GIGS.2.GO: Portable Tear and Share USB Flash Drives

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you desperately needed a flash drive but couldn’t find one to save your life? It’s times like these where something like the GIGS.2.GO would’ve been useful.
The question is, what’s GIGS.2.GO? It’s about the size of a credit card and it’s basically just four USB drives arranged into one neat little package.

The premise that Kurt Rampton and the BOLTgroup were working with when they designed GIGS.2.GO was to provide people with emergency thumb drives that they can just keep in their wallet.
Thanks to the “Tear and Share” technology, the card of drives will come in especially handy for people who work with large teams. Just tear off a drive, save your data, and pass it along to whoever needs it.

GIGS.2.GO is designed to be produced from 100% post-consumer molded paper pulp, so they can be labeled easily with a pen or marker.

Solar Window Socket: Stick up and Plug in

If only harnessing the power of the Sun could be as simple as sticking an outlet with a solar panel onto your window. That’s the idea designers Kyuho Song and Boa Oh are pushing for with their Window Socket concept design.

It’s basically an outlet you fasten onto any clear window so that it charges up by absorbing the sun’s solar energy. When you want to power something up, simply stick the plug into the socket and that’s it.

The design description indicates that the solar energy will be transformed into electrical energy by a converter, although I can’t really see where they could have crammed that circuitry inside of the small puck-like device.

18-Year Old Invents Supercapacitor that Charges Cellphone Batteries in 30 Seconds

How fitting is it that a high school student may have found the answer to longer lasting and faster charging mobile devices? The promising invention was made by Eesha Khare, an 18-year old student from Saratoga, California. It’s a supercapacitor that, according to Intel, “fits inside cell phone batteries, allowing them to fully charge within 20-30 seconds.”

Supercapacitors have significantly higher durability and rate of charging (and discharging) compared to rechargeable batteries, but the downside to them is that they have a low energy density. That’s why they’re mainly used in devices that need short bursts of power. But in the video below, which was uploaded by Santa Barbara Arts TV on YouTube, you’ll hear Khare mention that her supercapacitors have “a special nanostructure, which allows for a lot [sic] greater energy per unit volume.”

 For her invention, Khare won $50,000 (USD) and was awarded one of the runners-up honors at the 2013 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The first place went to a 19-year old who developed an AI for a low-cost self-driving car.

Machine Keeps Human Liver Alive And Functioning Outside The Body For 24 Hours

This could double the amount of livers available for transplant and save thousands of lives. Livers for everyone! 

A new machine can keep human livers warm and functioning outside the body for 24 hours before successfully transplanting them, a team of Oxford scientists announced last week. The breakthrough could double the number of livers available for transplant.
Livers are normally kept on ice to slow down their metabolism, a risky process that only buys doctors about 14 hours of time before they need to be transplanted. More than 2,000 livers are tossed every year because of oxygen deprivation or damage endured in the cold preservation process, according to the CEO of OrganOx, the company created around the new device. In the U.S. and Europe, there are about 30,000 patients awaiting new livers, many of whom will die before they can get one.

Staying Alive:  Oxford University

The machine, developed by biomedical engineering professor Constantin Coussios and Peter Friend of the Oxford Transplant Centre, keeps the liver alive at normal body temperature through perfusion, or supplying it with oxygenated red blood cells. While connected to the device, the liver regains its normal color and produces bile just like it would in the human body. The team has been working on the technology since 1994.
Two successful transplants at King's College Hospital in London last month indicate the device could become the go-to method for liver transplants, increasing the amount of time livers could be preserved for transport. The livers were only kept alive for 10 hours in those transplants, but the researchers say their other experiments have shown the machine to work for periods up to 24 hours.

Living Liver:  Oxford University

Having a little wiggle room in the timeframe could allow doctors to assess how well the organ is working and maximize the likelihood of a successful transplant.
Coussios and Friend plan to run a pilot with 20 patients, and pending success, have the machine on the market by 2014.

The Fastest DNA Sequencer

DNA sequencing has revolutionized medicine and biomedical research. For example, DNA analysis can tell doctors which drug might work best against a particular cancer. But current technology usually sequences only short stretches of DNA and can take hours or days. To sequence anything longer than a few hundred base pairs, scientists mince up thousands of copies of the target DNA, sequence all the fragments, and use software to painstakingly reconstruct the order of the DNA bases by matching overlap within fragments. A new approach, called nanopore sequencing, can handle long strands of DNA at once, eliminating the need for overlap analysis. As a result, nanopore sequencers could be cheaper, faster, and more compact than other DNA sequencers. They can also accurately sequence stretches with many repeating base pairs. The MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies connects to a USB port. Soon, anyone with $1,000 and a computer will be able to sequence DNA.

