Technology

Micro-imprinting and electro-spinning techniques have led to the ability to create a vascular graft composed of three layers and this tri-layer composite means the ability utilize separate materials that respectively possess mechanical strength and promote new cell growth - a significant problem for existing vascular grafts that have only consisted of a single or double layer. Vascular grafts are surgically attached to an obstructed or otherwise unhealthy blood vessel to permanently redirect blood flow, such as in coronary bypass surgery. Traditional grafts work by re-purposing existing…

In the two decades existence of lab-on-a-chip (LOC), there have been lots of individual systems developed, ranging from lung-on-a-chip and heart-on-a-chip to the liver-on-a-chip and kidney-on-a-chip - but an ideal embryo-on-a-chip has eluded science because of the challenges in condensing so many life factors inside a conventional LOC.  But now two scientists have developed a PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) "soft" process method to fabricate a transparent shell matching the shape and curvature of a real eggshell. The most important feature of a conventional "Lab-on-a-chip" is its chemically…

Public participation will have to be at the heart of big data projects in health care and biomedical research and a new report calls for greater transparency about how people's data are used. The report warns that if people's preferences and values are not taken into account and are instead picked by government elites, projects that could deliver significant public good may continue to be challenged and fail to secure public confidence. Recent health data projects, such as care.data, 100K Genomes, UK Biobank and the Scottish Informatics Programme (SHIP) have each, in their own way, raised…

I am a firm believer that physics is the One Science To Rule Them All and can accomplish almost anything, but I had not predicted that the "fourth state of matter" - non-thermal plasma - could show immunology how it's done and kill off noroviruses, the most common cause of non-bacterial gastroenteritis around the world that gets fame far too often for making people sick on things like cruise ships. Yet cold plasma can, writes Alex Berezow at the BBC. Researchers in Hannover have found that cold plasma treatment led to an incredible 20- to 50-fold reduction in the number of virus particles, by…

Jean Valentine, a bombe operator at Bletchley in the 1940s. Rui Vieira/PA By Bryony Norburn, University of Buckingham Bletchley Park is a name on everyone’s lips at the moment thanks to the generous coverage stemming from a film that rightly celebrates the role played by men like Alan Turing. But what about the women? At its height there were more than 10,000 people working at Bletchley Park, of whom more than two-thirds were women. Home to the Government Code and Cypher School, Bletchley Park – affectionately called BP by its incumbents – was shrouded in secrecy during the war and for…

A European consortium is developing an unmanned robot equipped with non-invasive advanced sensors and artificial intelligence systems which will help manage vineyards. The robot will be able to provide reliable, fast and objective information on the state of the vineyards to growers, such as vegetative development, water status, production and grape composition. VineRobot, whose partners met recently at the Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), is led by the Universidad de La Rioja. Completing the consortium are the Spanish company Avanzare, the French FORCE-A and Wall-YE, and the…

Can big data analytics predict population-level societal events such as civil unrest or disease outbreaks? That is the subject of a two-year analysis of the Early Model Based Event Recognition using Surrogates (EMBERS) system. The usefulness of this predictive artificial intelligence system for population-level events could be important. If existing models, which successfully predict the past, were good enough no one would ever lose money in the stock market. In a Big Data article, Andy Doyle and coauthors from CACI, Inc., Virginia Tech and BASIS Technology describe the structure and…

Wise advice. Julia Wolf, CC BY-NC-SA By Arun Vishwanath, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York Hackers gain access to computers and networks by exploiting the weaknesses in our cyber behaviors. Many attacks use simple phishing schemes – the hacker sends an email that appears to come from a trusted source, encouraging the recipient to click a seemingly innocuous hyperlink or attachment. Clicking will launch malware and open backdoors that can be used for nefarious actions: accessing a company’s network or serving as a virtual zombie for launching attacks on other computers…

Who's really driving your car? Saad Faruque, CC BY-SA By Andrew Smith, The Open University and Blaine Price, The Open University Theft of vehicles is about as old as the notion of transport – from horse thieves to carjackers. No longer merely putting a brick through a window, vehicle thieves have continually adapted to new technology, as demonstrated by a new method to steal a car without the need to be anywhere near it. Modern vehicles are built with a range of computerized systems that control and monitor security, fuel, engine management and more. Most new cars are fitted with Bluetooth…

The night before the famous "Raid at Entebbe" in 1976, when the Israel Defense Forces rescued over 100 kidnapped hostages from German and Palestinian terrorists at Entebbe airport in Uganda, Tel Aviv University's Prof. Pinhas Alpert, then head of an Israel Air Force base forecasting unit, provided intelligence that was critical to the success of the operation - the weather conditions commandos were likely to encounter en route and on the ground.  Had they been wrong, the mission might have ended differently. So it has always been. Decades earlier, the U.S.-led invasion of Normandy,…