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artificial placenta for human babies

+ Artificial placenta for human babies is just 5 years away from reality.

The womb is home to the most complex feat of human biology: the transformation from embryo to fetus to baby. But that magnificent conversion would be impossible without the placenta, the life-giving organ that the developing fetus is tied to via the umbilical cord. Even before a woman knows she’s pregnant, the placenta swells in size, poised to serve as the fetus’s kidneys and liver until the fetus has its own. The placenta starts to “breathe” for the fetus around 12 weeks in. Over a convoluted surface that grows large enough to cover a horse, fetal blood on one side soaks up oxygen from mom’s blood on the other. Her oxygen flows seamlessly into the fetus’s beating heart, brain, and limbs, and carbon dioxide from the fetus returns to the mother’s blood, to be exhaled in her breath.

Re-creating everything that happens inside the womb belongs firmly in the realm of science fiction. There’s still too much that scientists don’t know about the early stages of development, when fetal cells grow into organs, limbs, and tissues. But George Mychaliska thinks that creating an artificial version of the placenta, or at least replicating its most important function, is in reach. As a fetal and pediatric surgeon at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, in Ann Arbor, he often sees premature babies who have left the womb too soon. Although modern medicine can save many of them, the chances of survival for extremely small preemies—those younger than 28 weeks, barely in their third trimester—remain slim. Of the survivors, many are left with long-term health problems. Lungs simply aren’t designed to breathe until the baby is close to full term, which is currently defined as 39 weeks, and even the gentlest techniques to assist breathing can damage the tissue.

“We’re in a catch-22 as baby doctors,” Mychaliska says. “If we don’t do anything, they die. If we want to save them… they may survive, but they likely will have varying degrees of lung disease from the treatment itself.”

For more than a decade, Mychaliska has been working on a solution: an artificial placenta to keep extremely young preemies alive until they can breathe on their own. Already, he’s proven that it can sustain premature lambs for several weeks. Building a breathing apparatus for a premature infant is not trivial, as the baby’s tiny size and fragile physiology pose both medical and engineering challenges. Mychaliska’s team has been adapting existing technology to work reliably with the skinniest of blood vessels and developing materials compatible with the unique biology of fetuses. Now, after several recent breakthroughs, Mychaliska thinks his team’s artificial placenta is only five years away from human trials.

His system is one of several designs under development around the world that aim to breathe for extremely premature babies. Some mimic the fetal environment by submerging the fetus in a fluid bath, which gets closer to the conditions of an artificial womb. Other designs rely on novel technology that attempts to mimic the way the lungs breathe.

 next-gen spaceship

+ virgin galactic has unveiled its next-gen spaceship called vss imagine.

Similar to the firm’s other spacecraft, VSS Unity, VSS Imagine will take people and scientific experiments to and from suborbital space. The newcomer features upgrades that will “enable improved performance in terms of maintenance access and flight rate,” company representatives said in a statement.

The SpaceShip III design also features a mirror-like, chrome-effect livery that reflects the vehicle’s surroundings, from the ground to space and back.

“As a SpaceShip III class of vehicle, Imagine is not just beautiful to look at but represents Virgin Galactic’s growing fleet of spaceships,” Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group, said in a statement. “Our hope is for all those who travel to space to return with fresh perspectives and new ideas that will bring positive change to our planet.The Rollout of VSS Imagine gives the space tourism company a second spacecraft to test, as Virgin Galactic continues to work through final development testing of VSS Unity, with its next spaceflight test expected in May.

“For us to make the business scale, at the places that we’re aspiring towards, we need two things: We need many more ships than we have right now and we also need the ships that we bring forward to be built in a way that they’re able to be maintained in a way that we can have much quicker [turnaround times between flights] than what we have with Unity,” said Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier.

semiconductor chips in India

+ India may soon start offering cash prizes of billion dollars,to companies that make semiconductor chips in India .

“The government will give cash incentives of more than $1 billion to each company which will set up chip fabrication units,” an unnamed government official told Reuters. Private companies will be ordered to buy ‘made in India’ chips so that these new fabrication units have assured buyers for their product.

 So much so that car makers like Ford, Nissan, Volkswagen, Fiat Chrysler and Toyota recently cut back production citing a shortage in semiconductors. And to fill that void that is stalling the manufacturing of electronic products, India may soon start offering a cash incentive, worth a whopping billion dollars, to companies that make semiconductor chips in India.Semiconductors are typically silicon chips that perform control and memory functions in a wide range of products⁠ — from computers and smartphones to cars and microwave ovens, to name a few. And there are very few of them, compared to the demand, since the pandemic.

As it stands today, demand is not a problem for chip makers anywhere in the world. There is a huge addressable market that is growing by the day with the proliferation of electric vehicles⁠ and fancy cars loaded features like Bluetooth connectivity and driver-assist, navigation and hybrid-electric systems.

 fixing a bug

+ Apple is said to be fixing a bug that blocked searches for 'ASIAN' as an adult content.

Apple is said to be fixing a bug that caused adult-content filters to block the word "Asian."

The bug became public in February, but a developer said he had flagged it to Apple in 2019.mashable reported that it had confirmed Apple's coming iOS 14.5 update would fix the bug Apple is apparently fixing a bug that blocked the word "Asian" from web searches for qualifying as adult content.

The bug affected devices that had the "Limit Adult Websites" function switched on, and it came to light in February when the developer Steven Shen tweeted about it

+ Scientists found a technique to capture free-floating DNA and use it to identify what specific animals are nearby.

Scientists found that they can capture free-floating DNA and use it to identify what specific animals are nearby just by sucking air through a special filter.

It’s a cool trick that should prove useful for conservationists and ecologists,gizmodo reports, but the study is also fascinating from a human perspective. If DNA in the air can be used to track down specific species, it’s reasonable to assume that this tech would also be able to identify people someday — tech that could be useful for forensic investigations, but that also would raise questions about security and personal privacy as well.

 successfully measured brain signals

+ researches have successfully measured brain signals through an ear implant.

A cochlear implant enables people with severe hearing loss to hear again. An audiologist adjusts the device based on the user’s input, but this is not always easy. Think of children who are born deaf or elderly people with dementia. They have more difficulty assessing and communicating how well they hear the sounds, resulting in an implant that is not optimally tuned to their situation.

A possible solution is to adjust the implant based on brain waves, which contain information about how the person processes the sounds that they hear. This kind of objective measurement can be made with an electroencephalogram (EEG), whereby electrodes are placed on the head. However, it would be more efficient if the implant itself could record the brain waves to measure hearing quality.

Experimental implant

Research by KU Leuven and manufacturer Cochlear on a few human test subjects has shown for the first time that this is possible. “We used an experimental implant that works exactly the same way as a normal implant, but with easier access to the electronics,” says postdoctoral researcher Ben Somers from the Experimental Oto-rhino-laryngology unit.

“A cochlear implant contains electrodes that stimulate the auditory nerve. This is how sound signals are transmitted to the brain. In our research, we have succeeded in using these implanted electrodes to record the brain waves that arise in response to sound. That is a first. An additional advantage is that by carefully choosing the right measuring electrodes, we can measure larger brain responses than the classical EEG with electrodes on the head.