Author: Madhu Reddy

Brain activity can be monitored in real-time with tiny injectable flexible electronics, according to a new study done in mice.

Such devices could one day be used to map brain activity, or even stimulate activity to help treat people with disorders such as Parkinson’s disease, scientists added.

Traditional electronics are rigid, but inventors have recently developed flexible and stretchable electronics. These new devices could potentially lead to video screens one could roll up or fold to fit in a pocket.One key way flexible electronics could be used would be applications within the body, where they could help monitor and manipulate living tissue. However, current flexible electronics are usually flat sheets, designed to lie on surfaces.

As such, a sheet can be placed into the body only by cutting a slit into the tissue that is at least as wide as the sheet, for example, cutting a slit into a person’s skin or skull, said study co-author Charles Lieber, a nanoscientist and nanotechnologist at Harvard University. “It is difficult yet critical to protect the complex and fragile electronics when it is delivered,” he said. “Traditional procedures all involve surgery that would make an opening equal to the size of the structure.”

Now scientists have designed electronics flexible enough to get stuffed into the needle of a syringe — a tube with a diameter as small as about 100 microns, or about the average width of a human hair. [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

“Our new mesh flexible electronics are 1 million times more flexible than the state-of-the-art flexible electronics,” Lieber told Live Science.

The new devices start off as tiny flat sheets about the size of a postage stamp made of metal electrodes and silicone wires that are each only nanometers, or billionths, of a meter thick. These sheets are meshes like chicken wire, consisting of about 90 percent empty space.

A variety of sensors can incorporated into these meshes. To feed data from these sensors outward, one side of each of the meshes contains metal pads that researchers can hook up to outside wires.

When suspended in liquid that is drawn into a syringe, the meshes naturally roll up into a scroll-like, tubular shape. After they are injected, they return back to their original shapes in less than an hour.

“We can precisely deliver these ultra-flexible electronics through a common syringe injection into virtually any kind of 3D soft material,” Lieber said. “The injection process and ultraflexible electronics introduce no damage to the targeted structures.”

In experiments, the scientists injected these meshes into two distinct brain regions in live mice. “When we injected the electronics into a mouse brain with almost no bleeding and successfully recorded brain activity, we knew we were onto something very exciting,” Lieber said.

The flexible, thin nature of the wires and the porous quality of the meshes helped the devices to integrate into the living tissues they were implanted within. “There is no scar tissue or immune response around the injected ultra-flexible mesh electronics months after implantation, which contrasts to all work to date with larger and more rigid probes,” Lieber said. “This could be transformative for brain science and medicine.”

These devices were able to network with healthy neurons in the mouse brains and monitor their activity. The setup they used is much smaller and lighter than conventional electronic systems implanted in brains. “It allows the mouse to behave quite naturally, without a weight on its head,” Lieber said.

In the future, the researchers would like to see if their injectable devices can remain stable for long spans of time in the body. Such medical implants could help record and stimulate activity in the brain, such as in regions damaged by Parkinson’s disease, Lieber said. Mesh electronics could also go in the eyes, and be combined with stem cell therapies, he added.

In other experiments, the researchers showed they could inject and integrate their meshes into a variety of synthetic structures as well, such as cavities inside silicone rubber blocks. They suggest that injectable electronics could be used to monitor artificial structures with corrosion and pressure sensors.

The scientists noted that more than 90 percent of their devices worked after injection. Still, they would like to achieve total success in the future, which involves factors such as the best speeds for the injections. However, Lieber noted that even at 90 percent, their mesh electronics are better for commercial applications than conventional brain probes, many of which fail to work over time because they damage the brains they are implanted in.

References:http://www.livescience.com/

The entire U.S. federal workforce may be at risk after yet another intrusion from what security experts believe were hackers based in China. The Department of Homeland Security says that data from the Office of Personnel Management—the human resources department for the federal government—and the Interior Department has been infiltrated.

