Lucky Strike Gold owner Darren Kamp with the massive nugget - credit Lucky Strike Gold
Lucky Strike Gold owner Darren Kamp with the massive nugget – credit Lucky Strike Gold
An Australian gold digger turned up a stone weighing 10.1 pounds, more than half of which is gold, and one of the largest finds in recent times.
It’s the kind of photo that one would expect to see from the 1850s, in black and white, with the man wearing breeches, a wide-brimmed hat, and a bandana around his neck.
But even though it’s 2023, experienced prospector Darren Kamp says he’s never seen a rock like it before in his life.
“When it hit my hand, my jaw dropped with it,” Kamp told CNN on Tuesday. “It was just incredible. Once-in-a-lifetime find.”
Kamp runs Lucky Strike Gold which runs recreational prospecting trips into the gold-containing regions of Australia known collectively as the Golden Triangle, a profession he’s been engaged in for 43 years.
credit Lucky Strike Gold
The finder took the rock to Kamp’s shop, believing there might be a few dozen grams of gold inside. It was very dirty, but after they split it open Kamp described the gold just “oozing out of it”.
The media called the finder an amateur, but equipped with a Minelab Equinox 800 detector with a price tag of USD$800, he probably had more than just beginner’s luck on his side.
The largest gold specimen Kamp ever found was a 24-ounce piece, which now would be worth around USD$46,753 at current market prices.
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Quote of the Day: “Daffodils know the goal of living is to grow.” – E. E. Cummings (The same is true for humans.)
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As we are only a week of waxing away from the full moon of April, it’s worth taking a look at other celestial sightseeing opportunities in the springing month.
Around midnight of Wednesday, April 5th, the Pink Moon will fully illuminate the sky. Also known as the Paschal Moon, it sets the date for Easter on the Sunday after the first full moon in April.
Despite cherry blossoms and other flowers heralding spring, the Pink Moon is not actually pink. The name corresponds with the early springtime blooms of Phlox subulata—commonly called creeping phlox or moss phlox, native to North America where Old Farmer’s Almanac keeps track of all the names given by a mix of settlers and native tribes.
For example, you have Moon When the Ducks Come Back (Lakota), Moon When the Geese Lay Eggs (Dakota), Frog Moon (Cree), Breaking Ice Moon (Algonquin), and Budding Moon (Tlingit).
Further out into space, the second half of April will present some excellent viewing opportunities for those with a telescope or binoculars.
On April 15th, overnight into the 16th, the planet Saturn will come within very close proximity to the Moon. They will appear just 3° apart, and while the ringed planet can be seen by the naked eye, a decent pair of binos will allow you to see the rings.
On April 20th, for those readers from Indonesia, Timor Leste, and Australia, particularly in the Ningaloo area, there will be a hybrid solar eclipse.
That means that as the eclipse travels along the path of totality, depending on where you are along it, you will see different shapes pass over the sun as the moon’s shadow affects viewing on Earth.
The full moon of April will be called the “Pink Moon” or the “Frog Moon”
Time and Date have put together a great article on how to see it if you live Down Under.
April 23rd will be the peak time of the Lyrid Meteor Shower, where in the pre-dawn hours one will be able to see around 20 shooting stars per hour.
The point in the sky out of which they seem to radiate is in the constellation Hercules. The Lyrids aren’t the largest meteor swarm, but the moon will be very small that night and offer no light pollution of the meteors one would see.
Lastly, after sunset on April 25th, the waning crescent moon of April will pair on its bright side with Mars just behind it as a glowing red sphere. This one can also be seen without binos or a telescope, but they will make the opportunity all the more special.
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A man has turned his lockdown side hustle into a thriving business—which he says has now turned over a million pounds.
After the government-imposed lockdowns caused Liam Mchale-Smith’s construction firm to close down and lay him off, he took over the garden shed and began handmaking furniture.
His wife Ruth then posted pictures on her social media and inquiries came flooding in.
Three years later and the man who once made $700 per week as a tradesman has now sold over $1.3 million (£1 million) in goods, and is unsurprisingly “very proud” of it.
“I really never thought something like this would happen to me,” said 33-year-old Mchale-Smith, “I have no experience running a business or being the boss.”
