It seems that automated science writing is not ready—yet. Still, an April 18, 2019 news item on ScienceDaily suggests that progress is being made,
The work of a science writer, including this one, includes reading journal papers filled with specialized technical terminology, and figuring out how to explain their contents in language that readers without a scientific background can understand.
Now, a team of scientists at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] and elsewhere has developed a neural network, a form of artificial intelligence (AI), that can do much the same thing, at least to a limited extent: It can read scientific papers and render a plain-English summary in a sentence or two.
Even in this limited form, such a neural network could be useful for helping editors, writers, and scientists [emphasis mine] scan a large number of papers to get a preliminary sense of what they’re about. But the approach the team developed could also find applications in a variety of other areas besides language processing, including machine translation and speech recognition.
The work is described in the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, in a paper by Rumen Dangovski and Li Jing, both MIT graduate students; Marin Soljačić, a professor of physics at MIT; Preslav Nakov, a principal scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute, HBKU; and Mićo Tatalović, a former Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT and a former editor at New Scientist magazine.
From AI for physics to natural language
The work came about as a result of an unrelated project, which involved developing new artificial intelligence approaches based on neural networks, aimed at tackling certain thorny problems in physics. However, the researchers soon realized that the same approach could be used to address other difficult computational problems, including natural language processing, in ways that might outperform existing neural network systems.
“We have been doing various kinds of work in AI for a few years now,” Soljačić says. “We use AI to help with our research, basically to do physics better. And as we got to be more familiar with AI, we would notice that every once in a while there is an opportunity to add to the field of AI because of something that we know from physics — a certain mathematical construct or a certain law in physics. We noticed that hey, if we use that, it could actually help with this or that particular AI algorithm.”
This approach could be useful in a variety of specific kinds of tasks, he says, but not all. “We can’t say this is useful for all of AI, but there are instances where we can use an insight from physics to improve on a given AI algorithm.”
Neural networks in general are an attempt to mimic the way humans learn certain new things: The computer examines many different examples and “learns” what the key underlying patterns are. Such systems are widely used for pattern recognition, such as learning to identify objects depicted in photos.
But neural networks in general have difficulty correlating information from a long string of data, such as is required in interpreting a research paper. Various tricks have been used to improve this capability, including techniques known as long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent units (GRU), but these still fall well short of what’s needed for real natural-language processing, the researchers say.
The team came up with an alternative system, which instead of being based on the multiplication of matrices, as most conventional neural networks are, is based on vectors rotating in a multidimensional space. The key concept is something they call a rotational unit of memory (RUM).
Essentially, the system represents each word in the text by a vector in multidimensional space — a line of a certain length pointing in a particular direction. Each subsequent word swings this vector in some direction, represented in a theoretical space that can ultimately have thousands of dimensions. At the end of the process, the final vector or set of vectors is translated back into its corresponding string of words.
“RUM helps neural networks to do two things very well,” Nakov says. “It helps them to remember better, and it enables them to recall information more accurately.”
After developing the RUM system to help with certain tough physics problems such as the behavior of light in complex engineered materials, “we realized one of the places where we thought this approach could be useful would be natural language processing,” says Soljačić, recalling a conversation with Tatalović, who noted that such a tool would be useful for his work as an editor trying to decide which papers to write about. Tatalović was at the time exploring AI in science journalism as his Knight fellowship project.
“And so we tried a few natural language processing tasks on it,” Soljačić says. “One that we tried was summarizing articles, and that seems to be working quite well.”
The proof is in the reading
As an example, they fed the same research paper through a conventional LSTM-based neural network and through their RUM-based system. The resulting summaries were dramatically different.
The LSTM system yielded this highly repetitive and fairly technical summary: “Baylisascariasis,” kills mice, has endangered the allegheny woodrat and has caused disease like blindness or severe consequences. This infection, termed “baylisascariasis,” kills mice, has endangered the allegheny woodrat and has caused disease like blindness or severe consequences. This infection, termed “baylisascariasis,” kills mice, has endangered the allegheny woodrat.
Based on the same paper, the RUM system produced a much more readable summary, and one that did not include the needless repetition of phrases: Urban raccoons may infect people more than previously assumed. 7 percent of surveyed individuals tested positive for raccoon roundworm antibodies. Over 90 percent of raccoons in Santa Barbara play host to this parasite.
Already, the RUM-based system has been expanded so it can “read” through entire research papers, not just the abstracts, to produce a summary of their contents. The researchers have even tried using the system on their own research paper describing these findings — the paper that this news story is attempting to summarize.
Here is the new neural network’s summary: Researchers have developed a new representation process on the rotational unit of RUM, a recurrent memory that can be used to solve a broad spectrum of the neural revolution in natural language processing.
It may not be elegant prose, but it does at least hit the key points of information.
Çağlar Gülçehre, a research scientist at the British AI company Deepmind Technologies, who was not involved in this work, says this research tackles an important problem in neural networks, having to do with relating pieces of information that are widely separated in time or space. “This problem has been a very fundamental issue in AI due to the necessity to do reasoning over long time-delays in sequence-prediction tasks,” he says. “Although I do not think this paper completely solves this problem, it shows promising results on the long-term dependency tasks such as question-answering, text summarization, and associative recall.”
Gülçehre adds, “Since the experiments conducted and model proposed in this paper are released as open-source on Github, as a result many researchers will be interested in trying it on their own tasks. … To be more specific, potentially the approach proposed in this paper can have very high impact on the fields of natural language processing and reinforcement learning, where the long-term dependencies are very crucial.”
The research received support from the Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, the MIT-SenseTime Alliance on Artificial Intelligence, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation. The team also had help from the Science Daily website, whose articles were used in training some of the AI models in this research.
As usual, this ‘automated writing system’ is framed as a ‘helper’ not an usurper of anyone’s job. However, its potential for changing the nature of the work is there. About five years ago I featured another ‘automated writing’ story in a July 16, 2014 posting titled: ‘Writing and AI or is a robot writing this blog?’ You may have been reading ‘automated’ news stories for years. At the time, the focus was on sports and business.