It is not the first and it follows massive data breaches at health insurance companies, major U.S. banks like JPMorgan and retailers such as Target and Home Depot.
Here’s what to do if you think you’ve been compromised.
FIRST THINGS FIRST
— Notify the credit agencies (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) and request a 90-day credit alert. (Each reporting agency is supposed to notify the others, but you may want to contact all three yourself.) The alert tells businesses to contact you before opening any new accounts in your name. You can renew the alert every 90 days, or you’re entitled to keep it in effect for seven years if you find that your identity is stolen and file a report with police.
— You might consider asking the reporting agencies to place a full freeze on your credit. This blocks any business from checking your credit to open a new account, so it’s a stronger measure than a credit alert. BUT you should weigh that against the hassle of notifying credit agencies to lift the freeze—which can take a few days—every time you apply for a loan, open a new account or even sign up for utility service.
BE A DETECTIVE
— When your credit card bill comes, check closely for any irregularities. And don’t overlook small charges. Crooks are known to charge smaller amounts, usually under $10, to see if you notice. If you don’t, they may charge larger amounts later.
— Get a free credit report once a year from at least one of the major reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion), and review it for unauthorized accounts. Ignore services that charge a fee for credit reports. You can order them without charge at www.annualcreditreport.com . If you order from each agency once a year, you could effectively check your history every four months.
DO PAID SERVICES WORK?
— Some experts say there’s not much to be gained from a paid credit monitoring service. But it can’t hurt to sign up for any monitoring offered for free by a company or any other entity that may have held your information when it was hacked. NOTE: These services will tell you if a new account is opened in your name, but they won’t prevent it, and many don’t check for things like bogus cellphone accounts, fraudulent applications for government benefits or claims for medical benefits. Some do offer limited insurance or help from a staffer trained to work with credit issuers and reporting agencies.
SOMEONE DID STEAL MY IDENTITY, WHAT DO I DO?
— Contact the credit issuer to dispute fraudulent charges and have the bogus account closed.
— Request your credit report and ask the reporting agencies to remove bogus accounts or any incorrect information from your record. See tip #1 on setting up a credit alert and/or freeze.
— Submit a report through the FTC website: www.consumer.ftc.gov. Click the “privacy & identity” tab, which will walk you through creating an affidavit you can show to creditors.
— Keep copies of all reports and correspondence. Use certified mail to get delivery receipts, and keep notes on every phone call.
AVOID ADDITIONAL HACKS
— After a hack, scammers may try to use the stolen data to trick you into giving up more personal information. They can use that info to steal money in your accounts or open new credit cards.
— Don’t click on any links from emails. Bad software could be downloaded to your computer that can steal account passwords.
— You might get letters in the mail saying you won a tablet or vacation and give you a phone number to call. Don’t do it. It’s likely a ploy to gather more information from you.
— Hang up the phone if you get a call asking for account numbers or other information. Scammers may also send texts, so don’t click on any links from numbers you don’t know.

References:http://phys.org/

Retrofitting technology could benefit the EU economy enormously. Such activities could save up to 60% of a building’s energy consumption and this would translate into direct savings in energy expenditure. But energy technology alone is only part of the answer. There are also other barriers to retrofitting such as financial, legal and political impediments.

To tackle these issues, data collection on how energy is used in buildings is key. Now, an Italian energy efficiency company, Officinæ Verdi, based in Rome, has developed an innovative building management system (BMS) that can directly link energetic performance to financial impact.
This could help convince those making decisions to support high costs for renovation works, such as banks, of the benefits of retrofitting, based on hard data. It could also drive changes in people’s energy consumption behaviour.

Data-driven savings

Officinæ Verdi is working on public buildings, through the European project R2Cities. “We are involved in technology-payback analysis; this means we evaluate the financial sustainability of each technology,” says Giovanni Tordi, CEO of Officinæ Verdi.
He explains that several issues often prevent the implementation of retrofitting like a thermal coat insulation: the considerable costs, the credit crunch and the involvement of all the owners of the building.
Thus, “data could be used as a base for presenting a renovation project to a bank for getting the financial support that is needed,” affirms Simone Tola, coordinator of the public Agency for energy in the Venice province, Italy. In the long run, such fact-based investment may help businesses and the public sector make important energy saving interventions.
To realise the value of energy saving achieved, monitoring is key. An example of such monitoring system is the Mætrics Advanced BMS platform developed by Officinæ Verdi.
It gathers information on energy flows and building environmental parameters—such as humidity, indoor and outdoor temperature, etc.—thanks to a network of sensors displaced in strategic points. Through the platform’s software console, a building manager can analyse the energy consumption inefficiencies in detail. They can also directly link energetic performance with financial cost. This enables fact-based forecasting for future bills.

User behaviour shift

However, data collection may only be part of the issue. It has to be combined with a “smart man-machine interface,” says Fabio Morea, a retrofitting engineering expert at Area Science Park, a cluster of university spin offs and start-up companies in Trieste, Italy. “What is essential in energy saving and sustainability is fusing technological interventions with changes in people’s behaviour.”
The data collected by a platform, such as Mætrics Advanced, could be “a fundamental drive to change how people behave with respect to energy efficiency”, he adds. And changing behaviour is difficult, particularly if people do not see an immediate payback. “We have the technology to retrofit the existing buildings, boost energy savings and limit inefficiencies,” says Tola.

Private vs public

But there could be big differences between the private and public sectors. “Data collection can be used as a leverage, especially if it is directly linked to economic savings,” Tola notes, “but it is much easier in the private than in the public sector.”
If a building manager of a company can see a way to save money in a financially sustainable way, he or she would go for it. “But in the public administration, that would mean that extra-technical and political aspects of energy management should make a little step back,” he adds. Energy and financial data should provide a fact-based platform to determine the development of energy management of public buildings. But it is not so common.

References:http://phys.org/