“But I wouldn’t go back to being employed now. I love being the CEO, I’m just glad Ruth is great with computers and social media.”
At age 15, Liam started studying carpentry before taking a job in construction. His first offerings were a wall-mounted garden bar and radiator cover.
Liam Mchale-Smith, 33, with radiator cover – SWNS
“Unique Designs by Liam” continued to grow and by January 2021 he could afford a new workshop, as well as three employees—two apprentices and his dad.
As soon as lockdowns lifted Liam and Ruth were delivering furniture as far away as Aberdeen in Scotland, a more than 350-mile trip on Britain’s motorways.
“But the success is very much deserved,” Ruth adds. “I don’t know anyone who works as hard as Liam—he’s unique, and such an inspiration to others.”
He has since bought a new family home, and acquired a fleet of trucks and several members of staff who together work to produce up to 40 pieces a day, all handmade from locally sourced materials.
If you don’t know who Ai Weiwei is, he’s an artist who likes big, statement-setting installations, but in a new exhibition he is throwing it back to the Impressionists, with a massive interpretation of Water Lillies by Monet, made from 650,000 Lego bricks.
Titled Water Lillies #1, it’s the largest Lego sculpture the Chinese artist has ever made, and it will go on display in “Ai Weiwei: Making Sense” at the Design Museum in London, UK, from April 7 to July 30.
The nearly fifty-foot-long sculpture takes up a whole wall at the museum. The gentle flowing colors are interrupted suddenly by a dark portal that represents the underground tunnel built by his father at the family house in China’s Xinjiang Province—where they would often hide from the authorities.
“In ‘Water Lilies #1’ I integrate Monet’s Impressionist painting, reminiscent of Zenism in the East, and concrete experiences of my father and me into a digitized and pixelated language,” Ai said in a statement.
“Toy bricks as the material, with their qualities of solidity and potential for deconstruction, reflect the attributes of language in our rapidly developing era where human consciousness is constantly dividing.”
Ai has worked with Lego many times before. In his exhibition “The Human Comedy” on San Giorgio Island in the Venice Lagoon, Lego portraits of monsters and animals showed how similar the two can look at various resolutions.
In “Making Sense” Ai has prepared some other massive installations, including one made from 200,000 pieces of broken pottery from the Beijing workshop he used to run before the Communist Party demolished it.
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Nobody likes needles, but they’re necessary for delivering many vaccines and biologics into the body. But what if those could be puffed through the skin instead, with just a little pressure, like being hit in the arm with a foam toy?
Today, scientists report steps toward making that a reality. Using powdered vaccines that don’t require refrigeration and a system driven by compressed gas, their “MOF-Jet” could easily deliver therapeutics against cancer and other diseases in a painless and less fear-inducing way.
The idea for the project was formed out of pandemic-induced boredom. The project’s principal investigator, Jeremiah Gassensmith, Ph.D., had ordered inexpensive pieces of a compressed gas-powered jet injection system to mess around with while stuck at home.
Later, after everyone was back on campus, he handed the pieces over to Yalini Wijesundara, a graduate student in the lab, with the instructions, “See what you can do with this.”
Despite looking and sounding like something out of science fiction, jet injectors were in use in the military back in the 1960s, but were discontinued due to them actually being more painful, and often blowing the liquid vaccine back into the face of the administer.
The medical media in Wijesundara’s invention is called a MOF, or metal-organic framework; essentially tiny miny cages that can contain a vaccine powder until it’s safely inside a cell.
These are normally made of gold or tungsten and are extremely expensive. Wijesundara and her team instead found a way to use zeolite.
“We can also store vaccine formulations within it as powders at room temperature, which eliminates the need for the extremely cold temperatures many liquid vaccines require,” said Wijesundara.
According to Gassensmith, the blast from the injector just feels “like you got hit with a Nerf bullet,” and the team found it worked on both mice and onions.
By tinkering with the MOF-Jet, Wijesundara soon realized that cargo release could be tuned by simply changing the injector’s carrier gas.
“If you shoot it with carbon dioxide, it will release its cargo faster within cells; if you use regular air, it will take four or five days,” she explains. “Once we realized that, it opened up a lot of possibilities,” added Gassensmith.
The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS).
