Smart Ink Adds New Dimensions To 3-D Printing

Like the crazy eye of the universe

The Hydrogen Atom

Carrying and releasing nanoscale cargo with ‘nanowrappers’

This holiday season, scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN) – a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory – have wrapped a box of a different kind. Using a one-step chemical synthesis method, they engineered hollow metallic nanosized boxes with cube-shaped pores at the corners and demonstrated how these “nanowrappers” can be used to carry and release DNA-coated nanoparticles in a controlled way. The research is reported in a paper published on Dec. 12 in ACS Central Science, a journal of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

“Imagine you have a box but you can only use the outside and not the inside,” said co-author Oleg Gang, leader of the CFN Soft and Bio Nanomaterials Group. “This is how we’ve been dealing with nanoparticles. Most nanoparticle assembly or synthesis methods produce solid nanostructures. We need methods to engineer the internal space of these structures.”

“Compared to their solid counterparts, hollow nanostructures have different optical and chemical properties that we would like to use for biomedical, sensing, and catalytic applications,” added corresponding author Fang Lu, a scientist in Gang’s group. “In addition, we can introduce surface openings in the hollow structures where materials such as drugs, biological molecules, and even nanoparticles can enter and exit, depending on the surrounding environment.”

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Toxic ‘zombie’ cells seen for 1st time in Alzheimer’s

A type of cellular stress known to be involved in cancer and aging has now been implicated, for the first time, in Alzheimer’s disease. UT Health San Antonio faculty researchers reported the discovery in the journal Aging Cell.

The team found that the stress, called cellular senescence, is associated with harmful tau protein tangles that are a hallmark of 20 human brain diseases, including Alzheimer’s and traumatic brain injury. The researchers identified senescent cells in postmortem brain tissue from Alzheimer’s patients and then found them in postmortem tissue from another brain disease, progressive supranuclear palsy.

Cellular senescence allows the stressed cell to survive, but the cell may become like a zombie, functioning abnormally and secreting substances that kill cells around it. “When cells enter this stage, they change their genetic programming and become pro-inflammatory and toxic,” said study senior author Miranda E. Orr, Ph.D., VA research health scientist at the South Texas Veterans Health Care System, faculty member of the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, and instructor of pharmacology at UT Health San Antonio. “Their existence means the death of surrounding tissue.”

Improvements in brain structure and function

The team confirmed the discovery in four types of mice that model Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers then used a combination of drugs to clear senescent cells from the brains of middle-aged Alzheimer’s mice. Such drugs are called senolytics. The drugs used by the San Antonio researchers are dasatinib, a chemotherapy medication that is U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved to treat leukemia, and quercetin, a natural flavonoid compound found in fruits, vegetables and some beverages such as tea.

After three months of treatment, the findings were exciting. “The mice were 20 months old and had advanced brain disease when we started the therapy,” Dr. Orr said. “After clearing the senescent cells, we saw improvements in brain structure and function. This was observed on brain MRI studies (magnetic resonance imaging) and postmortem histology studies of cell structure. The treatment seems to have stopped the disease in its tracks.”

“The fact we were able to treat very old mice and see improvement gives us hope that this treatment might work in human patients even after they exhibit symptoms of a brain disease,” said Nicolas Musi, M.D., study first author, who is Professor of Medicine and Director of the Sam and Ann Barshop Institute at UT Health San Antonio. He also directs the VA-sponsored Geriatric Research, Education and Clinical Center (GRECC) in the South Texas Veterans Health Care System.

Typically, in testing an intervention in Alzheimer’s mice, the therapy only works if mice are treated before the disease starts, Dr. Musi said.

Tau protein accumulation is responsible

In Alzheimer’s disease, patient brain tissue accumulates tau protein tangles as well as another protein deposit called amyloid beta plaques. The team found that tau accumulation was responsible for cell senescence. Researchers compared Alzheimer’s mice that had only tau tangles with mice that had only amyloid beta plaques. Senescence was identified only in the mice with tau tangles.