Getting back to 2019 and science writing, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Scientists at Japan’s University of Osaka have a technique for creating higher resolution computer and smart phone screens from the main ingredient for a dessert, nata de coco. From the nata de coco Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),
Nata de coco (also marketed as “coconut gel”) is a chewy, translucent, jelly-like food produced by the fermentation of coconut water,[1] which gels through the production of microbial cellulose by ‘Komagataeibacter xylinus’. Originating in the Philippines, nata de coco is most commonly sweetened as a candy or dessert, and can accompany a variety of foods, including pickles, drinks, ice cream, puddings, and fruit cocktails.[2]
A team at the Institute of Scientific and Industrial Research at Osaka University has determined the optical parameters of cellulose molecules with unprecedented precision. They found that cellulose’s intrinsic birefringence, which describes how a material reacts differently to light of various orientations, is powerful enough to be used in optical displays, such as flexible screens or electronic paper (ACS Macro Letters, “Estimation of the Intrinsic Birefringence of Cellulose Using Bacterial Cellulose Nanofiber Films”
An April 18, 2019 Osaka University press release on AlphaGalileo, which originated the news release, provides some historical context for the use of cellulose along with additional detail about the research,
Cellulose is an ancient material that may be poised for a major comeback. It has been utilized for millennia as the primary component of paper books, cotton clothing, and nata de coco, a tropical dessert made from coconut water. While books made of dead trees and plain old shirts might seem passé in world increasingly filled with tablets and smartphones, researchers at Osaka University have shown that cellulose might have just what it takes to make our modern electronic screens cheaper and provide sharper, more vibrant images.
Cellulose, a naturally occurring polymer, consists of many long molecular chains. Because of its rigidity and strength, cellulose helps maintain the structural integrity of the cell walls in plants. It makes up about 99% of the nanofibers that comprise nata de coco, and helps create its unique and tasty texture.
The team at Osaka University achieved better results using unidirectionally-aligned cellulose nanofiber films created by stretching hydrogels from nata de coco at various rates. Nata de coco nanofibers allow the cellulose chains to be straight on the molecular level, and this is helpful for the precise determination of the intrinsic birefringence–that is, the maximum birefringence of fully extended polymer chains. The researchers were also able to measure the birefringence more accurately through improvements in method. “Using high quality samples and methods, we were able to reliably determine the inherent birefringence of cellulose, for which very different values had been previously estimated,” says senior author Masaya Nogi.
The main application the researchers envision is as light compensation films for liquid crystal displays (LCDs), since they operate by controlling the brightness of pixels with filters that allow only one orientation of light to pass through. Potentially, any smartphone, computer, or television that has an LCD screen could see improved contrast, along with reduced color unevenness and light leakage with the addition of cellulose nanofiber films.
“Cellulose nanofibers are promising light compensation materials for optoelectronics, such as flexible displays and electronic paper, since they simultaneously have good transparency, flexibility, dimensional stability, and thermal conductivity,” says lead author Kojiro Uetani. “So look for this ancient material in your future high-tech devices.”
Adding to the body of ‘memristor’ research I have here, there’s an April 17, 2019 news item on Nanowerk announcing the development of ‘memristor’ hardware by Japanese researchers (Note: A link has been removed),
A research group from Tohoku University has developed spintronics devices which are promising for future energy-efficient and adoptive computing systems, as they behave like neurons and synapses in the human brain (Advanced Materials, “Artificial Neuron and Synapse Realized in an Antiferromagnet/Ferromagnet Heterostructure Using Dynamics of Spin–Orbit Torque Switching”).
Today’s information society is built on digital computers that have evolved drastically for half a century and are capable of executing complicated tasks reliably. The human brain, by contrast, operates under very limited power and is capable of executing complex tasks efficiently using an architecture that is vastly different from that of digital computers.
So the development of computing schemes or hardware inspired by the processing of information in the brain is of broad interest to scientists in fields ranging from physics, chemistry, material science and mathematics, to electronics and computer science.
In computing, there are various ways to implement the processing of information by a brain. Spiking neural network is a kind of implementation method which closely mimics the brain’s architecture and temporal information processing. Successful implementation of spiking neural network requires dedicated hardware with artificial neurons and synapses that are designed to exhibit the dynamics of biological neurons and synapses.
Here, the artificial neuron and synapse would ideally be made of the same material system and operated under the same working principle. However, this has been a challenging issue due to the fundamentally different nature of the neuron and synapse in biological neural networks.
The research group – which includes Professor Hideo Ohno (currently the university president), Associate Professor Shunsuke Fukami, Dr. Aleksandr Kurenkov and Professor Yoshihiko Horio – created an artificial neuron and synapse by using spintronics technology. Spintronics is an academic field that aims to simultaneously use an electron’s electric (charge) and magnetic (spin) properties.
The research group had previously developed a functional material system consisting of antiferromagnetic and ferromagnetic materials. This time, they prepared artificial neuronal and synaptic devices microfabricated from the material system, which demonstrated fundamental behavior of biological neuron and synapse – leaky integrate-and-fire and spike-timing-dependent plasticity, respectively – based on the same concept of spintronics.
The spiking neural network is known to be advantageous over today’s artificial intelligence for the processing and prediction of temporal information. Expansion of the developed technology to unit-circuit, block and system levels is expected to lead to computers that can process time-varying information such as voice and video with a small amount of power or edge devices that have the an ability to adopt users and the environment through usage.
Before getting to the research news from the University of Twente (Netherlands), there’s this related event which took place on April 18, 2019 (from the Future Under Our Skin webpage (on the University of Twente website) Note: I have made some formatting changes,
Why this event?
Our skin can give information about our health, mood and surroundings. Medical and recreational tattoos have decorated humans for centuries. But we can inject other materials besides ink, such as sensing devices, nano- or bio-responsive materials. With the increased percentage of tattooed population in recent years new health challenges have emerged; but is also a unique possibility to “read from our own skin”, beyond an artistic design.
We have invited scientists, innovators, entrepreneurs, dermatologists, cosmetic permanent make-up technicians, tattoo artists, philosophers, and other experts. They will share with us their vision of the current and future role our skin has for improving the quality of life.
Open Event
This event is open to students, citizens in general as well as societal and governmental organisations around the different uses of our skin. The presence of scientists, medical doctors, tattoo artists and industry representatives is guaranteed. Then, we will all explore together the potential for co-creation with healthy citizens, patients, entreprises and other stakeholders.
If you want to hear from experts and share your own ideas, feel free to come to this Open Event!
It is possible to take the dish of the day (‘goed gevulde noedels met kippendij en satésaus en kroepoek’) in restaurant The Gallery (same building as DesignLab) at own costs (€7,85). Of course it is also possible to eat à la carte in Grand Café
Wanneer: : 18 april 2019 Tijd: :17:30 – 20:00 Organisator: University of Twente Locatie: Design Lab University of Twente Hengelosestraat 500 7521 AN Enschede
Just days before, the University of Twente announced this research in an April 16, 2019 news item on Naowerk (Note: A link has been removed),
A tattoo that is warning you for too many hours of sunlight exposure, or is alerting you for taking your medication? Next to their cosmetic role, tattoos could get new functionality using intelligent ink. That would require more precise and less invasive injection technique.
