Posted: 28 May 2008 08:02
Military-grade Exo-skeleton:
http://www.switched.com/2008/05/30/exos ... pre-order/
Consortium of Indian Defence Websites
https://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/
The POSTECH professor said tests have shown that the efficiency level of the magnetoresistance of graphene nanoribbons reaches into the million-percent range, compared to few hundred percent for devices created in the past.
Greater efficiency in magnetoresistance translates into smaller memory devices that can store more data.
A patient whose skin cancer had spread throughout his body has been given the all-clear after being injected with billions of his own immune cells.
Tests revealed that the 52-year-old man's tumours, which spread from his skin to his lung and groin, vanished within two months of having the treatment, and had not returned two years later.
Doctors attempted the experimental therapy as part of a clinical trial after the man's cancer failed to respond to conventional treatments.
The man is the first to benefit from the new technique, which uses cloning to produce billions of copies of a patient's immune cells. When they are injected into the body they attack the cancer and force it into remission.
Campaigners and scientists in the UK yesterday welcomed the breakthrough. "It's very exciting to see a cancer patient being successfully treated using immune cells cloned from his own body. While it's always good news when anyone with cancer gets the all-clear, this treatment will need to be tested in large clinical trials to work out how widely it could be used," said Ed Yong at Cancer Research UK.
Peter Johnson, chief clinician at the charity, added: "Although the technique is complex and difficult to use for all but a few patients, the principle that someone's own immune cells can be expanded and made to work in this way is very encouraging."
Cassian Yee at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle extracted immune cells from the patient and found that a small proportion of them, called CD4 T cells, naturally attacked a protein found on nearly three-quarters of the cancer cells. Using cloning techniques, Yee's team replicated these cells until they had more than 5bn of them.
When the cells were injected into the patient they immediately began attacking the cancer. Intriguingly, the patient's immune system gradually began a wider offensive, attacking all the cancer cells in the body, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Two months later medical scans failed to pick up any signs of cancer in the patient.
The team believes the treatment could be effective in around a quarter of skin cancer patients whose immune systems have cells that are already primed to attack their tumours. "For this patient we were successful, but we would need to confirm the effectiveness of therapy in a larger study," Yee added.
In an accompanying article Louis Weiner, director of the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre at Georgetown University, Washington, wrote that Yee's work "underscores the remarkable potential of the immune system to eradicate cancer, even when the disease is widespread".
The case showed that hopes to turn the immune system into a weapon against cancer was becoming a reality, Weiner added. "If the destination is not yet at hand, it is in sight. The endgame has begun."
Using the immune system to fight cancer could be much safer than existing treatments, which often have serious side effects.
Undergraduates Forge New Area Of Bioinformatics
The new area of bioinformatics is called "comparative proteogenomics," and as the name implies, sits at the intersection of the fields of "comparative genomics" and "proteomics" -- which is the study of all of an organism's proteins.
This achievement may pave the way for the application of graphene to VLSI.
Turner calculates that with a camera that can track one million wells, a polymerase that operates at about 50 bases per hour (the current rate is 10), and full use of all the wells on the plate, Pacific Biosciences technology could read 100 gigabases an hour. That translates to full coverage of a human genome -- the same genome sequenced 15 times -- in just 15 minutes.
Breakthrough In Energy Storage: New Carbon Material Shows Promise Of Storing Large Quantities Of Renewable Electrical Energy
ScienceDaily (Sep. 17, 2008) — Engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin have achieved a breakthrough in the use of a one-atom thick structure called "graphene" as a new carbon-based material for storing electrical charge in ultracapacitor devices, perhaps paving the way for the massive installation of renewable energies such as wind and solar power.
Also, scaling could be relaxed, starting with perhaps 0.5 µm devices while still getting a performance advantage over 45 nm silicon CMOS.
...
We can get rid of the PMOS transistors and switch much faster.”
'We are excited to announce the launch of a mobile version of Google Book Search, opening up over 1.5 million mobile public domain books in the US (and over half a million outside the US) for you to browse,' the company said.
This sounds very nice on paper but has tons of issues. I know this as i work in MEMS and have interacted with Dr.Maharbiz's students when he was formely in UMich before joining BSAC.
where did he pull the $100 number from? The cost of the Chip+fluorescent reagents+reading machine etc would definitely be much higher. He has not even demonstrated sequencing, only the ability to seperate large fragments. This is just trying to do the opposite of what Illumina, 454, solexa do. I am not holding my breath on this one.
MIT Technology Review
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Ultra-High-Power Lithium-Ion Batteries
New materials from MIT could power laser weapons or give hybrid cars jackrabbit acceleration.
New Nanocrystals Show Potential For Cheap Lasers, New Lighting
ScienceDaily (May 11, 2009) — For more than a decade, scientists have been frustrated in their attempts to create continuously emitting light sources from individual molecules because of an optical quirk called "blinking," but now scientists at the University of Rochester have uncovered the basic physics behind the phenomenon, and along with researchers at the Eastman Kodak Company, created a nanocrystal that constantly emits light.
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