In other studies to confirm this, reducing tau genetically also reduced senescence. The reverse also held true. Increasing tau genetically increased senescence.

Importantly, the drug combination reduced not only cell senescence but also tau tangles in the Alzheimer’s mice. This is a drug treatment that does not specifically target tau, but it effectively reduced the tangle pathology, Dr. Orr said.

“When we looked at their brains three months later, we found that the brains had deteriorated less than mice that received placebo control treatment,” she said. “We don’t think brain cells actually grew back, but there was less loss of neurons, less brain ventricle enlargement, improved cerebral blood flow and a decrease in the tau tangles. These drugs were able to clear the tau pathology.”

Potentially a therapy to be tested in humans

“This is the first of what we anticipate will be many studies to better understand this process,” Dr. Musi said. “Because these drugs are approved for other uses in humans, we think a logical next step would be to start pilot studies in people.”

The drugs specifically target—and therefore only kill—the senescent cells. Because the drugs have a short half-life, they are cleared quickly by the body and no side effects were observed.

Dasatinib is an oral medication. The mice were treated with the combination every other week. “So in the three months of treatment, they only received the drug six times,” Dr. Orr said. “The drug goes in, does its job and is cleared. Senescent cells come back with time, but we expect that it would be possible to take the drug again and be cleared out again. That’s a huge benefit—it wouldn’t be a drug that people would have to take every day.”

Dosage and frequency in humans would need to be determined in clinical trials, she said.

Next, the researchers will study whether cell senescence is present in traumatic brain injury. TBI is a brain injury that develops tau protein accumulation and is a significant cause of disability in both military and non-military settings, Dr. Orr said.

First DNA sequence from a single mitochondria

DNA sequences between mitochondria within a single cell are vastly different, found researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. This knowledge will help to better illuminate the underlying mechanisms of many disorders that start with accumulated mutations in individual mitochondria and provide clues about how patients might respond to specific therapies. The findings are published in Cell Reports this week.

Journal reference: Cell Reports 

Manual isolation of a single live mitochondria. The mitochondria can be seen under a microscope where a thin glass tube can be used to isolate the mitochondria from the dendrite region of the mouse neuron. Credit: Jacqueline Morris and Jaehee Lee, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

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Vacuum printer. Fill up the empty space.

Meet The First-Ever 3D Printer That Can Do Construction in The Vacuum of Space

This will change how we explore space.

One manufacturing company just made history by successfully using a special 3D printer in extreme, space-like conditions.

The team printed polymer alloy parts in a super-high vacuum, and hope their new tech will allow the design and manufacture of much more ambitious spacecraft and space-based telescopes.

“This is an important milestone, because it means that we can now adaptively and on demand manufacture things in space,” Andrew Rush, CEO of Made in Space, told Scientific American.

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Organic Pigment Photocapacitors May Restore Sight to Blind People

A simple retinal prosthesis is being developed in collaboration between Tel Aviv University in Israel and LiU. Fabricated using cheap and widely-available organic pigments used in printing inks and cosmetics, it consists of tiny pixels like a digital camera sensor on a nanometric scale. Researchers hope that it can restore sight to blind people.

Researchers led by Eric Glowacki, principal investigator of the organic nanocrystals subgroup in the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University, have developed a tiny, simple photoactive film that converts light impulses into electrical signals. These signals in turn stimulate neurons (nerve cells). The research group has chosen to focus on a particularly pressing application, artificial retinas that may in the future restore sight to blind people. The Swedish team, specializing in nanomaterials and electronic devices, worked together with researchers in Israel, Italy and Austria to optimise the technology. Experiments in vision restoration were carried out by the group of Yael Hanein at Tel Aviv University in Israel. Yael Hanein’s group is a world-leader in the interface between electronics and the nervous system.

The results have recently been published in the prestigious scientific journal Advanced Materials.

