Theatre Time. All Dancer Have Their Own Ways Of Getting Ready For A Show. I Believe That A Consistent

“Before a scene, she would be muttering deprecations under her breath and making small moans. According to Vivien, the situation was stupid, the dialogue was silly, nobody could possibly believe the whole scene. And then…she would walk into the scene and do such a magnificent job that everybody on the set would be cheering.” -David O. Selznick

David Silverman ‏@tubatron

1st appearance of Milhouse in 1st Butterfinger storyboard 11/18/1988 (missed the anni thing by a few weeks – )

More art, less pollution

Week in Brief (27 November – 1 December)

Credit: Christine Daniloff/MIT

Artists can now paint with ink made from polluted air. Start-up company Graviky Labs has developed a device that attaches to the exhaust systems of diesel generator chimneys, catching emissions, which are then converted into inks, called Air-Ink.

The devices ­– known as KAALINK devices ­– are currently being trialled across India. So far more than 200 gallons of Air-Ink have been produced from collected emissions. KAALINK relies on static electricity, whereby energised materials attract particles. Inside the device are cartridges filled with high-energy plasma, which is triggered by a voltage to attract emission particles.

The disposable cartridges, which need to be emptied after 15–20 days, are then sent to Graviky Labs collection units. From these, they are sent to the start-up’s lab for treatment, where heavy metals and toxins are removed.  

Graviky Lab’s Anirudh Sharma, an Interdisciplinary researcher at MIT Media Lab, commented, ‘Other processes convert air pollution into water pollution, and essentially generate more waste. We minimise the process and create a recycling stream from particulate matter waste that would have otherwise gone into our lungs.’

Credit: Graviky Labs

To find out more visit, bit.ly/2hXCRgX

In other news:

– Co-op and Iceland have backed a potential bottle deposit scheme 

– A mission testing methods to clean-up space junk is preparing for launch 

– Siemens, Rolls-Royce and Airbus are to collaborate on the development a of hybrid-electric aircraft 

To find out more on materials science, packaging and engineering news, visit our website IOM3 at or follow us on Twitter @MaterialsWorld for regular news updates. 

Spinal Stimulators Repurposed to Restore Touch in Lost Limb

Imagine tying your shoes or taking a sip of coffee or cracking an egg but without any feeling in your hand. That’s life for users of even the most advanced prosthetic arms.

Although it’s possible to simulate touch by stimulating the remaining nerves in the stump after an amputation, such a surgery is highly complex and individualized. But according to a new study from the University of Pittsburgh’s Rehab Neural Engineering Labs, spinal cord stimulators commonly used to relieve chronic pain could provide a straightforward and universal method for adding sensory feedback to a prosthetic arm.

For this study, published in eLife, four amputees received spinal stimulators, which, when turned on, create the illusion of sensations in the missing arm.

“What’s unique about this work is that we’re using devices that are already implanted in 50,000 people a year for pain — physicians in every major medical center across the country know how to do these surgical procedures — and we get similar results to highly specialized devices and procedures,” said study senior author Lee Fisher, Ph.D., assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. 

The strings of implanted spinal electrodes, which Fisher describes as about the size and shape of “fat spaghetti noodles,” run along the spinal cord, where they sit slightly to one side, atop the same nerve roots that would normally transmit sensations from the arm. Since it’s a spinal cord implant, even a person with a shoulder-level amputation can use this device 

Fisher’s team sent electrical pulses through different spots in the implanted electrodes, one at a time, while participants used a tablet to report what they were feeling and where.

All the participants experienced sensations somewhere on their missing arm or hand, and they indicated the extent of the area affected by drawing on a blank human form. Three participants reported feelings localized to a single finger or part of the palm.

“I was pretty surprised at how small the area of these sensations were that people were reporting,” Fisher said. “That’s important because we want to generate sensations only where the prosthetic limb is making contact with objects.”

When asked to describe not just where but how the stimulation felt, all four participants reported feeling natural sensations, such as touch and pressure, though these feelings often were mixed with decidedly artificial sensations, such as tingling, buzzing or prickling.

Although some degree of electrode migration is inevitable in the first few days after the leads are implanted, Fisher’s team found that the electrodes, and the sensations they generated, mostly stayed put across the month-long duration of the experiment. That’s important for the ultimate goal of creating a prosthetic arm that provides sensory feedback to the user. 

“Stability of these devices is really critical,” Fisher said. “If the electrodes are moving around, that’s going to change what a person feels when we stimulate.” 

The next big challenges are to design spinal stimulators that can be fully implanted rather than connecting to a stimulator outside the body and to demonstrate that the sensory feedback can help to improve the control of a prosthetic hand during functional tasks like tying shoes or holding an egg without accidentally crushing it. Shrinking the size of the contacts — the parts of the electrode where current comes out — is another priority. That might allow users to experience even more localized sensations. 

“Our goal here wasn’t to develop the final device that someone would use permanently,” Fisher said. “Mostly we wanted to demonstrate the possibility that something like this could work.”

“You know, we’ve always had been nerds. I was a nerd in high school. I was like… I didn’t get beat up, I was invisible.”

Directly Reprogramming a Cell's Identity with Gene Editing

Researchers have used CRISPR—a revolutionary new genetic engineering technique—to convert cells isolated from mouse connective tissue directly into neuronal cells.

