and 11. The multi-bit cells made for faster computation. PCM can store and retrieve data 100 times faster than Flash. To stabilize these four phase states they implement a nifty new “modulating coding technique.” Their demonstration last month was the first time PCM had been shown to reliably store multiple data bits over an extended period of time. To date, the chip has retained its data for five and a half months.

Revolutionary technology–now that's how you celebrate a centennial!

IBM has a long history of pioneering computer memory technologies. Invented by IBM’s Dr. Robert Dennard back in 1966, DRAM remain the world’s most ubiquitous memory today, loaded into our PCs, notebooks, and game consoles. As IBM celebrates its 100th birthday it’s poetic that they stand poised once again to lead a computer revolution. As they proudly write in their report: “With a combination of speed, endurance, non-volatility and density, PCM can enable a paradigm shift for enterprise IT and storage systems within the next five years.” Obviously PCM is ideal to replace flash memory in our thumb drives and our smart phones, as well as large scale enterprise storage systems used by businesses. What makes PCM’s timing all the more serendipitous is the increased use of cloud computing. “As organizations and consumers increasingly embrace cloud-computing models and services, whereby most of the data is stored and processed in the cloud, ever more powerful and efficient, yet affordable storage technologies are needed,” says Dr. Haris Pozidis, Manager of Memory and Probe Technologies at IBM Research, Zurich. “By demonstrating a multi-bit phase-change memory technology which achieves for the first time reliability levels akin to those required for enterprise applications, we made a big step towards enabling practical memory devices based on multi-bit PCM.”

And we can expect more great innovations from IBM. This past May they opened their Binnig and Rohrer Nanotechnology Center at the IBM Research–Zurich campus. The center was established with ETH Zurich, IBM’s partner for ten years. Both applied and basic science will be pursued to create new nanoscale devices as well as push scientific understanding of nanoscale physics. The center includes a “cleanroom” in which to build their nanodevices as well as “noise-free labs” that shield the equipment from surrounding electrical disturbances.

Along with genetics and robotics, nanotechnology is one of the three technological revolutions Kurzweil expects to usher in the beginning of the Singularity. With top-notch scientists, equipment, and funding that IBM and ETH Zurich bring to the table we’re sure to see more paradigm-shifting technologies such as multi-bit PCM, bringing the Singularity that much closer.

[image credits: They Might Be Timelords and Digg Hut Club]
image 1: Emmitt Brown
image 2: Jappinistic

The world's first synthetic trachea. The pink coloration is due to stem cells that have differentiated to tracheal tissue.

Regenerative medicine history was made on June 9th at Stockholm’s Karolinska University Hospital when doctors successfully gave Andemariam Beyene a synthetic trachea. The 36-year old African native, who is working towards a PhD in geology in Iceland, was diagnosed in 2008 with tracheal cancer. Despite treating it aggressively with radiation and chemotherapy the tumor continued to grow. When the tumor had grown to the size of a golfball and began to occlude Beyene’s breathing. It became clear that different measures needed to be taken or he would die. Trachea replacement was the treatment of choice but they didn’t have a donor and time was running out.

So the doctors decided to make a new trachea from scratch.

The surgery brought together experts from three continents. Dr. Paolo Macchiarini at Karolinska University Hospital, who led the surgery, collaborated with scientists in the UK to engineer a nanocomposite trachea scaffold. With measurements acquired through 3D scans the scaffold was molded to the exact dimensions of Beyene’s trachea. Like a real trachea it was a kind of flexible tube segmented with stiff rings. After being shipped to Sweden, the scaffold was placed in a bioreactor provided by Harvard Bioscience, along with stem cells extracted from Beyene’s bone marrow. Chemicals inside the bioreactor induced the stem cells to differentiate into trachea tissue and they grew into the nanocomposite mold which was porous like a sponge. Amazingly, the synthetic trachea was ready to implant in just two days. “Stem cells from the own patient were growing inside and outside,” Macchiarini told CNN. “The structure was becoming a living structure.” The operation lasted 12 hours, during which Dr. Macchiarini removed the tumor and the diseased section of the trachea and replaced it with its living duplicate.

Harvard Bioscience's "InBreath" bioreactor needed only two days to turn a nanoparticle composite into a trachea.

