K. Eric Drexler is known as the founding father of nanotechnology—the science of engineering on a molecular level. In Radical Abundance, he shows how rapid scientific progress is about to change our world. Thanks to atomically precise manufacturing, we will soon have the power to produce radically more of what people want, and at a lower cost. The result will shake the very foundations of our economy and environment.
Already, scientists have constructed prototypes for circuit boards built of millions of precisely arranged atoms. The advent of this kind of atomic precision promises to change the way we make things—cleanly, inexpensively, and on a global scale. It allows us to imagine a world where solar arrays cost no more than cardboard and aluminum foil, and laptops cost about the same.
A provocative tour of cutting edge science and its implications by the field’s founder and master, Radical Abundance offers a mind-expanding vision of a world hurtling toward an unexpected future.
Why all of this is surprisingly understandable.
A miniature artificial human liver has been grown by British scientists in a major medical breakthrough this week.
LONDON: A miniature artificial human liver has been grown by British scientists in a major medical breakthrough this week.
The organ, which is about the size of a thumbnail, was grown using stem cells in blood taken from umbilical cords.
It is hoped such mini-livers could be used to test drugs – reducing the need for animal experiments – to help repair damaged livers and eventually to produce entire organs for lifesaving transplants.
Colin McGuckin, a professor specialising in regenerative medicine, made the breakthrough with Nico Forraz at Newcastle University in northeast England.
While other scientists have created liver cells, the Newcastle team are the first to create sizeable sections of tissue from stem cells from the umbilical cord.
The pair extracted blood from the umbilical cords of newborn babies. They were then placed in a ‘bioreactor’ developed by the U.S. space agency NASA, which mimics the effects of weightlessness. This allowed the cells to multiply more quickly. Chemicals and hormones were then added to encourage the stem cells to turn into liver tissue.
“We take the stem cells from the umbilical cord blood and make small mini-livers,” said McGuckin. “We then give them to pharmaceutical companies and they can use them to test new drugs on.
“When a drug company is developing a new drug it first tests it on human cells and then tests it on animals before beginning trials on humans,” he said.
The mini-livers could potentially be used like dialysis machines, buying time for a patient’s liver to repair itself or for doctors to find a replacement liver, according to the researchers.
Professor Ian Gilmore, a liver specialist at the Royal Liverpool Hospital in northwest England, said that the Newcastle team had made a “big ethical leap forward” in not requiring embryos to produce tissue.
“It is exciting because there is a real dearth of treatments available for people with liver disease,” he said.
LONDON - Scientists have grown the first mini human brains in a laboratory and say their success could lead to new levels of understanding about the way brains develop and what goes wrong in disorders like schizophrenia and autism.
Researchers based in Austria started with human stem cells and created a culture in the lab that allowed them to grow into so-called "cerebral organoids" - or mini brains - that consisted of several distinct brain regions.
It is the first time that scientists have managed to replicate the development of brain tissue in three dimensions.
Using the organoids, the scientists were then able to produce a biological model of how a rare brain condition called microcephaly develops - suggesting the same technique could in future be used to model disorders like autism or schizophrenia that affect millions of people around the world.
"This study offers the promise of a major new tool for understanding the causes of major developmental disorders of the brain ... as well as testing possible treatments," said Paul Matthews, a professor of clinical neuroscience at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research but was impressed with its results.
Zameel Cader, a consultant neurologist at Britain's John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, described the work as "fascinating and exciting". He said it extended the possibility of stem cell technologies for understanding brain development and disease mechanisms - and for discovering new drugs.
Although it starts as relatively simple tissue, the human brain swiftly develops into the most complex known natural structure, and scientists are largely in the dark about how that happens.
This makes it extremely difficult for researchers to gain an understanding of what might be going wrong in - and therefore how to treat - many common disorders of the brain such as depression, schizophrenia and autism.
To create their brain tissue, Juergen Knoblich and Madeline Lancaster at Austria's Institute of Molecular Biotechnology and fellow researchers at Britain's Edinburgh University Human Genetics Unit began with human stem cells and grew them with a special combination of nutrients designed to capitalise on the cells' innate ability to organise into complex organ structures.
They grew tissue called neuroectoderm - the layer of cells in the embryo from which all components of the brain and nervous system develop.
Fragments of this tissue were then embedded in a scaffold and put into a spinning bioreactor - a system that circulates oxygen and nutrients to allow them to grow into cerebral organoids.
After a month, the fragments had organised themselves into primitive structures that could be recognized as developing brain regions such as retina, choroid plexus and cerebral cortex, the researchers explained in a telephone briefing.
At two months, the organoids reached a maximum size of around 4 millimetres (0.16 inches), they said. Although they were very small and still a long way from resembling anything like the detailed structure of a fully developed human brain, they did contain firing neurons and distinct types of neural tissue.
"This is one of the cases where size doesn't really matter," Knoblich told reporters.
"Our system is not optimized for generation of an entire brain and that was not at all our goal. Our major goal was to analyze the development of human brain (tissue) and generate a model system we can use to transfer knowledge from animal models to a human setting."
In an early sign of how such mini brains may be useful for studying disease in the future, Knoblich's team were able to use their organoids to model the development of microcephaly, a rare neurological condition in which patients develop an abnormally small head, and identify what causes it.