Researchers of the University of Twente now develop a micro-jet injection technology that doesn’t use needles at all. Instead, an ultrafast liquid jet with the thickness of a human hair penetrates the skin. It isn’t painful and there is less waste.
In their new publication in the American Journal of Physics (“High speed imaging of solid needle and liquid micro-jet injections”), the scientists compare both the needle and the fluid jet approach.
Here’s an image provided by the researchers which illustrates the technique they have developed,
Working principle of needle-free injection: laser heating the fluid.The growing bubble pushes out the fluid (medicine or ink) at very high speed. Courtesy: University of Twente
Ötzi the Iceman already had, over 5000 years ago, dozens of simple tattoos on his body, apparently for pain relief. Since the classic ‘anchor’ tattoo that sailors had on their arms, tattoos have become more and more common. About 44 million Europeans wear one or more of them. Despite its wider acceptance in society, the underlying technique didn’t change and still has health risks. One or more moving needles put ink underneath the skin surface. This is painful and can damage the skin. Apart from that, needles have to be disposed of in a responsible way, and quite some ink is wasted. The alternative that David Fernández Rivas and his colleagues are developing, doesn’t use any needles. In their new paper, they compare this new approach with classic needle technology, on an artificial skin material and using high speed images. Remarkably, according to Fernández Rivas, the classic needle technology has never been subject of research in such a thorough way, using high speed images.
Fast fluid jet
The new technique employs a laser for rapidly heating a fluid that is inside a microchannel on a glass chip. Heated above the boiling point, a vapour bubble forms and grows, pushing the liquid out at speeds up to 100 meter per second (360 km/h). The jet, about the diameter of a human hair, is capable of going through human skin. “You don’t feel much of it, no more than a mosquito bite”, say Fernandez Rivas.
The researchers did their experiments with a number of commercially available inks. Compared to a tattoo machine, the micro-jet consumes a small amount of energy. What’s more important, it minimizes skin damage and the injection efficiency is much higher, there is no loss of fluids. And there is no risk of contaminated needles. The current microjet is a single one, while tattooing is often done using multiple needles with different types or colours of ink. Also, the volume that can be ‘delivered’ by the microjet has to be increased. These are next steps in developing the needle-free technology.
Skin treatment
In today’s medical world, tattoo-resembling techniques are used for treatment of skin, masking scars, or treating hair diseases. These are other areas in which the new technique can be used, as well as in vaccination. A challenging idea is using tattoos for cosmetic purposes and as health sensors at the same time. What if ink is light-sensitive or responds to certain substances that are present in the skin or in sweat?
On this new approach, scientists, students, entrepreneurs and tattoo artists join a special event ‘The future under our skin’, organized by David Fernandez Rivas.
Research has been done in the Mesoscale Chemical Systems group, part of UT’s MESA+ Institute.
Here’s a link to an d a citation for the paper,
High speed imaging of solid needle and liquid micro-jet injections by Loreto Oyarte Gálveza, Maria Brió Pérez, and David Fernández Rivas. Journal of Applied Physics 125, 144504 (2019); Volume 125, Issue 14 DOI: 10.1063/1.5074176 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5074176 Free Published Online: 09 April 2019
One of Joseph Cohen’s painting incorporating carbon nanotubes photographed in normal light. Photo courtesy of Joseph Cohen. [downloaded from https://news.artnet.com/art-world/carbon-nanotube-cancer-paint-1638340?utm_content=from_&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Global%20September%202%20PM&utm_term=artnet%20News%20Daily%20Newsletter%20USE%20%2830%20Day%20Engaged%20Only%29]
The artist credited with the work seen in the above, Joseph Cohen, has done something remarkable with carbon nanotubes (CNTs). Something even more remarkable than the painting as Sarah Cascone recounts in her August 30, 2019 article for artnet.com (Note: A link has been removed),
Not every artist can say that his or her work is helping in the fight against cancer. But over the past several years, Joseph Cohen has done just that, working to develop a new, high-tech paint that can be used not only on canvas, but also to detect cancers and medical conditions such as hypertension and diabetes.
Sloan Kettering Institute scientist Daniel Heller first suggested that Cohen come work at his lab after seeing the artist’s work, which is often made with pigments that incorporate diamond dust and gold, at the DeBuck Gallery in New York.
“We initially thought that in working with an artist, we would make art to shed a little light on our science for the public,” Heller told the Memorial Sloan Kettering blog. “But the collaboration actually taught us something that could help us shine a light on cancer.”
For Cohen, the project was initially intended to develop a new way of art-making. In Heller’s lab, he worked with carbon nanotubes, which Heller was already employing in cancer research, for their optical properties. “They fluoresce in the infrared spectrum,” Cohen says. “That gives artists the opportunity to create paintings in a new spectrum, with a whole new palette of colors.”
Because human eyesight is limited, we can’t actually see infrared fluorescence. But using a special short-wave infrared camera, Cohen is able to document otherwise invisible effects, revealing the carbon nanotube paint’s hidden colors.
“What you’re perceiving as a static painting is actually in motion,” Cohen says. “I’m creating paintings that exist outside of the visible experience.”
Art Supplies—and a Diagnostic Tool
That same imaging technique can be used by doctors looking for microalbuminuria, a condition that causes the kidneys to leak trace amounts of albumin into urine, which is an early sign of of several cancers, diabetes, and high blood pressure.
Cohen helped co-author a paper published this month in Nature Communications about using the nanosensor paint in litmus paper tests with patient urine samples. The study found that the paint, when viewed through infrared light, was able to reveal the presence of albumin based on changes in the paint’s fluorescence after being exposed to the urine sample.
“It’s easy to detect albumen with a dipstick if there’s a lot of levels in the urine, but that would be like looking at stage four cancer,” Cohen says. “This is early detection.”
What’s more, a nanosensor paint can be easily used around the world, even in poor areas that don’t have access to the best diagnostic technologies. Doctors may even be able to view the urine samples using an infrared imaging attachments on their smartphones.
…
One of Joseph Cohen’s painting incorporating carbon nanotubes shown in both the visible light (left) and in UV fluorescence (right). Photo courtesy of Joseph Cohen. [downloaded from https://news.artnet.com/art-world/carbon-nanotube-cancer-paint-1638340?utm_content=from_&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Global%20September%202%20PM&utm_term=artnet%20News%20Daily%20Newsletter%20USE%20%2830%20Day%20Engaged%20Only%29]
Amazing, eh? If you have the time, do read Cascone’s article in its entirety and should your curiosity be insatiable, there’s also an August 22, 2019 posting by Jim Stallard on the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center blog,
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Synthetic molecular recognition nanosensor paint for microalbuminuria by Januka Budhathoki-Uprety, Janki Shah, Joshua A. Korsen, Alysandria E. Wayne, Thomas V. Galassi, Joseph R. Cohen, Jackson D. Harvey, Prakrit V. Jena, Lakshmi V. Ramanathan, Edgar A. Jaimes & Daniel A. Heller. Nature Communicationsvolume 10, Article number: 3605 (2019) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-11583-1 Published: 09 August 2019
This paper is open access.