A major risk with trachea transplants–or, for that matter, transplants of any organ–is that the donor organ will be rejected by the recipient’s immune system. Up until now trachea scaffolds have been provided by organ donors. They’re cut to size and the outer layers of cells are washed off. To prevent rejection from the host the scaffolds are coated with stem cells from the recipient. The advantages of a purely synthetic trachea are two-fold: you don’t need to wait for a donor and the implant is a perfect fit. And the fact that it takes only two days before it’s ready for implantation means more patients can be treated earlier and thus have a greater chance to be cured. Karolinska University Hospital also acknowledged that the treatment could greatly benefit children for whom donor tracheas are much less available compared to adults.

Bioengineered trachea transplants have come a long way in a short period of time. It was only 2008 when Dr. Macchiarini himself became the first to implant a trachea covered with the recipient’s own stem cells. This past January he led a heroic surgery to restore the voice box of a woman from California who’d been incapable of speaking for more than a decade. Beyene’s transplant is only the surgeon’s 11th trachea transplant overall.

This is the fourth time in a year and a half that we’ve reported on Dr. Macchiarini’s remarkable work. It’s indicative of a field and its pioneer moving rapidly forward. It’s also a superb example of multi-disciplinary collaboration. In comments to BBC, Dr. Macchiarini referred to nanotechnology as a “new branch of regenerative medicine.” He went on to suggest that the same approach could be used to repair or replace other organs.

In fact, the entire field of regenerative medicine seems to be moving rapidly. Last year a “magic powder” was used to grow back fingertips. Just months ago the same substance was used to grow back a Marine’s thigh muscle. And it seems like every time we turn around there’s another breakthrough in stem cell research. It’s one of the most exciting pursuits in science today.

It’s been over a month now since Beyene received his new trachea. He’s still in the hospital and he’s still pretty weak. But he’s looking forward to finishing his studies and rejoining his family back in Eritrea. “I was very scared, very scared about the operation,” he told BBC. “But it was live or die.”

An exciting pursuit indeed, made even more so by the people it helps.

[image credits: Harvard Bioscience]
image1: Trachea
image2: Bioreactor

Eye Robot

Robots have been trying to invade our bodies for years. Now they’ve found a way to get in our eyes and–if we’re lucky–we won’t even know about it.

Bradley Nelson is a Professor of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH-Zürich and is the founder of the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems where he leads the Multi-Scale Robotics Lab. Dr. Nelson and his team have created a robot that, once injected into the eye, can be moved forwards, backwards, and turned in place–all by remote control. If they can shrink their micrometer-scale robot enough to fit into a 23 gauge needle it could be injected into the eye with little or no anesthetic.

The MagMite, as it’s called, is driven by magnetic propulsion. At the center of 8 overlapping magnetic fields (and their magnets) the MagMite’s movements are the net result of changes in the strengths of the magnetic fields. It has a mass of 30-50 µg and, measuring 300 µm x 300 µm x 70 µm, the microbot (a nanobot, of course, would have dimensions in the hundreds of nanometers) is comparable in size to the blood vessels in the human retina having diameters of approximately 150 µm. This is important as Dr. Nelson hopes MagMite will one day be used to treat retinal vein occlusion, a common cause of glaucoma or macular edema. The spatial resolution afforded by the MagMite would allow physicians to deliver drugs in a precise, site-specific manner. People with age-related macular degeneration, the most common cause of blindness among older people, would also benefit. Age-related macular degeneration is often treated with injections directly into the eye. But this leads to rapid diffusion of the drug and the need for regular injections. MagMite could remain in the eye for months, dispensing the drug in a time-release fashion.

So far it’s only been tested in synthetic eyes or eyes dissected from animals (the demonstration in the clip below is in a pig eye). Plans are in the works for human trials. Any takers? Try not to look at the needle headed right for your eye. Remember, it probably won’t hurt.

The magnetic control system developed by Dr. Nelson’s group is a major improvement over robotic propulsions systems of the past. A common strategy for designing medical robots has been to give it a kind of motor with the idea of enabling them to swim their way to targets in the body such as a tumor where they could deliver local chemotherapy. As we’ve pointed out before these mechanical approaches have several drawbacks including tissue damage caused by moving parts and the possibility of the motor getting snagged. These robots would also require nano-sized batteries which simply don’t exist yet. The ideal situation would be a robot that doesn’t require internal propulsion or power. That’s what Dr. Nelson has in his MagMites. We can conceive of letting them course through the bloodstream, passively going with the flow, until they near their target where the magnets could then be turned on and guide it the rest of the way.