1) Drop the DNA sample on a chip.
Researchers place pretreated samples—blood from a patient or purified DNA, for example—into a small port. Within the device is a silicon chip with many thin membranes studded with tiny pores.

2) Unzip the DNA.
An enzyme shuttles the DNA to the membrane’s nanopore. It then unzips the twin strands of DNA and feeds one end into the pore. The pore is a set of proteins arranged in a ring and derived from bacteria. The inner diameter of the pore is a couple of nanometers wide: 100,000 times thinner than a human hair.

3) Block the ion current.
Electrodes send an ionic current, a flow of ions, through the open nanopore. As a group of a few DNA bases—the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs—threads through the neck of the pore, it blocks the ions and interrupts the current. A sensor records the electrical disturbance.

4) Determine the sequence.
Software in an attached computer analyzes the electrical signal recorded for every group of bases. Because each combination of bases blocks the current in a distinctive fashion, the software can deduce the identity and sequence of the individual bases in the group. As the DNA strand feeds through the pore, the software stitches together the sequence of bases on the entire strand.

5) Check for errors.
The device can determine the sequence of a single strand of DNA, but for greater precision, it can also read the complementary strand. Once the first strand of the DNA ratchets through the pore, a small stretch of DNA called a hairpin structure acts as a tether to draw the matching half into the pore as well.

STATS

Price: Less than $1,000
DNA Read Length: 70,000 base pairs
Human Genome Size: 3 billion base pairs

9 Reasons To Avoid Sugar As If Your Life Depended On It

The harmful effects of sugar go way beyond empty calories.
Added sugar is so unhealthy that it is probably the single worst ingredient in the modern diet.
Here are the top 9 reasons to avoid sugar as if your life depended on it (it does).

1. Added Sugar Supplies a Large Amount of Fructose

The reason added sugar (and its evil twin… High Fructose Corn Syrup) is bad for you, is that it supplies a very large amount of fructose.
Sugar (and HFCS) are half glucose, half fructose. Glucose is essential and can be metabolized by pretty much every cell in the body. If we don’t get it from the diet, our bodies make it from proteins and fat.
Fructose, however, is not essential to our functioning in any way.
The only organ that can metabolize fructose is the liver, because only the liver has a transporter for it (1).
When large amounts of fructose enter the liver and it is already full of glycogen, most of the fructose gets turned into fat (2).
This process is probably one of the leading causes of the epidemics of many chronic, Western diseases.
I’d like to point out that this does NOT apply to fruit, which are a real food with vitamins, minerals, fiber, lots of water and are very difficult to overeat on.
Bottom Line: The only organ that can metabolize fructose is the liver. When we eat a lot of fructose, many things in the body start to go wrong.

2. Sugar Doesn’t Contain Any Vitamins or Minerals (Empty Calories)

Sugar IS empty calories. No doubt about that.
Most high-sugar foods like pastries, sodas and candy bars contain very little essential nutrients.
People who eat them instead of other more nutritious foods will probably become deficient in many important nutrients.
Bottom Line: Most products with added sugars in them contain very little nutrients and can therefore be classified as “empty” calories.

3. Sugar Causes Deposition of Fat in The Liver

When we eat fructose, it goes to the liver.
If liver glycogen is low, such as after a run, the fructose will be used to replenish it (3).
However, most people aren’t consuming fructose after a long workout and their livers are already full of glycogen.
When this happens, the liver turns the fructose into fat (2).
Some of the fat gets shipped out, but part of it remains in the liver. The fat can build up over time and ultimately lead to Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (4, 5, 6).
Bottom Line: Eating a lot of added sugar (fructose) can cause deposition of fat in the liver and lead to Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.

4. Sugar Harms Your Cholesterol and Triglycerides

Most of the fat generated in the liver gets shipped out as Very Low Density Lipoprotein (VLDL) particles.
These particles are rich in triglycerides and cholesterol.
In a controlled study, people were assigned to drink 25% of calories as either a glucose-sweetened drink or a fructose-sweetened drink for 10 weeks (7).
The fructose group had:
Increases in blood triglycerides.
Increases in small, dense LDL and oxidized LDL (very, very bad).
Higher fasting glucose and insulin.
Decreased insulin sensitivity.
Increased fat in the abdominal cavity (visceral fat).
Basically, 25% of calories as fructose significantly harmed blood lipids and caused features characteristic of the metabolic syndrome, which is a stepping stone towards obesity, heart disease, diabetes and a (short) lifetime of poor health. 
Bottom Line: Consuming a large part of calories as fructose can lead to serious adverse effects on blood markers in as little as 10 weeks.