WATCH the invention in action below…
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Quote of the Day: “May my mind stroll about hungry and fearless and thirsty and supple.” – E. E. Cummings
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A new study found that having an active sporting hobby offset stress and contributed to academic competence even during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
The effect was calculated during the so-called two weeks to flatten the curve, and the researchers believe the observed effect was robust enough to be applicable in future periods of societal disruption.
Researchers at the University of Waterloo found that participation in activities such as fitness classes and drop-in sports before the pandemic was linked to lower levels of stress and higher levels of perceived competence to handle challenges and master school workload during the lockdown.
The study used factor and regression analyses based on self-reported responses from 116 students active in campus recreational sports at two-time points: January 2020, before the pandemic, and April 2020, after lockdowns.
“Our findings suggest that the impact of campus recreational activities on reducing stress went beyond the obvious physical health benefits and contributed to overall well-being even down the line,” said Steven Mock, a researcher in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies.
“It’s possible that students who had learned how to deal with challenges and losses in the context of sport and recreational activity developed key skills such as adaptability that helped them manage with pandemic-related setbacks.”
At the beginning of winter 2020, stress levels for students were generally low. Managing academic demands, building new relationships, and trying to achieve personal goals were the top three stressors at that time.
“Students had just come back from the holiday break, their academic workload was still low, and they were not anticipating any societal disruption such as COVID-19,” said co-author Narges Abdeahad, a former Ph.D. candidate in the department of Recreation and Leisure Studies.
By April 2020, after lockdowns had begun, the overall level of stress had increased to above the midpoint, and the top stressors had changed to online delivery of quizzes and exams, the influence of the pandemic on their lives, and managing academic demands.
“We also found that graduate students and, even more so, international students had very low participation in campus recreational sports pre-pandemic, which has wellness implications for these two groups of students,” said Abdeahad.
– Nicole Green, Unsplash
“Since campus recreational sports appear to help develop lifelong skills that offset stressful events, educational institutions should consider including campus recreational sports as a strategy to enhance student mental health and well-being.”
Theodore Roosevelt was a leading proponent of campus sports. Born a sickly child with asthma, his father told him he would have to build himself a body since God had given him a weak one.
Roosevelt became an accomplished collegiate boxer and wrestler, activities he continued to partake in routinely even after entering the White House. He praised the development of sports in university, and “was delighted” to hear his children had taken it up.
“I always believe in going hard at everything, whether it is Latin or mathematics, boxing or football,” the president wrote in a letter to his son.
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With the knowledge that dogs are easier to adopt out than cats, a Kansas City animal shelter took to social media with a simple, yet clever video to even the odds.
But Wayside Waifs Hospital and Shelter did more than even them, they managed to get all but two of their shelter cats adopted after the video went viral on TikTok, garnering a million views, and 2,500 shares.
In the video below, shelter workers are asked to recommend a cat with a specific personality type as a way of giving the felines, with only a name and a picture, a bit more character.
“It was actually something that one of our feline care technicians thought of. What kind of animal likes people? What kind of animal would wanna snuggle with the other kittens?” Casey Waugh with Wayside Waifs said.
The video went viral, as commenters from The Philippines, Brazil, the UK, and others all cheered on the shelter for their admirable efforts.
One commenter even offered to relocate to Kansas City if the shelter was hiring, which they are as it turns out.
Although methane is harmful in its effect on our climate, a new study of the greenhouse gas shows that its effects are not as intense as previously thought.
The biggest sources of methane gas emissions come from coal, oil, and gas development, although emissions from agriculture is probably the most heavily publicized.
As the planet absorbs heat from the sun, it would naturally radiate this long-wave energy back out into space. But greenhouse gasses trap the heat inside the atmosphere, causing ‘the greenhouse effect’.
Scientists at the University of California-Riverside have now found that methane also absorbs short-wave energy, which, through the creation of cooling clouds, actually cancels 30% of its own heat (the heat which the gas has created in the greenhouse effect).
Specifically, it creates more low-level clouds that offset the short-wave energy from the sun and fewer high-level clouds which increase the outward radiation of long-wave energy from the Earth.
“This has implications for understanding in more detail how methane and perhaps other greenhouses gases can impact the climate system,” said Robert Allen, UCR assistant professor of Earth sciences. “Shortwave absorption softens the overall warming and rain-increasing effects but does not eradicate them at all.”
