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2021-10-28 14:27:26 Open / Comment

2021-10-28 14:27:19 Implanted electrodes could offer improved vision for 148 million blind people

Berna Gómez is a former teacher who has been blind for 16 years. She recently regained enough vision to see letters and objects thanks to the successful implantation of a microelectrode array into her visual cortex.

Implanting electrodes into the visual cortex has long been a dream of scientists who believe that rudimentary sight can be restored for scores of patients by simply sending information directly to the brain’s visual cortex. The research, conducted by American and Spanish scientists, demonstrates that this can be done effectively and safely. Gómez has had the implant for six months and with the help of a video game training system, has learned to interpret the visual signals from the electrodes.

The implant is paired with a pair of glasses with a video camera. Following this initial successful trial, a clinical trial will run through May of 2024. The researchers hope that these electrodes could offer functional mobility to some of the 148 million individuals in the world who are blind due to a severed link between the eyes and the brain. This blindness is common from conditions such as glaucoma and optic nerve atrophy. An electrode system would successfully allow these individuals to see doorways, car doors, large letters, and other key infrastructure objects to more easily move through the world independently. Open / Comment

2021-10-26 09:34:55 Open / Comment

2021-10-26 09:34:49 The future of eco-friendly laundry detergent is in dissolvable sheets

While laundry pods are supposed to be biodegradable, wastewater treatment plants often don’t have the capacity to create the necessary conditions to dissolve them. As a result, the material in question (polyvinyl alcohol) typically ends up in the environment. There’s also an environmental problem when it comes to standard liquid laundry detergent jugs, which are usually landfilled or incinerated instead of recycled.

There’s clearly a need for more sustainable alternatives. That’s why a handful of laundry product companies have been exploring more eco-friendly product delivery methods. Among these companies is Frey, a brand that has designed dissolvable detergent sheets that take environmentally harmful materials out of the equation.

Conventional liquid detergent faces two sustainability problems — the amount of plastic that’s used for packaging and the amount of water content in the product, which make the product heavy and thus increase the carbon footprint associated with the product’s transportation.

“You’re now shipping a very heavy liquid all around the world when it’s completely unnecessary to be doing so,” says co-founder Leif Frey. “Your washing machine is right there—just let your machine add water instead of shipping water.” While making laundry detergent more concentrated can help, making the product in sheet form eliminates water—and plastic—altogether.

The startup makes its dissolvable detergent sheets out of naturally derived ingredients and adds starch and protein to help hold the product together until it dissolves completely in the washing machine. The sheets come in a small cardboard box, with compostable plastic wrapping to protect the product. Open / Comment

2021-10-25 10:48:30 Open / Comment

2021-10-25 10:48:12 Newest NASA mission will provide insights into the conception of our Solar System

On October 16, NASA’s Lucy mission lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The spacecraft is on its way to visit a previously-unexplored region of our outer Solar System: the Trojans.

The Trojans are a set of asteroids orbiting the Sun near Jupiter. Lucy will spend the next 12 years navigating around the asteroids, capturing images of them. Scientists theorize that the Trojans came closer to our planet 4.6 billion years ago when Earth, Jupiter, and other planets were forming from a disk of gas and dust around the newborn Sun. This would mean that gravity pulled the Trojans inwards billions of years ago, so they could offer insights into the distant depths of our Solar System, but at closer range. They could even offer evidence about the origins of our Solar System. 

Lucy, named after the 3.2-million-year-old hominid fossil unearthed in 1974, is powered by two 7.3-metre-wide solar panels. One of the notable Trojans scheduled for analysis is Eurybates, a 64-kilometre-wide remnant of a massive cosmic collision, which was discovered last year with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Although we won’t have reports from this mission for many years, it could very well revolutionize our models of how our Solar System formed. “You definitely have to be patient when you’re trying to explore the outer Solar System,” Cathy Olkin, Lucy’s deputy principal investigator, told Scientific American. Open / Comment

2021-10-24 10:49:26 Open / Comment

2021-10-24 10:49:19 This crisis alert app provides crucial information to residents of Kabul

As conditions in Kabul continue to worsen due to the Taliban takeover, residents of the Afghan capital have been struggling to get accurate real-time information about what’s happening in the city.

Three and a half years ago, for instance, Sara Wahedi had a near-miss experience when a bomb exploded not far from her. In the aftermath, with the streets blocked and broken glass everywhere, she was found that there’s wasn’t any information available about what had happened, when the roads would reopen, or whether it was safe to go outside.

“It led me to wonder why an alert system didn’t exist in a country like Afghanistan, which has been crippled by instability over the last two decades, and with so much money going into social development and community development, how there wasn’t something that people could turn to to find verified, real-time information about security and city services,” she said.

Seeing a need for a solution, Wahedi decided to put together a team and develop Ehtesab—an app that relies on crowdsourced information from citizens to send real-time alerts during a crisis, be it a bomb attack, a power outage, or even a traffic jam.

“We designed it to be as simple to use as possible because it’s a crisis app,” Wahedi says. When opening the app, users can tap a button to send a report if they’re witnessing a problem. There’s also a map showing current alerts, and an option for push notifications, reports Fast Company. The alerts are sent to everyone in Kabul, without tracking their location.

As Wahedi explains, anyone living in the capital can use the app as an everyday tool. For instance, someone heading to work or school can “see okay, this area where I’m heading today is not safe, or there has been an explosion, or this area doesn’t have electricity.” Despite the chaos in the country, the state-run electricity department still provides updates when the power comes on, crucial information that can be included on Ehtesab.

In the future, Wahedi plans to expand the tool to other parts of Afghanistan, and potentially even to countries in Africa and South America, which could have their own local versions of the app. Open / Comment

2021-10-22 10:14:01 Open / Comment

2021-10-22 10:13:53 Study: Algae can resurrect tadpole brain cells

Essential organisms such as plants, microalgae, and certain types of bacteria carry out photosynthesis. This key process releases oxygen into the atmosphere for the rest of us dependent species to feed off and carry out respiration. Every cell in every living thing on earth respires and is the action of turning oxygen into energy.

Microalgae in particular could provide many potential solutions to the problems the world faces such as saving coral reefs, treating wastewater, and cleaning oil spills in the ocean. Most recently, research has uncovered a new potential application of these incredible little species: the rescue of dead brain cells.

Scientists from the Ludwig Maximilian University in Germany injected a combination of green microalgae and blue-green algae into the brain of African clawed frog tadpoles. It was observed that these were able to perform internal CPR on the tadpoles oxygen depleted neurons and bring the cells back to life. The microalgaes do this by carrying out photosynthesisㅡtaking in light through the tadpoles’ skin and releasing oxygen to reboot the neuronal system.

The study details the potential application of this novel treatment to rescue cells in more complex organisms, including humans. This could be helpful for those recovering from strokes or even for traveling through environments that don’t contain oxygen.

Although exciting, the study was also met with caution and understanding this is a far off dream. There are a number of problems with this potential treatment including harmful immune responses and uncontrollable algae growth in the bloodstream, resulting in clogged vessels. Plus the fact these microorganisms need light to photosynthesize. This was no problem in the tadpoles due to their thin transparent skin, but humans have a much less light penetrable brain, creating another obstacle to overcome.
Despite these negatives, this new discovery that brain cells can be recovered in this way is shocking and exciting. By keeping an open mind, maybe another potential use of this finding could be applied. The authors have already suggested the microorganisms could increase survival rates of lab grown cultures by feeding them oxygen in this way, possibly reducing the number of live animal experiments. Open / Comment