Category Archives: BioEngineering

Yesterday at 6:48 PM The Defense Department-funded project combines bioengineering with physical therapy to spur stem cells to turn into the right kind of tissue. By Lauran Neergaard The Associated Press WASHINGTON Scientists implanted thin sheets of scaffolding-like material from pigs into a few young men with disabling leg injuries and say the experimental treatment coaxed the mens own stem cells to regrow new muscle. click image to enlarge Dr. Stephen Badylak, a surgery professor at the University of Pittsburgh and deputy director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, holdings a sheet of scaffolding-like material derived from pig bladder. His team implanted a similar version into a handful of men with severe leg injuries and reported Wednesday that the experimental treatment helped regrow muscle. The Associated Press/University of Pittsburgh Medical Center The research, funded by the Defense Department, included just five patients, a small first step in the complex quest for regenerative medicine. But the researchers described some of the men improving enough to no longer need canes, or to ride a bicycle again, after years of living with injuries that today have no good treatment. The real rush for someone like myself is to see this patient being … Continue reading →

If the producers of television's hit comedy "The Big Bang Theory" ever need to add a teenage star to their cast of brilliant, eccentric minds, then Jasmin Joseph of Woodland Hills El Camino Real would fit right in. She's an aspiring scientist and a top softball player for the No. 1 team in the City Section. She ranks No. 2 in her class academically and is headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She gets about three hours a sleep each night juggling her many responsibilities and couldn't be happier. She never forgets her long-term ambitions. "I want to see a world where there's no genetic diseases, no Parkinson's, no Tay-Sachs, no Huntington's, no cystic fibrosis," she said. Her dreams and aspirations started when she sat in the biology class of Annie Darakjian as a freshman and sophomore. She remembers also being inspired by the movie "Lorenzo's Oil," about parents searching for a cure for their ill son. "I fell in love and wanted to go into genetics and bioengineering," she said. "I want to work in a lab and do research." Her softball teammates joke that at MIT, "they have rulers on their bats." Her coach, Lori Chandler, said, … Continue reading →

April 30, 2014 Image Credit: Rice University [ Watch The Video: Keeping Fat And Nutrients In Tube-Fed Preemies With Nutriflow ] Rice University Fat, the bane of many an adult, is precisely what babies born prematurely need to gain weight and grow strong and healthy. Some students at Rice University have invented a device to ensure preemies get enough fat, which has been a challenge. Babies born more than five or six weeks before their due dates are unable to feed from a bottle or breast because they cannot coordinate sucking, breathing and swallowing. They must be tube-fed milk, but that too presents problems: Some 20 to 50 percent of the fat content in mothers milk clings to the tubing and never reaches the child. Also lost are essential nutrients, including calcium, phosphorus and magnesium, that bind to the fat. Fat is essential for preemies, but its always been a problem getting it to them, said Mika Tabata, a senior bioengineering student and a member of the design team Nutriflow at Rice. Our task was to figure out a way to increase the amount of fat they receive, which has been difficult. Other team members are Alexa Juarez, Denizen Kocak … Continue reading →

Medical Bioengineering Device - Bone Marrow Extraction Thank you for taking the time to watch this video, please fill out the quick survey about your thoughts. Thank you! Survey - http://freeonlinesurveys.com/s.asp?sid=k157vqb2nrlgyl0471191 Idea... By: Ahmed Imran … Continue reading →

The state's governor, Pete Shumlin, is expected to sign a bill that wouldmake the Green Mountain State the nations first to mandate that companies label products containing GMO products, beginning in July 2016. Shumlinhas saidhe will sign the legislation, which many GMO skeptics see as the most significant step yet in the march toward a nationwide re-evaluation of where genetically engineered products stand in the country's food supply. As genetically modified ingredients have become increasingly common, controversy has grown over their persistent creep into products as varied as bread, cereal, tofu and beer.The companies that produce the bioengineered seeds from which GMO crops grow maintain that they are safe for the health of both consumers and the environment.But an international grassroots movement that is determined to slow the spread of products containing bioengineered ingredients -- or at least compel authorities to require that such food be labeled accordingly due to concerns about their long-term effects -- is pushing governments from the United States to Vietnam to reconsider their approach to the burgeoning sector. The Vermont bill is the most recent high-profile development in the GMO regulatory space, but governments from Europe to California have taken, or are considering, measures aimed … Continue reading →