They also found, as Allen says, that methane cancels 60% of increased levels of precipitation predicted under global warming models—yet more good news for cities and towns around flood zones.
For a number of reasons, this could be a revolutionary discovery. The EPA says that methane’s greenhouse effect is 34 times that of CO2.
Using the U.S. as an example, methane accounts for only around 10% of the nation’s emissions. The lifespan of a methane molecule in terms of its harmful affect on climate is around 9 years.
This means that methane emitted 9 years ago is no longer causing a greenhouse effect. By contrast, the greenhouse effect of CO2 molecules is more than 1,000 years.
For years, climate scientists have known that methane was a critical greenhouse gas for humanity to target, but now we can create more accurate models that reflect how methane is 30% less harmful than we thought and it counteracts 60% of its own harmful rain effects.
In a paper published in 2021, Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) member, and Oxford professor of geosystem science, Myles Allen, showed that over-accounting for methane’s effect, particularly from animal agriculture, risked “the reputation of environmental policy, and… undermining public confidence.”
It’s true, that recent climate models don’t account for these newly-discovered effects, but, with the new research from UC Riverside, climate forecasts will become that much more accurate in assessing CO2 vs methane emissions, so we can make good decisions about how to focus our resources in the future.
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Like the ancients naming constellations after the animals they resembled, scientists at the European Space Agency say they have found a galactic ‘jellyfish.’
The presence of star-forming gas dripping from the disk of the galaxy JW100 in long streamers, over 800 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus, was detected by the Hubble Space Telescope.
Comparing them to “streaks of fresh paint”, an ESA spokesperson says they point to a process called ram pressure stripping, which the view from Hubble shows as resembling “dangling jellyfish tentacles.”
Ram pressure stripping occurs when galaxies encounter the diffuse gas that pervades galaxy clusters.
“As galaxies plow through this tenuous gas, it acts like a headwind, stripping gas and dust from the galaxy and creating the trailing streamers that prominently adorn JW100,” ESA said in a statement.
ESA said the other bright elliptical patches in the Hubble image are other galaxies in the cluster that hosts JW100.
“This observation took advantage of Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and its capabilities. The data is part of a sequence of observations designed to explore star formation in the tendrils of jellyfish galaxies.”
“These tendrils represent star formation under extreme conditions and could help astronomers better understand the process of star formation elsewhere in the universe.”
Launched more than 20 years ago, the Hubble Space Telescope is still in good working order thanks to its placement in Earth’s orbit. Engineers are able to launch into space in order to make repairs on the telescope, meaning it has the ability to continue its service for decades to come.
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Quote of the Day: “Hope is a form of planning.” – Gloria Steinem
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Two New Orleans high school students claim to have solved a 2,000-year-old puzzle in mathematics, which scientists are saying should be submitted to peer review.
Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson from St. Mary’s Academy presented their findings to a meeting of the American Mathematics Society in which they explain they were able to prove Pythagoras’ Theorem using trigonometry rather than circular logic.
For the mercifully uninitiated, trigonometry is the study of triangles. Pythagoras’ Theorem deals with triangles that are not perfectly symmetrical, and it goes like this.
The area of the square whose side is the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the areas of the squares on the other two sides. It is written as a2+b2=c2.
Pythagoras’ Theorem CC 3.0. Wapcaplet
One of the interesting things about this equation is that for 2,000 years, no mathematician has been able to demonstrate the truth of it without simply using the equation itself as proof; what is called circular logic, and not accepted as true evidence of proof.
Johnson and Jackson reference Elisha Loomis’s The Pythagorean Proposition, a book investigating this concept, which “flatly states that ‘there are no trigonometric proofs because all the fundamental formulae of trigonometry are themselves based upon the truth of the Pythagorean theorem,’” the girls wrote.
It was this conundrum that they managed to untangle, presenting “a new proof of Pythagoras’s Theorem which is based on a fundamental result in trigonometry—the Law of Sines—and we show that the proof is independent of the Pythagorean trig identity,” they said in their abstract. The equation they cite for this is sin2x+cos2x=1.