Both the research team and other experts acknowledged, however, that the work was a very long way from growing a fully-functioning human brain in a laboratory.
"The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and has a frighteningly elaborate number of connections and interactions, both between its numerous subdivisions and the body in general," said Dean Burnett, lecturer in psychiatry at Cardiff University.
"Saying you can replicate the workings of the brain with some tissue in a dish in the lab is like inventing the first abacus and saying you can use it to run the latest version of Microsoft Windows - there is a connection there, but we're a long way from that sort of application yet."
En las últimas semanas se está hablando bastante de un par de «ojos biónicos» que pronto podrían empezar a ser utilizados de forma regular en humanos, al menos en Europa.
Uno de ellos es el Argus II, desarrollado por Second Sight, que consiste en unas gafas que llevan una cámara que van conectadas a una unidad de procesamiento de imagen donde y que tienen un transmisor para enviar las señales al implante.
Este va colocado en la parte exterior del globo ocular, donde se alojan la antena y la electrónica que lo hacen funcionar, que a su vez envían las señales pertinentes a una serie de electrodos que van implantados en la retina.
El otro es el llamado Nano Retina, que lleva el sensor en el interior del ojo y que usa unas gafas que emiten un láser casi infrarrojo que permite a las células fotoelétricas del implante obtener energía para que este funcione, eliminando la necesidad de usar baterías externas como en el caso del Argus II.
El Argus II es el más caro de los dos, con un precio de unos 115.000 dólares, y necesita una operación de 4 horas para su implantación; el Nano Retina ronda los 60.000 dólares y se implanta en media hora con una operación con anestesia local.
El Argus II proporciona el equivalente de un display de 60 pixeles en forma de patrones de luz que el cerebro del paciente tiene que aprender a interpretar y hasta ahora ha dado resultados prometedores, dentro de sus limitaciones, como por ejemplo en el caso de Eric Selby, quien entre otras cosas es de nuevo capaz de distinguir la acera de la calzada desde que lleva uno de estos implantes.
El Nano Retina, por su parte, da una resolución de 24x24 en su primera versión, que ya ha sido fabricada y será sometida a pruebas con humanos en 2013, mientras que la segunda generación dará una resolución de 72x72, y el fabricante dice que permitirá a los pacientes que lo reciban ver la televisión e identificar caras, a pesar de que si nos atenemos al vídeo da la impresión de que hasta podrían leer, algo por ahora muy lejos de las posibilidades de estos dispositivos.
Estas prestaciones, por supuesto, se quedan muy cortas no solo comparadas con el ojo biónico de Lee Austin, el hombre de los seis millones de dólares, sino con nuestros ojos naturales, pero no hay que olvidar que desarrollar este tipo de implantes tiene un serio problema.
Y es que no sabemos lo suficiente acerca del proceso mediante el que el cerebro y el ojo se entienden y como el segundo convierte la luz que recibe en las señales que envía al cerebro, así que vamos un poco a ojo en todo esto.
Para avanzar en esta dirección hay estudios que han recogido las señales que circulan por el nervio óptico de un animal cuando su ojo ve imágenes y que a base de analizarlas han conseguido reproducir los patrones correspondientes, o al menos eso se supone, aunque falta todavía probar esto en humanos. Es una técnica que además quizás se podría aplicar a los demás sentidos si se demuestra que funciona correctamente.
Otra imitación es que las prótesis actuales, tanto las dos mencionadas como otras en desarrollo, necesitan además que el nervio óptico del paciente funcione correctamente, por lo que sólo son útiles en caso de patologías que provocan una degeneración de la retina.
Pero en cualquier caso son un paso más en la dirección de poder ir parcheando nuestros cuerpos mediante la tecnología, algo que quizás algún día nos haga más que humanos.
For years artificial muscles have promised to deliver a more flexible, more durable alternative to electric motors and hydraulic systems. These lab-made actuators are usually created by putting an electrical charge into a piece of polymer or into an aerogel sheet made from carbon nanotubes, causing those materials to expand and contract. This motion could someday be used to power turbines, animate robots or move prosthetic limbs.
In a new study published in the October 14 issue of Science, an international team of researchers describes how they’re taking carbon nanotube artificial muscles in a new direction. Scientists at the University of Texas at Dallas’ Alan G. MacDiarmid NanoTech Institute have already demonstrated in the lab the ability of these muscle-like carbon nanotubes to flex even in extreme temperatures that would freeze or, on the other end of the spectrum, decompose electroactive polymer-based artificial muscles.
Their latest work—with scientists from the University of Wollongong in Australia, the University of British Columbia in Canada, and Hanyang University in Korea—indicates that these carbon nanotubes can be spun into yarns (see inset to the left) and, when dipped into an electrolyte solution, move in a twisting direction that mimics the stiffness, extension, bending and torsion of natural muscles found in an elephant’s trunk and squid tentacles. The researchers found that the yarns can even untwist (moving with the opposite rotation) when the applied voltage is changed.
If you give a nanodiamond to your fiancée, you can forget about the wedding. But a new study reports that these tiny flecks of carbon can shrink tumors in mice by delivering chemotherapy drugs to cancer cells.