The MagMite is a major achievement, but there are some additional major advances that need to be developed before anything like the scenario I described above becomes a reality. For one, the robot has to be seen. Dr. Nelson’s group chose to develop their MagMite in the eye because they can watch it from the outside-in (I’m certain it was experimental feasibility rather than a desire to treat eye conditions that drove their test target–but I digress). But even the eye presented difficulties. The various types of tissues that make up the eye scatter light differently. It was a major challenge for the team to tweak the optics so they could properly monitor the MagMite’s movements. Good luck trying to reach that lung tumor. For that to happen, the MagMite technology will probably have to be merged with that of carbon nanotube transmitters that would transmit the robot’s precise location. Again, this technology is a ways off yet.

Dr. Bradley Nelson's remotely-controlled MagMite may pave the way to future nanotechnology-based medicine.

But Dr. Nelson’s proof of principle is indeed a beautiful display of technological finesse. To manipulate 8 magnetic fields with such a soft touch as to precisely control a micrometer-sized robot is mastery. The MagMite’s speed tops out at 12.5 mm/s or 42 times the robot’s body length per second. At such speeds the robot can produce enough force to push objects of comparable size. It’s easy to get excited about the prospects of using MagMites for noninvasive surgery, at least in the eye where small changes in structure lead to big changes in vision. And the magnetic power required to move it is 2 mT, about 50 times the average magnetic field of the Earth and a thousand times less power than a typical MRI magnet.

At this point, the MagMite is really just a small magnet, not much of a robot at all. But that’ll change soon when Dr. Nelson enables it with drug delivery capabilities. At hundreds of microns the MagMite is not the ideal vehicle for drug delivery. Nanobots, with dimensions in the hundreds of nanometers, would be able to go where MagMite cannot (nanoparticles small enough to pass through cell membranes are already being created in labs). The dream application, of course, is to unleash trillions of robots into the body that would deliver drugs to specific sites, including specific organelles inside of cells. And yes, again, this technology is quite a ways off. But with Dr. Nelson’s demonstration, it was brought that much closer.

[image credits: NewScientist, Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems]
[video credit: NewScientist via youtube]

image: Bradley Nelson
video: NewScientist

This tiny implant is only 8mm wide, but it contains enough nanotechnology to detect heart damage that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Heart attacks and cancer account for nearly half of all deaths in the United States – they’re the two biggest killers walking the streets, but MIT isn’t afraid. Michael Cima and his team developed an implantable sensor that uses antibodies attached to nanoparticles to detect cancer related biomarkers. In 2009 Cima showed that he could implant these devices into human tumors in mice and then ‘read’ the cancer growth using MRI. No biopsies need. Over the past few years, Cima and his team have adapted their work to create a very similar device that measures biomarkers related to heart damage. This month they published work in Nature that demonstrated how their implant could detect heart attacks in mice. Watch Cima discuss some of the potential of this technology in the video below. While these implants aren’t ready for the clinic (Cima thinks 5 years for some applications) they are just too cool to ignore. Once fully realized, implants like these could be inserted into cells via a needle and read with a hand held scanner. Heart attacks, cancer…those bastards would never have the chance to sneak up on you again.

Biopsies, the standard method for testing clumps of cells for cancer, is an invasive procedure. Mild heart attacks can go unnoticed or ignored, but still leave behind serious damage that could later lead to death. What is needed in both cases is a method of safely and reliably monitoring the body, preferably from the inside where signals are stronger. That’s why the MIT implants are so ingenious. They can detect small changes in cells and relate that information to a medical professional without having to be removed. Developed by Cima and his team, graduate student Christophoros Vassiliou was able to get the devices small enough to fit inside a biopsy needle. You can inject them into the tissue you want to monitor. Once there, they not only can warn you of dangerous changes, they can help you directly control the treatment of patients so that their therapy matches their current needs. Cima describes this further in the following video:

While they have a different shape, and monitor for vastly different biomarkers, the two sensors share a common technique. Each implant is filled with magnetic nanoparticles (iron-oxide) that are bonded to antibodies. Those antibodies will respond to different biomarkers around them and cause the nanoparticles to clump together. This changes the magnetic properties of the implant. When you scan the body with MRI, a change in the device’s magnetic response alerts you to the presence of the biomarkers you were looking for.