While we let mathematicians work out whatever that means, Catherine Roberts, executive director for the American Mathematical Society, encouraged the young ladies to submit their work for peer review, and commit themselves further to the study of mathematics so they can further advance the mathematical literature.
The two ladies were interviewed on WWL New Orleans, and said it was an “unparalleled feeling” to present their findings to the society.
“There’s nothing like it—being able to do something that people don’t think that young people can do,” Johnson said to the station. “You don’t see kids like us doing this—it’s usually, like, you have to be an adult to do this.”
WATCH the story below if you prefer to understand their genius further…
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In the far western desert of Texas, a striking 3D-printed hotel with Swedish style will take shape over the coming years to present both the beauty and savings of 3D printing to the country and the world.
The architecture is handled by Swedish design architect Bjarke Ingels, while the printers will be supplied by Austin-based 3D printing company ICON, that’ve really taken the technology to the next level with 3D-printed batteries and whole neighborhoods besides.
The two are teaming up to transform the El Cosmico hotel/campground in Marfa, Texas, into a 62-acre remote hotel with an infinity pool, art exhibition hall, outdoor bathhouse, and outdoor kitchen, all designed as an homage to both the desert surroundings and the cosmic show on display in the night sky above.
The local West Texas earth is being added to the 3D printing cement mixture to ensure the luxury cabins blend in with their surroundings.
“The promise of 3D printing is that the printer doesn’t care how complex the design is, if it uses organic curvature, dome-like shapes, or hyperbolic paraboloids,” Ingels, an early investor in Icon and a frequent design collaborator on its 3D-printed projects, told AD.
“All it cares about is how long it takes to print and how much material [it is] going to deploy, so you can make a square box or a beautiful domed house at the same cost.”
That cost can be around 30% less than traditional methods, as well as 350% stronger depending on the size and scope of the project.
The hotel rooms will all feature skylights to allow unobstructed viewing of the night sky, and expansive views of the Davis Mountains. Just next door is Big Bend National Park, one of the largest in the Lower 48, and a paradise of desert exploration.
El Cosmico “2.0.” is predicted to begin construction in 2024.
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Archaeologists made a huge discovery while examining a golden pendant when they decoded the words “He is Odin’s man”—making the object the oldest ever found to bear the name of the chief Norse deity.
Dating to the 400s AD, the century of the fall of the Roman Empire, the pendant is believed to have been owned by some sort of leader, since gold symbolizes status and Odin was the god of kings.
Odin, also known as Wotan or Woden—the king of the gods and god of kings. He was also the god of runes, wisdom, magic, and death, and sat at the pinnacle of the Northern European pantheon worshiped by Anglo-Saxons, Germanic tribes, Celts, and of course most famously, the Vikings.
The pendant, officially called a bracteate, was found in a gold hoard near the village of Vindelev on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula in 2020. The newly translated inscription of Odin’s name is 150 years older than the previous earliest reference found.
“It’s absolutely amazing,” said Lisbeth Imer, runologist, and writing expert at the National Museum of Denmark. “This means that Norse mythology can now be dated all the way back to the early fifth century,” she told Live Science.
The museum’s linguist, Krister Vasshus, described it as a “huge discovery” and a moment of “pure ecstasy.”
The 1kg of gold in the Vindelev hoard – Vejle Museum
“Odin’s man,” in this case, is believed to have been called Jaga, or Jagaz—a name that is a fair distance away from the names carved into the hundreds of runestones that dot Scandinavia from the Viking period, or which appear in the Norse or Icelandic sagas, perhaps suggesting he, and extension perhaps Odin worship, came from farther inland.
The inscription is written in runes—the alphabet from Iron Age Scandinavia and Germania. Runic language changed every few centuries, with many words falling out of use. The deciphering team from the National Museum of Denmark believes the discovery can reshape the study of early runic language, and potentially open up all-new interpretations of unknown passages.
Bacteates were popular jewelry in Iron Age Scandinavia, and more than 1,000 have been recovered by archaeologists, many of which bear inscriptions like the ones found at Vindelev.
For example, the “Odin’s man” bracteate was found to have been stamped by the same die used on another bracteate uncovered in 1852.
“So, the National Museum has been in possession of an inscription with the word Odin on it for 170 years—but we didn’t know until recently,” Imer said.
