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Waves propagating from cell to cell

Image: Xavier Serra-Picamal

Issue no. 20, 2012 Published: Jul 13, 2012
Waves of migration could help heal tissue
Silky scheme for vaccine storage without refrigeration
Researchers design 'smart' waterpumps for rural Africa
Stephen Hawking trials device that reads his mind
Giant ice telescope hunts for dark matter's space secrets
Scientists develop paintable batteries
Israeli firm grows 'highless' marijuana
Computer watches you play a game, then beats you at it

Waves of migration could help heal tissue
Researchers in Spain and the US have discovered that ultraslow waves occur during the expansion of living tissue. These waves could explain how cells migrate to the right places for an organism to grow, repair itself or develop tumours. Growth, repair and the development of tumours are all processes that involve the expansion of a monolayer of cells, or 'epithelial expansion'. If you have a small wound, for example, the wound will form a scab and, beneath that, a matrix for the construction of new tissue. But in the final stage, a monolayer of cells will migrate from undamaged tissue to form a new outer-boundary layer. Understanding this migration has been difficult. The dynamics of the protein network or 'cytoskeleton' within cells that governs cell propulsion occurs at speeds of several microns per second. However, cell motion itself is stifled by viscous drag and is therefore thousands of times slower, at just a few microns per hour. Such a disparity has troubled scientists, who have been trying to describe the mechanical forces - and the rules that govern them. Researchers at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia in Barcelona and Harvard University grew a monolayer culture of canine epithelial cells within a mask and then removed the mask to study the subsequent expansion. The researchers measured the expansion and mechanical forces in one dimension. To their surprise, they discovered wave-like crests that formed at the edges of the cell monolayer and propagated inwards at roughly twice the speed of the cells' migration. The wave is like a traffic jam seen from above. Like stopping and starting cars, the cells ripple in density throughout the monolayer at about 1 mm per day. The wave transmits mechanical stress from the moving front of the monolayer to the centre of the group. Although the researchers cannot be sure of the function of the wave, they believe that it might help control the cell monolayer's movement.
Physics World / Nature Physics Jul 11, 2012	back to top

Silky scheme for vaccine storage without refrigeration
Silkworms may provide a novel way to store vaccines according to researchers at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Preventable infections kill millions of children in poor countries, partly because reliable refrigeration for vaccines isn't always available. Vaccines are refrigerated to slow the rate at which the biological molecules they contain gradually degrade, largely due to contact with water. Fibroin, a protein in silk, forms stable sheets that contain tiny pockets lined with molecules that repel water. You can trap a biological molecule within these pockets by dissolving it with fibroin in water, then drying it to form a film. Tucked away in a pocket, the molecule is protected. The Tufts University team made such films with the live measles, mumps and rubella viruses in the MMR vaccine. The films kept the viruses undamaged for six months, even powdered and at temperatures of 45 °C, when regular freeze-dried vaccines degraded rapidly.
New Scientist / PNAS Jul 09, 2012	back to top

Researchers design 'smart' waterpumps for rural Africa
Researchers hope to harness mobile phone technology to improve water supplies in rural parts of Africa. A team from the University of Oxford, in the UK, proposes installing handpumps containing devices that automatically send text messages to local water engineers whenever pumps break down or dry up. The device, known as a waterpoint data transmitter, is fitted into handpump handles, and automatically monitors the number of strokes made when a pump is operated. This data, which provides estimates of daily and seasonal demand, including critical under- or over-usage information, is then transmitted to a central hub - thus informing engineers, cheaply and regularly, of the need for repairs, and helping to ensure a constant flow of water. The researchers will trial their idea, which is known as the 'Smart Handpumps' initiative, in 70 villages in Kenya in August. A prototype transmitter was successfully trialled in Zambia in 2011. The researchers hope to expand the technology to other African countries, including Malawi, South Sudan and Zambia.
SciDev Jul 11, 2012	back to top

Stephen Hawking trials device that reads his mind
Technology has helped Stephen Hawking in many ways, and now it might allow him to communicate using thought alone. The cosmologist is trialling a device that monitors brain activity with the ultimate aim of transforming it into speech. Hawking has motor neurone disease - nerve decay that has left him almost completely paralysed. He currently communicates using a series of cheek twitches to select words from a screen. 'It is a very, very slow process,' says Philip Low at Stanford University in California, who is founder of healthcare company NeuroVigil. As Hawking loses control of his cheek, Low hopes he might instead communicate using his company's portable device. The iBrain records brain activity from a single point on the scalp. An algorithm then extracts useful information from this activity. In a preliminary trial, Low's team asked Hawking to imagine moving his hands and feet while wearing the device. They were able to identify what movement he was imagining through changes in his brain activity. They now hope to develop the technology to enable Hawking and others to use the imagined movements to instruct a computer to write or speak words.
New Scientist Jul 12, 2012	back to top