Joseph Cohen has graced this blog before in a May 3, 2019 posting titled, Where do I stand? a graphene artwork. It seems Cohen is very invested in using nanoscale carbon particles for his art.
In a major medical breakthrough, Tel Aviv University researchers have “printed” the world’s first 3D vascularised engineered heart using a patient’s own cells and biological materials. Their findings were published on April 15 [2019] in a study in Advanced Science.
Until now, scientists in regenerative medicine — a field positioned at the crossroads of biology and technology — have been successful in printing only simple tissues without blood vessels.
“This is the first time anyone anywhere has successfully engineered and printed an entire heart replete with cells, blood vessels, ventricles and chambers,” says Prof. Tal Dvir of TAU’s School of Molecular Cell Biology and Biotechnology, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Center for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology and Sagol Center for Regenerative Biotechnology, who led the research for the study.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death among both men and women in the United States. Heart transplantation is currently the only treatment available to patients with end-stage heart failure. Given the dire shortage of heart donors, the need to develop new approaches to regenerate the diseased heart is urgent.
“This heart is made from human cells and patient-specific biological materials. In our process these materials serve as the bioinks, substances made of sugars and proteins that can be used for 3D printing of complex tissue models,” Prof. Dvir says. “People have managed to 3D-print the structure of a heart in the past, but not with cells or with blood vessels. Our results demonstrate the potential of our approach for engineering personalized tissue and organ replacement in the future.
Research for the study was conducted jointly by Prof. Dvir, Dr. Assaf Shapira of TAU’s Faculty of Life Sciences and Nadav Moor, a doctoral student in Prof. Dvir’s lab.
“At this stage, our 3D heart is small, the size of a rabbit’s heart, [emphasis mine] ” explains Prof. Dvir. “But larger human hearts require the same technology.”
For the research, a biopsy of fatty tissue was taken from patients. The cellular and a-cellular materials of the tissue were then separated. While the cells were reprogrammed to become pluripotent stem cells, the extracellular matrix (ECM), a three-dimensional network of extracellular macromolecules such as collagen and glycoproteins, were processed into a personalized hydrogel that served as the printing “ink.”
After being mixed with the hydrogel, the cells were efficiently differentiated to cardiac or endothelial cells to create patient-specific, immune-compatible cardiac patches with blood vessels and, subsequently, an entire heart.
According to Prof. Dvir, the use of “native” patient-specific materials is crucial to successfully engineering tissues and organs.
“The biocompatibility of engineered materials is crucial to eliminating the risk of implant rejection, which jeopardizes the success of such treatments,” Prof. Dvir says. “Ideally, the biomaterial should possess the same biochemical, mechanical and topographical properties of the patient’s own tissues. Here, we can report a simple approach to 3D-printed thick, vascularized and perfusable cardiac tissues that completely match the immunological, cellular, biochemical and anatomical properties of the patient.”
The researchers are now planning on culturing the printed hearts in the lab and “teaching them to behave” like hearts, Prof. Dvir says. They then plan to transplant the 3D-printed heart in animal models.
“We need to develop the printed heart further,” he concludes. “The cells need to form a pumping ability; they can currently contract, but we need them to work together. Our hope is that we will succeed and prove our method’s efficacy and usefulness.
“Maybe, in ten years, there will be organ printers in the finest hospitals around the world, and these procedures will be conducted routinely.”
Growing the heart to human size and getting the cells to work together so the heart will pump makes it seem like the 10 years Dvir imagines as the future date when there will be organ printers in hospitals routinely printing up hearts seems a bit optimistic. Regardless, I hope he’s right. Bravo to these Israeli researchers!
Caption: Bryson and Sanchez, two alpacas who produce unusually small antibodies. These ‘nanobodies’ could help highly promising CAR T-cell therapies kill solid tumors, where right now they work only in blood cancers. Credit: Courtesy of Boston Children’s Hospital
The latest camelid-oriented medical research story is in an April 11, 2019 news item on phys.org (Note: A link has been removed),
In 1989, two undergraduate students at the Free University of Brussels were asked to test frozen blood serum from camels, and stumbled on a previously unknown kind of antibody. It was a miniaturized version of a human antibody, made up only of two heavy protein chains, rather than two light and two heavy chains. As they eventually reported, the antibodies’ presence was confirmed not only in camels, but also in llamas and alpacas.
Fast forward 30 years. In the journal PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Science] this week [April 8 – 12, 2019], researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] show that these mini-antibodies, shrunk further to create so-called nanobodies, may help solve a problem in the cancer field: making CAR T-cell therapies work in solid tumors.
Highly promising for blood cancers, chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy genetically engineers a patient’s own T cells to make them better at attacking cancer cells. The Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center is currently using CAR T-cell therapy for relapsed acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), for example.
But CAR T cells haven’t been good at eliminating solid tumors. It’s been hard to find cancer-specific proteins on solid tumors that could serve as safe targets. Solid tumors are also protected by an extracellular matrix, a supportive web of proteins that acts as a barrier, as well as immunosuppressive molecules that weaken the T-cell attack.
Rethinking CAR T cells
That’s where nanobodies come in. For two decades, they largely remained in the hands of the Belgian team. But that changed after the patent expired in 2013. [emphases mine]
“A lot of people got into the game and began to appreciate nanobodies’ unique properties,” says Hidde Ploegh, PhD, an immunologist in the Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine at Boston Children’s and senior investigator on the PNAS study.
One useful attribute is their enhanced targeting abilities. Ploegh and his team at Boston Children’s, in collaboration with Noo Jalikhani, PhD, and Richard Hynes, PhD at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, have harnessed nanobodies to carry imaging agents, allowing precise visualization of metastatic cancers.
The Hynes team targeted the nanobodies to the tumors’ extracellular matrix, or ECM — aiming imaging agents not at the cancer cells themselves, but at the environment that surrounds them. Such markers are common to many tumors, but don’t typically appear on normal cells.
“Our lab and the Hynes lab are among the few actively pursuing this approach of targeting the tumor micro-environment,” says Ploegh. “Most labs are looking for tumor-specific antigens.”
Targeting tumor protectors
Ploegh’s lab took this idea to CAR T-cell therapy. His team, including members of the Hynes lab, took aim at the very factors that make solid tumors difficult to treat.