At the moment, the team is assuming this means the entire Norse canon is backdated along with Odin, since Odin’s presence in the Norse versions of stories like Genesis, Exodus, and Revelations from the Bible, is nearly ubiquitous. In short, almost none of the other stories can be told without him.
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Happy the cow was never destined for greatness, born as he was a bull on a dairy farm.
Yet despite his inability to produce milk, Happy had another valuable skill that began working the minute he dropped onto the grass of Barry Coster’s dairy—making people smile.
The Holstein calf was born with a smiley face on one side of his body, a result of the naturally random black and white markings typical of their breed.
“We’ve seen some number sevens or love hearts on the head, and a few strange markings, but we’ve never seen anything that resembles a smiley face before,” Mrs. Megan Coster told ABC Australia.
Upon finding Happy, Brian snapped a picture and sent it to Megan who even suspected he was a victim of graffiti.
“I couldn’t believe it—I actually zoomed in at first to make sure that none of our workers had added some extra lines or anything, ” she added.
Happy is what is known in the Australian dairy industry as a “bobby calf” meaning one that is surplus to requirements for replacing the existing stock.
Quote of the Day: “I want enough time to be in love with everything.” – Marina Keega
Photo by: Kevin Ku
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University of Cambridge Department of Engineering and Clinical Neurosciences
University of Cambridge Department of Engineering and Clinical Neurosciences
A brain implant that can restore arm and leg movements has been developed by British scientists to boost connections between neurons and the paralyzed limbs, offering hope to accident victims.
The device combines flexible electronics and human stem cells – the body’s ‘reprogrammable’ master cells – to better integrate with the nerve and drive limb function.
Previous attempts at using neural implants to restore limb function have mostly failed, as scar tissue tends to form around the electrodes over time, impeding the connection between the device and the nerve. By sandwiching a layer of muscle cells reprogrammed from stem cells between the electrodes and the living tissue in rats, the researchers found that the device integrated with the host’s body and the formation of scar tissue was prevented.
The cells survived on the electrode for the duration of the 28-day experiment, the first time this has been monitored over such a long period.
The researchers say that by combining two advanced therapies for nerve regeneration – cell therapy and bioelectronics – into a single device, they can overcome the shortcomings of both approaches, improving functionality and sensitivity.
“This was a high-risk endeavor, and I’m so pleased that it worked,” said Professor George Malliaras from Cambridge’s Department of Engineering, who co-led the research. “It’s one of those things that you don’t know whether it will take two years or ten before it works, and it ended up happening very efficiently.”
“This interface could revolutionize the way we interact with technology,” said co-first author Amy Rochford, who worked on the professor’s team. “By combining living human cells with bioelectronic materials, we’ve created a system that can communicate with the brain in a more natural and intuitive way, opening up new possibilities for prosthetics, brain-machine interfaces, and even enhancing cognitive abilities.”
While extensive research and testing will be needed before it can be used in humans, the device is a promising development for amputees or those who’ve lost function in limbs. The results were reported this month in the journal Science Advances.
A huge challenge when attempting to reverse such injuries is the inability of neurons to regenerate and rebuild disrupted neural circuits.
“If someone has an arm or a leg amputated, for example, all the signals in the nervous system are still there, even though the physical limb is gone,” said Dr. Damiano Barone from Cambridge’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences, who co-led the research. “The challenge with integrating artificial limbs, or restoring function to arms or legs, is extracting the information from the nerve and getting it to the limb so that function is restored.”
One way of addressing this problem is implanting a nerve in the large muscles of the shoulder and attaching electrodes to it. The problem with this approach is scar tissue forms around the electrode, plus it is only possible to extract surface-level information from the electrode.
To get better resolution, any implant for restoring function would need to extract much more information from the electrodes. And to improve sensitivity, the researchers wanted to design something that could work on the scale of a single nerve fibre, or axon.
“An axon itself has a tiny voltage,” said Barone. “But once it connects with a muscle cell, which has a much higher voltage, the signal from the muscle cell is easier to extract. That’s where you can increase the sensitivity of the implant.”
The researchers designed a biocompatible flexible electronic device that is thin enough to be attached to the end of a nerve. A layer of stem cells, reprogrammed into muscle cells, was then placed on the electrode. This is the first time that this type of stem cell, called an induced pluripotent stem cell, has been used in a living organism in this way.