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Breakthrough in blending metals—precise control of multimetallic one-nanometer cluster formation achieved

Researchers in Japan have found a way to create innovative materials by blending metals with precision control. Their approach, based on a concept called atom hybridization, opens up an unexplored area of chemistry that could lead to the development of advanced functional materials.

Multimetallic clusters—typically composed of three or more metals—are garnering attention as they exhibit properties that cannot be attained by single-metal materials. If a variety of metal elements are freely blended, it is expected that as-yet-unknown substances are discovered and highly-functional materials are developed. So far, no one had reported the multimetallic clusters blended with more than four metal elements so far because of unfavorable separation of different metals. One idea to overcome this difficulty is miniaturization of cluster sizes to one-nanometer scale, which forces the different metals to be blended in a small space. However, there was no way to realize this idea.

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Skin gel allows wounds to heal without leaving a scar

A team of researchers at Huazhong University of Science and Technology has developed a silk protein-based gel that they claim allows for skin healing without scarring. In their paper published in the journal Biomaterials Science, the group describes their gel and how well it works.

Scarring due to a skin injury is not just unsightly—for many, it can also be a painful reminder of a wound. For these reasons, scientists have sought a way to heal wounds without scarring. In this new effort, the team in China claims to have found such a solution—a sericin hydrogel.

The gel used by the researchers was based on a silk protein—the researchers extracted sericin from silk fibers and then used a UV light and a photoinitiator to cross-link the protein chains. The result was a gel that adhered well to cells and did not trigger much of an immune response. The researchers note that it also has adjustable mechanical properties. They explain that the gel allows for scar-free healing by inhibiting inflammation and by promoting the development of new blood vessels. It was also found to regulate TGF-β growth factors, which resulted in stem cells being routed to the injury site allowing new skin to develop, rather than scar tissue.

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Rocket into sub-orbit on Blue Origin’s New Shepard! (December 15, 2017) It’s a pristine day in west Texas. The desert stretches far to the horizon out the capsule’s windows with the foothills of the Van Horn mountain range in the distance. The typical winter day is broken first by a deep rumble from below  followed an instant later by clouds of smoke and a flash of flame. That’s the scene inside Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew capsule during launch as seen in new footage from this week’s test. Mannequin Skywalker - the company’s astronaut simulator - is seen rocketing to over 322,000 feet, or 61 miles, strapped in one of the cabin’s six seats.

Within seconds, the receding countryside below gives way to vast swaths of desert. The sky turns from thick and blue to pitch black in a matter of seconds as the vehicle races upwards. New Shepard would reach a maximum ascent velocity of Mach 2.94 during the flight.  As the single BE-3 engine of the propulsion stage cuts out, the cabin becomes weightless as indicated by straps on the dummy’s chest. Hundreds of miles of the Earth below spread out in all directions from the cabin’s six panoramic windows. Measuring 2.4 by 3.6 feet, they’re the largest ever flown on a space vehicle. Weightless conditions and breathtaking views continue as the capsule begins its descent to Earth. It’s like the launch but in reverse; the black of space quickly fills with colour as the atmosphere is reentered. Because New Shepard is a suborbital vehicle and doesn’t boost the capsule fast enough to achieve significant atmospheric friction, there is no flaming meteor-in-the-sky or heat shield on the spacecraft. It simply falls through the sky, racing to meet the Earth below which it only just left. Back in the thicker atmosphere, three drogue parachutes help stabilize the cabin before the larger main canopies are unfurled. These help bring the capsule to a safe, soft landing at just one foot per second a few kilometers from the launch pad. According to Blue Origin’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, the pinging heard inside the capsule in the video was due to one of the 12 experiments carried on board Mission 7. This was the first New Shepard flight granted a commercial launch license by the FAA, allowing them to carry commercial research payloads on the flight. Other flight milestones can also be discerned by the subtle audio and visual clues, such as MECO, stage separation, drogue cute deployment and mail parachute deployment. Read our full story on Mission 7 and the resumption of New Shepard testing by clicking here.

Check out the full video with audio by clicking here or below.

P/C: Blue Origin.