The CAR T cells they created were studded with nanobodies that recognize specific proteins in the tumor environment, bearing signals directing them to kill any cell they bound to. One protein, EIIIB, a variant of fibronectin, is found only on newly formed blood vessels that supply tumors with nutrients. Another, PD-L1, is an immunosuppressive protein that most cancers use to silence approaching T cells.
Biochemist Jessica Ingram, PhD of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Ploegh’s partner and a coauthor on the paper, led the manufacturing pipeline. She would drive to Amherst, Mass., to gather T cells from two alpacas, Bryson and Sanchez, inject them with the antigen of interest and harvest their blood for further processing back in Boston to generate mini-antibodies.
Taking down melanoma and colon cancer
Tested in two separate melanoma mouse models, as well as a colon adenocarcinoma model in mice, the nanobody-based CAR T cells killed tumor cells, significantly slowed tumor growth and improved the animals’ survival, with no readily apparent side effects.
Ploegh thinks that the engineered T cells work through a combination of factors. They caused damage to tumor tissue, which tends to stimulate inflammatory immune responses. Targeting EIIIB may damage blood vessels in a way that decreases blood supply to tumors, while making them more permeable to cancer drugs.
“If you destroy the local blood supply and cause vascular leakage, you could perhaps improve the delivery of other things that might have a harder time getting in,” says Ploegh. “I think we should look at this as part of a combination therapy.”
Future directions
Ploegh thinks his team’s approach could be useful in many solid tumors. He’s particularly interested in testing nanobody-based CAR T cells in models of pancreatic cancer and cholangiocarcinoma, a bile duct cancer from which Ingram passed away in 2018.
The technology itself can be pushed even further, says Ploegh.
“Nanobodies could potentially carry a cytokine to boost the immune response to the tumor, toxic molecules that kill tumor and radioisotopes to irradiate the tumor at close range,” he says. “CAR T cells are the battering ram that would come in to open the door; the other elements would finish the job. In theory, you could equip a single T cell with multiple chimeric antigen receptors and achieve even more precision. That’s something we would like to pursue.”
So, the Belgian researchers have a patent for two decades and, after it expires, more researchers could help to take the work further. Hmm …
Moving on, here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
There are movies, plays, a multimedia installation experience all in Vancouver, and the ‘CHAOSMOSIS mAchInesexhibition/performance/discussion/panel/in-situ experiments/art/ science/ techne/ philosophy’ event in Toronto. But first, there’s a a Vancouver talk about engaging scientists in the upcoming federal election. .
Science in the Age of Misinformation (and the upcoming federal election) in Vancouver
Dr. Katie Gibbs, co-founder and executive director of Evidence for Democracy, will be giving a talk today (Sept. 4, 2019) at the University of British Columbia (UBC; Vancouver). From the Eventbrite webpage for Science in the Age of Misinformation,
Science in the Age of Misinformation, with Katie Gibbs, Evidence for Democracy In the lead up to the federal election, it is more important than ever to understand the role that researchers play in shaping policy. Join us in this special Policy in Practice event with Dr. Katie Gibbs, Executive Director of Evidence for Democracy, Canada’s leading, national, non-partisan, and not-for-profit organization promoting science and the transparent use of evidence in government decision making. A Musqueam land acknowledgement, welcome remarks and moderation of this event will be provided by MPPGA students Joshua Tafel, and Chengkun Lv.
Wednesday, September 4, 2019 12:30 pm – 1:50 pm (Doors will open at noon) Liu Institute for Global Issues – xʷθəθiqətəm (Place of Many Trees), 1st floor Pizza will be provided starting at noon on first come, first serve basis. Please RSVP.
What role do researchers play in a political environment that is increasingly polarized and influenced by misinformation? Dr. Katie Gibbs, Executive Director of Evidence for Democracy, will give an overview of the current state of science integrity and science policy in Canada highlighting progress made over the past four years and what this means in a context of growing anti-expert movements in Canada and around the world. Dr. Gibbs will share concrete ways for researchers to engage heading into a critical federal election [emphasis mine], and how they can have lasting policy impact.
Bio: Katie Gibbs is a scientist, organizer and advocate for science and evidence-based policies. While completing her Ph.D. at the University of Ottawa in Biology, she was one of the lead organizers of the ‘Death of Evidence’—one of the largest science rallies in Canadian history. Katie co-founded Evidence for Democracy, Canada’s leading, national, non-partisan, and not-for-profit organization promoting science and the transparent use of evidence in government decision making. Her ongoing success in advocating for the restoration of public science in Canada has made Katie a go-to resource for national and international media outlets including Science, The Guardian and the Globe and Mail.
Katie has also been involved in international efforts to increase evidence-based decision-making and advises science integrity movements in other countries and is a member of the Open Government Partnership Multi-stakeholder Forum.
Disclaimer: Please note that by registering via Eventbrite, your information will be stored on the Eventbrite server, which is located outside Canada. If you do not wish to use this service, please email Joelle.Lee@ubc.ca directly to register. Thank you.
Location Liu Institute for Global Issues – Place of Many Trees 6476 NW Marine Drive Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z2
Sadly I was not able to post the information about Dr. Gibbs’s more informal talk last night (Sept. 3, 2019) which was a special event with Café Scientifique but I do have a link to a website encouraging anyone who wants to help get science on the 2019 federal election agenda, Vote Science. P.S. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to post this in a more timely fashion.
Transmissions; a multimedia installation in Vancouver, September 6 -28, 2019
Lisa Jackson is a filmmaker, but she’s never allowed that job description to limit what she creates or where and how she screens her works.
The Anishinaabe artist’s breakout piece was last year’s haunting virtual-reality animation Biidaaban: First Light. In its eerie world, one that won a Canadian Screen Award, nature has overtaken a near-empty, future Toronto, with trees growing through cracks in the sidewalks, vines enveloping skyscrapers, and people commuting by canoe.
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All that and more has brought her here, to Transmissions, a 6,000-square-foot, immersive film installation that invites visitors to wander through windy coastal forests, by hauntingly empty glass towers, into soundscapes of ancient languages, and more.
Through the labyrinthine multimedia work at SFU [Simon Fraser University] Woodward’s, Jackson asks big questions—about Earth’s future, about humanity’s relationship to it, and about time and Indigeneity.
Simultaneously, she mashes up not just disciplines like film and sculpture, but concepts of science, storytelling, and linguistics [emphasis mine].
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“The tag lines I’m working with now are ‘the roots of meaning’ and ‘knitting the world together’,” she explains. “In western society, we tend to hive things off into ‘That’s culture. That’s science.’ But from an Indigenous point of view, it’s all connected.”
