Tentacle Robots For Use in Space Explorations

Tentacle Robots For Use in Space Explorations

Space robots are about to get a whole lot sleeker and slinkier.

Researchers are developing new types of robotic systems inspired by elephant trunks, octopus arms and giraffe tongues. These flexible, maneuverable "tentacle robots" could have a variety of space applications, from inspecting hard-to-reach gear on the International Space Station to

exploring crevices on Mars, scientists say.

"Those are all things that would be difficult for a conventional robot to do," roboticist Ian Walker of Clemson University said in April during a presentation with NASA's Future In-Space Operations working group.

The conventional robots to which Walker refers are mainstays of assembly lines around the world. They tend to be anthropomorphic, often modeled after the human arm, and are built to do one thing and do it well, over and over again.

These machines perform precision tasks in highly structured environments, with limited flexibility and adaptability, Walker said.

"What we want to do is something rather different than that," he said. The goal is to develop "something that can adapt its shape more completely down its structure, and to be able to adapt to environments you haven't seen before. So it's the non-factory scenario, in many ways."

Such snakelike robots could aid spaceflight and exploration,

Walker said. For example, astronauts could send them into rock cracks on the moon, Mars and other alien worlds, gathering data about intriguing environments that would otherwise be inaccessible or dangerous to explore. And relatively stout tentacle robots could help rovers anchor themselves when

need be.

"You could reach it out into the environment and grab things,

and basically use it as a tunable hook for stability," Walker

said. "In some ways, this is inspired by various monkeys ,"

which use their tails for the same purpose, he added.

Lithe, flexible robots could also check the outside of the

International Space Station for damage caused by

micrometeoroid strikes, Walker said. They could serve as

useful general-purpose tools aboard the orbiting lab as well,

wielded by astronauts or by NASA's humanoid robot

Robonaut 2 , which was designed to help human crew

members perform menial tasks.

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Sound of an Atom

Sound of an Atom

Scientists have figured out how to interact with an artificial
atom using sound. While other teams have connected tiny membranes or strings to atoms, this is the first time they've connected a sound wave to an atom.

The experiment may seem unusual, but the result could lead to the long-term goal of building quantum computers that can harness the power of sound to make electrical circuits and faster data processors.

The team started by first making an artificial atom. Next, they charged it with energy. Normally, atoms release energy in the form of light, called a photon. However, in this experiment, the atom was designed to both emit and absorb energy in the form of sound, called a phonon.

The emitted sound was, in theory, a stream of quantum particles, the weakest whisper physically possible. In fact, it was about the same frequency of radio waves of a mobile
phone or wireless network.

The experiments were done at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology while Gustafsson was a post-doc there. The results are published online today in the journal
Science Express.

In this experiment, the artificial atom becomes a Superconducting circuit that can be used as a qubit, which is
the name for the building block of a quantum computer.

Since sound moves 100,000 times more slowly than light, scientists have more time to control sound particles, or phonons, while they travel. The
researchers cooled their experiments to near absolute zero, or 20 millikelvin, to make sure any heat energy would not disturb the atom.

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Stem Cell Transplant, A New Hope For Blind

Stem Cell Transplant, A New Hope For Blind

Injecting stem cells into the eyes of people who are blind may work as a way to restore their vision, a small new study suggests.

In the study, researchers coaxed stem cells into developing into cells called retinal pigment epithelium cells, which the scientists transplanted into one eye of each of 18 patients.

After the transplants, the researchers tested the patients' eyesight. Visual acuity improved in 10 of the patients' eyes, remained about the same in another seven patients and got worse in one patient's eye. The participants experienced no improvement in their untreated eyes.

The results show that human embryonic stem cells can slow or reverse the vision loss in people with degenerative eye diseases, the researchers said. In addition, the stem cells caused no medical problems for the patients up to three years after transplant, according to the study published in the journal The Lancet.

Stem cells, with their ability to develop into many different types of tissue, have long been touted for their promise in regenerative medicine, yet treatments have been slow to develop.

The new findings"mark an exciting step towards using [human embryonic] stem cells as a safe source of cells for the treatment of various medical disorders requiring tissue repair or replacement," study co-author Dr. Steven Schwartz, an ophthalmologist at the Jules Stein Eye Institute in Los Angeles, said in a statement. Stem cell treatments have developed slowly in part due to concerns that the cells could be rejected by the immune system or grow into tumors. But the eyes do not produce a strong immune response, so they're a good target for these treatments, the researchers said.

Half of the patients in the study suffered from dry, atrophic age-related macular degeneration, which is the leading cause of blindness in adults in the developed world. The other half had Stargardt's macular dystrophy, the leading cause of blindness in young adults in the developed world. Both diseases affect the retina, the light-sensitive tissue in the back of the eye, causing progressive vision loss. No treatments exist for either disease.

The researchers transplanted the cells in doses of 50,000; 100,000; or 150,000 cells into the space beneath the retina, in the eye with worse vision. The doctors then administered drugs to suppress any immune response to the foreign cells.The only adverse effects of the procedure came from the eye surgery itself and the immunosuppressant drugs, the researchers said.

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I phone 6 with new health coach

I phone 6 with new health coach

With the launch of Apple's new iPhone 6 and the announcement of the forthcoming Apple Watch, the company signaled its intention to play a major role in how we manage our health. Apple has presented the watch as a fancy fitness tracker and has plugged the iPhone's Health app, which serves as a dashboard for all the user's health and fitness data. The company also created the HealthKit API to allow developers to build apps that share data with the phone's health app.

