A toothpaste-like gel that can heal wounds six times faster than normal

A gene therapy in the form of a thick gel is about to revolutionize wound treatment. The gel is called Nexagon, and when you apply it to a wound, it reprograms the cells to heal more quickly and efficiently.
Unlike an antibiotic cream, which promotes healing by preventing infection, Nexagon is actually speeding up your body's healing process. Or, in the case of ulcers, it's jumpstarting a healing process that's failed to start. Doctors have been testing Nexagon on people with chronic ulcers on their legs, which are wounds that essentially never heal or take at least six months to do so. After just four weeks, some patients reported they were completely healed up.

According to the Associated Press:

The gel, named Nexagon, works by interrupting how cells communicate and prevents the production of a protein that blocks healing. That allows cells to move faster to the wound to begin healing it.
Though it has only been tested on about 100 people so far, experts say if it proves successful, the gel could have a major impact on treating chronic wounds, like leg or diabetes ulcers, and even common scrapes or injuries from accidents.
In most chronic wounds, Becker said there is an abnormal amount of a protein involved in inflammation.
To reduce its amount, [cell biologist David] Becker and colleagues made Nexagon from bits of DNA that can block the protein's production. "As that protein is turned off, cells move in to close the wound," Becker said. The gel is clear and has the consistency of toothpaste.
In an early study on leg ulcers, scientists at the company Becker co-founded to develop the gel found that after four weeks, the number of people with completely healed ulcers was five times higher in patients who got the gel versus those who didn't. The average leg ulcer takes up to six months to heal and 60 percent of patients get repeated ulcers . . . The gel has also been used on a handful of people who have suffered serious chemical burns to their eyes, including a 25-year-old workman in New Zealand who accidentally squirted liquid cement into one of his eyes. In that case and five others, after Nexagon was applied, the outer lining of the patients' eyes and the blood vessels within them regrew, saving their vision. In the U.S., the gel has been granted approval by the Food and Drug Administration for serious eye injuries.

Stanford's New Solar Cells Are The First to Produce Electricity From Both Light and Heat

Though the sun offers us a couple options for exploiting its energy -- light and heat -- we've always had to choose to use one at a time, because solar-energy technology hasn't been able to capture both typs of radiation simultaneously. Stanford researchers say that's about to change, however. Their new breakthrough could put solar power on par with oil, price-wise.
Using readily available materials, a team of engineers has come up with the first solar technology to combine photovoltaic and thermal electricity generation.
Called "photon enhanced thermionic emission," or PETE, the process uses cesium to more than double existing systems' efficiency levels. PETE devices could be easily incorporated into existing solar collection systems, and they're cheap to boot.
Photovoltaic (PV) cells get less efficient as they get hot, which is one of the biggest problems in solar efficiency. What's worse, silicon -- used in most PV cells -- can only absorb energy from certain parts of the light spectrum. Ultimately, more than half the solar energy hitting each cell is wasted.

The Stanford system exploits the excess heat, turning it into extra electricity.
Researchers led by Nick Melosh, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, coated a piece of semiconducting material with a thin layer of cesium. This allowed the cell to use both light and heat to generate electricity, Melosh says.
The team used gallium nitride in the tests because it can withstand high temperatures, but PETE systems of the future would likely include gallium arsenide, commonly used in household electronics.
The system has to get extremely hot in order to work -- the hotter the better, Melosh says -- so new PETE systems will be a better fit for huge solar farms than rooftop arrays. They will need to include solar concentrators, but that creates another layer of efficiency, because less semiconducting material will be needed. Melosh says each device would require about a six-inch wafer of semiconducting material.
When used with the heat-conversion process, PETE devices could reach 60 percent efficiency, Melosh says. But as Stanford's news release points out, even 30 percent efficiency would bring solar power in line with the price of oil.
This video from Stanford further explains the process.