Transmissions is split into three parts, with what Jackson describes as a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like Biidaaban, it’s also visually stunning: the artist admits she’s playing with Hollywood spectacle.
Without giving too much away—a big part of the appeal of Jackson’s work is the sense of surprise—Vancouver audiences will first enter a 48-foot-long, six-foot-wide tunnel, surrounded by projections that morph from empty urban streets to a forest and a river. Further engulfing them is a soundscape that features strong winds, while black mirrors along the floor skew perspective and play with what’s above and below ground.
“You feel out of time and space,” says Jackson, who wants to challenge western society’s linear notions of minutes and hours. “I want the audience to have a physical response and an emotional response. To me, that gets closer to the Indigenous understanding. Because the Eurocentric way is more rational, where the intellectual is put ahead of everything else.”
Viewers then enter a room, where the highly collaborative Jackson has worked with artist Alan Storey, who’s helped create Plexiglas towers that look like the ghost high-rises of an abandoned city. (Storey has also designed other components of the installation.) As audience members wander through them on foot, projections make their shadows dance on the structures. Like Biidaaban, the section hints at a postapocalyptic or posthuman world. Jackson operates in an emerging realm of Indigenous futurism.
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The words “science, storytelling, and linguistics” were emphasized due to a minor problem I have with terminology. Linguistics is defined as the scientific study of language combining elements from the natural sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. I wish either Jackson or Smith had discussed the scientific element of Transmissions at more length and perhaps reconnected linguistics to science along with the physics of time and space, as well as, storytelling, film, and sculpture. It would have been helpful since it’s my understanding, Transmissions is designed to showcase all of those connections and more in ways that may not be obvious to everyone. On the plus side, perhaps the tour, which is part of this installation experience includes that information.
The Roots of Meaning World Premiere September 6 – 28, 2019
Fei & Milton Wong Experimental Theatre SFU Woodward’s, 149 West Hastings Tuesday to Friday, 1pm to 7pm Saturday and Sunday, 1pm to 5pm FREE
In partnership with SFU Woodward’s Cultural Programs and produced by Electric Company Theatre and Violator Films.
TRANSMISSIONS is a three-part, 6000 square foot multimedia installation by award-winning Anishinaabe filmmaker and artist Lisa Jackson. It extends her investigation into the connections between land, language, and people, most recently with her virtual reality work Biidaaban: First Light.
Projections, sculpture, and film combine to create urban and natural landscapes that are eerie and beautiful, familiar and foreign, concrete and magical. Past and future collide in a visceral and thought-provoking journey that questions our current moment and opens up the complexity of thought systems embedded in Indigenous languages. Radically different from European languages, they embody sets of relationships to the land, to each other, and to time itself.
Transmissions invites us to untether from our day-to-day world and imagine a possible future. It provides a platform to activate and cross-pollinate knowledge systems, from science to storytelling, ecology to linguistics, art to commerce. To begin conversations, to listen deeply, to engage varied perspectives and expertise, to knit the world together and find our place within the circle of all our relations.
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Produced in association with McMaster University Socrates Project, Moving Images Distribution and Cobalt Connects Creativity.
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Admission: Free Public Tours Tuesday through Sunday Reservations accepted from 1pm to 3pm. Reservations are booked in 15 minute increments. Individuals and groups up to 10 welcome. Please email: sfuw@sfu.ca for more information or to book groups of 10 or more.
Her Story: Canadian Women Scientists (short film subjects); Sept. 13 – 14, 2019
Curiosity Collider, producer of art/science events in Vancouver, is presenting a film series featuring Canadian women scientists, according to an August 27 ,2019 press release (received via email),
“Her Story: Canadian Women Scientists,” a film series dedicated to sharing the stories of Canadian women scientists, will premiere on September 13th and 14th at the Annex theatre. Four pairs of local filmmakers and Canadian women scientists collaborated to create 5-6 minute videos; for each film in the series, a scientist tells her own story, interwoven with the story of an inspiring Canadian women scientist who came before her in her field of study.
Produced by Vancouver-based non-profit organization Curiosity Collider, this project was developed to address the lack of storytelling videos showcasing remarkable women scientists and their work available via popular online platforms. “Her Story reveals the lives of women working in science,” said Larissa Blokhuis, curator for Her Story. “This project acts as a beacon to girls and women who want to see themselves in the scientific community. The intergenerational nature of the project highlights the fact that women have always worked in and contributed to science.
This sentiment was reflected by Samantha Baglot as well, a PhD student in neuroscience who collaborated with filmmaker/science cartoonist Armin Mortazavi in Her Story. “It is empowering to share stories of previous Canadian female scientists… it is empowering for myself as a current female scientist to learn about other stories of success, and gain perspective of how these women fought through various hardships and inequality.”
When asked why seeing better representation of women in scientific work is important, artist/filmmaker Michael Markowsky shared his thoughts. “It’s important for women — and their male allies — to question and push back against these perceived social norms, and to occupy space which rightfully belongs to them.” In fact, his wife just gave birth to their first child, a daughter; “It’s personally very important to me that she has strong female role models to look up to.” His film will feature collaborating scientist Jade Shiller, and Kathleen Conlan – who was named one of Canada’s greatest explorers by Canadian Geographic in 2015.
Other participating filmmakers and collaborating scientists include: Leslie Kennah (Filmmaker), Kimberly Girling (scientist, Research and Policy Director at Evidence for Democracy), Lucas Kavanagh and Jesse Lupini (Filmmakers, Avocado Video), and Jessica Pilarczyk (SFU Assistant Professor, Department of Earth Sciences).
This film series is supported by Westcoast Women in Engineering, Science and Technology (WWEST) and Eng.Cite. The venue for the events is provided by Vancouver Civic Theatres.
Event Information
Screening events will be hosted at Annex (823 Seymour St, Vancouver) on September 13th and 14th [2019]. Events will also include a talkback with filmmakers and collab scientists on the 13th, and a panel discussion on representations of women in science and culture on the 14th. Visit http://bit.ly/HerStoryTickets2019 for tickets ($14.99-19.99) and http://bit.ly/HerStoryWomenScientists for project information.
I have a film collage,
Courtesy: Curiosity Collider
I looks like they’re presenting films with a diversity of styles. You can find out more about Curiosity Collider and its various programmes and events here.
