DARPin E2-79, is the beginning of the end for allergies

antiallergy

How stupid are allergies. Stupids. Our immune system becomes hysterical in reacting to external impulses and does so for no reason: an 'excess defense' which in the most serious cases can even lead to death. The so-called 'vaccines' currently on the market are only desensitizing treatments that actually act on the symptoms, nothing that eliminates the underlying cause once and for all. [highlight]Today a new molecule could succeed in the mission:[/highlight]its name is DARPin E2-79 and it comes… Read more

Tefina, Viagra Spray is here for you

tephine

Space research has often encountered rather serious problems when trying to reproduce the same conditions on Earth in the absence of gravity. One of the most insurmountable difficulties was that linked to 'space sex'. There is a whole series of cases on the subject: the results are not satisfactory. Looking at our planet can then make us understand that the problems related to sex are many and complex even without leaving our atmosphere. For men, erectile dysfunction, for women,... Read more

Jasper walks again thanks to the stem

jasper

It's a beautiful day at least for dogs: Jasper, a small dachshund paralyzed by an accident, responded magnificently to a 6-month treatment based on stem cells: the results are not far from what a little long ago it could easily be described as a miracle. Jasper no longer sits still, he socializes with others and wanders around the house: he has started walking again, he has come back. [youtube]IWIE_YoL1LA[/youtube] The process developed by a … Read more

Christmas gives us two certainties. Adopt the second.

ginkgo

  The future gives us, in relation to the theme of 'Christmas holidays', at least two positive certainties. The first certainty: barring major upheavals in the short term, Christmas will be celebrated as always for many years to come. Among the social changes observable by going backwards along the time line, those relating to "ritual" celebrations are the hardest to change: they often change the origin (for example a celebration born for religious reasons will be converted into a 'pagan' celebration or vice versa ) but the… Read more

Tomorrow the Pepsi fat blocker debuts, and I don't feel very well.

pepsispecial thumb 550xauto 105030

The global diffusion of soft drinks has reached widespread figures: an entire part of the 'Western' world seems to drink more colored concoctions than water. The results are alarming, many research centers on the planet have already brought out the results of different studies, all of which agree in attributing negative effects on the organism. The reason? Carbon dioxide which upsets the stomach. A burst of sugars (about 9 teaspoons per can) or sweeteners (aspartame and acesulfame suspected of being carcinogenic). The dyes. A disaster, in short. And for … Read more

Eyes on me, please

comedd2

Try to imagine a mechanic with grease-stained hands trying to flip through the pages of a car maintenance guide. Every time you put the wrench down, clean yourself carefully so as not to get dirty, turn the page and start again. The scientists at the Fraunhofer Center for Organics, Materials and Electronic Devices in Dresden (better known as COMEDD) must have experienced this sensation many times, having developed special glasses capable of allowing the wearer to browse ... Read more

Goodbye puncture? At least for bikes!

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For years and periodically, tubeless tires have been offered for all vehicles: their adoption is struggling to reach its completion (perhaps due to the producers' interests in having greater wear of this product to encourage quicker replacement: it's a sin to think badly, but sometimes you can guess). But perhaps the time has come for bikes to say goodbye to annoying punctures and more or less makeshift remedies for inflation... Read more

Flying salvation: a network of aerial drones for first aid

drone1

The statistics released by the WHO tell us that of the millions of cases of fatal cardiac arrest occurring outside of hospital facilities, more than a third could be tackled: the timely arrival of an ambulance, the use of a defibrillator and lots and lots of speed (6 minutes is the window of time needed to save the patient). Many cities around the world do not have the capacity to act in time and lack the necessary organization. This translates into genocide: hundreds of thousands… Read more

Hitachi develops crystal storage media

quartz

Chopin and the Beatles teach us that things like good music can last a very long time: from tomorrow they could be preserved forever thanks to more stable and long-lasting memories. From the advent of the information age onwards, the most pressing problem of the industry (and of people) has been to protect an increasingly large amount of data, to save them from the wear and tear of time and their own 'volatility'. Locking paper photos in a safe means guaranteeing them a long life, but closing ... Read more