5. Sugar Causes Insulin Resistance

The main function of insulin is to drive glucose from the bloodstream into cells.
But when we eat a Western diet, the cells tend to become resistant to the effects of insulin.
When this happens, the pancreas start secreting even more insulin to remove the glucose from the bloodstream, because elevated blood glucose is toxic.
This is how insulin resistance leads to elevated insulin levels in the blood.
But insulin also has another important function… it tells the fat cells to pick up fat from the bloodstream and to hold on to the fat that they already carry.
This is how insulin causes obesity.
When the body becomes even more resistant to insulin, the beta cells in the pancreas eventually become damaged and lose the ability to produce sufficient insulin. This is how you get type II diabetes, which now afflicts about 300 million people worldwide.
Excess fructose is a known cause of insulin resistance and elevated insulin in the blood (8, 9, 10).
Bottom Line: Excess fructose consumption can lead to insulin resistance, a stepping stone towards obesity and diabetes.

6. Sugar Raises Your Risk of Western Diseases

Excess sugar consumption has been associated with many Western diseases.
If anything, sugar is the single largest contributing factor to the poor health of affluent nations.
Every time sugar (and refined flour and vegetable oils) enter a population’s diet, these people become sick.
Sugar has been associated with:
Obesity. Sugar causes weight gain via various mechanisms, including elevated insulin and leptin resistance (11, 12).
Diabetes. Sugar is probably a leading cause of diabetes (13, 14, 15).
Heart disease. Sugar raises the bad cholesterol, triglycerides and causes various other issues that can ultimately lead to heart disease (16, 17).
Bottom Line: Excess sugar consumption has been associated with many serious diseases, including obesity, type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

7. Sugar Doesn’t Cause Proper Satiety

n area in the brain called the Hypothalamus is supposed to regulate our food intake.
In a study published in 2013, two groups drank either a glucose-sweetened drink or a fructose-sweetened drink (18).
The glucose drinkers had decreased blood flow in the hypothalamus and felt satiated, while the fructose drinkers had increased blood flow in this area of the brain.
The fructose drinkers felt less satisfied and were still hungry.
Another study revealed that fructose didn’t reduce levels of the hunger hormone ghrelin like glucose. The more ghrelin, the hungrier you are (19).
Bottom Line: Studies comparing fructose and glucose show that fructose does not induce satiety like glucose, which will contribute to a higher calorie intake.

8. Sugar is Addictive

When we eat sugar, dopamine is released in the brain, giving us a feeling of pleasure.
This is actually how drugs of abuse like cocaine function (20).
Our brain is hardwired to seek out activities that release dopamine. Activities that release an enormous amount of it are especially desirable.
In certain individuals with a certain predisposition to addiction, this causes reward-seeking behavior typical of addiction to abusive drugs.
Studies in rats demonstrate that they can in fact become physically addicted to sugar (21).
This is harder to prove in humans, but many people consume sugar and other junk foods in a pattern that is typical for addictive, abusive compounds.
Bottom Line: Sugar, due to its powerful effects on the reward system in the brain, can lead to classic signs of addiction.

9. Sugar Causes Resistance to a Hormone Called Leptin

Leptin is a hormone that is secreted by our fat cells. The more fat we have, the more leptin is secreted.
This is supposed to function as a signal to tell the brain that we’re full and need to stop eating. It is also supposed to raise our energy expenditure.
Obese individuals actually have high levels of leptin, but the problem is that the leptin isn’t working.This is called leptin resistance and is a major reason why people eat more calories than they burn and become obese.

Scientists map 3-D structure of telomerase enzyme – key actor in cancer, aging

Like finally seeing all the gears of a watch and how they work together, researchers from UCLA and UC Berkeley have, for the first time ever, solved the puzzle of how the various components of an entire telomerase enzyme complex fit together and function in a three-dimensional structure.



The creation of the first complete visual map of the telomerase enzyme – which is known to play a significant role in aging and most cancers – represents a breakthrough that could open up a host of new approaches to fighting disease, the researchers said.

