A team of NASA engineers has been working on a new type of Thermal Protection System (TPS) for spacecraft that would improve upon the status quo. Having seen success in the laboratory with these new materials, the next step is to test in space. The Conformal Ablative Thermal Protection System, or CA-TPS, will be installed on a small probe flight article provided by Terminal Velocity Aerospace (TVA) and launched on Orbital ATK’s seventh contracted commercial resupply services missio...

Giant viruses appear to have evolved from smaller viruses (not from cells) based on presence of nearly complete set of translation-related genes. Viruses have a ubiquitous presence in the world. Their population is estimated to be 1031, 10 times greater than the nonillion (1030) of microbes on the planet—a figure that surpasses the number of stars in the Milky Way. Giant viruses are characterized by disproportionately large genomes and virions that house the viruses’ genetic material. T...

Music moves brain to pay attention, Stanford study finds Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure 18th-century composer, a research team from the Stanford University School of Medicine has gained valuable insight into how the brain sorts out the chaotic world around it. The research team showed that music engages the areas of the brain involved with paying attention, making predictions and updating the event in memory. Peak brain activity occurred ...

Scientists at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley have now developed a wearable sensor that stays on the skin, stimulates it and measuring the chloride concentration while the person can move around freely. A wearable sensor developed by Stanford researchers can diagnose diseases by measuring molecular constituents of sweat, such as chloride ions and glucose. A wearable device that extracts sweat and analyzes its constituents to monitor health and d...

UNSW Head of Psychiatry Philip Mitchell has been involved in developing a smartphone application that will monitor technology use for the first signs of a manic episode. The early signs of an episode of mania can be hard to detect, but people with bipolar disorder may soon get help from a smart and constant companion – their mobile phones. Mental health organisation SANE Australia will soon trial a smartphone application that will monitor a person’s technology use for the f...

Research has repeatedly confirmed that the first 1,000 days after conception strongly influence a person’s life expectancy and susceptibility to chronic diseases.  The primary marker used to identify early life stress is low birth weight, which can, for instance, indicate poor nutrition of the mother during pregnancy. But low birth weight is a marker only until birth, about 280 days – far short of a measurement useful for the first thousand days. New research from University of Washington ...

For millions of sufferers, there is nothing more debilitating than chronic back or joint pain. It can feel like a lifetime of misery. But researchers led by University of Utah bioengineering assistant professor Robby Bowles have discovered a way to curb chronic pain by modulating genes that reduce tissue- and cell-damaging inflammation. “This has applications for many inflammatory-driven diseases,” Bowles says. “It could be applied for arthritis or to therapeutic cells that are being deliv...

By the time someone realizes they damaged a ligament, tendon or cartilage from too much exercise or other types of physical activity, it’s too late. The tissue is stretched and torn and the person is writhing in pain. But a team of researchers led by University of Utah bioengineering professors Jeffrey Weiss and Michael Yu has discovered that damage to collagen, the main building block of all human tissue, can occur much earlier at a molecular level from too much physical stress, alerting doc...

For neurologist Lee Peterlin, migraines run in the family. She and her sister, Jackie, both suffer from migraine headaches that have been, at times, completely debilitating. That’s one reason why, several years ago, she started looking into why they and 30 million other Americans suffer from a neurological disorder whose cause, at least in part, remains a mystery despite the wealth of potential research subjects. One thing researchers have long known, however, is that migraine sufferers—or migr...

The Human Support Robot (HSR) is being developed to assist people in their everyday activities. In the future, the HSR will coexist with family members in the home, providing support to improve living conditions and the overall quality of life. Features Three key features make it possible for the HSR to operate in indoor environments around people. 1.Compact, Lightweight Body To better accommodate a wide variety of households, the HSR needs to be lightweight and maneuverable. An ar...

Biomedical engineers have developed a way to deliver drugs to specific types of neurons in the brain, providing an unprecedented ability to study neurological diseases while also promising a more targeted way to treat them. Drugs are the tool of choice for studying the connections between neurons, and continue to be the mainstream treatment for neurological disease. But a major drawback in both endeavors is that the drugs affect all types of neurons, complicating the study of how cell recepto...

