Cool News Timestamps:

Dengue Mosquitoes Can Be Tamed by a Common Microbe | The Atlantic (01:24)

• Dengue fever is caused by a virus that infects an estimated 390 million people every year, and kills about 25,000; the World Health Organization has described it as one of the top 10 threats to global health.
  • About one in four people infected with dengue will get sick.
  • Spreads through the bites of mosquitoes,  particularly the species Aedes aegypti.
  • Comes in four distinct versions, or “serotypes.”
  • People who recover from one serotype can still be infected by the other three; 
    • More likely to develop severe and potentially lethal symptoms.

• Adi Utarini, a public-health professor at Gadjah Mada University, and her colleagues have spent the past decade turning these insects from highways of dengue into cul-de-sacs.

• They’ve loaded the mosquitoes with a bacterium called Wolbachia, which prevents them from being infected by dengue viruses.
  • It outcompetes the viruses for the nutrients they need to reproduce, and also boosts the mosquito’s immune system.

• Wolbachia spreads very quickly: If a small number of carrier mosquitoes are released, almost all of the local insects should be dengue-free within a few months. 

• Utarini and her team have now published their findings and they are promising:
  • Wolbachia rapidly spread among the local mosquitoes and reduced the occurrence of dengue by 77 percent. 
  • Reduced the number of dengue hospitalizations by 86 percent in the Indonesian testing city of Yogyakarta.

• Oliver Brady, a dengue expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is excited about this finding:
  • “That provides the gold standard of evidence that Wolbachia is a highly effective intervention against dengue … It has the potential to revolutionize mosquito control.”

• The Wolbachia method does have a few limitations:
  • Takes months to establish itself so can’t contain an outbreak
  • Works when at least 80 percent infected, which requires a lot of work and strong community support.

• Benefits:
  • Self-amplifying and self-perpetuating
  • Not toxic like insecticides.
  • Doesn’t kill beneficial insects
  • Cost-effective because it doesn’t need to be reapplied

• So far, 7 million people live under the protective blanket of Wolbachia, and the World Mosquito Program’s goal is to cover at least 75 million by 2025, and at least half a billion by 2030.

• Wolbachia also seems to work against the other diseases that Aedes aegypti carries, including Zika and yellow fever. 
  • Transforming this mosquito from one of the most dangerous species to humans into just another biting nuisance.

Intelligent carpet gives insight into human poses | CSAIL News (13:03)

• A new tactile sensing carpet from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) can estimate human poses without using cameras, in a step towards improving self-powered personalized healthcare, smart homes, and gaming.

• Many of our daily activities involve physical contact with the ground: walking, exercising, or resting. These embedded interactions contain a wealth of information that helps us better understand people’s movements. 

• Previous research has leveraged the use of single RGB cameras, wearable omnidirectional cameras, and even off-the-shelf webcams.
  • Byproducts of camera occlusions and privacy concerns 

• Cameras for this research were utilized to create the dataset the system was trained on and to capture the moment of the person performing the activity.

• The crazy thing once the carpet was trained, all a person would do is to get on the carpet, perform an action, and then the team’s deep neural network, using just the tactile information, could determine the person’s action. 

• Yiyue Luo, a lead author on a paper about the carpet, provides ways you could utilize this technology:
  • “You can imagine leveraging this model to enable a seamless health monitoring system for high-risk individuals, for fall detection, rehab monitoring, mobility, and more.”

• The carpet is low cost and scalable and was made of commercial, pressure-sensitive film and conductive thread
  • Over 9,000 sensors spanning 36 x 2 feet.

• Each of the sensors on the carpet converts the human’s pressure into an electrical signal, through the physical contact between people’s feet, limbs, torso, and the carpet. 

• Based on the measurements the model was able to predict a person’s pose with an error margin of less than ten centimeters.
  •  For classifying specific actions, the system was accurate 97 percent of the time. 

• Due to more of the pressure being exerted on the carpet was from the lower body than the upper body the model had better accuracy with lower body positions than upper body positions.

• While the system can understand a single person, the scientists, down the line, want to improve the metrics for multiple users.

Virgin Galactic Was Just Cleared by the FAA to Launch Commercial Flights to Space | Interesting Engineering (22:11)

• Virgin Galactic Holdings Inc., according to a press release, was just granted regulatory approval to launch customers into space by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), in a major benchmark for the industry. 