"Everyone in the field wants to know what telomerase looks like, and there it was. I was so excited, I could hardly breathe," said Juli Feigon, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a senior author of the study. "We were the first to see it."
The scientists report the positions of each component of the enzyme relative to one another and the complete organisation of the enzyme's active site. In addition, they demonstrate how the different components contribute to the enzyme's activity, uniquely correlating structure with biochemical function. Their research is published in Nature.
"We combined every single possible method we could get our hands on to solve this structure and used cutting-edge technological advances," said co-first author Jiansen Jiang, a researcher who works with Feigon. "This breakthrough would not have been possible five years ago."

"We really had to figure out how everything fit together, like a puzzle," said co-first author Edward Miracco, a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow in Feigon's laboratory. "When we started fitting in the high-resolution structures to the blob that emerged from electron microscopy, we realized that everything was fitting in and made sense with decades of past biochemistry research. The project just blossomed, and the blob became a masterpiece."

The telomerase enzyme is a mixture of components that unite inside our cells to maintain the protective regions at the ends of our chromosomes, which are called telomeres. Telomeres act like the plastic tips at the end of shoelaces, safeguarding important genetic information. But each time a cell divides, these telomeres shorten, like the slow-burning fuse of a time bomb. Eventually, the telomeres erode to a point that is no longer tolerable for cells, triggering the cell death that is a normal part of the aging process.

While most cells have relatively low levels of telomerase, 80 percent to 90 percent of cancer cells have abnormally high telomerase activity. This prevents telomeres from shortening and extends the life of these tumorigenic cells — a significant contributor to cancer progression.

The new discovery creates tremendous potential for pharmaceutical development that takes into account the way a drug and target molecule might interact, given the shape and chemistry of each component. Until now, designing a cancer-fighting drug that targeted telomerase was much like shooting an arrow to hit a bulls-eye while wearing a blindfold. With this complete visual map, the researchers are starting to remove that blindfold.
"Inhibiting telomerase won't hurt most healthy cells but is predicted to slow down the progression of a broad range of cancers," said Miracco. "Our structure can be used to guide targeted drug development to inhibit telomerase, and the model system we used may also be useful to screen candidate drugs for cancer therapy."

The researchers solved the structure of telomerase in Tetrahymena thermophila, the single-celled eukaryotic organism in which scientists first identified telomerase and telomeres, leading to the 2009 Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology. Research on Tetrahymena telomerase in the lab of co-senior author Kathleen Collins, a professor of molecular and cell biology at UC Berkeley, laid the genetic and biochemical groundwork for the structure to be solved.

An illustration of how telomerase elongates telomere ends progressively. Credit: Uzbas, F

"The success of this project was absolutely dependent on the collaboration among our research groups," said Feigon.

"At every step of this project, there were difficulties," she added. "We had so many technical hurdles to overcome, both in the electron microscopy and the biochemistry. Pretty much every problem we could have, we had – and yet at each stage these hurdles were overcome in an innovative way."

One of the biggest surprises, the researchers said, was the role of the protein p50, which acts as a hinge in Tetrahymena telomerase to allow dynamic movement within the complex; p50 was found to be an essential player in the enzyme's activity and in the recruitment of other proteins to join the complex.

"The beauty of this structure is that it opens up a whole new world of questions for us to answer," Feigon said. "The exact mechanism of how this complex interacts with the telomere is an active area of future research."

Battery concept

Continuance is a battery that can power pretty much anything. It’s a rechargeable, AA-sized cell with a USB port in the side. The concept — designed by Haimo Bao, Hailong Piao, Yuancheng Liu and Xiameng Hu — is meant to make it easy to power any device, whether it takes batteries or has its own USB port.

Physically lockable USB flash drive "Crypteks"

Featuring a sleek all-metal solid-aluminum alloy construction, the Crypteks USB storage is physically locked inside its housing encrypted with a user-created password that is input by twisting five rings displaying all 26 letters of the alphabet. There is a clear resemblance between the cryptex device featured in The Da Vinci Code and the Crypteks flash drive’s locking mechanism – hence the name. And if that’s still not secure enough, it also offers 256-bit AES Hardware Encryption. Its aluminum housing features five twisting rings with letters of the alphabet which need to be set in the right combination in order to remove the stick from inside.

After removing the USB stick, you can also remove all the outer rings and then place them back with a new code set accordingly between the couple of red dots. The outer pass-code is user customizable and is easy to change. The device offers some 14,348,907 possible combinations and if you happen to forget your password, the Crypteks can be sent back to its maker to have the code reset. Security aside, the durable solid-aluminum design also features anodized layer that helps to deal with fingerprints and dust, as well as a retractable USB tip.
Its dimensions are 3.1 x 1.1 in (7.8 x 2.7 cm). Offered in 4, 8 and 16 GB capacities, the Crypteks supports USB 2.0 and offers 24 MB/s read and 10 MB/s write speeds. Initially, two versions can be purchased, the 8 GB for the price of US$130, or 16 GB for US$160.