Many cancers produce characteristically high levels of certain hormones that can be monitored. In a 2009 article in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, Cima and his team found that implants in cancerous tumors showed a signal that was about 20% stronger than in control cases. The bigger the signal, the more cancer cells you’re likely to have in the region.

MRI images after heart attack (top) and control (bottom). The disk shaped implant showed much greater magnetic response (red) in the mouse that suffered a heart attack due to its detection of key biomarkers released after heart cells were damaged.

In the more recent 2011 article in Nature, the MIT team (along with associates at Harvard Medical and Mass General Hospital) were looking for three proteins heart cells release when they are damaged. Implants inside mice were used to detect these biomarkers up to 72 hours after a heart attack was induced. Sure enough, the stronger the signal seen in the MRI, the more damage caused. Not only that, but the signal was cumulative. These implants could help us see not just how cells are being damaged now, but how much they’ve been damaged recently – a very necessary distinction if you want to detect patients who have injured hearts but who may not be actively showing signs of distress.

This work is very exciting, but still very early in development. As we’ve said many times before, successes with mice experiments and successes with human experiments can be miles apart. The 5mm cylindrical cancer implant and the 8mm heart monitoring disk both need more time to be perfected. The antibodies used to detect biomarkers have a limited lifetime in the body. Currently an implant probably wouldn’t last much longer than two months. Also, while MRI is non-invasive, it’s also not portable. Cima and his colleagues are working on upgrading the implants so that they can be read by handheld magnetic instruments.

If MIT continues to see good results with these early prototypes, there’s a good chance we’ll see similar devices in clinical trials in the near future. Cima thinks that such experiments could be as little as five years away. The lowest hanging fruit are implants that could monitor for pH levels – acidity is often a hallmark of cancer cells. After that, we may see versions that can accurately detect hormone levels and drug responses.

Cancer and heart attacks may be vicious killers, but they’re also really dumb. They leave traces of their presence we can watch for, and they often rely upon a patient’s ignorance to succeed. We need to be smarter than these bullies, and to know more about what they are up to. The implants out of the Cima Lab are a great solution and they’re not alone. We’ve seen handheld testing devices and lab-on-chip technology that will likewise help us track cancer in our cells and damage in our hearts. Along with a more general trend towards continuous body monitoring, these systems will help us stay vigilant against the most prevalent causes of death. One day we’ll all have these technologies inside us, implanted well ahead of time so that we’ll know the second something goes wrong. Information well used is the best weapon in medicine, and with developments like the ones we’ve seen from MIT, we’ll soon have more than enough to help keep us alive for a very long time.

[image credit: Michael Cima/MIT via New Scientist]
[video credit: MIT TechTV]
[sources: Ling et al Nature 2011, Daniel et al Biosensors and Bioelectronics 2009, MIT Media Relations]

A labrador retriever was trained to detect cancer in patients just by smelling their breath.

Maybe you’ve heard that line about dogs being able to tell whether or not someone has cancer just by smelling their breath. And maybe you think it’s baloney, kind of like eating chocolate will kill a dog, or cats can tell when a person is going to die?

Wrong. Wrong. Um, I have no idea.

It may surprise you to know that the ability of dogs to smell cancer is well documented. A 1989 report marked the first medical record of what had been known anecdotally in communities around the world for hundreds of years. Subsequent studies have quantified just how skilled dogs are at detecting different cancers including lung, breast, ovarian, and bladder cancers, and skin melanoma. Incredibly, they can do this just by smelling the patient’s breath.

The top three killer cancers worldwide are lung, stomach, and liver cancers. Number four is colorectal cancer (1.2 million new cases in 2008). A recent study published in the journal Gut, adds colorectal cancer (CRC) to the list of cancers that our canine friends can sniff out. Kyushu University’s Yoshihiko Maehara and colleagues began by training a Labrador retriever (named Marine) in scent detection of cancer by exposing it to the breaths of healthy people without cancer and patients with confirmed colorectal cancer. They also trained Marine with watery stool samples to compare her performance to the fecal occult test, a common CRC screen. Thirty-three patients and 132 healthy controls were tested. For each trial Marine sniffed five samples, four from healthy controls and one from a patient. She was taught to lie down on the floor upon positive identification of a patient. Marine’s accuracy was astounding. Of the patients conventionally diagnosed by colonoscopy she correctly identified 91 percent based on the smell of their breaths—making the distinction between cancerous and benign polyps—and she was correct in excluding 99 percent of the healthy samples. When she was presented with the water stool samples her accuracy increased to 97 percent. Compare that to a 70 percent accuracy of fecal occult tests. What’s more, Marine was better at detecting early-stage cancers.

