Hitchhiker plants inspire improved techniques for reattaching tendon to bone

The unique array of hooks on the fruit of hitchhiker plant H. palermi led researchers at the Center for Engineering MechanoBiology to develop improved suturing techniques for surgically repairing tissues.
 Image Credit: Genin laboratory

For most people, getting burrs stuck to your clothes during a hike is nothing more than a nuisance, something to pick off and throw out when you get home. But for scientists at the Center for Engineering MechanoBiology (CEMB), the hooks on these little hitchhikers are inspiring new suturing schemes for surgical reattachment of tendon to bone. 

Tendon-to-bone reattachment is required in many surgical procedures, perhaps most commonly in repairing torn rotator cuff tendons in the shoulder, a condition that will affect more than 30% of the population over 60. Current suturing methods fail to distribute stress evenly, leading to failure rates as high as 94% due to ineffective attachment and re-tearing of sutures.

Cow dung possible sustainable material of the future, study finds

Photo Credit: Jonas Koel

Livestock dung could be used to create the next generation of cellulosic materials, according to a new report.

Livestock dung is typically used as a fertilizer or as a source of biogas for green energy applications, but the study, led by scientists at Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) in collaboration with the universities of Bristol and Edinburgh, reviewed recent research into the development of high-value manure-derived materials from ruminant animals such as cattle.

They found that dung has been largely overlooked despite the variety of different applications for recycled ruminant waste biomass (RWB).

The most common applications use manure in combination with other components to create composite materials such as plastic, recycled card and paper or concrete. However, it could also be used for the extraction of nanocellulose - a prospective bio-based and biodegradable material of the future.

Currently, there is a trade-off between the performance of the material and the amount of processing required to achieve this – limiting the capacity of RWB to replace conventional materials on a commercial level.

World’s fastest burst-mode X-ray camera hits the road

Sandia National Laboratories’ Quinn Looker inspects sensors used in the ultrafast X-ray imaging camera.
Photo Credit: Craig Fritz

Nuclear reactions are fast. Really fast. Faster than billionths of a second. Your best shot at catching one is with a high-speed X-ray camera that can only be obtained from the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories. But these cameras could soon become more widely available.

Sandia has partnered with Albuquerque-based startup Advanced hCMOS Systems (pronounced “H C moss”) to commercialize ultrafast imaging technology invented at the Labs and used extensively in fusion research. If successful, the collaboration could move the world more quickly to limitless clean energy by accelerating such research, while potentially impacting many other research and development areas.

“A perfect example is glass research,” said Liam Claus, cofounder of Advanced hCMOS Systems. “The Gorilla Glass that’s in your iPhone so it doesn’t shatter every time it slips out of your hand — there’s a ton of materials science that’s gone into that. They need to understand how it fractures, and glass fractures can propagate at extremely high speeds.”

Rice labs seek RNA programming for ‘smart’ antibiotics

Rice University bioscientists James Chappell (left) and Joff Silberg aim to create “genetically encoded antibiotics,” strands of RNA that bacteria will readily copy and share. The RNA will selectively kill disease-causing bacteria thanks to a triggering mechanism that will be activated by “virulence genes” or other biomarkers found only in bacterial pathogens.
Photo Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University

Synthetic biologists at Rice University are embarking on a three-year project to create “genetically encoded antibiotics,” strands of RNA that bacteria will readily copy and share that will selectively kill only disease-causing, pathogenic bacteria.

“Most bacteria pose no danger to human health,” said James Chappell, an assistant professor of biosciences and bioengineering at Rice. “The question for us as synthetic biologists is, ‘Can we create genetic programs that move through microbial communities and precisely remove only the bad actors from those communities?’”

Thanks to a $1.5 million grant from the Kleberg Foundation, Chappell’s lab and the lab of Rice bioscientist and bioengineer Jonathan “Joff” Silberg are getting a chance to test their idea of combating antibiotic resistance by enlisting the aid of bacteria that either benefit humans or pose no threat to them.

In prototype tests, they showed they could design RNA programs that were highly targeted and potent, killing 99.99% of “bad actor” pathogens within a matter of hours. In the three-year project, they also plan to partner with Dr. Pablo Okhuysen from the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center to design RNA antibiotics that are effective against diarrhea-causing E. coli, as well as RNA drugs that selectively kill the opportunistic Lactobacillus iners, a pathogen that has been associated with cervical cancer radiation therapy resistance.

Epilepsy could become easier to pinpoint with blood test

Researchers from Lund University in Sweden have discovered higher levels of immune proteins in the blood before and after an epileptic seizure. The possible biomarkers can be identified using a simple blood test. Diagnosing epilepsy is currently resource intensive, and distinguishing it from other conditions can be challenging. Better diagnostic methods as soon as the patient seeks medical care after a suspected seizure is therefore an urgent necessity.

Epilepsy is the collective name for abnormal activity in the brain that causes temporary loss of control of behavior and movement. The condition can be congenital, be caused by a tumor, stroke or infection in the brain and cause very different symptoms depending on which part of the brain the episode begins in or spreads to. Inflammation processes that start as an immune response in the body can also provoke a seizure. That is why researchers started to look for possible biomarkers for epilepsy within the immune system. Previous studies exist, but the results have so far been mixed and difficult to interpret:

“In our study, we have a carefully selected group of participants and we have a lot of background information on each person. We have also taken into account a number of confounding factors that may affect the immune system such as other neurological and immunological illnesses, infections and various psychiatric conditions,” says Christine Ekdahl Clementson.

