New Florence. New Renaissance.

Growing new knees

Vericel’s procedure may seem a little weird. First, doctors perform a biopsy to remove a Tic Tac-size piece of the patient’s healthy knee cartilage. Next, technicians in the company’s Cambridge, Mass., lab extract cartilage cells called chondrocytes and bathe them for about 10 days in proteins and nutrients to grow more. Over two days, the techs then seed millions of chondrocytes onto a sheet of biodegradable collagen, creating a living mesh scaffold a little more than an inch across and about 2 inches high. A doctor cuts the scaffold down to the size of the damage in the patient’s knee and through a small incision inserts it back into the knee to cover the damage. It’s glued in place, making stitches unnecessary. The whole process is called matrix-induced autologous chondrocyte implantation, or MACI (pronounced like Stacy).

Bloomberg

 

Biomimicry and Robotics

ZDNet has a gallery of 11 bio-inspired robots that walk, wiggle, and soar like the real things including RoboBird “which is a flapping robot bird designed to look like a falcon. (They also have a hawk version.)

By mimicking a bird of prey in look and movement, and the flying robot effectively scares off smaller birds without the aid of potentially harmful netting or noise-emitting devices.”

 

Thinking of the 2040s

This time of the year pundits forecast what’s coming in the next year, but Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis are bold enough to look 25 years out!

 

The Cell Atlas

The objective is to construct the first comprehensive “cell atlas,” or map of human cells, a technological marvel that should comprehensively reveal, for the first time, what human bodies are actually made of and provide scientists a sophisticated new model of biology that could speed the search for drugs.

To perform the task of cataloguing the 37.2 trillion cells of the human body, an international consortium of scientists from the U.S., U.K., Sweden, Israel, the Netherlands, and Japan is being assembled to assign each a molecular signature and also give each type a zip code in the three-dimensional space of our bodies.

MIT Technology Review

The Fairchild Challenge

During a visit to the Fairchild Tropical Gardens in Miami today, I ran into a bunch of excited young school children. They were here as part of the annual Fairchild Challenge - see video

In my few hours here I picked up on bunch of flora - Frangipani, bamboo, mangroves, Bahama swamp bush, jade vine, desert rose bougainvilleas, boabob and pentas

Interesting birds - Anhinga, comorand, ibis, tri colored heron, coot, kestrel, turkey vulture

And local butterfly species - zebra, giant swallow tail, Julia. Atala and monarch

So, I can just imagine what the kids pick up over a few weeks and when they can access facilities like the Hsiao Labs and the DiMare Science Village in the park

 

Eau de extinct plants

The synthetic biology company Ginkgo Bioworks says it is developing a fragrance line that will contain smells from plants that have gone extinct in the last 200 years.

Ginkgo plans to make the scents by grafting DNA from extinct plants into yeast grown in its “DNA brewery,” a large genetic engineering facility it operates in Boston.

Image below of equipment in the DNA Brewery

MIT Technology Review

Rarest Minerals

Minerals are combinations of chemical elements arranged into crystalline structures. Earth's rocks are built from different aggregations. Think of feldspar, quartz and mica - these are the ubiquitous species that everyone knows.

But cobaltominite, abelsonite, fingerite, edoylerite - these are examples that will not form unless the "cooking conditions" are absolutely perfect.

The atomic ingredients must sum exactly, the temperature must be precise to the degree, and the pressure will have to be defined in the narrowest of margins.

And then, some will immediately fall apart when they get wet or the sun shines on them.

BBC News

Nevadaite, pictured below, is only known from just two locations: Eureka County, Nevada, and a copper mine in Kyrgyzstan

Digital Noah’s Ark

Like the biblical character Noah, Joel Sartore is building an ark, with photos. He is in the midst of a daunting quest to document 12,000 captive species, from the striking Malayan tiger to the adorable red panda and almost laughably small royal antelope. The goal is to raise awareness of these creatures, and the mounting threat of extinction many of them face.

He started researching the work of great conservationist artists like James Audubon, who famously attempted to paint and describe every species of bird in America. Audobon’s goal inspired Sartore to begin his own ambitious catalog of the animals he treasures. He hopes to engender the same passion in others.

Wired

Photo Credit

Biomimicry in the Arctic

Impressive all the laws of nature and tech is use to monitor the Marginal Ice Zone in the Arctic

“Among the sensors the scientists placed on the ice in March were a set of eight acoustic navigation beacons. These have base-stations at the surface, which fix their locations using GPS. They then rebroadcast that information from loudspeakers hanging 100 metres down below the ice, in the transmission layer. If a Seaglider can detect two or more beacons while it is travelling through this layer, it can swiftly compute its own position.

This may not always work, because the Seagliders might stray too far from the beacons. In that case, the researchers have a pair of robotic guide dogs to assist. These are called Wave Gliders (pictured at the top of the story). One part of each Wave Glider stays on the surface, generating electricity from solar panels during the Arctic’s 24-hour summer daylight. The other part is an array of hydrofoils suspended four metres underwater. The difference in motion between the waves above and the calm below causes water to move over the hydrofoils and propel the Wave Glider forward up to twice as fast as a Seaglider. Although Wave Gliders broadcast far above the sound layer, and thus have shorter ranges than fixed beacons, they can be programmed to shadow the Seagliders, and keep them within earshot.”

The Economist

Soft Robots

Popular Mechanics

Designing a light, soft robot that is both self-contained and high-performance remains a challenge. Onboard computers are heavy, so engineers are often forced to strike a less-than-ideal balance between dexterity and autonomy: They can weigh down their robots with sophisticated hardware, tether their experiments to external computers and lose autonomy, or settle for lighter, inferior onboard tech.

Soft robotic fish provide one biomimetic solution. In nature, fish store their heavy machinery—a skull and a brain—in their heads, while the rest of their bodies are light and bendable. Borrowing from nature's model aquatic organisms, Marphese copied fish musculature to design a smart, but still soft, mechanical fish.