Giant ice telescope hunts for dark matter's space secrets
Scientists are using the world's biggest telescope, buried deep under the South Pole, to try to unravel the mysteries of tiny particles known as neutrinos, hoping to shed light on how the universe was made. The mega-detector, called IceCube, took 10 years to build 2,400m below the Antarctic ice and has a size of one cubic km. Designed to observe neutrinos, which are emitted by exploding stars and move close to the speed of light, the telescope is attracting new attention in the wake of last week's discovery of a particle that appears to be the Higgs boson - a basic building block of the universe. IceCube is essentially a string of light detectors buried in the ice through hot water drilling. When neutrinos, which are everywhere, interact in the ice, they produce charged particles that then create light, which can be detected. The ice acts as a net that isolates the neutrinos, making them easier to observe. It also protects the telescope from potentially damaging radiation. Scientists are attempting to track the particles to discover their points of origin, in the hope that will give clues on what happens in space, particularly in unseen parts of the universe known as dark matter. Before IceCube was completed in 2010, scientists had observed just 14 neutrinos. With the huge new instrument, paired with another telescope in the Mediterranean, hundreds of neutrinos have been detected. So far, all of those have been created in the earth's atmosphere, but scientists hope to eventually detect those from space.
Reuters Jul 10, 2012	back to top

Scientists develop paintable batteries
Scientists at Rice University have managed to design a lithium-ion battery that can be painted on virtually any surface. The rechargeable battery consists of spray-painted layers, each representing components of a traditional battery. The team spent numerous hours formulating, mixing and testing paints for each of the five layered components - two current collectors, a cathode, an anode and a polymer separator in the middle. The materials were subsequently airbrushed onto ceramic bathroom tiles, flexible polymers, glass, stainless steel and even a beer stein to see how well they would bond with each substrate. In the first experiment, nine bathroom tile-based batteries were connected in parallel. One was topped with a solar cell that converted power from a white laboratory light. When fully charged by both the solar panel and house current, the batteries alone powered a set of light-emitting diodes that spelled out 'RICE' for six hours, while the batteries provided a steady 2.4 volts. The researchers confirmed the hand-painted batteries were quite consistent in their capacities, within plus or minus 10 percent of the target. They were also put through 60 charge-discharge cycles with only a very small drop in capacity.
TG Daily Jun 28, 2012	back to top

Israeli firm grows 'highless' marijuana
They grow in a secret location in northern Israel. A tall fence, security cameras and an armed guard protect them from criminals. A hint of their sweet-scented blossom carries in the air: rows and rows of cannabis plants, as far as the eye can see. It is here, at a medical marijuana plantation atop the hills of the Galilee, where researchers of the Tikun Olam company have developed marijuana that can be used to ease the symptoms of some ailments without getting patients high. Cannabis has more than 60 constituents called cannabinoids. THC is perhaps the best known of those, less so for its medical benefits and more for its psychoactive properties that give people a 'high' feeling. But cannabis also contains Cannabidiol, or CBD, a substance that some researchers say has anti-inflammatory benefits. Unlike THC, it hardly binds to the brain's receptors and can therefore work without getting patients stoned. Tikun Olam began its research on CBD enhanced cannabis in 2009 and about six months ago they came up with Avidekel, a cannabis strain that contains 15.8% CBD and only traces of THC, less than one percent. Marijuana is an illegal drug in Israel. Medicinal use of it was first permitted in 1993, according to the health ministry. Today cannabis is used in Israel to treat 9,000 people suffering from illnesses such as cancer, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis, Crohn's disease and post traumatic stress disorder, according to Israel's health ministry.
Reuters Jul 03, 2012	back to top

Computer watches you play a game, then beats you at it
The easiest way to learn a new game is to watch someone else play it - and now computers can do the same. Lukasz Kaiser, who studies logic and games at Paris Diderot University in France, has developed software that learns to play games such as Connect 4 and noughts-and-crosses by watching videos of humans playing. As it watches, it uses standard image-processing tools to recognise changes in the separate board squares and pieces of a game, while ignoring extra details like human hands. The videos allow the system to learn the rules by logging what the board looks like when a game has been won, and what count as legal moves. Having mastered the rules, the software plays the game by examining all possible moves and choosing those it deems most likely to lead to a win. As you would expect, its performance depends on the complexity of the game. Connect 4 has few possibilities, making it very hard to beat the trained computer. The system is not yet sophisticated enough to understand games where rules for winning are linked to rules for moving, such as in chess where a player loses if their king is unable to make a legal move, but Kaiser is working to tackle that.
New Scientist Jul 10, 2012	back to top