The often-maligned E. coli bacteria has powerhouse potential: in the lab, it has the ability to crank out fuels, pharmaceuticals and other useful products at a rapid rate. A research team has discovered a new way to remove a major stumbling block in the process, and boost biofuel production from E. coli.
In a set of studies in mice bearing human tumors, nanoparticles designed to bind to a protein called P-selectin successfully delivered both chemotherapy drugs and targeted therapies to tumor blood vessels. Targeting the blood vessels improved the delivery of drugs to tumor tissue, causing the tumors to shrink and improving how long the mice lived.
A tumor’s blood vessels can serve as a barrier to engineered drug-delivery systems like nanoparticles, which may not be able to cross the blood vessel wall. However, the same blood vessels may express proteins—such as P-selectin—that researchers can potentially exploit, by engineering their nanoparticles to recognize and latch onto those proteins, which enables them to reach the tumor.
This is a comprehensive and critical write-up on some of my policies by some leading researchers and thinkers. It’s from the magazine website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization devoted to engineering and the applied sciences. Naturally, people in the field of science and engineering are some of the most difficult to please, since they are such critical thinkers (which is precisely why I like them so much):
When a transhumanist runs for president, what does that mean for society?
Half quad-copter and 1/2 missile.
The design of small UAVs usually falls into one of two categories: the cruciform quadcopter (with extra arms added as necessary) and the fixed-wing glider (such as early iterations of Google’s delivery drones). However, there’s still room for innovation in this market, as demonstrated by the QuadRKT: a quadcopter drone with a rocket-shaped fuselage that can hovers vertically, but also switch to a horizontal orientation when it needs to go really fast.
The QuadRKT’s basic design has been around for a few years, but its creators are now looking to raise funds on Kickstarter for further development. The team originally developed prototypes of the design (then known as the XQ-139 family of aircraft) for DARPA’s Experimental Vertical Takeoff and Landing program. The US agency reportedly declared the QuadRKT “too risky” to build, and the drone’s creators — a team of engineering and aerospace experts — are now trying to make their design a commercial reality by themselves.
There are a lot of big claims being made by QuadRKT, particularly that the design has the “lowest drag coefficient of any quadcopter out there” and that the smallest model has set unofficial speed records of 133 miles per hour. That’s certainly faster than some of the speediest custom-built quadcopters we’ve seen (these can reportedly reach speeds of around 86 mph), but it’s worth remembering that these claims are unverified. It’s also disappointing that QuadRKT’s videos never seem to show the craft in sustained horizontal flight, or its maneuverability — how it handles turns, loops, at high speed.
WOW — now that’s an engineering feat.
While Dubai is keen to become a 3D printing world leader with their Dubai 3D Printing Strategy, they are by no means the only Middle Eastern nation to look into this technology. Last week a delegation of Chinese WinSun officials traveled to Riyadh, the capital of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to discuss construction 3D printing. Among others, the Chinese construction 3D printing pioneers were invited to 3D print up to 1.5 million housing units over the next five years.
WinSun is the company that made construction 3D printing a practical reality. Back in 2014, the Shanghai-based company created headlines all over the internet for building not one, but ten 3D printed houses in less than 24 hours. Since then, Shanghai WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co., to give its full name, has been building on that initial achievement with one 3D printed concrete creation after another. Back in March, they even unveiled two gorgeous 3D printed Chinese courtyards.
Mars mission with plasma rockets concept. NASA
By Gary Li / 07.29.2016 PhD Candidate in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering University of California, Los Angeles
Smart bricks capable of recycling wastewater and generating electricity from sunlight are being developed by a team of scientists from the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol). The bricks will be able to fit together and create ‘bioreactor walls’ which could then be incorporated in housing, public building and office spaces.
The UWE Bristol team is working on the smart technologies that will be integrated into the bricks in this pan European ‘Living Architecture’ (LIAR) project led by Newcastle University. The LIAR project brings together living architecture, computing and engineering to find a new way to tackle global sustainability issues.
The smart living bricks will be made from bio-reactors filled with microbial cells and algae. Designed to self-adapt to changing environmental conditions the smart bricks will monitor and modify air in the building and recognise occupants.
Now, a team of engineers at Washington University in St. Louis has found a way to use graphene oxide sheets to transform dirty water into drinking water, and it could be a global game-changer.
“We hope that for countries where there is ample sunlight, such as India, you’ll be able to take some dirty water, evaporate it using our material, and collect fresh water,” said Srikanth Singamaneni, associate professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the School of Engineering & Applied Science.
The new approach combines bacteria-produced cellulose and graphene oxide to form a bi-layered biofoam. A paper detailing the research is available online in Advanced Materials.
Big Data and Obama’s Brain Initiative — As we harness mass volumes of information and the current tech explosion around information; we will seeing an accelerated growing need/ urgency for more advance AI, QC, and new brain-mind interface intelligence to assist others when working with both super-intelligence AI and the mass volumes of information.
Engineers are experimenting with chip design to boost computer performance. In the above layout of a chip developed at Columbia, analog and digital circuits are combined in a novel architecture to solve differential equations with extreme speed and energy efficiency. Image: Simha Sethumadhavan, Mingoo Seok and Yannis Tsividis/Columbia Engineering.
In the big data era, the modern computer is showing signs of age. The sheer number of observations now streaming from land, sea, air and space has outpaced the ability of most computers to process it. As the United States races to develop an “exascale” machine up to the task, a group of engineers and scientists at Columbia have teamed up to pursue solutions of their own.
The Data Science Institute’s newest working group— Frontiers in Computing Systems —will try to address some of the bottlenecks facing scientists working with massive data sets at Columbia and beyond. From astronomy and neuroscience, to civil engineering and genomics, major obstacles stand in the way of processing, analyzing and storing all this data.
Nice article; I do need to mention that more and more screen displays are moving to Q-Dot technology. So, computer graphics is being enriched in multiple ways by Quantum.
Caltech applied scientists have developed a new way to simulate large-scale motion numerically using the mathematics that govern the universe at the quantum level.
The new technique, presented at the International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics & Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH), held in Anaheim, California, from July 24–28, allows computers to more accurately simulate vorticity, the spinning motion of a flowing fluid.
A smoke ring, which seems to turn itself inside out endlessly as it floats along, is a complex demonstration of vorticity, and is incredibly difficult to simulate accurately, says Peter Schröder, Shaler Arthur Hanisch Professor of Computer Science and Applied and Computational Mathematics in the Division of Engineering and Applied Science.