Particle Accelerators Could Be Used to Produce Energy (and Plutonium)

Particle accelerators, which are not renowned for their real-world applications, could in fact be used to produce energy, according to a 34-year-old research paper that resurfaced this week.
It's not exactly intuitive -- accelerators require plenty of power to work -- but one of the founders of Fermilab wrote in 1976 that they could produce more energy than they use, because they're extremely good at fissioning atoms.
At the time, accelerator physicist Robert Wilson was the director of Fermilab, according to Technology Review's arXiv blog. He was building an accelerator called the Energy Doubler/Saver, the first device to use superconducting magnets on a large scale.
Wilson wrote that superconductivity would reduce the power consumption of accelerators.
Wilson's abstract was recently posted to the physics arXiv, a clearinghouse for research papers. Here's a recap:
In the Energy Doubler/Saver, protons comprising an energy of 1,000 giga-electron volts would be sent into a block of uranium. Each proton would generate 60,000 neutrons, which would be absorbed by the uranium nuclei to produce plutonium.
When burned in a nuclear reactor, plutonium produces 0.2 GeV of fission energy. So multiply that by 60,000 extra neutrons, and that's 12,000 GeV. Ergo, a single proton could lead to the release of 12,000 GeV of energy.
Now, this is not very much energy -- you would need about 600,000 TeV (tera-electron volts) to power a 10-watt light bulb for one second, and there are 1,000 GeV in every TeV. So you would need lots and lots of protons to make enough plutonium to power a reactor.
What's more, as Tech Review's arXiv blog notes, the calculation leaves out a lot of detail, including how much energy would be lost. It takes about 20 MW of power to produce an 0.2 MW beam in the Energy Doubler, Tech Review says.
Still, the concept is interesting -- as Wilson wrote in the 70s, it might be worthwhile to calculate the cost of making each plutonium proton to see if net energy production would be possible.
It could be handy for new nuclear power plants, as well as spacecraft in need of long-term power supplies. But given current nuclear non-proliferation treaties, it's unlikely that the Large Hadron Collider will be tapped to make a new supply of plutonium anytime soon.

Green machine: Don't burn plant waste, bury it

When it comes to using plant waste to mitigate climate change, most people think of turning it into ethanol or biodiesel for use as a fuel. But a new study suggests we may have more to gain by converting plant material into biochar, a type of charcoal, and burying it in farmers' fields.

Biochar is produced by heating plant waste in an oxygen-free environment, a process known as pyrolysis. This also yields syngas – a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen – plus a small amount of oil. Both can be burned as fuels.

Typically, up to 60 per cent of the plant's carbon ends up as biochar. When buried, this can lock the carbon away for thousands of years if necessary. The pyrolysis itself releases no carbon dioxide into the air.

Burning issue

The new study was the work of James Amonette at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, and colleagues. It centres on a computer model they developed to compare the carbon emissions that would be saved by converting the world's available supplies of plant waste into either biofuel or biochar.

The model showed that converting all the world's available plant waste into biofuels would cut carbon emissions by 10 per cent from today's levels. Turning it into biochar could cut emissions by up to 12 per cent – or 1.8 gigatonnes of the 15.4 gigatonnes emitted each year (Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms1053).

Carbon storage

However, the relative benefits of biochar and biofuel will vary from region to region. "It depends on the fertility of the soil in the region where you are producing the biochar, and whether you are offsetting coal or some other form of energy," Amonette says.

In regions with highly fertile soil and a high proportion of coal in their energy-generation mix, such as the American Midwest, Amonette says it may be better to convert all the available plant waste into biofuel. "But in South America, Africa, south-eastern parts of the US and most of the rest of the world on average, you're better off going with char."

Burying biochar also increases soil fertility. The Biochar Fund, based in Heverlee, Belgium, is carrying out trials of biochar with rural communities in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and southern Cameroon to improve the fertility of soil in these regions.

Midway through the second growing seasons in Cameroon with biochar in the soil, average maize yields have increased from 1.7 tonnes per hectare to 2.5 tonnes per hectare. "In many cases, we saw a spectacular boost in both biomass and grain yield because of the addition of biochar; these extremes are generally found on the poorest soils," says Laurens Rademakers, Biochar Fund's managing director.