Aire Mask: Your breathing into renewable electrical power

There is a dearth of tech products that can also double as accessories for fictional serial killers. If Hannibal Lecter was as into jogging as he was into human consumption, he would have definitely been sporting the Aire mask to power his iPod. The idea behind the mask it that your breath charges your small electronics. The mask contains small wind turbines that convert your huffing and puffing into renewable power. The Aire is just a concept at this point, and it’s not very likely to see the light of a local Best Buy shelf anytime soon. The mask is intriguing enough to have earned a Red Dot design award in the energy category for its creator, Joao Paulo Lammoglia, though it has some aesthetic issues that walk the line between creepy and cool. Maybe it would look less threatening, if it came in colors like hot pink and lime green. In the search for renewable-energy sources, it makes sense to go all out and try some new ideas–like strapping wind turbines to your mouth. I would definitely add an Aire mask to my post-apocalyptic survival kit, along with my Ralph Lauren solar backpack and 1TB Swiss Army Knife for fighting off zombies. Should the Aire ever make it into production, be sure to grab one for your Mortal Kombat costume.

Concept interactive car windows.

How boring and uninteresting to sit in the back seat of a car and just look out the window. This can be corrected and revitalize dull stay on the road! With the ‘windows of opportunity’ (‘WOO’) project, GM collaborated with students in the ‘future lab’ masters course at bezalel academy of arts and design in jerusalem to transform car windows into interactive displays. Produced full scale functional prototypes of a rear passenger seat and side windows, using ‘eyeclick’ motion and optical sensor technology to transform the glass into an interactive surface on which they featured their game designs. Take a look at these 4 Projects. This technology can be used in the future. 

‘pond’ seeks to increase interactivity not solely within but also among cars, letting users share music and messages with passengers of other vehicles via a networked interface. text can also be spun outwards to be read by any fellow travelers.
‘foofu’ is a high-tech take on drawing in window fog, providing a colourful backdrop for finger painting.  
‘otto’, an animated travel companion, offers an educational experience by responding to the landscape, weather, and car performance, for example, moving more quickly as the car speeds up. the creature can also provide lights or be controlled in his environment via gestures.
‘spindow’ provides a realtime look at the window view of other users from around the globe.
passengers may select a city from a spinnable globe and then watch as that destination’s landscape is overlain on the window display over their own.  

Concept Smart Highway

Now the roads are not just roads, but be smart. Two Dutch design studios  Roosegaarde and Heijmans developed stunning project  a "smart way."  It includes a number of interactive technologies that adapt to traffic conditions and visually show drivers of useful information.
The main technological element of the road of the future – the paint. In this respect, the Dutch ahead over Europe. A few years ago, they got the "nano-paint", which can be controlled with the remote control – press the blue button and the wall paint, turned blue, red – red, etc.
The concept of the new Dutch road uses a combination of sensors, special inks and high-tech batteries that collect energy from the wind of passing vehicles. «Smart Highway» will become reality in 2013.





Road paint «Dynamic Paint» sensitive to temperature. In normal weather conditions, the paint is transparent, but when the temperature drops and the road is slippery, the paint shows warning signs of danger.
«Glow-in-the-Dark Road» – fluorescent dye that absorbs sunlight during the day and light up to 10 hours at night, which increases visibility and reduces the need for additional lighting.
Another technique is called "Interactive Light". It uses sensors to detect an oncoming car, if a car is approaching, the road begins to glow brighter and fades when the vehicle is removed. Thus, the road will turn on only when needed, and will not waste expend energy reserve. "Smart Highway" was named best concept. 

Band-Aid – concept printer for the patch

This conceptual device designed by a team of EVENdesign for use in the emergency room and hospitals. In essence it is an automatic cutterб, to make plaster of different geometry for the desired body part. In addition, the printer can be painted in any color  under the skin tone.
The project is being developed for each of the flap on the computer with a special graphics program, a user draws a shape and sets all sizes. Of course, in an emergency will not have time to draw, so you can download the complete document or template. But as a result time is still saved.
The device is connected to a computer, and on command from editor a flap patch any form quickly crawls out of the tray. And in first aid at the school, where a lot of downed knees, a device for printing curly patch will be an indispensable tool.