New Drug Could Let Your Pet Dogs Live Longer

Scientists have identified a drug that may allow dogs to live significantly longer by delaying the onset of heart failure by an average of 15 months. A new study has highlighted the need for a shift in how vets approach the diagnosis and management of mitral valve disease (MVD) – one of the most common heart diseases in dogs. The EPIC (Evaluation of Pimobendan In Cardiomegaly) study has found that the drug pimobendan extends the asymptomatic period by an average of 15 months, and dogs that received it lived significantly longer than those receiving a placebo. The study at Royal Veterinary College (RVC) in the UK was terminated early following an interim analysis as the evidence was considered conclusive, the researchers said. The vast majority of older, small breed dogs with a characteristic heart murmur are likely to have preclinical MVD; many of them will also have cardiomegaly secondary to the disease and may benefit from early treatment. Thanks to the results, vets no longer have to adopt a ‘watch and wait’ approach to suspected preclinical cases of MVD. When a typical mitral valve murmur is detected, vets should now investigate further to look for cardiac enlargement.

Now, An Ice Cream That May Help You Live Longer

A cardiologist and ice cream enthusiast has created a gelato which he says will make you live longer and run faster. Researchers have patented a recipe for ice cream which has antioxidant properties. The exact recipe is secret but contains dark cocoa powder, hazelnut, and green tea extracts. They’re known to have antioxidant properties, which can help to improve heart health and prevent certain diseases. Tests on human subjects at his university showed a marked improvement in the subjects’ performance of those who ate it. Participants had blood tests taken before and after sampling the gelato and were asked to pedal as fast as they could on an exercise bike. A standard chocolate ice cream was used as a placebo on some of the participants. The tests found that vascular function was improved in participants who had eaten the new ice cream, while no changes were observed in those who ate the placebo. The results were published in the scientific journal Nutrition. Low, controlled temperatures are best way to conserve the antioxidant properties of foods, which is why he chose to add them to gelato. There is talk of red berries, pomegranates, goji berries (having antioxidant properties). But researchers found that many foods from farm to our table, they lose their properties. The foods that best preserve these substances are precisely dried fruit, cocoa beans and green tea, especially at low, controlled temperatures. Who says that health foods have to taste bad? If the findings are confirmed, gelato could be added to the pantheon of Italian foods with antioxidant properties. They include red wine, extra virgin oil and tomatoes, which are all thought to contribute to longevity of Italians.

A 3D Printed Microscope Lets Kids 'Play' Microbiology

A playing classic video games like Pac-Man with living single celled microbes thinner than a human hair is now possible thanks to an interactive microscope developed by bioengineers at Stanford University. After several prototypes, the researchers released blue-print earlier this month for a “LudusScope” in the international scientific journal PLOS ONE, offering kids of all ages a playful window into the world of microbiology. It’s a microscope that you can 3D print and builds yourself. After it is assembled, tiny, light-responsive organisms called Euglena swim on a microscope slide surrounded by four LED lights. The lights are controlled by a joystick, allowing users to control the direction in which the microbes move. You turn microscopy from something that is purely observational into something that is interactive. You can select a cell, track it and collect data about it that you can then analyse and discuss. You can really do simple research in educational settings.