I told you it was astounding.

The potential here is obvious. Every dog park in the world is populated by highly-accurate, non-invasive cancer screens. Patients with familial adenomatous polyposos or Lynch syndrome—different forms of CRC—are subject to frequent colonoscopy to minimize the morbidity and mortality associated with CRC. Imagine if they had only to blow into a bag.

So why not bring Marine and her friends into the clinic?

“Come right in Mr. Jones. Put on this robe and have a seat on the table next to Fido.”

In fact, some people are pushing to get dogs into the clinic. But there’s resistance to that, and it’s understandable. The oft cited argument against this was in fact mentioned in the current study: “It may be difficult to introduce canine scent judgement into clinical practice owing to the expense and time required for the dog trainer and for dog education.”

I don’t buy that. Recent research shows that among the causes of death in the world cancer has the most devastating impact on economy. I admit I haven’t crunched the numbers to determine just how much a dog would cost a clinic—but I’m still not buying it.

I suspect it’s something else. I suspect it comes down to confidence in Fido, despite what the data says they can do. Usually when a person is diagnosed with cancer he’s looking at a mass in an MRI scan or results from a biopsy. This is hard, tangible evidence with a good track record. How many of us would immediately commit to the frightful regimen of chemotherapy and surgery that follows a cancer diagnosis because a dog lay down on the floor? What if the dog was too good at early detection and follow-up verification showed negative? What do you do then? What would you do?

The much more accepted approach is to bring dogs not to the clinic, but to the lab. The goal here is to identify the compounds in a person’s breath that signals to the dog cancer. But that’s a really, really tough task.

We all know that a dog’s sense of smell is far better than that of a human. A dog can detect odor molecules at concentrations as low as one part per trillion while the limits of human detection top out at about one part in several billion. Obviously there’s something unique about the odor of cancers otherwise the dogs wouldn’t be able to distinguish diseased breath from normal breath. Numbered among the normal odorants in the patient’s breath is (are) molecule(s) produced solely by the tumor, and the fact that they’re detectable in the breath means they’re systemic.

A cell becomes cancerous when the replication machinery malfunctions and the cell proliferates out of control, resulting in a tumor. This process involves gene and/or protein changes that may result in peroxidation of lipids that make up the cellular membranes. These peroxidized lipids then generate what are called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). Dogs, as well as other animals, are currently used in research to screen for tumor-specific VOCs in the hopes of identifying them. If we can identify them, then we could build chemical sensors to detect them. But it’s estimated that a single breath contains hundreds of thousands of compounds. To identify them all and rule out those not produced by the tumor is a daunting task to say the least.

But maybe we don’t have to.

Dr. Hossam Haick of Israel Institute of Technology invented an "electronic nose" able to detect cancer in the breaths of patients. He was named one of the "Ten Most Promising Young Israeli Scientists" in 2010.

Gene arrays that compare gene expression patterns between healthy and diseased cells often show differences in tens or hundreds of different genes. From a diagnostic standpoint, that’s enough. If, instead of trying to identify the VOCs generated by tumors, what if we simply compared VOC concentrations in healthy individuals with those of cancer patients. If the VOC profiles between the two groups are sufficiently different it would make for a very effective screen.

Hossam Haick at the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute, Israel Institute of Technology, has built such a screen. Described in a study last August, Dr. Haick’s group developed a kind of “electronic nose” that can “smell” VOCs. The nose is actually a nanosensor array of organically functionalized gold particles that can detect trace amounts of VOCs. Single, exhaled breaths of patients with lung, colon, breast, and prostate cancer were analyzed with the array and compared with the breaths of people without cancer. The results showed a distinct difference in the VOC profile of cancer patients compared to the cancer-free group. The differences were then confirmed with gas chromatography linked to mass spectrometry, technology commonly used to quantify chemical concentrations.