Vancouver Fringe Festival September 5 – 16, 2019
I found two plays in this year’s fringe festival programme that feature science in one way or another. Not having seen either play I make no guarantees as to content. First up is,
AI Love You Exit Productions London, UK Playwright: Melanie Anne Ball exitproductionsltd.com
Adam and April are a regular 20-something couple, very nearly blissfully generic, aside from one important detail: one of the pair is an “artificially intelligent companion.” Their joyful veneer has begun to crack and they need YOU to decide the future of their relationship. Is the freedom of a robot or the will of a human more important? For AI Love You:
***** “Magnificent, complex and beautifully addictive.” —Spy in the Stalls **** “Emotionally charged, deeply moving piece … I was left with goosebumps.” —West End Wilma **** —London City Nights Past shows: ***** “The perfect show.” —Theatre Box
The first show is on Friday, September 6, 2019 at 5 pm. There are another five showings being presented. You can get tickets and more information here.
The second play is this,
Red Glimmer Dusty Foot Productions Vancouver, Canada Written & Directed by Patricia Trinh
Abstract Sci-Fi dramedy. An interdimensional science experiment! Woman involuntarily takes an all inclusive internal trip after falling into a deep depression. A scientist is hired to navigate her neurological pathways from inside her mind – tackling the fact that humans cannot physically re-experience somatosensory sensation, like pain. What if that were the case for traumatic emotional pain? A creepy little girl is heard running by. What happens next?
This show is created by an underrepresented Artist. Written, directed, and produced by local theatre Artist Patricia Trinh, a Queer, Asian-Canadian female.
The first showing is tonight, September 5, 2019 at 8:30 pm. There are another six showings being presented. You can get tickets and more information here.
CHAOSMOSIS mAchInes exhibition/performance/discussion/panel/in-situ experiments/art/ science/ techne/ philosophy, 28 September, 2019 in Toronto
An Art/Sci Salon September 2, 2019 announcement (received via email), Note: I have made some formatting changes,
CHAOSMOSIS mAchInes
28 September, 2019 7pm-11pm. Helen-Gardiner-Phelan Theatre, 2nd floor University of Toronto. 79 St. George St.
A playful co-presentation by the Topological Media Lab (Concordia U-Montreal) and The Digital Dramaturgy Labsquared (U of T-Toronto). This event is part of our collaboration with DDLsquared lab, the Topological Lab and the Leonardo LASER network
7pm-9.30pm, Installation-performances, 9.30pm-11pm, Reception and cash bar, Front and Long Room, Ground floor
Description: From responsive sculptures to atmosphere-creating machines; from sensorial machines to affective autonomous robots, Chaosmosis mAchInes is an eclectic series of installations and performances reflecting on today’s complex symbiotic relations between humans, machines and the environment.
This will be the first encounter between Montreal-based Topological Media Lab (Concordia University) and the Toronto-based Digital Dramaturgy Labsquared (U of T) to co-present current process-based and experimental works. Both labs have a history of notorious playfulness, conceptual abysmal depth, human-machine interplays, Art&Science speculations (what if?), collaborative messes, and a knack for A/I as in Artistic Intelligence.
Thanks to Nina Czegledy (Laser series, Leonardo network) for inspiring the event and for initiating the collaboration
Project presentations will include: Topological Media Lab tangibleFlux φ plenumorphic ∴ chaosmosis SPIEL On Air The Sound That Severs Now from Now Cloud Chamber (2018) | Caustic Scenography, Responsive Cloud Formation Liquid Light Robots: Machine Menagerie Phaze Phase Passing Light Info projects Digital Dramaturgy Labsquared Btw Lf & Dth – interFACING disappearance Info project
Earlier last month [August 2019?], surgeons at St Paul’s Hospital performed an ankle replacement for a Cloverdale resident using a 3D printed bone. The first procedure of its kind in Western Canada, it saved the patient all of his ten toes — something doctors had originally decided to amputate due to the severity of the motorcycle accident.
Maker Faire Vancouver Co-producer, John Biehler, may not be using his 3D printer for medical breakthroughs, but he does see a subtle connection between his home 3D printer and the Health Canada-approved bone.
“I got into 3D printing to make fun stuff and gadgets,” John says of the box-sized machine that started as a hobby and turned into a side business. “But the fact that the very same technology can have life-changing and life-saving applications is amazing.”
When John showed up to Maker Faire Vancouver seven years ago, opportunities to access this hobby were limited. Armed with a 3D printer he had just finished assembling the night before, John was hoping to meet others in the community with similar interests to build, experiment and create. Much like the increase in accessibility to these portable machines has changed over the years—with universities, libraries and makerspaces making them readily available alongside CNC Machines, laser cutters and more — John says the excitement around crafting and tinkering has skyrocketed as well.
“The kind of technology that inspires people to print a bone or spinal insert all starts at ground zero in places like a Maker Faire where people get exposed to STEAM,” John says …
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… From 3D printing enthusiasts like John to knitters, metal artists and roboticists, this full one-day event [Maker Faire Vancouver on Saturday, September 14, 2019] will facilitate cross-pollination between hobbyists, small businesses, artists and tinkerers. Described as part science fair, part county fair and part something entirely new, Maker Faire Vancouver hopes to facilitate discovery and what John calls “pure joy moments.”
This is a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) story where the researchers are working on flies. If successful, this has much wider implications. From an April 10, 2019 news item on phys.org,
New CRISPR-based gene drives and broader active genetics technologies are revolutionizing the way scientists engineer the transfer of specific traits from one generation to another.
Scientists at the University of California San Diego have now developed a new version of a gene drive that opens the door to the spread of specific, favorable subtle genetic variants, also known as “alleles,” throughout a population.
The new “allelic drive,” described April 9 [2019] in Nature Communications, is equipped with a guide RNA (gRNA) that directs the CRISPR system to cut undesired variants of a gene and replace it with a preferred version of the gene. The new drive extends scientists’ ability to modify populations of organisms with precision editing. Using word processing as an analogy, CRISPR-based gene drives allow scientists to edit sentences of genetic information, while the new allelic drive offers letter-by-letter editing.
In one example of its potential applications, specific genes in agricultural pests that have become resistant to insecticides could be replaced by original natural genetic variants conferring sensitivity to insecticides using allelic drives that selectively swap the identities of a single protein residue (amino acid).
In addition to agricultural applications, disease-carrying insects could be a target for allelic drives.
“If we incorporate such a normalizing gRNA on a gene-drive element, for example, one designed to immunize mosquitoes against malaria, the resulting allelic gene drive will spread through a population. When this dual action drive encounters an insecticide-resistant allele, it will cut and repair it using the wild-type susceptible allele,” said Ethan Bier, the new paper’s senior author. “The result being that nearly all emerging progeny will be sensitive to insecticides as well as refractory to malaria transmission.”
“Forcing these species to return to their natural sensitive state using allelic drives would help break a downward cycle of ever-increasing and environmentally damaging pesticide over-use,” said Annabel Guichard, the paper’s first author.