If Diamond Are Forever, Your Data Could Be Too

If you wear a diamond on your finger, it likely has flaws, even if you can’t see them. Don’t blame your partners for your flawed engagement rings, thank them. You could be flaunting the future of data storage on your digits. A paper published on 26 October in Science Advances shows how diamonds can be harnessed to store data for the long term. Right now, a tiny diamond – about half as long as a grain of rice and thinner than a sheet of paper – can hold a hundred times more data than a DVD. In the future, physicists could access a diamond with storage capacity a million times greater than that of a DVD. Groups all over the world are scrambling to find a place to cram all the data we’re generating taking selfies and swiping credit cards. They’ve proposed DNA, holograms, old fashioned magnetic tape and other ideas. Diamonds aren’t new to the memory game, either. They’ve been proposed for quantum data storage, which is kind of like teleportation. It’s basic storage 101 – 010101 (and so on). A diamond has a tiny, atomic sized imperfection known as nitrogen vacancy centre. These flaws occur when a stray nitrogen atom – or a few of them – sneaks in among its carbon structure. Deleting a carbon atom near the nitrogen leaves an empty space for stashing data. For the research, the team of physicists from City University of US used industrial fabricated diamond, which costs $150 – the cheapest thing in the experiment. They used laser to encode and read data on these spaces, which they treated like magnets that could repel or absorb an electron. To encode simple grayscale images like a smiley face, Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrodinger they added an electron by shining a green laser and took one away with a red laser. They read their data like a computer reads 0s and 1s, but instead of digits there was light, which indicated the presence of absence of electrons. While both use light to read data, the concept is a little different from DVD storage. A DVD is like a 2D puzzle, and this diamond technique is like a 3D model. Unlike the DVD, which has only one surface, a diamond can store data in multiple layers. This storage would also work differently than a magnetic hard drive, because diamonds, as they say, are forever. Every time you access or rewrite your hard drive, the material it’s made of degrades, and after five or 10 years, it’s dead. But defects in the diamonds don’t change, and if you do nothing, yur data could last as long as your diamond. It will sit there forever.

Wearable Robot Helps Paralytic People Walk

Scientists have designed a wearable lower limb robot exoskeleton with natural knee movement to help stroke and spinal cord injury patients regain the ability to walk and strengthen their muscles. Wearable “robot-assisted training” is quickly emerging as a method to improve gait rehabilitation. Researchers from Beihang University in China and Aalborg University in Denmark said that the robotic exoskeleton was intended to help stroke patients strengthen their physical fitness, aid the rehabilitation training of paralyzed patients, or to assist those who need help performing daily activities. The team focused on the knee joint, one of the most complex mechanical systems within the human body and a critical player during gait. The knee joint’s motion is actuated by several skeletal muscles along its articular surfaces and its centre of rotation moves. Researchers wondered if a parallel mechanism similar to skeletal muscles would be useful for designing a bionic knee joint. This design features a parallel knee joint to improve the bio-imitability and adaptability of the exoskeleton. The exoskeleton taps a hybrid serial parallel kinematic structure consisting of a one degree of freedom (DOF) hip joint module and a 2-DOF knee joint module in the sagittal plane. A planar 2-DOF parallel mechanism helps to fully accommodate the motion of the human knee – enabling rotation and relative sliding. When wearing the exoskeleton, its movement should be synchronized and consistent with a patient’s natural movement.

Explained: Why Pints Spill But Straw Do Not

It is not only the size, but the shape of a tube that determines whether a liquid will spill out of it when tipped over. Glasses of liquid, when turned horizontally, inevitably spill. This is not necessarily the case, however with thin straws, which, when turned on their sides, can retain liquid in them. This simple relationship was thought to be based on the size of the tube opening but researchers from University of Oxford have determined that this rule does not always hold true. The shape of the tube turns out to be important too, and if it is squashed enough – forming an elliptical shape – then no matter how thin the straw is the liquid will always spill out. This new discovery has applications in technologies that deal with liquids on small scales – such as biomedical diagnostics, oil recovery and inkjet printing – where choosing the right tube shape could be as important as its size.

'Martian' Redux? NASA Plants Lettuce On ISS

NASA has planted lettuce on the International Space Station to learn how to grow fresh food in space which may help prepare astronauts for future manned mission to Mars. Astronaut Shane Kimbrough initiated the Veg-03 experiment, one of his first science assignments, and has planted the third on orbit crop of red romaine lettuce. Operations were little slower than expected, but all plant pillows were successfully primed for the first time in Veg series. Plant pillows are small pouches containing a growth medium, fertilizer and seeds. The Veg-03 crop will be the team’s first on-orbit attempt at a new, repetitive harvest technique termed ‘Cut-and-Come-Again’. Once the plants are four weeks old, a selection of leaves can be harvested for a bit of fresh lettuce.