Biochar increases the pH of acidic soil, and helps it to retain nutrients such as ammonium, calcium, magnesium, potassium and phosphorus. Some biochars are also highly porous, allowing them to trap moisture and improve the water retention of soils in dry regions

Wind mill at home

With the environmental movement gathering momentum, many are thinking of installing wind turbines to generate their own electricity. Unfortunately, wind speeds in urban areas are usually too slow and turbulent to make micro wind generation cost-effective.

So while the strict planning regulations that have prevented homeowners from erecting domestic turbines in the UK are expected to be relaxed next month, city-dwellers may find manufacturers reluctant to sell them their turbines for fear that poor performance will reflect badly on a young and vulnerable industry.

However, researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, believe that the problem is not with the low wind speeds after all, but with the methods used to harvest wind power. Cities have plenty of wind energy we can use, they say, but to harness it requires a different tack. It's time to reinvent the urban wind turbine.

Moving away from traditional electromagnetic generators and turbines may seem like a radical step, but on a small scale and with low wind speeds, piezoelectric generation looks like an attractive option.

Ephrahim Garcia, a mechanical engineer at Cornell, attached a flexible aerofoil to the end of a pole made out of a piezoelectric material. When air passes over the aerofoil it flutters, causing the pole to flex and generate a small alternating current. "The inspiration came from fish tails," Garcia says.

Garcia and colleague Matthew Bryant tested aerofoils that were 13 centimetres long in a wind tunnel, and found that they generated power in the milliwatt range from wind speeds of just 2 metres per second. With many devices operating in parallel, the amount of power generated could quickly add up, they say.

Leaf out of nature's book

Hod Lipson, also at Cornell, and Shuguang Li, now at the Northwestern Polytechnical University in Xi'an, China, have been working on the same principle. Taking a leaf out of nature's book, they have devised a tree-like configuration that uses lots of flapping leaves as generators.

The leaves are attached to vertically hanging piezoelectric branches by a hinge. As air flows over the leaves, instabilities create turbulent vortices first on one side and then on the other, causing it to flap.

To make the technology as cost-effective as possible, Lipson and Li built their branches from a piezoelectric material called polyvinylidene fluoride, or PVDF. However, while this is cheap it is relatively insensitive, "so we had to find ways to make it shake more vigorously", says Lipson. For this reason the leaves are designed to twist as well as bend the branch, increasing the strain acting on it.

Each leaf can generate nearly 0.3 milliwatts of power, the team say. Although considerably less than Garcia's arrangement, at just a few centimetres long they are smaller and potentially cheaper, says Lipson.

Another solution is to increase the wind speed. Borrowing a trick from the world of concentrated solar power, Kevin Pratt and Francis Charles Moon, both at Cornell, have designed honeycomb-like arrays of funnels designed to accelerate wind as it passes over fluttering piezoelectric strips just a few centimetres across.

Like a lens

"The amount of energy contained within moving wind is determined by the amount of air and its speed," says Pratt. So by forcing the same volume of air through a smaller aperture you can increase the speed. "It's the wind equivalent of a lens," he says.

Computer simulations have shown that some concentrator designs should be able to increase the wind speed by more than 50 per cent. The pair are now building the first prototype for wind tunnel tests. They envisage the final product containing arrays of 30-centimetre-wide concentrators, each housing several dozen piezoelectric strips.

Wind concentrators are not a new idea, but have proved impractical for standard turbines because of their large size. By shrinking the technology the researchers hope to achieve an output power of 5 watts per square metre, roughly one-third of that created by solar power. So if they can be made for a third of the price of solar panels, then the technology could be competitive

Faster cancer prognosis, courtesy IISc and Apple

A new imaging method has been developed which can diagnose cancers affecting lung, ovary, breast and skin. This breakthrough innovation in the cancer treatment field is a collaborative effort by researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore and technology giant Apple, reports Peerzada Abrar of ET Finance.
The imaging method uses infrared imaging solution which can help accelerate the process of cancer diagnosis and is also a much flexible option. The core component used in the imaging technology is from Apple. It also makes use of the open source medical image processing software OsiriX.