The researchers describe two versions of the allelic drive, including “copy-cutting,” in which researchers use the CRISPR system to selectively cut the undesired version of a gene, and a more broadly applicable version referred to as “copy-grafting” that promotes transmission of a favored allele next to the site that is selectively protected from gRNA cleavage.
“An unexpected finding from this study is that mistakes created by such allelic drives do not get transmitted to the next generation,” said Guichard. “These mutations instead produce an unusual form of lethality referred to as ‘lethal mosaicism.’ This process helps make allelic drives more efficient by immediately eliminating unwanted mutations created by CRISPR-based drives.”
Although demonstrated in fruit flies, the new technology also has potential for broad application in insects, mammals and plants. According to the researchers, several variations of the allelic drive technology could be developed with combinations of favorable traits in crops that, for example, thrive in poor soil and arid environments to help feed the ever-growing world population.
Beyond environmental applications, allelic drives should enable next-generation engineering of animal models to study human disease as well as answer important questions in basic science. As a member of the Tata Institute for Genetics and Society (TIGS), Bier says allelic drives could be used to aid in environmental conservation efforts to protect vulnerable endemic species or stop the spread of invasive species.
Gene drives and active genetics systems are now being developed for use in mammals. The scientists say allelic drives could accelerate new laboratory strains of animal models of human disease that aid in the development of new cures.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Efficient allelic-drive in Drosophila by Annabel Guichard, Tisha Haque, Marketta Bobik, Xiang-Ru S. Xu, Carissa Klanseck, Raja Babu Singh Kushwah, Mateus Berni, Bhagyashree Kaduskar, Valentino M. Gantz & Ethan Bier. Nature Communicationsvolume 10, Article number: 1640 (2019) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09694-w Published 09 April 2019
This paper is open access.
For anyone new to gene drives, I have a February 8, 2018 posting that highlights a report from the UK on the latest in genetic engineering, which provides a definition for [synthetic] gene drives, and if you scroll down about 75% of the way, you’ll also find excerpts from an article for The Atlantic by Ed Yong on gene drives as proposed for a project in New Zealand.
Spend enough time reading about emerging technologies and, at some point, you will find yourself questioning some of your dearly held beliefs. It gives a whole new meaning to term, mind altering (also, mind blowing or mind expanding), which in the 1960s was used to refer to the effects of LSD and other hallucinogens. Today <September 1, 2019 (Labour Day in Canada and elsewhere), I have two news bits that could be considered mind expanding, sans hallucinogens.
Gold-embroidered computers
The Embroidered Computer. Artists: Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak .[downloaded from http://www.ireneposch.net/the-embroidered-computer/]
If you look closely, you’ll see the beads shift position and that’s how the ones and zeroes make themselves known on this embroidered computer. An August 23, 2019 article (updated from a March 8, 2019 article) on the CBC’s (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio, Spark programme web space, provides insight into the work,
A beautiful ’embroidered computer’ may explode our categories of what computers are supposed to look like.
After all, we may think the design of a computer is permanent, but what a computer ‘looks like’ depends a lot on what era it’s from.
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“We use gold-coloured copper wire to form a coil, in a donut shape” Posch told Spark host Nora Young. “Then we have a magnetic bead that sits in the middle of this coil, and when this coil is [connected to] power, the magnetic bead is either attracted or pushed away….
Depending on how we power… the embroidered coil, we can direct the magnetic bead in different positions.”
More gold embroidery on top of the bead will flip one way or another, based on the bead [above].
The process is analogous to the zeros and ones of computation.
As well as being an artist, Posch is a professor at the University for Art and Industrial Design in Linz, Austria. Much of her work and research uses textile art to explore digital technology.
In this case, it’s not like Irene expects people to start doing today’s heavy-duty computing on a two-metre-long, eight-bit golden embroidered fabric computer. But The Embroidered Computer project opens up space to question the design of computers in particular, but also our technologies in general
“I understand The Embroidered Computer as an alternative, as an example, but also a critique of what we assume a computer to be today, and how it technically could be different,” Posch said. “If this is actually what we want is a whole different question, but I think it’s interesting to propose an alternative.”
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Bringing together textiles and electronics, which are normally seen as worlds apart, can bring new insights. “Going into the history of computing we very soon become aware that they’re not that apart as we sometimes think they are, if you think of the Jacquard weaving loom as one of the predecessors of computing today.”
OrBItaly (Organic BIoelectronics Italy) is an international conference, organized by the Italian Scientific Community and attended by scientists of the highest reputation, dedicated to the most recent results in the field of bioelectronics, with a particular focus on the employment of organic materials.
OrBItaly has attracted in the years a growing interest by scientists coming from all over the world. The 2019 edition is the fifth one of this cross-disciplinary conference, and will be held in Naples, on October 21st-23rd, 2019, at the Congress Center of the University Federico II
This year the conference will be preceded by the first edition of the Graduate School in Organic Bioelectronics, that will be held at the Congress Center of the University of Naples Federico II in Naples (Italy), on October 20th, 2019. The school is mainly targeted to PhD students, post-docs and young researchers as well as to senior scientists and industry-oriented researchers, giving them the opportunity to attend an overview of the latest advances in the fields of organic bioelectronics presented by leading scientists of the highest international repute. Invited lecturers will provide highly stimulating lessons at advanced levels in their own field of research, and closely interact with the attendees during platform discussions, outreach events and informal meetings.
Organizing Committee
Mario Barra, CNR – SPIN, mario.barra@spin.cnr.it Irene Bonadies, CNR – IPCB, irene.bonadies@ipcb.cnr.it Antonio Cassinese, Univ. Napoli Federico II, cassinese@na.infn.it Valeria Criscuolo, IIT, valeria.criscuolo@iit.it Claudia Lubrano, IIT, claudia.lubrano@iit.it Maria Grazia Maglione, ENEA, mariagrazia.maglione@enea.it Paola Manini, Univ. Napoli Federico II, paola.manini@unina.it Alessandro Pezzella, Univ. Napoli Federico II, alessandro.pezzella@unina.it Maria Grazia Raucci, CNR – IPCB, mariagrazia.raucci@cnr.it Francesca Santoro, IIT, francesca.santoro@iit.it Paolo Tassini, ENEA, paolo.tassini@enea.it
So, the conference runs from the 21st to the 23rd of October 2019 and there’s a one-day graduate school programme being held one day prior to the conference on the 20th of October 2019.
Regular readers may notice that some of the ORBITALY 2019 organizers have recently been mentioned here in an August 25, 2019 posting titled, Cyborgs based on melanin circuits.