This is an incredible example of technology imitating biology and I’m extremely eager to see how the electronic nose is put to use. If we do find ourselves one day soon, blowing into a bag as a normal part of our checkup, we should remember to thank our canine friends when we get home. Were it not for dogs like Marine pointing the way, researchers like Haick might not have known to look in the first place. And while the electronic nose looks promising, it is as yet still unproven in the clinic. That leaves us with only our dogs to sniff out cancer. And thus it is unfortunate that their use in cancer detection is not more widespread as a tool that could at least assist, if not replace current diagnostic tools.

[image credit: Peter Wadsworth via WikiCommons]

[image credit: Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at the Technion -- Israel Institute of Technology]

Image 1: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Labrador_Retriever_black_portrait_Flickr.jpg

Image 2: http://rbni.technion.ac.il/.upload/hossam35.JPG

Displax's thin polymer film can be applied onto any nonconductive surface to create a touchscreen.

Portuguese engineers have taken us one step closer to fusing the digital and physical worlds. Displax, a fledgling tech company in Braga, has developed a device that can read the electrical disturbances in a thin transparent polymer film embedded with nanowires. Any pressure on the film (from a finger, or even from wind) can be detected and understood as a command. Apply the Displax Multitouch Technology (DMT) to any noncoductive surface and you’ve got an instant multitouch interface. According to their press kit, the DMT can interpret up to 16 fingers on a 50 inch screen. The film system can work on any surface from ~7 inches (18cm) to ~10 feet (3m). With drivers for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, the DMT should be able to work with most conventional computers. Which means that all those non-touch LCD screens out there could be easily updated to be touch capable. With projectors every glass window, every wooden bench, every plastic surface could be used as an I/O device. The possibilities are awesome. Displax put its technology on display in several case studies. We have video of a concept store and a museum for you to enjoy below. Behold the power of film.

Touch surfaces are emerging as a dominant contender for the next human-computer interface. Many smart phones are now touch capable (more’s the pity for my meaty fingertips) and the iPad is likely to popularize the same concept for tablet computers (though Apple isn’t the first to merge those technologies). We’ve also seen touchscreens make impressive splashes in novel settings like the Ring Wall in Germany and the Hard Rock Cafe in Las Vegas. These things are practically everywhere. Now, with Displax, that may take on a literal truth. Most of the surfaces around us are nonconductive and less than 3m in size. The DMT could go on almost everything. What’s the world going to be like when anything we touch could interpret our actions as commands?

The Displax Multitouch Technology has some impressive specs. It’s completely transparent (to the naked eye), a 50 inch screen with processor weights just 300 grams, isn’t affected by lighting conditions, and it’s sensitive enough to detect you blowing on it. Curved surfaces are ok, and it works indoors and outdoors. 16 fingers on a single 50 inch surfaces is probably more than enough for most applications, but Displax is hoping to increase that limit later. The DMT will start shipping in July 2010 with prices to be announced later. It will come with a software package that includes applications for photos, videos, and Google Maps. All in all, it’s a tidy little package.

We've seen these types of systems a thousand times before, but the crayon wall at the Ecomuseum of Barroso is still my favorite application from the videos.

But it’s only half complete. Displax provides the touch interfaces, but they don’t provide the display. Maybe that’s a quibble, but it’s going to affect how this technology is applied. Put the film on a screen and it becomes a touchscreen, with flashing icons and things to indicate your commands are being interpreted. The same holds true for a surface with an image projected onto it. However, for a non-screen surface there’s just input, no output. That’s ok for some applications (like turning your whole wall into simple controls for a radio), but what we really need is a thin transparent film that can also display images. Combined with the DMT a thin film display would turn any surface into a full-fledged touchscreen. Perhaps if the multitouch half of the concept works well, someone will develop the display half (we’ve already seen a few technologies that are headed in that direction).

Of course, we have no idea how well the concept will catch on until it actually hits the market. Certainly interactive window displays (as seen in the video) and wall controls are cool, but they may not find a customer base, especially if they are expensive. I wonder if LCD screen manufacturers will be willing to incorporate DMT into their existing models as a quick bootstrap way of turning every computer monitor into a touchscreen. That could be a really cool application that catches on very quickly.

