Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,814

I’m amazed no one has done this before, and there’s only one company doing it now. Microfabrica, based in Van Nuys, California, has perfected the technique of mass producing mechanical devices using the same electrodeposition technology used to make computer chips.

“We are the only high-volume production additive manufacturing platform in the market,” Microfabrica CEO Eric Miller tells me. “We use engineering grade metals to make commercially robust parts, and we’re focused on another end of the spectrum from where a lot of the 3D companies are focused, and that’s at the micro scale.”

The resulting devices are vanishingly small, and exquisitely made. How small? The company makes biopsy forceps less than a millimeter in diameter for a medical device company and timing mechanisms (i.e., clocks) that are less than half a centimeter across for a defense contractor, as well many other very small devices and precision parts.

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South Korean-based company Rokit is a 3D printing manufacturer we’ve talked about on several occasions before. In February this year, they released Edison Invivo, a tissue engineering and bio-medical research 3D printer that uses a bio ink to produce cell structures in the form of organic tissue.

Now, as a constant innovator, Rokit is back with their latest and also the world first Multi-Use Hybrid Bio 3D printer — Rokit Invivo. What’s exciting is that this awesome bioprinter will be revealed very soon on 30th, September in the Digical Show held by London-based iMakr.

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Interesting article overall; however, I have noticed many Gastric Bypass patients from my area who drastically loss weight quickly within a year had stomach, throat, and esophageal cancer. As with obesity being a trigger, I believe drastically changes with the body such as massive weight loss quickly could also trigger a cancer gene mutation. I would love to connect with others working of this type of research.

A review of more than a thousand studies has found solid evidence that being overweight or obese increases the risk for at least 13 types of cancer.

The study was conducted by a working group of the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organisation.

Strong evidence was already available to link five cancers to being overweight or obese: adenocarcinoma of the esophagus, colorectal cancer, breast cancer in postmenopausal women, and uterine and kidney cancers.

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Interesting read.

When Hippocrates first described cancer around 400 B.C., he referred to the disease’s telltale tumors as “karkinos” — the Greek word for crab. The “Father of Western Medicine” likely noted that cancer’s creeping projections mirrored certain crustaceans, and the tumors ‘ characteristic hardness resembled a crab’s armored shell.

Later, scientists added another attribute: Tumors are hypoxic. That is, they grow so large and dense that they exclude blood vessels, causing a lack of oxygen in their cores. But what role these characteristics play in the development of cancer has remained a mystery.

Moving possibly one step closer to an answer, scientists from Princeton University and the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center have found that, in breast cancer, tumor hardness and hypoxia trigger a biological switch that causes certain cells to embark on a cancer-promoting program. Reported Aug. 8 in an article in the journal Cancer Research, this biological switch is critical to a tumors’ ability to invade other tissue, a process called metastasis — and could offer a promising treatment target.

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Definitely a big deal.

I look forward to the day when everything lives and adapts as well as interacts in their environments. Buildings, machines, autos, planes, etc. Last month we read about the living buildings that DARPA is focused on that utilizes synthetic cells which enables buildings and other structures to self repair themselves much like human cells do.

Definitely glad to see more and more people jump on the Singularity path.

Materials with large dielectric constants—aka “high-K materials”—have recently garnered attention for their potential use within future generations of reduced-dimension semiconductor devices.

Barium strontium titanate, one such material, possesses an inherently large dielectric constant that can be altered significantly by an applied electrical field—by as much as a factor of 10. While this property has been known to exist for more than half a century and many researchers have attempted to exploit it, the technology has been limited by the low quality of the material. By semiconductor industry standards, the material is considered to be defective.

But researchers at University of California, Santa Barbara, who began exploring thin-film tunable dielectrics using sputtered material nearly two decades ago, are now trying to leverage advanced and scalable deposition techniques like (MBE) to create tunable, high-frequency integrated circuits and devices with high-quality materials that are comparable to modern semiconductor technology.

Continue reading “Tuning materials and devices to adapt to their environment” | >