Tech | Page 1125 | Science Codex

Babies' lives saved by 3-D printing

Kaiba was just a newborn when he turned blue because his little lungs weren't getting the oxygen they needed. Garrett spent the first year of his life in hospital beds tethered to a ventilator, being fed through his veins because his body was too sick to absorb food. Baby Ian's heart stopped before he was even six months old.

Three babies all had the same life-threatening condition: a terminal form of tracheobronchomalacia, which causes the windpipe to periodically collapse and prevents normal breathing. There was no cure and life-expectancies were grim.

The trillion-frame-per-second camera

When a crystal lattice is excited by a laser pulse, waves of jostling atoms can travel through the material at close to one sixth the speed of light, or approximately 28,000 miles/second. Scientists now have a new tool to take movies of such superfast movement in a single shot.

Putting an end to electrical grid gold-plating

The interim Senate report into the performance and management of electricity network companies has rightly identified over-investment as a key reason for the increase in electricity prices.

But in choosing to focus on the most difficult and complicated area for regulators and governments to grapple with - what the efficient level of investment for these businesses is - the inquiry has struggled to come up with solutions.

Genital-only screening misses many cases of gonorrhea and chlamydia in women

Current public health guidelines recommend that only gay men and people with HIV should be routinely screened for extragenital gonorrhea and chlamydia, given the high burden of these sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in this at-risk population.

Mobile of 2020: The latest on the 5G era

Automated organization, multi-RAT and multi-layer heterogeneous networks, those are what are being requested in mobile of 2020, what will be the 5G era - the first meaningful unified wideband mobile communication system.

A recent systematic overview discussed progress on 5G research and highlighted the network architecture and techniques which could be employed in the future 5G systems.

New material for creating artificial blood vessels

Blocked blood vessels can quickly become dangerous. It is often necessary to replace a blood vessel - either by another vessel taken from the body or even by artificial vascular prostheses. Together, Vienna University of Technology and Vienna Medical University have developed artificial blood vessels made from a special elastomer material, which has excellent mechanical properties. Over time, these artificial blood vessels are replaced by endogenous material. At the end of this restorative process, a natural, fully functional vessel is once again in place.

Cas9 fof Hep C: A CRISPR antiviral tool

Emory scientists have adapted an antiviral enzyme from bacteria called Cas9 into an instrument for inhibiting hepatitis C virus in human cells.

The results were published Monday April 27, 2015 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cas9 is part of the CRISPR genetic defense system in bacteria, which scientists have been harnessing to edit DNA in animals, plants and even human cells. In this case, Emory researchers are using Cas9 to put a clamp on RNA, which hepatitis C virus uses for its genetic material, rather than change cells' DNA.

Autonomous convergence and divergence of self-powered soft liquid metal vehicles

The autonomous locomotion for a macroscopic machine remains an intriguing issue for the researchers to explore. Recently, Professor LIU Jing and his group from Tsinghua University demonstrated that as a versatile material, the liquid metal could be self-actuated when fueled with aluminum (Al) flake, and the motion thus enabled would persist for more than an hour at a quite high velocity.

7 percent: Landmark hydropower report from DOE

For the first time, industry and policymakers have a comprehensive report detailing the U.S. hydropower fleet's 2,198 plants that provide about 7 percent of the nation's electricity.

The 98-page report by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers Rocio Uria-Martinez, Patrick O'Connor and Megan Johnson is a resource that describes key features of the nation's hydro resources and systematically tracks trends that have influenced the industry in recent years.

'Motion-tracking' MRIs reveal harbingers of stroke in people with heart rhythm disorder

Stroke is a frequent and dreaded complication of atrial fibrillation. But predicting which of the estimated six million Americans with a-fib are at highest risk has long challenged physicians weighing stroke risk against the serious side effects posed by lifelong therapy with warfarin and other blood thinners.

Hypothermia treatment provides little benefit for pediatric cardiac arrest

A new, randomized clinical study co-authored by Cohen Children's Medical Center's chair of pediatrics says there is little neurological benefit to using therapeutic hypothermia to lower a child's core temperature after an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest.

Combined brachytherapy techniques should be 'benchmark' for cervical cancer treatment

The first large international study to investigate the late side-effects of a combination of two forms of brachytherapy to treat cervical cancer has shown that the technique successfully delivers higher radiation doses to the tumour without an increase in treatment-related problems afterwards.

First liquid nanolaser developed

Northwestern University scientists have developed the first liquid nanoscale laser. And it's tunable in real time, meaning you can quickly and simply produce different colors, a unique and useful feature. The laser technology could lead to practical applications, such as a new form of a "lab on a chip" for medical diagnostics.

To understand the concept, imagine a laser pointer whose color can be changed simply by changing the liquid inside it, instead of needing a different laser pointer for every desired color.

Breakthrough for treatments of HER2+ breast cancer

Ahmad M. Khalil, PhD, knew the odds were against him -- as in thousands upon thousands to one.

Yet he and his team never wavered from their quest to identify the parts of the body responsible for revving up one of the most aggressive forms of breast cancer, HER2+. This month in Breast Cancer Research and Treatment, Khalil and his colleagues at Case Western Reserve University proved the power of persistence; from a pool of more than 30,000 possibilities, they found 38 genes and molecules that most likely trigger HER2+ cancer cells to spread.

18F-PET/CT not useful in staging newly diagnosed stage III invasive lobular breast cancer

Although National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines consider 18F-PET/CT (FDG PET/CT) appropriate for systemic staging of newly diagnosed stage III breast cancer, the technique may not be equally valuable for all breast cancer histologies. Researchers at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center found that while FDG PET/CT is valuable for systemic staging of stage III ductal breast cancer, it adds little to the systemic staging of ILC.