New “traffic cop” algorithm helps a drone swarm stay on task

MIT engineers have developed a method to tailor any wireless network to handle a high load of time-sensitive data coming from multiple sources.
Illustration Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT
(CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

How fresh is your data? For drones searching a disaster zone or robots inspecting a building, working with the freshest data is key to locating a survivor or reporting a potential hazard. But when multiple robots simultaneously relay time-sensitive information over a wireless network, a traffic jam of data can ensue. Any information that gets through is too stale to consider as a useful, real-time report.

Now, MIT engineers may have a solution. They’ve developed a method to tailor any wireless network to handle a high load of time-sensitive data coming from multiple sources. Their new approach, called WiSwarm, configures a wireless network to control the flow of information from multiple sources while ensuring the network is relaying the freshest data.

The team used their method to tweak a conventional Wi-Fi router, and showed that the tailored network could act like an efficient traffic cop, able to prioritize and relay the freshest data to keep multiple vehicle-tracking drones on task.

The team’s method, which they will present in May at IEEE’s International Conference on Computer Communications (INFOCOM), offers a practical way for multiple robots to communicate over available Wi-Fi networks so they don’t have to carry bulky and expensive communications and processing hardware onboard.

High-performance detectors to combat spies

Using these sensors, scientists were able to generate a secret key at a rate of 64 megabits per second over 10 km of fibre optic cable.
Photo Credit: © M. Perrenoud - G. Resta / UNIGE

A team from UNIGE and ID Quantique has developed single-photon detectors with unprecedented performance. These results open new perspectives for quantum cryptography.

How can we combat data theft, which is a real issue for society? Quantum physics has the solution. Its theories make it possible to encode information (a qubit) in single particles of light (a photon) and to circulate them in an optical fiber in a highly secure way. However, the widespread use of this telecommunications technology is hampered in particular by the performance of the single-photon detectors. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), together with the company ID Quantique, has succeeded in increasing their speed by a factor of twenty. This innovation, to be discovered in the journal Nature Photonics, makes it possible to achieve unprecedented performances in quantum key distribution.

Buying a train ticket, booking a taxi, getting a meal delivered: these are all transactions carried out daily via mobile applications. These are based on payment systems involving an exchange of secret information between the user and the bank. To do this, the bank generates a public key, which is transmitted to their customer, and a private key, which it keeps secret. With the public key, the user can modify the information, make it unreadable and send it to the bank. With the private key, the bank can decipher it.

New tool for diagnosing and evaluating the severity of sarcopenia

From left to right, researchers from the Faculty of Medicine and Welfare of WITH (Campus Bellvige) Maribel Miguel, Ingrid Mötller and Joan Basi.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of University of Barcelona

Sarcopenia is a degenerative disease characterized by a pathological decrease in muscle strength that especially affects older people. Researchers at the University of Barcelona have developed a new tool to assess the presence and severity of this muscle failure. The study, published in the journal RMD Open, provides a muscle quality scoring system based on musculoskeletal ultrasound, which has been validated with anatomical and histological samples of patients. It is the first imaging method that assesses muscle quality, an essential factor in the disease. According to researchers, these results could be useful "not only for diagnostic purposes, but also for monitoring patients in clinical practice and also in clinical trials.".

Researchers from the Human Anatomy and Embryology Unit and the Histology Unit of the Department of Pathology and Experimental Therapeutic Therapeutic Tepell de la Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences (Campus Bellvige) of the UB. Also, experts from the Puigvert Foundation, the University of Genoa, the University of Oslo and the University of Copenhagen have been trained.

New biosensor reveals activity of elusive metal that’s essential for life

Nuclear magnetic resonance shows the structure of a natural protein called lanmodulin, which binds rare earth elements with high selectivity and was discovered 5 years ago by Penn State researchers. Researchers recently genetically reprogramed the protein to favor manganese over other common transition metals like iron and copper.
Illustration Credit: Courtesy Cotruvo Lab | Pennsylvania State University
(CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

A new biosensor engineered by Penn State researchers offers scientists the first dynamic glimpses of manganese, an elusive metal ion that is essential for life.

The researchers engineered the sensor from a natural protein called lanmodulin, which binds rare earth elements with high selectivity and was discovered 5 years ago by some of the Penn State researchers involved in the present study.

They were able to genetically reprogram the protein to favor manganese over other common transition metals like iron and copper, which defies the trends observed with most transition metal-binding molecules.

The sensor could have broad applications in biotechnology to advance understanding of photosynthesis, host-pathogen interactions and neurobiology. It could also be potentially applied more generally for processes such as separation of the transition metal components (manganese, cobalt, and nickel) in lithium-ion battery recycling.

Why are mammals more likely to go extinct on islands than on the mainland?

Illustration of Sardinian Dwarf Mammoth, Sardinian Giant Otter, Deer, Sardinian Dhole and Giant Pica
 Illustration Credit: Peter Schouten

Islands are "laboratories of evolution" and home to animal species with many unique features, including dwarfs that evolved to very small sizes compared to their mainland relatives, and giants that evolved to large sizes. A team of researchers from the German Centre of Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) has now found that species that evolved to more extreme body sizes compared to their mainland relatives have a higher risk of extinction than those that evolved to less extreme sizes. Their study, which was published in Science, also shows that extinction rates of mammals on islands worldwide increased significantly after the arrival of modern humans.

Islands are hotspots for biodiversity - they cover less than 7% of the Earth’s land area, but account for up to 20% of all terrestrial species on the planet. However, islands are also hotspots for species extinction as 50% of today’s IUCN threatened species are native to islands.