In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka, a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University at the time, discovered how to revert adult connective tissue cells, called fibroblasts, back into immature stem cells that could differentiate into any cell type. These so-called induced pluripotent stem cells won Yamanaka the Nobel Prize in medicine just six years later for their promise in research and medicine.

Since then, researchers have discovered other ways to convert cells between different types. This is mostly done by introducing many extra copies of “master switch” genes that produce proteins that turn on entire genetic networks responsible for producing a particular cell type.

Now, researchers at Duke University have developed a strategy that avoids the need for the extra gene copies. Instead, a modification of the CRISPR genetic engineering technique is used to directly turn on the natural copies already present in the genome.

These early results indicate that the newly converted neuronal cells show a more complete and persistent conversion than the method where new genes are permanently added to the genome. These cells could be used for modeling neurological disorders, discovering new therapeutics, developing personalized medicines and, perhaps in the future, implementing cell therapy.

The study was published on August 11, 2016, in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

“This technique has many applications for science and medicine. For example, we might have a general idea of how most people’s neurons will respond to a drug, but we don’t know how your particular neurons with your particular genetics will respond,” said Charles Gersbach, the Rooney Family Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering and director for the Center for Biomolecular and Tissue Engineering at Duke. “Taking biopsies of your brain to test your neurons is not an option. But if we could take a skin cell from your arm, turn it into a neuron, and then treat it with various drug combinations, we could determine an optimal personalized therapy.”

“The challenge is efficiently generating neurons that are stable and have a genetic programming that looks like your real neurons,” says Joshua Black, the graduate student in Gersbach’s lab who led the work. “That has been a major obstacle in this area.”

In the 1950s, Professor Conrad Waddington, a British developmental biologist who laid the foundations for developmental biology, suggested that immature stem cells differentiating into specific types of adult cells can be thought of as rolling down the side of a ridged mountain into one of many valleys. With each path a cell takes down a particular slope, its options for its final destination become more limited.

If you want to change that destination, one option is to push the cell vertically back up the mountain—that’s the idea behind reprogramming cells to be induced pluripotent stem cells. Another option is to push it horizontally up and over a hill and directly into another valley.

“If you have the ability to specifically turn on all the neuron genes, maybe you don’t have to go back up the hill,” said Gersbach.

Previous methods have accomplished this by introducing viruses that inject extra copies of genes to produce a large number of proteins called master transcription factors. Unique to each cell type, these proteins bind to thousands of places in the genome, turning on that cell type’s particular gene network. This method, however, has some drawbacks.

“Rather than using a virus to permanently introduce new copies of existing genes, it would be desirable to provide a temporary signal that changes the cell type in a stable way,” said Black. “However, doing so in an efficient manner might require making very specific changes to the genetic program of the cell.”

In the new study, Black, Gersbach, and colleagues used CRISPR to precisely activate the three genes that naturally produce the master transcription factors that control the neuronal gene network, rather than having a virus introduce extra copies of those genes.

CRISPR is a modified version of a bacterial defense system that targets and slices apart the DNA of familiar invading viruses. In this case, however, the system has been tweaked so that no slicing is involved. Instead, the machinery that identifies specific stretches of DNA has been left intact, and it has been hitched to a gene activator.

The CRISPR system was administered to mouse fibroblasts in the laboratory. The tests showed that, once activated by CRISPR, the three neuronal master transcription factor genes robustly activated neuronal genes. This caused the fibroblasts to conduct electrical signals—a hallmark of neuronal cells. And even after the CRISPR activators went away, the cells retained their neuronal properties.

“When blasting cells with master transcription factors made by viruses, it’s possible to make cells that behave like neurons,” said Gersbach. “But if they truly have become autonomously functioning neurons, then they shouldn’t require the continuous presence of that external stimulus.”

The experiments showed that the new CRISPR technique produced neuronal cells with an epigenetic program at the target genes matching the neuronal markings naturally found in mouse brain tissue.

“The method that introduces extra genetic copies with the virus produces a lot of the transcription factors, but very little is being made from the native copies of these genes,” explained Black. “In contrast, the CRISPR approach isn’t making as many transcription factors overall, but they’re all being produced from the normal chromosomal position, which is a powerful difference since they are stably activated. We’re flipping the epigenetic switch to convert cell types rather than driving them to do so synthetically.”

The next steps, according to Black, are to extend the method to human cells, raise the efficiency of the technique and try to clear other epigenetic hurdles so that it could be applied to model particular diseases.

“In the future, you can imagine making neurons and implanting them in the brain to treat Parkinson’s disease or other neurodegenerative conditions,” said Gersbach. “But even if we don’t get that far, you can do a lot with these in the lab to help develop better therapies.”

Bobby Fisher playing 50 opponents simultaneously. He won 47, lost 1 and drew 2. 1964.

via reddit

Dutch trains now all powered by wind energy

All Dutch trains have become 100% powered by electricity generated by wind energy, the national railway company NS has said, making it a world’s first.

One windmill running for an hour can power a train for 120 miles, the companies said. Dutch electricity company Eneco won a tender offered by NS two years ago and the two companies signed a 10-year deal setting January 2018 as the date by which all NS trains should run on wind energy. ‘We in fact reached our goal a year earlier than planned,” said NS spokesman Ton Boon, adding that an increase in the number of wind farms across the country and off the coast of the Netherlands had helped NS achieve its aim.

They hope to reduce the energy used per passenger by a further 35% by 2020 compared with 2005.

Moonlight