“These cells give us an enormous degree of control,” said Barone. “We can tell them how to behave and check on them throughout the experiment. By putting cells in between the electronics and the living body, the body doesn’t see the electrodes, it just sees the cells, so scar tissue isn’t generated.”
The Cambridge biohybrid device was implanted into the paralyzed forearm of the rats. The stem cells, which had been transformed into muscle cells prior to implantation, integrated with the nerves in the rat’s forearm. While the rats did not have movement restored to their forearms, the device was able to pick up the signals from the brain that control movement. If connected to the rest of the nerve or a prosthetic limb, the device could help restore movement.
The cell layer also improved the function of the device, by improving resolution and allowing long-term monitoring inside a living organism. The cells survived through the 28-day experiment: the first time that cells have been shown to survive an extended experiment of this kind.
The researchers say that their approach has multiple advantages over other attempts to restore function in amputees. In addition to its easier integration and long-term stability, the device is small enough that its implantation would only require keyhole surgery. Other neural interfacing technologies for the restoration of function in amputees require complex patient-specific interpretations of cortical activity to be associated with muscle movements, while the Cambridge-developed device is a highly scalable solution since it uses ‘off the shelf’ cells supplied by the University’s Kotter lab, which are owned by synthetic biology company bit.bio.
In addition to its potential for the restoration of function in people who have lost the use of a limb or limbs, the researchers say their device could also be used to control prosthetic limbs by interacting with specific axons responsible for motor control.
“This technology represents an exciting new approach to neural implants, which we hope will unlock new treatments for patients in need,” said co-first author Dr Alejandro Carnicer-Lombarte, also from the Department of Engineering.
The researchers are now working to further optimize the devices and improve their scalability. The team have filed a patent application with the support of Cambridge Enterprise, the University’s technology transfer arm, which is also supporting the commercialization of the technology.
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University music students are working with new mothers who are incarcerated to compose heartfelt musical messages for their children—a partnership aptly titled The Lullaby Project.
Although concrete and steel bars separate the new moms at Camille Graham Correctional Institution from their babies, students use music to break down those barriers.
The musicians studying at the University of South Carolina are helping to foster family intimacy, despite the distances between parent and child, thanks to Carnegie Hall and its Weill Music Institute.
“No amount of training could truly prepare us for how impactful this project is,” said USC grad student Alyssa Santivanez, who has been co-writing original lullabies for the project.
“It’s one thing to learn about how to create alone and how to put everything together, and another thing to really be there with the women and work with them—it just means so much.”
Alexis, an inmate benefiting from the Lullaby project said, “I get sad so much not being around him, so just knowing that he’s going to be able to hear something that I wrote word for word. It’s amazing.”
“It’s amazing because I just wish I was there, but this is something for him to hold onto me. It’s an amazing feeling.”
“It kind of makes me feel accomplished…to be able to write a song and he is going to be able to hear it.”
Claire Bryant, USC Assistant Professor of Cello says, “This is a very special project and process. I personally have worked in corrections for the past 10 years through music, and I think music can do a lot of good for all of us, no matter our circumstance but especially incarcerated people I think need the chance with some positive programming.”
And, according to the Lullaby project participant featured in a new video below, it’s working.
“It makes me want to try to write more songs or poetry. It just makes me want to do more positive things… This is like the opening door. I feel like I can do it.”
“It’s very motivating how talented they are and I’m grateful for them.” adds Alexis.
Serena LaRoche, USC Assistant Professor of Voice, commented: “It’s just so rewarding. We all come from different backgrounds, myself as faculty and the students who come in with their own tonal preferences and ideas about composition and music and songwriting and all their life experience…and how a song can be born out of that—how it can create a real musical moment that can connect on a very personal level to her, but really to all of us.”
“While we’re in the songwriting process and talking to the women, it really means a lot just for that one moment when we can tell that their eyes get that sparkle.” said Santivanez. “It’s just it’s really emotional.”
“We are like the bridge between them right now and their kids and our families.” Eunice Koh, USC Music performance doctoral student.
