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Organoids, miniature and simplified in vitro model systems that mimic the structure and function of organs, have attracted considerable interest due to their promising applications in disease modeling, drug screening, personalized medicine, and tissue engineering. Organoids are three-dimensional structures that mimic the architecture and functions of various organs. They are grown in vitro from stem cells or other precursor cells and have been used to study the development and behavior of different organs, as well as for drug screening and disease modeling. Organoids are highly valued for their ability to recapitulate the complex microenvironments and functions of different organs, making them valuable tools for studying the mechanisms of disease and for testing potential treatment Despite the substantial success in cultivating physiologically relevant organoids, challenges remain concerning the complexities of their assembly and the difficulties associated with data analysis. The advent of AI-Enabled Organoids, which interfaces with artificial intelligence (AI), holds the potential to revolutionize the field by offering novel insights and methodologies that can expedite the development and clinical application of organoids. read this article which delineates the fundamental concepts and mechanisms underlying AI-Enabled Organoids, summarizing the prospective applications on rapid screening of construction strategies, cost-effective extraction of multiscale image features, streamlined analysis of multi-omics data, and precise preclinical evaluation and application.
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This week, the academic community provided a rather impressive example of the promise of neural implants. Using an implant, a paralyzed individual managed to type out roughly 90 characters per minute simply by imagining that he was writing those characters out by hand Dreaming is doing Previous attempts at providing typing capabilities to paralyzed people via implants have involved giving subjects a virtual keyboard and letting them maneuver a cursor with their mind. The process is effective but slow, and it requires the user's full attention, as the subject has to track the progress of the cursor and determine when to perform the equivalent of a key press. It also requires the user to spend the time to learn how to control the system. But there are other possible routes to getting characters out of the brain and onto the page. Somewhere in our writing thought process, we form the intention of using a specific character, and using an implant to track this intention could potentially work. Unfortunately, the process is not especially well understood. Downstream of that intention, a decision is transmitted to the motor cortex, where it's translated into actions. Again, there's an intent stage, where the motor cortex determines it will form the letter (by typing or writing, for example), which is then translated into the specific muscle motions required to perform the action. These processes are much better understood, and they're what the research team targeted for their new work. Disclaimer: Not even a prototype As the researchers themselves put it, this "is not yet a complete, clinically viable system." To begin with, it has only been used in a single individual, so we have no idea how well it might work for others. The simplified alphabet used here doesn't contain any digits, capital letters, or most forms of punctuation. And the behavior of the implants changes over time, perhaps because of minor shifts relative to the neurons they read or the build-up of scar tissue, so the system had to be recalibrated regularly—at least once per week to maintain a tolerable error rate read the research at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03506-2 related code : https://github.com/fwillett/handwritingBCI read the article in its complete and unedited form at https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/05/neural-implant-lets-paralyzed-person-type-by-imagining-writing/
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Wearables that have weaved their way into everyday life include smart watches and wireless earphones, while in the healthcare setting, common devices include wearable injectors, electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring patches, listening aids, and more. A major pain point facing the use of these wearables is the issue of keeping these devices properly and conveniently powered. As the number of wearables one uses increases, the need to charge multiple batteries rises in tandem, consuming huge amounts of electricity. A research team, led by Associate Professor Jerald Yoo from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the N.1 Institute for Health at the National University of Singapore (NUS), has developed a technology that enables a single device, such as a mobile phone placed in the pocket, to wirelessly power other wearable devices on a user's body, using the human body as a medium for power transmission. The team's novel system has an added advantage—it can harvest unused energy from electronics in a typical home or office environment to power the wearables. The NUS team designed a receiver and transmitter system that uses the human body as a medium for power transmission and energy harvesting. Each receiver and transmitter contains a chip that is used as a springboard to extend coverage over the entire body. A user just needs to place the transmitter on a single power source, such as the smart watch on a user's wrist, while multiple receivers can be placed anywhere on the person's body. The system then harnesses energy from the source to power multiple wearables on the user's body via a process termed as body-coupled power transmission. In this way, the user will only need to charge one device, and the rest of the gadgets that are worn can simultaneously be powered up from that single source. The team's experiments showed that their system allows a single power source that is fully charged to power up to 10 wearable devices on the body, for a duration of over 10 hours. As a complementary source of power, the NUS team also looked into harvesting energy from the environment. Their research found that typical office and home environments have parasitic electromagnetic (EM) waves that people are exposed to all the time, for instance, from a running laptop. The team's novel receiver scavenges the EM waves from the ambient environment, and through a process referred to as body-coupled powering, the human body is able to harvest this energy to power the wearable devices, regardless of their locations around the body. This paves the way for smaller, battery-free wearables read the paper in Nature at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00592-y read the original unedited article https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-approach-wirelessly-power-wearable-devices.html
