Magnetic bone implants
If the bionic man ever becomes reality, his
skeleton may be magnetic.
Artificial bone implants can
help fix damaged skeletons, but they can also
prevent the healthy growth of natural bone
around the implant, weakening the bond between
them.
Various ways of encouraging
growth and preventing infection have been
tried – among them impregnating bone
implants with growth hormones and using anti-inflammatory
drugs and antibiotics. But these methods provide
only a single dose of treatment and if the
problem recurs there is little that can be
done to treat it without surgery.
One possibility is to attach
the drug to magnetic particles and steer them
through the body to the relevant site using
an external magnetic field. But using that
field to hold the drug-bearing particles in
place for hours or days is impractical.
Making bone implants magnetic,
so that the particles simply stick to them,
could get around that, says Zachary Forbes,
a surgeon at Drexel
University College of Medicine
in Philadelphia, US.
He adds magnetic powder to
the biopolymer used in bone implants so that
they can be made magnetic for an extended
time, using the same strong magnetic field
used to steer drug particles.
Read the full magnetic
bone implant patent application.
Cow udder plugger
Mastitis, a bacterial infection of the mammary
glands, can be a significant problem for cow
farmers. Up to now they have treated cows
by dipping their infected teats into an antibacterial
solution – but that can contaminate
milk, so any that is produced by the affected
cows must be discarded for a time.
Norman
Williamson, an expert on bovine
health at Massey University in Auckland, New
Zealand, has an answer, which he calls an
"udder plugger".
Bacteria are usually prevented
from entering teats by a plug made of the
protein keratin, he explains. Milking, and
modern milking machines in particular, can
suck out this plug and allow the bacteria
in.
Williamson's solution is simply
to plug the teat again using keratin mixed
with fat that can then be injected or rolled
into a plug-shape and pushed in by hand. He
has tested the idea on a number of cows and
found that it does not irritate the teat.
"The way now appears clear to further
test the product in dairy cows," he says.
Read the full
cow udder plugger patent application.
Supergrass for superlawns
One of the most common grasses
chosen for gardens and for planting along
roadsides in the southeast US is bahiagrass
(Paspalum notatutri). It is popular because
it flourishes in poor-quality soil, is resistant
to many insects and tolerates conditions of
drought and heat.
It may sound ideal, but
Fred Altpeter and colleagues
at the University of Florida in Gainesville,
US, think they can improve it.
Bahiagrass grows 60cm seed
heads during the summer, so it must be mowed
regularly. It also has a low-density growth
pattern that allows weeds to invade.
Altpeter says that adding
just one gene to bahiagrass from every geneticist's
favourite plant,
Arabidopsis thaliana, fixes both
those problems.
That gene, Arabidopsis ATHB
16 protein, suppresses the formation of seed
heads and encourages bahiagrass to spread
out more underground. The modified plant has
performed well in tests but whether people
will want GM grass along their roadsides and
on the lawns is another matter.
Read the full
GM supergrass for superlawns
patent
Magnetic banknotes
There is a continual battle
between counterfeiters and banknote manufacturers.
But Stuart Eaton and colleagues at UK military
research company Qinetiq
think they have designed the only technology
that makes it possible for anyone to spot
a fake by touch alone.
Most anti-counterfeiting techniques
use visual cues such as watermarks or holograms,
or machine-readable features like markings
that only become visible under ultraviolet
light.
Qinetiq's idea is to use spots
of magnetic inks on a document such as a banknote,
with alternating polarity.
To check a note's authenticity,
you simply fold the note and rub it to feel
the alternate attraction and repulsion as
the inks move past each other.
The sensation would make a
smooth piece of paper feel rippled, say the
group, who think the technology could work
on anything from passports to legal letters.
Whether the idea would make notes difficult
to stack or peel apart, we can only guess.
A touch-based system would
have advantages in places where lighting is
poor such as pubs and clubs, as well as being
a useful aid to the visually impaired.
The public could be educated
to learn how to recognise the particular pattern,
says the patent, but no mention is made of
how easy or difficult it would be for fraudsters
to copy the design.
Read the full magnetic
banknotes patent application.
Explosion-absorbing foam
Concussion and longer-lasting
brain damage caused by the compression waves
from explosions are a growing problem for
the military. Carbon foam able to absorb a
blast could help tackle that.
A team funded by the US
Army Space and Missile Defense Command
in Huntsville, Alabama, has developed panels
of carbon foam with pores varying in size
from 50 micrometres to 2 millimetres.
Carbon foam is made by heat-treating
particular materials made from carbon fibres.
In tests, panels of the foam absorbed up to
83% of the energy of a blast wave from the
detonation of 2 kilograms of C4
explosives at a distance of only
20 centimetres.
This is possible because the
foam's pores collapse when hit by a compression
wave, absorbing its energy.
The team says the material
could be used to protect rooms and vehicles
and, if used to enclose explosives, could
prevent their accidental detonation when caught
in a blast.
Read the full explosion-absorbing
foam patent application.
Antibody adapters
Antibodies bind onto foreign
substances – antigens – inside
the body. Much like a key must fit its lock
they need a 3D structure to be able to latch
onto their specific antigen.
However, many antigens such
as HIV – the virus that causes AIDS
– seem impervious to this kind of attack
and no known antibody is able to bind to them.
Peter
Kwong at the National Institutes
of Health Dale and Betty Bumpers Vaccine Research
Center in Washington, DC, US, thinks it may
be possible to trick the immune system into
latching onto these untouchable antigens.
His idea is to design a kind
of protein "adapter" that can bind
to the antigen on one end and an existing
antibody at the other, allowing the antigen
to be neutralised.
Kwong and his colleagues have
come up with a method of designing these structures
on computer and say the approach could provide
a new way to fight diseases, such as HIV,
that have resisted other approaches.
This will not be an easy process,
though – the shapes of antigens and
antibodies are hugely complex. Even calculating
what they look like requires cutting-edge
computer-modelling tools. Predicting what
kind of protein could modify that shape is
even harder.
Read the full antibody
adapter patent application.
Source: www.newscientist.com