Dr. Phaneendra Yalavarthy, Assistant Professor of Supercomputer Education and Research Centre,IISc, who led the research said, "Near infrared light is a promising way to assess the physiology of tumours in tissue,and to monitor responses to treatment."

The imaging data that is available now can only identify a tumor but gives no information about its physiology. Also the equipments used for the process are unwieldy and ionizing done in the process has its side effects.

However, the big step forward comes in form of three-dimensional image reconstruction. The Apple and IISc team aim to reconstruct images in 3D in realtime in the doctors' clinics. 3D near infrared imaging can also help in assessing the effects on the bodies of people who are treated with chemotherapy.

Additionally, this imaging technology can also be used to monitor other changing conditions such as arthritis and brain diseases. Yalavarthy is hopeful that it can detect not only different cancers but other diseases such as diabetes as well

Electromobility

ScienceDaily — Electromobility makes sense only if car batteries are charged using electricity from renewable energy sources. But the supply of green electricity is not always adequate. An intelligent charging station can help, by adapting the recharging times to suit energy supply and network capacity.
Germany aims to have one million electric vehicles -- powered by energy from renewable sources -on the road by 2020. And, within ten years, the German environment ministry expects "green electricity" to make up 30 percent of all power consumed. Arithmetically speaking, it would be possible to achieve CO2-neutral electromobility. But, in reality, it is a difficult goal to attain. As more and more solar and wind energy is incorporated in the power grid, the proportion of electricity that cannot be controlled by simply pressing a button is on the increase. In addition, there is a growing risk that the rising number of electric vehicles will trigger extreme surges in demand during rush hour.

"What we need is a smart grid that carries information in addition to power," says Dominik Noeren of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE. The structure of the grid has to change from a push system based on energy demand to a pull system based on production output. In Noeren's opinion, "electric cars are best equipped to meet this challenge." Introduced in large numbers, they have the capacity to store a lot of energy. On average, a car is parked for at least 20 hours out of 24. That is more than enough time to recharge them when the wind picks up or the demand for electricity is low.

Developed by Fraunhofer researchers, the "smart" charging station is a device that enables electric vehicles to recharge when the system load is low and the share of energy from renewable resources is high. In this way, load peaks can be avoided and the contribution of solar and wind power fully exploited. "For us, it is important that end consumers are completely free to decide when they want to recharge. We do not want them to suffer any disadvantages from the controlled recharging of their vehicles' batteries," Noeren emphasizes. That's why he favors electricity rates that adapt to the prevailing situation in the power grid -- ones that are more expensive in periods of peak demand and particularly cheap when there is a surfeit of renewable energy.

The person using the "smart" charging station could then choose between recharging immediately or opting for a cheaper, possibly longer, recharging time. If they go for the second option, all they need to do is enter the time when their vehicle has to be ready to drive again. The charging station takes care of everything else, calculating the costs and controlling the recharging process. Via the display the user can track the progress of recharging and also see the costs incurred and the amount of energy used.

Newts' Ability to Regenerate Tissue Replicated in Mouse Cells

ScienceDaily — Tissue regeneration a la salamanders and newts seems like it should be the stuff of science fiction. But it happens routinely. Why can't we mammals just re-grow a limb or churn out a few new heart muscle cells as needed? New research suggests there might be a very good reason: Restricting our cells' ability to pop in and out of the cell cycle at will -- a prerequisite for the cell division necessary to make new tissue -- reduces the chances that they'll run amok and form potentially deadly cancers.
Now scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have taken a big step toward being able to confer this regenerative capacity on mammalian muscle cells; they accomplished this feat in experiments with laboratory mice in which they blocked the expression of just two tumor-suppressing proteins. The finding may move us closer to future regenerative therapies in humans -- surprisingly, by sending us shimmying back down the evolutionary tree.

"Newts regenerate tissues very effectively," said Helen Blau, PhD, the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Professor and a member of Stanford's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine. "In contrast, mammals are pathetic. We can regenerate our livers, and that's about it. Until now it's been a mystery as to how they do it."