Millions of American men pop a multivitamin each day, but new research shows the pills won't help the heart -- even if a man's nutrition is lacking. "Many had thought that men with 'poor' nutritional status at baseline may benefit more from long-term multivitamin use on cardiovascular outcomes; however, we did not see any evidence for this in our recent analysis," study author Howard Sesso, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said in a hospital news release. According to background ...

Researchers have shown how to modify commercially available silicon wafers into a structure that efficiently absorbs solar energy and withstands the high temperatures needed for “concentrated solar power” plants that might run up to 24 hours a day. The research advances global efforts to design hybrid systems that combine solar photovoltaic cells, which convert visible and ultraviolet light into electricity, thermoelectric devices that convert heat into electricity, and steam turbines to genera...

From Greek mythology and the Bible to modern critiques of the digital age, loneliness has been portrayed as part of the human condition. With modern society requiring more and more attention away from family, its currently being recognized as a significant adverse consequence of loneliness  and health. Loneliness and isolation are increasingly part of the experience for many. As societies are evolving globally in many different ways as, reduced inter-generational living, different societies c...

NASA Invests in 22 Visionary Exploration Concepts Montage of innovative concepts selected for 2017 NIAC Phase I and Phase II funding Credits: Joel Sercel, Jay McMahon, Siegfried Janson, Adam Arkin, Jonathan Sauder, John Lewis and background, Chris Mann NASA is preparing for a future that could include soft robotic spacecraft with flexible surfaces that can anchor to an asteroid, and an artificial gravity device for long-duration, deep space missions, along with other t...

University of Utah Department of Bioengineering is developing device (Electrode Array) that will allow amputee’s arm to read signals from the brain and then tell the prosthetic hand how to move. Researchers, led by Clark, are further developing the Utah Slanted Electrode Array, a neural interface that uses 100 electrodes which connect with nerves in an amputee’s arm to read signals from the brain - telling the hand how to move. The Utah Slanted Electrode Array was first developed by Departmen...

Medical Realities is an innovative group offering medical training products, specializing in virtual reality, augmented reality and serious games. By using consumer-level virtual reality devices such as the Oculus Rift, Medical Realities can reduce the cost of training, reach a wider audience & provide a completely safe learning environment for medical students. Combining 360 video, 3D and interactive content, The Virtual Surgeon™ puts you inside the operating theatre overseeing an op...

Human communication is unique because it strongly relies on language as well as on the exceptional motivation of humans to share information with others. Identifying by means of words what someone is talking about is hardly available for non-human animals, but human as well as non-human animals can use the direction of others’ gaze and gestures to detect to which object or social partner others’ behaviour is referring to. https://youtu.be/crL6mn_LW28 Hence, following others’ gaze and g...

  Every day the lining of your colon naturally sheds cells. If you have cancer or precancer in your colon, abnormal cells shed into the colon – along with normal cells – where they are picked up by stool as it passes through. Cologuard uses advanced stool DNA technology to find elevated levels of altered DNA and/or hemoglobin in these abnormal cells, which could be associated with cancer or precancer. Cologuard Collection Kit is easy to use, and it’s shipped directly to your home. ...

Passive smoking during pregnancy also affects the cognitive development of children URV researchers show for the first time that passive smoking affects the cognitive development of children in the same way as active smoking The harmful effects that smoking during pregnancy has on child development are well known. Even so, of all the drugs, tobacco is the one that is most widely consumed in this period. A group of researchers belonging to the group NUTRISAM-Nutrition and Mental Healt...

UNSW researchers have observed how microbiota in the oesophagus is affected by a high-fat diet, depleting known beneficial bacteria and increasing the levels of “bad” bacteria. The team’s paper, published in Scientific Reports, found a high-fat diet affects the microbiota in the oesophagus of rats. First author Dr Nadeem Kaakoush says two other interesting things were observed. “The high-fat diet drops the levels of Lactobacillus species, well known to be beneficial and form part of dif...

The plant’s immune system can recognize whether a piece of RNA is an invader or not based on whether the RNA has a threaded bead-like structure at the end, say University of Tokyo researchers. Their finding provides an answer to the quarter-century-old question of why RNAs belonging to the plant escape its self-defense mechanism, paving the way for future biotechnological techniques to modify crops. Our immune system protects us from diseases and infections by fighting off viruses and other f...