I’m very curious about the embedded nanowires in the polymer film. Displax doesn’t manufacture this film itself (it has a partner for that) just the processing unit. Could the same technology that turns pressure into electrical disturbances generate electrical current? Could nanowires in polymers serve as ultrathin computer circuits? There are likely to be many applications for this kind of technology outside of touchscreens.

LCD TV + Displax = Touchscreen? Could be that simple.

For now, though, I’m just impressed with the wide range of places we might see these screens appear. It’s too soon to know if they’ll catch on, but they could turn every shop window into an interactive catalog for the goods inside. Your chair could know if you’re sitting on it, and could play relaxing music if your seat-signature seems too tense. Any table top could become a keyboard, or a piano, or a drum kit. The possibilities are endless. It’s likely to take years to develop the software for such applications, but the DMT hardware seems to be available now. If Displax, or some other cheap touchscreen technology, catches on, it will go a long ways towards “waking up” our physical world so that it looks for and responds to our input. I wonder what we’ll tell it to do?

[image/video/source credit: Displax]

According to healthbase, hynopsis may be evil. Definitely a CON.

Surf the Internet these days and you’re likely to drown in a sea of information. New “better than search” engines like Bing, and Wolfram Alpha hope to provide users not just with content, but with the power to use that content to reliably answer questions and make decisions. Netbase, a Silicon Valley based startup is vying to be the new dominant aggregate information site. Their code is supposedly able to review millions of documents and actually understand what it is reading. To prove their point, Netbase established healthBase, a medical search engine that will scour the web to address your medical inquiries. As many users soon came to find out, however, healthBase is definitely still in beta. Check out the demonstration video and some of the screen shots to see some fun examples of how Netbase’s technology produces powerful and humorous results.

Even if healthBase is experiencing its birth pangs, the concept behind it is promising. There’s simply too much content on the web for anyone to understand on their own. Sifting through that content is a painstaking process rife with pitfalls. Searching for a recipe for lady finger cookies can get you a cookbook, a sex toy shop, a discussion of okra, or the homepage of a rock band. That’s fine if you’re just out to explore the Internet, but it can be horribly frustrating if you need an answer quickly about topics related to your health. Aggregating and filtering information is going to be a necessary tool as we start to explore the next generation of the web.

While the code behind healthBase is proprietary, Netbase does explain that it works as a semantics engine. Diagramming sentences, evaluating parts of speech, and all the wonderful things you’ve forgotten from your elementary grammar lessons help healthBase look through WebMD, Wikipedia, Mayo Clinic, Health.com, and millions of other medical websites. That information is then extracted and listed. Search tabs allow you to specify if you are looking for the treatment, cause, or complications of a condition. They also allow you to explore some of the pros and cons of said treatments. When it works well, it is an amazingly quick way to access medical information and trace it back to its source to learn more.

When healthBase fails though…well, it fails pretty big. Opening day saw the unfortunate treatment of the condition Jews using the applications of alcohol and salts. Yeah, you’re going to want to avoid racism in your aggregate search engine. While Netbase was quick to fix the errors that lead to that particular mistake, others are still easily found. Alcohol is a treatment for poverty. Cancer is a cause of love. A con of hypnosis is that it’s evil. You learn all sorts of wacky things on the interwebs.

The medical causes for love. Good to know. Thanks healthBase!

Unlike other health care websites, such as FatSecret, healthBase is not really designed to provide verified and accurate information. The whole purpose of healthBase is to demonstrate Netbase’s technology. In that capacity, the website is less than impressive because of its unreliability. Search for myopia and you get amazingly helpful information, search for AIDS and you run the risk that the semantics code doesn’t distinguish between the disease and the people who assist you in an office.

As TechCrunch covered in a recent article, Netbase is playing catch up and reminding users that the healthBase website isn’t a “ready for prime-time consumer search engine.” Still, if Netbase really wanted to demonstrate the power of its technology, shouldn’t they have waited to launch until they were ready? And why work out the bugs in a field like medicine, where reliability and trust are at the very top of the list of requirements?

Aggregate information sites are a trend that is likely to continue. The same is true for semantics search engines. Whether healthBase, or some other demo from Netbase, becomes successful, you can bet that we’re all going to be looking for ways to mediate and prioritize the data we find on the Internet. The healthBase glitches demonstrate that automated approaches may take a while to get to the same level as professionally reviewed journals, or even wikis. Which is fine, I can be suspicious of hypnosis all on my own.