Make way for the Magic Finger

fingertip

From the advent of touch screens onwards there has been a flourishing of mobile devices and tablets: our way of interacting with these devices has changed at an impressive speed. Today someone may mistakenly imagine that the 'finger-on-screen' scheme is the one on which the fortune of future technologies will be built, but it is not written anywhere: a prototype currently under study promises to let us use a device 'by touching ' any surface. Magic Finger is a joint project developed… Read more

The mad rush of miniaturized health

nanosalute

The efforts that technology has made to improve our health conditions and our life expectancy seem to be preparing for the big leap, causing a substantial transformation in the way we treat ourselves and stay healthy for a long time. Here are the changes we should prepare for, and if they don't arrive quickly we should push for them to happen: Loanable Telemedicine: Telemedicine services, 'lighter' consultations that can be delivered via telephone or internet, now have an excellent propensity to ... Read more

Chiba, the robot chair that breaks down architectural barriers

chiba

Creating a wheelchair capable of overcoming architectural barriers couldn't have been very simple: today a team of engineers from the Chiba Institute of Technology, led by the Associate Professor, succeeded in the feat using a good dose of lateral thinking. A wheelchair? It's difficult to define it this way: when it encounters an obstacle, Chiba transforms its wheels into... legs! It goes without saying: the wheel is a universal and efficient way to allow all people with limited mobility to travel. However, … Read more

A bionic leg guided by thought and chasing a record.

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Zac Vawter lost a leg in an accident 3 years ago and since then he has been through an ordeal looking for a prosthesis (he calls it a 'fake leg') which for him had satisfactory answers close to those of a real leg. So the thirty-one-year-old software engineer from Washington signed up in 2010 as a volunteer tester in a research program with the aim of creating a thought-guided bionic leg. The Rehabilitation Institute of the Medical Center… Read more

Memoto, first steps for the digitization of memory

memoto xl

Memoto is not a camera like all the others: you can't control it, it has no button to shoot. It takes automatic photos every 30 seconds from the position in which you place it (it is equipped with a clip to place it on a jacket, on a bike, wherever you want) and creates a sort of shareable "photographic memory" with its own search engine . It is the first step towards the digitalisation of our life experiences. It is unlikely that all the images taken… Read more

Arduino wirelessly? Yes it can. That's how.

Arduino is an opensource framework that allows rapid prototyping and quick learning of the fundamental principles of electronics and programming. It is composed of a hardware platform for physical computing developed at the Interaction Design Institute, an institute based in Ivrea, founded by Olivetti and Telecom Italia. The name of the card derives from that of a bar in Ivrea frequented by some of the founders of the project. (source: wikipedia). The Arduino system offers an open source method for programming… Read more

Connectomics – Building a map of the mind

There are approximately 100 billion neurons in the brain of an adult human, and each of these neurons is connected to hundreds of others for a total of approximately 150 billion connections in total. Neuroscience is discovering that it is the pattern of these connections, the structure of this immense neural network, that is largely responsible for the functionality of the brain, in other words for our mental life: everything we feel, think, experience or do. Our … Read more

After the guinea pigs also the monkeys: the anti-fat drug works

fat burning

Recent tests on obese monkeys show an 11% reduction in body weight after just a few applications. The drug works in totally different ways compared to other discoveries of the kind, which try to replace or substitute the ways in which human beings eat, altering the sense of appetite or metabolic levels: the action is internal and surprising. The principles of the researched substance seek the blood supply that binds to fatty tissues, and apply to these a peptide that kills … Read more

The greenest fuel there is? Made with air and water.

clean petrol

AFS (Engineers at Air Fuel Synthesis) based in the north of England claims to have produced 5 liters of synthetic oil in the space of 3 months. It's a little bit, you might say. And give me a break. The technique consists of extracting carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from the water, then combining them in a reactor which produces methanol with the help of a catalyst. The methanol is then converted into oil. Now have you understood why it takes 3 months for 5 liters? Not exactly the time that… Read more

You move on to artificial blood

Artificial blood could soon become a reality thanks to the first successful human transfusion. Dr. Luc Douay of the Parisian University 'Pierre et Marie Curie' extracted stem cells from bone marrow and 'encouraged' them to grow and transform into blood cells by administering a cocktail of growth factors: finally he injected 10 billion of these cells (the equivalent of 2 milliliters) in the donor's spinal cord. After 5 days 94% of the cells were still alive and… Read more