Blau is the senior author of the research, which will be published in Cell Stem Cell on Aug. 6. Kostandin Pajcini, PhD, a former graduate student, and Jason Pomerantz, MD, a former postdoctoral scholar in Blau's laboratory, are primarily responsible for the work and are first author and co-senior author, respectively.

Although there's been a lot of discussion about using adult or embryonic stem cells to repair or revitalize tissues throughout the body, in this case the researchers weren't studying stem cells. Instead they were investigating whether myocytes, run-of-the mill muscle cells that normally don't divide, can be induced to re-enter the cell cycle and begin proliferating. This is important because most specialized, or differentiated, cells in mammals are locked into a steady state that does not allow cell division. And without cell division, it is not possible to get regeneration.

In contrast, the cells of some types of amphibians are able to replace lost or damaged tissue by entering the cell cycle to give rise to more muscle cells. While doing so, the cells maintain their muscle identity, which prevents them from straying from the beaten path and becoming other, less useful cell types.

Pomerantz and Blau wondered if it could be possible to coax mammalian cells to follow a similar path. To do so, though, they needed to pinpoint what was different between mammalian and salamander cells when it comes to cell cycle control. One aspect involves a class of proteins called tumor suppressors that block inappropriate cell division.

Previous research had shown that a tumor suppressor called retinoblastoma, or Rb, plays an important role in preventing many types of specialized mammalian cells, including those found in muscle, from dividing willy-nilly. But the effect of blocking the expression of Rb in mammalian cells has been inconsistent: In some cases it has allowed the cells to hop back into the cell cycle; in others, it hasn't.

The researchers employed some evolutionary detective work to figure out that another tumor suppressor called ARF might be involved. Like Rb, ARF works to throw the brakes on the cell cycle in response to internal signals. An examination of the evolutionary tree provided a key clue. They saw that ARF first arose in chickens. It is found in other birds and mammals, but not in animals like salamanders nestled on the lower branches. Tellingly, it's also missing in cell lines that begin cycling when Rb is lost, and it is expressed at lower-than-normal levels in mammalian livers -- the only organ that we humans can regenerate.

Based on previous investigators' work with newts, Blau said it "seemed to us that they don't have the same limitations on growth. We hypothesized that maybe, during evolution, humans gained a tumor suppressor not present in lower animals at the expense of regeneration."

Sure enough, Pajcini and Pomerantz found that blocking the expression of both Rb and ARF allowed individual myocytes isolated from mouse muscle to dedifferentiate and begin dividing. When they put the cells back into the mice, they were able to merge with existing muscle fibers -- as long as Rb expression was restored. Without Rb the transplanted cells proliferated excessively and disrupted the structure of the original muscle.

"These myocytes have reached the point of no return," said Blau. "They can't just start dividing again. But here we show that temporarily blocking the expression of just two proteins can restore an ancient ability to contribute to mammalian muscle."

The key word here is "temporarily." As is clear from the mouse experiments, blocking the expression of tumor suppressors in mammalian cells can be a tricky gambit. Permanently removing these proteins can lead to uncontrolled cell division. But, a temporary and well-controlled loss -- as the researchers devised here -- could be a useful therapeutic tool.

The research required some sophisticated technology to separate individual myocytes from one another for study. To do so, Pajcini traveled to Munich to learn how to optimize a technique normally used on cryopreserved and fixed tissue sections -- "laser micro-dissection catapulting" -- for use with living cells. But the effort paid off when he was able to prove conclusively that once the expression of the two proteins was blocked, individual live cells were, in fact, dividing in culture.

Next, the researchers would like to see if the technique works in other cell types, like those of the pancreas or the heart, and whether they can induce it to happen in tissue at sites of injury. If so, it may be possible to trigger temporary cell proliferation as a means of therapy for a variety of ailments.

In addition to Blau, Pajcini and Pomerantz, other Stanford researchers involved in the study include senior research scientist Stephane Corbel, PhD, and assistant professor of pediatrics and genetics Julien Sage, PhD. Pajcini is now at the University of Pennsylvania, and Pomerantz is an assistant professor of surgery at the University of California-San Francisco.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health and the Baxter Foundation.