The initials for Stanford University are written in electron waves on a piece of copper and projected into a tiny hologram.

“Stanford researchers have reclaimed bragging rights for creating the world’s smallest writing, a distinction the University first gained in 1985 and lost in 1990.”

Thus begins an article from Stanford that chronicles the history of nanoscale (atomic and now subatomic) sized writing.   Nanoscale writing could have many uses for labeling objects large and small with identifying information (serial numbers, ownership rights, tracking information, etc.), but it is also a barometer of man’s ability to harness the world at the nanoscale.  For the full dirt, read the article.  Otherwise, see below for summary:

So how small is the writing recently created at Stanford?  “The letters in the words are assembled from subatomic sized bits as small as 0.3 nanometers, or roughly one third of a billionth of a meter.”

The article from Stanford highlights three major milestones in the history of nanoscale writing:

1. In 1985, Stanford grad student Tom Newman used electron beam lithography to engrave the opening page of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities in such small print that it could be read only with an electron microscope.
2. In 1990 IBM researchers famously spelled out the letters IBM by arranging 35 individual xenon atoms.  Singularity Hub reported on this here
3. Now, in a paper published online Sunday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, the Stanford researchers describe how they have created letters 40 times smaller than Newman’s effort and more than four times smaller than the IBM initials.

The new small writing technique from Stanford, called Electronic Quantum Holography, actually creates a hologram that can be read with a scanning tunneling microscope.  Each letter, or image, is stored and viewed at a particular electron wavelength.  The researchers read them separately, like stacked pages of a book.

The new microscope uses a technique called magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) to achieve 100 million times the resolution of standard MRI.  Using this new device researchers were able to build a 3D image of the tobacco mosaic virus.  Although the current results are impressive, the researchers are confident that they can make the microscope a further 10 times more powerful in the coming years, allowing for resolution of 1 nanometer or less.

This microscope from IBM is an incredible scientific achievement that is poised to accelerate the ongoing revolution in the fields of biological research, new medical treatments, and nanotechnology.   3-Dimensional shape is crucial to the proper function of proteins, enzymes, and other molecules in the human body and thus several human diseases result from their malformation.  3-Dimensional shape is equally important in the manufacture and function of nanomachines and nanomaterials where atoms and molecules must be arranged in very specific locations. 

Below is a video of the microscope released by IBM, followed by further analysis:

Although this breakthrough is substantial, we should keep in mind that several other techniques (many that also came from IBM in fact) are available for viewing objects at the nanoscale.  X-ray Crystallography and cryo electron microscopes have long given us the ability to determine molecular structure, atomic distance, and even “view” individual atoms.  

What is important about this new microscope from IBM is that it will be able to step in where the other techniques have failed.  X-ray crystallography requires the structure being analyzed to be crystallized for analysis, a requirement that is not achievable for entire subclasses of proteins and other nano sized structures.  Cryo electron microscopy has its own limitations, most notably that the electron beam can destroy the specimen under examination.  This new MRFM microscope from IBM will overcome these problems as well as add more flexibility and options to complement the other techniques.

Below are some cool pics with descriptions from IBM media:

Animation How an MRFM works — The magnetic resonance force microscope (MRFM) uses an ultrathin silicon cantilever (yellow) with a nanometer size magnetic tip (blue) to detect the magnetic signal from an individual electron buried below the surface of the sample. Because the electron has a quantum mechanical property called “spin,” it acts like a tiny bar magnet and can either attract or repel the magnetic tip. The interaction between the spin and the tip is localized to the bowl-shaped region in the sample called the “resonant slice,” which moves as the cantilever vibrates. With the aid of a high-frequency magnetic field generated by a coil (right, background), the orientation of the electron (green arrow) flips as the resonant slice passes through. The magnetic force between the electron and magnetic tip alternates between attraction and repulsion every time the electron flips its orientation, causing the cantilever frequency to change slightly. A laser beam (left) is used to measure precisely the variations in cantilever vibration frequency.

IBM Almaden’s MRFM research team — Raffi Budakian, John Mamin and Dan Rugar (left to right) are three of the four members of the IBM Research team who developed and used this Magnetic Resonance Force Microscope to detect the magnetic signal from a single electron. Benjamin Chui is not shown.

The end of the cantilever arm, with virus particles attached.