“You can put as much metal and walls in the way as you want and you cannot break that connection and it will never be broken,” said Bryan Stirling, Director of the state’s department of corrections.
“I can’t thank USC South Carolina enough for what they’re doing— stepping up and helping these folks—and I hope they realize they’re not just helping the mothers. they’re helping the children and they’re helping the family and therefore they help their community and their state.”
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Scientists have documented plant species for centuries to help us understand and conserve the incredible diversity of flora in our world. But according to new research, many have never actually been photographed in their natural habitats—and Australian researchers say this is a problem.
A team from UNSW Sydney and the Australian Institute of Botanical Science surveyed 33 major online databases of plant photographs to examine the photographic record of plant species Down Under. The findings revealed that out of 21,077 native Australian vascular plant species, almost 20 percent lack a verifiable photograph.
Lead author of the study published in New Phytologist, UNSW Science PhD student Thomas Mesaglio, was shocked.
“It was surprising to see how many plant species had just line drawings, illustrations, paintings, or even no media at all.”
Dr. Hervé Sauquet, co-author of the study and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute based at the National Herbarium of New South Wales, was also surprised.
“Even in this digital age where most herbarium specimens have been scanned and are accessible on the web, photos of live plants in the wild remain in critical need.”
Senior author of the study from UNSW, Professor Will Cornwell, says a lack of detailed photos can have real consequences. Many plant species that are difficult to identify in the wild may go extinct if scientists cannot properly identify them with the help of photos.
“We had assumed every plant species would have simply been photographed by someone, somewhere, throughout history. But it turns out this isn’t the case.”
“This is where citizen scientists can come in and help us fill this gap with their photos,” he said.
Gaps in the photographic record
Photographs can help botanists and taxonomists who work with plant specimens by preserving characteristics like flower color that get lost over time in lab samples contained in collections. They can also show additional features, such as the orientation of leaves or bark appearance, and add ecological context by, perhaps, hinting at co-beneficial relationships with surrounding plants.
“Having a comprehensive photographic set helps us to be confident in our identifications,” said Mesaglio. “Particularly when it is practically challenging to collect and preserve the entire plant, photos complement the physical voucher by showing the soil type, the habitat it’s growing in, and other species growing alongside it.”
The first identified field photo of Olearia eremaea was taken last year in Western Australia – Credit: Thomas Mesaglio / UNSW
But it turns out, not all plant groups are photographed equally. Just as some animals receive less attention than others, there might also be a bias against less charismatic plants.
The study found the most well–photographed plant groups tend to be shrubs or trees with more noticeable or spectacular features, such as colorful flowers. Banksia, for example, is one of only two Australian plant genera with more than 40 species to have a complete photographic record. Meanwhile, the family with the most significant photo deficit was Poaceae – commonly known as grasses – with a whopping 343 unphotographed species.
Geography also affected the photographic record. While most species across the south-eastern states of Australia have comprehensive records, Western Australia had the largest void, with 52 percent of all unphotographed species found there.
“The primary ‘hotspots’ for unphotographed Australian plants are areas with high plant diversity, but the environments are rugged and often difficult to access, particularly by road,” Mesaglio says. “But it means there’s an exciting opportunity to visit these locations because we might capture something that has never before been photographed.”
Activate your snapping
Because digital photography is so accessible now, anyone can also help make a meaningful contribution to science by using the camera in their pocket.
Amaranthus tricolor – Amaranthaceae family, by Kurt Stüber, CC license
“Since April last year, we’ve identified nearly 10 percent of those previously unphotographed species, thanks to members of the public uploading their photographs and experts who’ve kindly identified them,” says Mesaglio. “There could be many more in personal collections or behind paywalls just waiting to be shared.”
“We also suspect more photos exist, but they’re hidden away on social media or behind scientific paywalls that aren’t accessible, discoverable, or searchable,” added Mesaglio, who, along with his team, is calling for all new species descriptions to be published as Open Access in searchable databases with Creative Commons licensing to maximize their usage.
“Of the species with photographs, many have a single photo. We not only want to capture those unrepresented species but also continue building the photographic record for all species. Doing so will help us identify, monitor, and conserve our native species for generations to come.”
“People can engage with, sympathies with, and get much more excited about plants with photographs, which is vital when our natural environments are more at risk than ever.”
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