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Scientists have fabricated a device that can mimic human brain cognitive actions and is more efficient than conventional techniques in emulating artificial intelligence, thus enhancing the computational speed and power consumption efficiency. Artificial intelligence is now a part of our daily lives, starting from email filters and smart replies in communication to helping battle the Covid-19 pandemic. But AI can do much more such as facilitate self-driving autonomous vehicles, augmented reality for healthcare, drug discovery, big data handling, real-time pattern/image recognition, solving real-world problems, and so on. These can be realised with the help of a neuromorphic device which can mimic the human brain synapse to bring about brain-inspired efficient computing ability. The human brain comprises of nearly a hundred billion neurons consisting of axons and dendrites. These neurons massively interconnect with each other via axons and dendrites, forming colossal junctions called synapse. This complex bio-neural network is believed to give rise to superior cognitive abilities. Software-based artificial neural networks (ANN) can be seen defeating humans in games or helping handle the Covid-19 situation. However, the power-hungry (in megawatts) von Neumann computer architecture slows down ANNs performance due to the available serial processing while the brain does the job via parallel processing consuming just 20 W. It is estimated that the brain consumes 20% of the total body energy. From the calory conversion, it amounts to 20 watts. While the conventional computing platforms consume megawatts, i.e., 1 million watts of energy, to mimic basic human cognition. To overcome this bottleneck, a hardware-based solution involves an artificial synaptic device that, unlike transistors, could emulate the functions of human brain synapse. Scientists had long been trying to develop a synaptic device that can mimic complex psychological behaviors without the aid of external supporting (CMOS) circuits. To address this challenge, Scientists from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bengaluru, an autonomous institute of the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, devised a novel approach of fabricating an artificial synaptic network (ASN) resembling the biological neural network via a simple self-forming method (the device structure is formed by itself while heating). This work has been recently published in the journal ‘Materials Horizons’. “Nature has had an incredible amount of time and diversity to engineer ever new forms and functions through evolution. Learning and emulating new processes, technologies, materials and devices from the nature and biology are the important pathways to the significant advances of the future which will increasingly integrate the worlds of the living with the man-made technologies,” said Prof Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, DST. read the original unedited post at https://www.indianext.co.in/2021/06/scientists-develop-efficient-artificial-synaptic-network-that-mimics-human-brain/
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Purdue University engineers have developed a method to transform existing cloth items into battery-free wearables resistant to laundry. These smart clothes are powered wirelessly through a flexible, silk-based coil sewn on the textile. In the near future, all your clothes will become smart. These smart clothes will outperform conventional passive garments, thanks to their miniaturized electronic circuits and sensors, which will allow you to seamlessly communicate with your phone, computer, car and other machines. This smart clothing will not only make you more productive but also check on your health status and even call for help if you suffer an accident. The reason why this smart clothing is not all over your closet yet is that the fabrication of this smart clothing is quite challenging, as clothes need to be periodically washed and electronics despise water. Purdue engineers have developed a new spray/sewing method to transform any conventional cloth items into battery-free wearables that can be cleaned in the washing machine. "By spray-coating smart clothes with highly hydrophobic molecules, we are able to render them repellent to water, oil and mud," said Ramses Martinez, an assistant professor in Purdue's School of Industrial Engineering and in the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering in Purdue's College of Engineering. "These smart clothes are almost impossible to stain and can be used underwater and washed in conventional washing machines without damaging the electronic components sewn on their surface." read the study at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nanoen.2021.106155 read the original and unedited version of the article at https://phys.org/news/2021-06-wearables-future-washable-smart-powered.html
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Data encoded on DNA could last 500 years! Check out a new DNA decoder that can read data at 330 gigabits per square centimeter Years ago, the world marveled as it recognized that more human information was created on the internet than had been written in thousands of years of human history. But with the information age growing more complex by the day, we may have to look at new ways of storing information, and it turns out the DNA we're made of might hold the key to the ultimate organic hard drive. A team of scientists has developed a new way of storing data, using pegs and pegboards composed of DNA, which can be retrieved via microscope, in a molecular variant of the traditional Lite-Brite, according to a recent study published in the journal Nature Communications. The prototype can store information in DNA strands with a 10-nanometer space between them. This distance is less than one-thousandth of the diameter of a human hair, and roughly one-hundredth the size of a living bacterium. The team tested a digital nucleic acid memory (dNAM) with the storage of a simple statement: "Data is in our DNA/n." Earlier attempts to retrieve data stored in DNA called for DNA sequencing, which involves reading the genetic code of DNA strands — which is a critical tool in biology and medicine, but not very efficient for DNA memory. Data stored on DNA strands can last for 500 years Using a microscope, the team imaged hundreds of thousands of DNA pegs in one recording, allowing for an error-correction algorithm to retrieve all data. Once all of the bits were organized via algorithms, the prototype DNA decoder could read data at 330 gigabits per square centimeter. While this technology likely won't show up in smartphones or laptops in the near future, DNA storage has incredible potential for archival use. In case you missed it, DNA evolved to store unconscionable amounts of data. If we knew how, our genes could store all of the emails, tweets, songs, photos, films, and books that ever existed in a DNA volume the size of a jewelry box. read the original version of this interesting article at https://interestingengineering.com/dna-could-store-every-tweet-movie-book-and-more-in-a-jewelry-box-sized-device
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