10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017

These technologies all have staying power. They will affect the economy and our politics, improve medicine, or influence our culture. Some are unfolding now; others will take a decade or more to develop. But you should know about all of them right now.

1. Reversing Paralysis 
   Scientists are making remarkable progress at using brain implants to restore the freedom of movement that spinal cord injuries take away.
   
   
2. Self-Driving Trucks Tractor-trailers without a human at the wheel will soon barrel onto highways near you. What will this mean for the nation’s 1.7 million truck drivers?
   
   
3. Paying with Your Face
   Face-detecting systems in China now authorize payments, provide access to facilities, and track down criminals. Will other countries follow?
   
   
4. Practical Quantum Computing
   Advances at Google, Intel, and several research groups indicate that computers with previously unimaginable power are finally within reach.
   
    
5. The 360-Degree Selfie
   Inexpensive cameras that make spherical images are opening a new era in photography and changing the way people share stories.
   
    
6. Hot Solar Cells
   By converting heat to focused beams of light, a new solar device could create cheap and continuous power.
   
    
7. Gene Therapy 2.0
   Scientists have solved fundamental problems that were holding back cures for rare hereditary disorders. Next we’ll see if the same approach can take on cancer, heart disease, and other common illnesses.
   
   
8. The Cell Atlas
   Biology’s next mega-project will find out what we’re really made of.
   
   
9. Botnets of Things
   The relentless push to add connectivity to home gadgets is creating dangerous side effects that figure to get even worse.
   
   
10. Reinforcement Learning
    By experimenting, computers are figuring out how to do things that no programmer could teach them.
    
    

ORIGINAL: Technology Review

Scientists Implant Tiny Lasers Into Living Cells

photo credit: A living macrophage cell showing the implanted laser (green dot). Marcel Shubert et al./St.Andrews

It sounds like a plot from a science fiction movie, but quite incredibly scientists have managed to implant tiny lasers into living cells. In the quest to track cells as they move about and interact, the researchers have created miniature lasers that when internalized by the cell can be used to follow cells for weeks at a time. The study is published in Nano Letters.

For the “biointegrated” laser to work, like other conventional lasers, it requires three main components: 

• some sort of material that will emit light when stimulated, known as the “gain medium,” 
• a resonator that confines the light by total internal reflection, and 
• a “pump source,” or a way of transferring energy from an external source to the gain medium.

The researchers, from the University of St. Andrews, achieved this by making what they call a “whispering gallery mode microsphere resonator” out of a particular plastic called polystyrene divinylbenzene. They were able to make these resonators with a radius of just 5-10 µm (0.005-0.01 mm), or small enough to be able to fit inside a living cell.

Previously, gain mediums such as vitamins and naturally produced fluorescent proteins had been used, but these needed resonator cavities much larger than typical cells, and so had limited use. For this study, the scientists instead turned to a green fluorescent dye inserted into the microsphere resonators. The pump source was provided by nanosecond pulsed output from an “optical parametric oscillator laser system.”

They then tested how well four different cells types engulfed the microspheres, using 

• human macrophages (found in the immune system), 
• mouse fibroblasts (that help give tissue structure), 
• mouse microglia cells (found in the brain), and 
• human embryonic kidney cells. 

They found that the cells were able to internalize the miniature lasers, and that the macrophages then continued to move, dragging the tiny tech as they go.

Once the lasers were stimulated and started emitting their own light, the scientists then followed the cells for 19 hours, and found no significant difference in the amount of light they were releasing over the time period. They also managed to show that the macrophages were able to live normally and survive for up to four weeks with the laser still embedded.

There are quite a few advantages of using a tiny laser to track cells over more traditional techniques, such as fluorescent proteins. The range in different light frequencies emitted by the microspheres, determined by their diameter, coupled with the ability to use around 30 different dyes to stain them, means that scientists could theoretically uniquely tag up to 100,000 individual cells. The technique also allows them to follow cells in 3D structures, and is less complicated to carry out then other tagging methods. 

They hope that this new method will allow better imaging of cell cultures in the lab, but also the tracking of 

• macrophages in their immune response, 
• dendritic cells in lymph nodes, or 
• even map circulating tumor cells. 

ORIGINAL: IFLSCience

by Josh L Davis

July 24, 2015

A Bendable Implant Taps the Nervous System without Damaging It

Swiss researchers allow rats to walk again with a rubbery electronic implant.

Why It Matters
Neuroscientists need new materials to restore movement to paralyzed people.

An implant made of silicone and gold wires is as stretchy as human tissue.

Medicine these days entertains all kinds of ambitious plans for reading off brain signals to control wheelchairs, or using electronics to bypass spinal injuries. But most of these ideas for implants that can interface with the nervous system run up against a basic materials problem: wires are stiff and bodies are soft.

That motivated some researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale, in Lausanne, Switzerland, to design a soft, flexible electronic implant, which they say has the same ability to bend and stretch as dura mater, the membrane that surrounds the brain and spinal cord.

The scientists, including Gregoire Courtine, have previously showed that implants can allow mice with spinal injuries to walk again. They did this by sending patterns of electrical shocks to the spinal cord via electrodes placed inside the spine (see “Paralyzed Rats Take 1,000 Steps, Orchestrated by Computer”). But the rigid wires ended up damaging the mice’s nervous systems.

So Courtine joined electrical engineer Stéphanie Lacour (see “Innovators Under 35, 2006: Stéphanie Lacour”) to come up with a new implant they call “e-dura.” It’s made from 

• soft silicone, 
• stretchy gold wires, and 
• rubbery electrodes flecked with platinum, 
• as well as a microchannel through which the researchers were able to pump drugs.

The work builds on ongoing advances in flexible electronics. Other scientists have built patches that match the properties of the skin and include circuits, sensors, or even radios (see “Stick-On Electronic Tattoos”).

What’s new is how stretchable electronics are merging with a widening effort to invent new ways to send and receive signals from nerves (see “Neuroscience’s New Toolbox”). “People are pushing the limits because everyone wants to precisely interact with the brain and nervous system,” says Polina Anikeeva, a materials scientist at MIT who develops ultrathin fiber-optic threads as a different way of interfacing with neural tissue.

The reason metal or plastic electrodes eventually cause damage, or stop working, is that they cause compression and tissue damage. A stiff implant, even if it’s very thin, will still not stretch as the spinal cord does. “It slides against the tissue and causes a lot of inflammation,” says Lacour. “When you bend over to tie your shoelaces, the spinal cord stretches by several percent.”

The implant mimics a property of human tissue called viscoelasticity—somewhere between rubber and a very thick fluid. Pinch the skin on your hand with force and it will deform, but then flow back into place.

Using the flexible implant, the Swiss scientists reported today in the journal Science that they could overcome spinal injury in rats by wrapping it around the spinal cord and sending electrical signals to make the rodent’s hind legs move. They also pumped in chemicals to enhance the process. After two months, they saw few signs of tissue damage compared to conventional electrodes, which ended up causing an immune reaction and impairing the animal’s ability to move.

The ultimate aim of this kind of research is an implant that could restore a paralyzed person’s ability to walk. Lacour says that is still far off, but believes it will probably involve soft electronics. “If you want a therapy for patients, you want to ensure it can last in the body,” she says. “If we can match the properties of the neural tissue we should have a better interface.”

ORIGINAL: Tech Review
By Antonio Regalado 

January 8, 2015