A One-Dose Cure For Ear Infections

A single dose of a new bioengineered gel may deliver a full course of antibiotic therapy for middle ear infections, making treatment for this common childhood illness much easier and potentially safer. Middle-ear infection, or otitis media, is the number one reason for pediatric antibiotic prescriptions, but getting oral antibiotics into young children several times a day for seven to 10days is a daunting task. With oral antibiotics, you have to treat the entire body repeatedly just to get to the middle ear. With the gel, a pediatrician could administer the entire antibiotic course all at once, and only where it’s needed. Squirted into the ear canal, the gel quickly hardens and stays in place, gradually dispensing antibiotic across the eardrum into the middle ear.

Lab-Grown 3D Lungs to Help Study Diseases

Scientists, including those of Indian origin, have successfully grown 3D lungs in the lab, using stem cells, which can be used to study diseases that are difficult to understand with conventional methods. By coating tiny gel beads with lung-derived stem cells and then allowing them to self-assemble into the shapes of the air sacs found in human lungs, researchers created 3D “organoids”. The laboratory-grown tissue can be used to study diseases including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which has been difficult to study using conventional methods.

While researchers haven’t built a fully functional lung, they’ve been able to take lung cells and place them in the correct geometrical spacing and pattern to mimic a human lung. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a chronic lung disease characterized by scarring of the lungs. The scarring makes the lungs thick and stiff, which over time results in progressively worsening shortness of breath and lack of oxygen to the brain and vital organs.

Finally, Tech to Boost Old Drugs With Hydrogen is Here

Drug makers are breathing new life into old drugs – with hydrogen. Substituting a heavier form of the gaseous element in drugs can slow their breakdown by the body, leaving them in the bloodstream longer. That means a patient can take them less frequently – and that, in theory, might reduce the severity of side effects. While the technology has been around for 40 years, it’s taken that long to understand it well enough to bring such a treatment before the US Food and Drug Administration. The regulator is reviewing that would be the first medicine made with deuterium, or heavy hydrogen.

 This is new concept, and FDA approval will make it a lot clearer for the field. Deuterium provides unique properties that cannot be attained in any other way. The approach interferes with one of the ways that the body metabolizes or eliminates drugs, involving enzymes that “nibble away” at the hydrogen in the molecule. Deuterium is essentially armored hydrogen, tougher and more difficult for the enzymes to break down, so it sticks around longer in the body. Other than that, the drug works the same as the original.

Now, Just Spray And Make Cup of Tea

If there is one thing the British enjoy, it is a good cup of tea and one English drinks maker has come up with an unusual way of making the brew – sprayed into a cup form an aerosol can. No More Tea Bags is prebrewed and dispensed from an aluminum spray can. Drinkers squirt a small amount of the concentrated tea into a cup, and add hot water and milk if desired. It was really about just trying to make a better cup of tea. Of course there’s an element of convenience with this and not having a soggy tea bag to get rid of tat the end of it. Developer uses wine making equipment to make the equivalent of a giant pot of tea to produce the spray, one can of which yields about 20 cups of average strength tea.

Developer starts developing it in glass. The trouble was he had to use chemical preservatives and he didn’t want to do that. He realized that he could put the tea in (an aerosol can) in a sterile condition and it’s completely isolated from the atmosphere. Launched in august in a small number of independent shop, No More Tea Bags come in three flavours: English breakfast, Earl Grey and Jasmine. This is probably more like your average cup of tea. There’ll be a lot of people who’d probably love this flavour and this convenience.

Food Waste May Store Solar, Wind Energy

Sugar alcohols – an abundant waste product of the food industry – mixed with carbon nanotubes could be used to store excess solar and wind energy for times when the Sun is down or the air is still, scientists have found. The researchers wanted to study how mixing carbon nanotubes with sugar alcohols might affect their energy storage properties. The new insights could assist in the future design of sugar alcohol-based energy storage systems

China Launches Second Space Station Tiangong 2

China has launched its second space station in a sign of the growing sophistication of its military backed programme. The Tiangong 2 was carried into space on 15 September night atop a Long March 7 rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre on the Edge of the Gobi Desert in northern China. Plans call for the launch next month of the Shenzhou 11 spaceship with two astronauts on board to dock with the station and remain on board for a month. The station, whose name means “Heavenly Palace,” is considered a stepping stone to a mission to Mars by the end of the decade.

Boeing Altering Planes to Help Passenger Beat Jet Lag

During the development of the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing encountered countered countless engineering hurdles. One of which was the decision to build much of the plane out of carbon fiber reinforced plastics and other composite materials instead of aluminum most, commonly used on airliners. While the engineering of the composite airframe may have been a challenge, it’s a decision that allowed Boeing to make a major change to its aircraft that could greatly reduce the effect of jet lag on its passengers. The Dreamliner has a composite fuselage and that allowed them to pressurize it at whatever altitude they wanted because the material is not as susceptible to fatigue.

The very symptoms they attribute to jet lag may actually be attributed to acute mountain sickness, which affects individuals exposed to altitudes above 6,500 feet. A study with the help of Boeing found that flyers that go from sea level up to 8,000 feet saw the oxygen content in their blood fall 4%. The research showed passengers’ bodies reacted at 6,000 feet similar to that at sea level. So they decided to pressurize the Dreamliner at 6,000 feet. At 6,000 feet, the cabin air is denser and has a greater level of oxygen saturation. As result, the body does not have to work as hard to oxygenate blood and sustain itself. Boeing has also increased in cabin humidity as well as hot a new air-filtration system to reduce jet lag. Boeing upcoming 777X wide body mini jumbo jet, which comes into service in 2019m will also be pressurized at 6,000 feet.