PUBLIC RELEASE DATE: 28-Apr-2014 Contact: Tom Abate tabate@stanford.edu 650-736-2245 Stanford University The Neurogrid circuit board can simulate orders of magnitude more neurons and synapses than other brain mimics on the power it takes to run a tablet computer. Stanford scientists have developed a new circuit board modeled on the human brain, possibly opening up new frontiers in robotics and computing. For all their sophistication, computers pale in comparison to the brain. The modest cortex of the mouse, for instance, operates 9,000 times faster than a personal computer simulation of its functions. Not only is the PC slower, it takes 40,000 times more power to run, writes Kwabena Boahen, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford, in an article for the Proceedings of the IEEE. "From a pure energy perspective, the brain is hard to match," says Boahen, whose article surveys how "neuromorphic" researchers in the United States and Europe are using silicon and software to build electronic systems that mimic neurons and synapses. Boahen and his team have developed Neurogrid, a circuit board consisting of 16 custom-designed "Neurocore" chips. Together these 16 chips can simulate 1 million neurons and billions of synaptic connections. The team designed these chips with power efficiency … Continue reading →

Imagine an implantable device that can dramatically reduce the severity of epileptic seizures, or a smartphone app to help combat veterans ward off a post-traumatic stress episode or stop panic attacks. Or a device to precisely pinpoint tumors of the small bowels, or disposable scopes equipped with wireless cameras and light sources for looking into nasal passages. The devices were invented and designed by IDEA Labs, a bioengineering design and entrepreneurship incubator founded by students in collaboration with faculty on the medical campus of Washington University. The programs goal is to find solutions to real-world problems in health-care delivery and clinical medicine. It puts together doctors, who know the problems, and students and faculty with skills to solve them. Teams then try to get their inventions funded, into production and in use as quickly as possible. IDEA Labs, which stands for innovation, design and engineering in action, mainly involves students in Washington Universitys schools of medicine, engineering and applied science especially its biomedical engineering division. You want to be useful in the world, said Avik Som, IDEA Labs president and founder. Its nice to be able to be useful even as students and to apply the learning were getting. Som … Continue reading →

Photo: PrakashLab/Stanford University Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash, PhD, is giving away 10,000 build-your-own paper microscope kits to citizen scientists with the most inspiring ideas for things to do with this new invention. Ten thousand 'print-and-fold' paper microscopes initially designed as low-cost medical diagnostic tools are being given away to researchers and citizen scientists who come up with novel ways to use them to test their ideas. The goal of the Ten Thousand Microscopes initiative, funded by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, is to create a crowdsourced lab manual for Foldscope, the low-cost microscope launched earlier this year by a US bioengineering team that combines pragmatic, origami design with sophisticated micro-optics. The idea is to make "microscopy for everyone", says Manu Prakash, a bioengineering researcher at Stanford University, United States, who led the development of the frugal innovation to address the lack of cheap, easy-to-use diagnostic tools for diseases in remote and impoverished communities. Assembled from a single sheet of paper, Foldscope microscopes are fitted with tiny ball lenses - about the size of a grain of salt - that can magnify samples up to 2,000 times. Yet, as well as being lightweight, Foldscope is durable and, at roughly 50 … Continue reading →

HOUSTON (AP) - People with prosthetic hands have to handle everything with care. When picking up a delicate egg, they cant instinctively modulate how hard theyre gripping it. When placing a glass on a table, they have to watch closely that they dont loosen their hold before it is set down safely. A group of five Rice University engineering students have been working for months to solve this problem and develop a device to bring a little more normalcy to the lives of amputees. Theyve created an armband that amputees can wear with their prosthetics. As the artificial hand opens and closes, a rubber wheel in the armband rotates, pulling against the arm and indicating to what degree the hand is open or closed. Using a prosthetic is still about learning what you can do and what you cant do, said Bryan Solomon, a 22-year-old bioengineering senior at Rice University. It takes a lot of mental effort to use a prosthetic limb - you have to watch it all the time. Solomon and the other members of his group, called Magic Touch, have worked all year to solve one of dozens of conundrums presented to engineering students at Rice at … Continue reading →

Rice Catalyst, the Rice University undergraduate science research journal, hosted the fourth annual TEDx RiceU at Herring Hall 100 on Saturday, April 12. The speakers included Rebecca Richards-Kortum, professor of bioengineering, David Dickman, adjunct professor of psychology, Cyrus Mody, assistant professor of history, Junghae Suh, assistant professor of bioengineering, Charles Chang, lecturer of linguistics, and Nathan Jones, postdoctoral research associate of the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. [TEDx RiceU is an] independent TED Talk, Amber Mirajkar, Rice Catalyst co-editor in chief, said. It is usually hosted officially by individual organizations. [The talks] are 15 minutes long about any ideas that are worth spreading. We, as an organization, host TED by ourselves, but we are under their umbrella. We have the same format, a general theme, the same amount of time. Our theme is sharing the vision. According to Mirajkar, a Duncan College senior, hosting TEDx RiceU is in accordance with Catalysts mission of making science and research accessible. We want for Rice students to get exposed to more professors on campus because, [most] of the time, not all professors research is known to Rice students, Mirajkar said. Especially for those freshmen and sophomores who would like to … Continue reading →