But all the buzz hasn't answered the real questions: What will consumers do with all that data? What will iPhone-enabled health care look like?

It might look a lot like the forthcoming app RevUp, from the San Diego startup MD Revolution. The company's founder, cardiologist Samir Damani, told Spectrum that the app has the potential to really change people's behavior because it combines the data with personalized coaching.

RevUp will work with the iPhone's Health app, which pools data from whatever trackers or at-home health devices the customer has synched with it: pedometers, heart rate trackers, blood pressure monitors, and so forth. Based on that data, each RevUp user will receive automated health coaching messages, as well as feedback from a fitness coach, a nutritionist and a nurse practitioner. Damani said the company has spent three years developing a "predictive engine" that correlates data with health outcomes.

Next year, the company aims to add genetic data to the mix. MD Revolution is working with a genomics company to provide users with partial genome scans, and will add information about users' genetic variants and possible health vulnerabilities to RevUp. It's unclear how helpful such data will be, however, since medical science is still struggling to understand the role that our genes play in our health.

The intended customers for RevUp are health care systems that will sign up their patients, and corporations that will use the app in wellness programs for employees. It seems possible, though, that such organizations could get all the health data and management functions they need directly from the iPhone's Health App. It remains to be seen whether RevUp's coaching features will entice institutional customers.

The company has submitted the app to Apple for approval, but it's also developing an Android version. It's probably a good idea to cover one's bets in this area, since Google and Samsung have both announced platforms that compete directly with Apple's HealthKit. Google Fit offers developers a way to collect and use data from a variety of monitoring devices. Samsung created the SAMI platform to do the same, and is also coming out with a biometric-tracking watch called SimBand.

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Ebola destroying robots in hospitals

Ebola destroying robots in hospitals

A robot to defend ebola virus. An autonomous machine from San Antonio-based Xenex Disinfection is currently doing battle against viruses and bacteria in 250 hospitals across the country, including the hospital in Dallas where Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, was treated and eventually died.

The robot kills viruses and bacteria using ultraviolet light to destroying a virus’ or bacteria’s DNA.

The sun’s rays are made up of three different kind of ultraviolet light. The first two, UV-A and UV-B, shine onto the planet and are responsible for making some people tan, as well as giving other sunburns and even skin cancers.

But the ozone layer surrounding Earth blocks UV-C. Because this light doesn’t exist in the natural world below the ozone layer, organisms have not evolved genetic mechanisms to deal with it. That’s where Xenex comes in. The robot pulses UV-C light for five minutes in a given location, such as a patient’s hospital room. When the light encounters bacteria or viruses, it damages their DNA, essentially disabling the pathogen and killing it.

Actually, UV light has been used for decades to disinfect air and water. But older versions of this technology relied on mercury-based light bulbs, which are toxic. Xenex uses xenon gas to create the light, which is turns out is 25,000 times more intense than the UV light that the sun produces. It also kills a wider range of germs.

Xenex is currently in discussions with the U.S. Department of Defense and several relief organizations about deploying the robots to Africa.

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Self healing power for humans using tiny implants.

Self healing power for humans using tiny implants.

A new military-sponsored program aims to develop a tiny device that can be implanted in the body, where it will use electrical impulses to monitor the body's organs, healing these crucial parts when they become infected or injured.

Known as Electrical Prescriptions, or ElectRx, the program could reduce dependence on pharmaceutical drugs and offer a new way to treat illnesses, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense responsible for developing the program.

"The technology DARPA plans to develop through the ElectRx program could fundamentally change the manner in which doctors diagnose, monitor and treat injury and illness," Doug Weber, program manager for DARPA's biological technologies office, said in a statement.

The implant that DARPA hopes to develop is something akin to a tiny, intelligent pacemaker, Weber said. The device would be implanted into the body, where it would continually assess a person's condition and provide any necessary stimulus to the nerves to help maintain healthy organ function, he added.

The idea for the technology is based on a biological process known as neuromodulation, in which the peripheral nervous system (the nerves that connect every other part of the body to the brain and spinal cord) monitors the status of internal organs and regulate the body's responses to infection and disease. When a person is sick or injured, this natural process can sometimes be thrown off, according to DARPA. Instead of making a person feel better, neuromodulation can actually exacerbate a condition, causing pain, inflammation and a weakened immune system.

But with the help of an electrically charged implant, DARPA says it can keep neuromodulation under control. Electric impulses from the device will stimulate the nerve patterns that help the body heal itself and keep the out-of-whack nerve stimulus patterns that cause a sick person even greater harm from doing damage.

DARPA hopes to develop a device so tinythat it can be implanted using only a needle. Such a small implant would be a huge improvement over similar neuromodulation devices already in use today, most of which are about the size of a deck of cards and require invasive surgery to implant, according to DARPA.

And the miniature size of the device has another advantage: It can be placed exactly where it is needed at nerve endings. An implant as small as a nerve fiber could minimize the side effects caused by implants whose electric impulses aren't sent directly into nerve channels, DARPA officials said.

The device could help treat a host of painful, inflammatory conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic inflammatory response syndrome (a condition that causes inflammation throughout the body) and inflammatory bowel disease. And if the ElectRx program is a success, it could also lead to the development of implants that help treat brain and mental-health disorders, such as epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, according to DARPA.

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''Computers Of The Future''

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