• The company’s new permission from the FAA, after a successful May 22 test flight, the aerospace company can fly people on a fare, transforming into the world’s first “spaceline”: An airline, but one that takes you to space.

• The company aims to lift space tourists and researchers into suborbital space regularly.
  • Several minutes of authentic weightlessness.
  • Each trip will take roughly 2 hours.

• While this is a huge step for Virgin Galactic, it still needs to execute and ace three more test flights before it can start taking paying customers to suborbital space. 

• And of course, because I can forget to mention this last week and since it coincides with this article,:
  • Owner of Virgin Galactic Sir Richard Branson could, according to a report, fly on the next test flight, and that might occur as early as the coming July 4 weekend.
  • He would make it to space faster than his billionaire rocket-riding rival Jeff Bezos, who is set to make a trip on his own Blue Origin New Shepard spaceship on July 20.

Adaptable AdhFix patches could replace metal plates on broken bones | New Atlas (27:30)

• Presently, orthopedic surgeons use screwed-in metal plates to hold unstable broken bones together.

• While traditional metal plates are effective at stabilizing broken bones, they do have at least two drawbacks.
  • Difficult to form them into the exact shape needed for each patient
  • The patient’s adjacent soft tissue may adhere to them over time, resulting in a loss of mobility

• With those drawbacks in mind, scientists at Sweden’s KTH Royal Institute of Technology have developed what’s known as the AdhFix system.
  • Apply screws to the section of the bone that needs stabilization
  • Place a temporary soft and malleable patch across the target area.
    • Made up of alternating layers of a medically approved polyethylene terephthalate (PET) fiber mesh and a putty-like composite.
  • Once in the desired shape & size (through manipulation), it is exposed to a high-energy LED visible light source, causing it to harden within a matter of seconds.

• Through testing the system on cadaver hands, AdhFix patches withstood the forces of repeated finger-flexing exercises. 

• When applied to fractured femurs of live lab rats, they were shown to support bone healing without any adverse effects such as soft tissue adhesion.

• The study on the material & process had the conclusion, “We herein introduce AdhFix as a viable and strong, nondegradable fixation method for fractures …  which overcomes the soft-tissue adhesion and limited customizability issues of the standard-of-care metal plates.” 

• The technology is now being commercialized by spinoff company Biomedical Bondings. Plans call for it to be available in the future:
  • Veterinary use by 2022
  • Humans use by 2024.

Miniature organs to heal damaged livers | Nature (34:16)

• The start-up Bilitech hopes organoids could be used as an alternative to liver transplants, to save lives and money.

• Although the human liver can repair itself, everything has its limits. And when this regenerative capacity is exhausted, the best course of action to treat liver disease is a transplant. 
  • Expensive & low supply of donors

• Kourosh Saeb-Parsy is a transplant surgeon at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Trust, UK, had a question that spurred this research:  “If a liver is 2% damaged, then why replace the whole thing if you could just fix the 2%?” 
  • Founded Bilitech in late 2017

• According to Wikipedia, an organoid is a miniaturized and simplified version of an organ produced in vitro in three dimensions that shows realistic micro-anatomy.
  • Bilitech wants to use these to restore livers, rather than replace them.

• Besides just fixing the patient’s damaged liver, they created a product called BiliCell that can be utilized to improve the quality of donor livers before they are transplanted, which could mitigate the supply shortage.

• The main focus of this research was solving Biliary disease.
  • Accounts for up to 70% of liver transplants in children and roughly 30% in adults. 
  • The disease re-emerges in as many as 60% of transplant cases.

• Bilitech’s result is a bioengineered organ called BiliDuct, which they hope could replace failing bile ducts. 
  • In 2017, they demonstrated that the organoids could replace bile ducts in mice

• The Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, an independent center of excellence in London charged with advancing the United Kingdom’s cell-therapy industry, conducted an independent economic analysis of Bilitech in 2020.
  • Found that their therapy would cost an estimated $39,000 per person, which is cheaper than a liver transplant.
    • In 2015, it was estimated that liver transplants in the United States cost around $1.4 million per person

• The company still has hurdles to overcome, because there is no other product like it in use, all of the infrastructure needed will have to be built from scratch.