Bioengineering

Many wearable devices can now track your heart rate, steps, speed, balance, body temperature and sleep. Smart devices are definitely the future and will be used in people’s everyday lives. A new generation of brain-reading technology was created by the company NeuroSky, with the help of electroencephalography (EEG) biosensors.

When we think of mind reading, we may imagine a process by which an entity, perhaps aided by super-advanced technology, ‘listens in’ on our thoughts to capture or record them. However, thoughts and how they manifest in the brain are much more complicated than simple voices in our heads. Currently, the best of our scientific tools that come close to representing how it works are non-invasive techniques that can produce accurate 2D, 3D or 4D (i.e.

The role of viral vectors as carriers, to effect and manipulate expression of certain genes, has done wonders in the realms of medicine and therapy. Experts are now considering the possibility of the very same virus vehicles to instead transport cargo to the neurons of the nervous system. This would help them to understand and treat neurodegenerative disorders and other diseases more effectively in the future.

Malaria, dengue, yellow fever, Zika and other mosquito-borne illnesses have wreaked havoc among humans in the past, and are continuing to do so by taking lives irrespective of age, gender or status. Among these, malaria, the deadliest of all, affects more than half the world’s population. Fortunately, innovations in biotechnology are attempting to provide solutions to eradicate these maladies.

Change blindness refers to the inability of our visual system to memorize details in scenery. An example of our brain’s inability becomes obvious when playing the game Spot-the-difference. It’s a game where you have two pictures that look absolutely identical, but in fact small details are different. Often one has to study the pictures for several minutes to discover the well-hidden differences.

The CRISPR system can be inserted into a scientist’s favorite cell or organism to eliminate a specific gene. CRISPR stands for Clustered Regularly Interspersed Short Palindromic Repeat. With tinkering, it can shut down transcription from a gene, edit a gene, and even theoretically at least, wipe out a species. CRISPR may have important medical applications, eliminating or repairing disease genes.

Synthetic biologists, like Eric Klavins and his colleagues at Washington State University, attempt to engineer living things to carry out machine functions, such as computing. This group recently reported advances in making computer circuits in living cells, known as biocircuits. These circuits have the advantage of avoiding some of the messiness of living systems.

New approaches to studying biological problems have been sprouting up like mushrooms. Genomics is the study of all the genes of an organism. Proteomics is the study of all the proteins of an organism. Transcriptomics is the study of all the RNA molecules made by an organism. Collectively, these new approaches are known as “omics.” They are novel in that they use techniques and computational biology software that can track thousands of molecules at once.

The positive identification of a person has been identified as a need of our growing society for centuries, together with crime and law enforcement. First there was facial recognition and detection of walking style. Now, with our ever-increasing human population the need for “more accurate” identification appeared, including fingerprints and handwriting analysis, either to identify or to authenticate (e.g. bank transactions) certain individuals.

The brain is the most complex structure in our body. It has more than 200 billion neurons, which are all interconnected in specific orders. This creates synapses, which are the neurotransmitters. Between these synapses, signals are transferred and this in turn creates a circuit.

How many times have you gone to karaoke or heard someone sing along with a song on the radio only to sing the wrong lyrics? Don’t be ashamed, it’s more common than you think. When I first heard Elton John’s Tiny Dancer, without knowing the song’s title, I wondered about the lyric ‘hold me closer, Tony Danza’.

Cellulose is the world’s most abundant organic compound on Earth. It is estimated to make up 30% of the entire globe’s non-fossil organic carbon. It is used as a structural support biopolymer by plants to build up cell walls. You can find cellulose in many different forms, as humans have learned to exploit this naturally occurring material.