Posts tagged biomaterials

In 1995, 11 years after Saucier started NASA’s informal work on an implantable continuous-flow blood pump, some of the NASA and Baylor researchers helped create a company called MicroMed to bring the pump to market, and three years later, surgeons implanted one in a patient in Europe. (The FDA hadn’t yet approved it for use in the U.S.) By now, MicroMed had competition from a company called Thoratec, which had an Archimedes’-screw continuous-flow blood pump of its own moving through the FDA approval process. Eager to stay ahead, MicroMed made the bubble-era mistake of letting itself be acquired by a hedge fund called Absolute Capital Management, which starved the project as it imploded spectacularly, its principals facing charges of fraud. Thoratec zoomed past the wreckage of MicroMed and was soon testing its own device, the HeartMate II, in clinical trials.

The HeartMate II was an Archimedes’ screw with magnets implanted in the axle and an electric coil in the cylindrical case surrounding it—the saltshaker-shaped device that Cohn had placed in my hands. A charge zipped around the coil, drawing the screw along at 8,000 to 12,000 revolutions per minute. The axle spun on a synthetic-ruby bearing, lubricated by the blood itself. Connected to a portable battery, it let patients live fairly normal lives and was designed to stay in place forever, not merely as a “bridge to transplant.” Patients’ own hearts still worked; the continuous flow of the pump just helped things along.

(Source: futurenow321)

Forget about putting solar panels on the roof. Miles Barr wants to make curtains, cell-phone cases, and even shirtsleeves that generate electricity from the sun.

Barr, who earned a chemical engineering Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is an expert in chemical vapor deposition. That’s a process in which two vapors are piped into a sealed chamber, where they react, creating a thin, solid film around an object inside. The technique isn’t new; it’s been used to add a waterproof layer to fabric, for example. Barr successfully adapted the technology to “print” an electrically active solar cell coating onto ordinary materials, starting with a sheet of paper in 2010. “When we first did that, it really sparked a lot of imagination,” says Barr, 28. “If you can put a solar cell on paper, what else can you put it on?”

Chemical vapor deposition changes the quality of a surface without using extreme temperatures or solvents that might cause damage. When Barr’s team at MIT figured out how to use the process to make solar cells, he says, they went to an office supply store and loaded up on stuff to test it on: “Saran Wrap, copy paper, tissue paper, almost anything you can imagine,” he says. Barr maintains the technique could be adapted for mass production. Because it relies on abundant organic molecules, rather than heavy metals or rare elements, it could be cheap, too. Right now, Barr’s solar cells convert only about 2 percent of the energy in light into electric power, compared with 10 percent to 20 percent for conventional photovoltaic panels, though he thinks he can eventually raise the efficiency to 10 percent.

(Source: futurenow321)

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The discovery that synthetic DNA and RNA can evolve like their natural counterparts could bring artificial life one step closer, U.S. scientists say.

DNA is built using deoxyribose sugars and RNA with ribose, but scientists have discovered how to replace these sugars with six others to create synthetic genetic chains called xeno-nucleic acids or XNAs.

The synthetic XNAs can share information with natural DNA and one, anhydrohexitol nucleic acid, can undergo evolution and become biologically useful forms, they said.

The findings could shed new light on questions concerning the origins of life, researchers said.

(Source: futurenow321)

A $10 million project aims to grow algae for biofuels inside plastic bags. Next week, NASA will show off some of its latest technology, a system for growing algae in floating plastic bags. The system is the result of a $10 million, two-year project that investigated whether the algae could be used to make biofuels, including jet fuel. The system is designed to reduce the cost of making fuel from algae by making it possible to put algae farms near wastewater facilities, which offer a large source of nutrients.

(Source: futurenow321)