Stem cell facility to open in Co Galway

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Monday 27 January 2014 10.49

The first facility in Ireland licensed to manufacture human stem cells opensin NUI Galway this morning.

The development will mean some patients suffering from certain diseases will be able to access clinical trials of stem cell therapies.

Stem cells are human cells that can develop into many types of tissue.

As a result, scientists are increasingly studying their potential for regenerating diseased or damaged tissue in people suffering the effects of certain illnesses, such as heart attacks, stroke, arthritis or diabetes.

Before they can be used widely in humans such therapies must undergo extensive clinical trials.

The first Irish licence to manufacture stem cells for this purpose has been granted to the Centre for Cell Manufacturing Ireland at NUIG.

The custom-built facility will take small samples of bone marrow from adult donors and culture them in a specially designed laboratory to make billions of stem cells.

The cells will then be injected back into the donor or other patients as part of clinical trials.

The first of those trials will investigate their use in the treatment of diabetes patients who are suffering reduced blood flow to lower limbs, a symptom which often results in amputations.

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Stem cell facility to open in Co Galway

Marijuana and Spirituality (Does Pot/Weed/Cannabis Enhance Spirituality?) – Video

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Marijuana and Spirituality (Does Pot/Weed/Cannabis Enhance Spirituality?)
Ask Teal Website - http://www.askteal.com Pot, otherwise known as cannabis or marijuana, is considered a spiritual medicine and has been used as such since 2...

By: TheSpiritualCatalyst

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Marijuana and Spirituality (Does Pot/Weed/Cannabis Enhance Spirituality?) - Video

Popstars shimmer and shine on Grammys red carpet

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27 JANUARY 2014 A host of stunning popstars lit up the Grammy awards red carpet on Sunday night wearing sparkling dresses.

Taylor Swift turned heads in her full-length silver glittering Gucci gown, despite complaining that it was "a bit scratchy!"

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The singing sensation showed off her incredible physique in the column number, topping off the look with a simple ponytail and smokey eyes.

Another star sparkling at the annual awards ceremony was Rita Ora.

The British popstar, who posed up with boyfriend Calvin Harris, turned heads in her metallic green Lanvin number. She had eschewed her usual floor-sweeping creations for the short dress.

Pregnant Ciara showed off her blossoming baby bump in a beautiful gold Emilio Pucci dress. She revealed that it had taken some time to make sure the fit of the dress was perfect.

"My good friend Peter Dundee did all kinds of fun things to make it happen," she told E!s Guiliana Rancic on the red carpet. "Three to four fittings were mandatory."

She also spoke about her pregnancy, revealing that she feels "really good, really comfortable. I just ate a club sandwich and fries!"

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Popstars shimmer and shine on Grammys red carpet

NASA’s Humanoid Robonaut 2 Waltz Both Elegant and Creepy (Video)

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NASA's robot butler for astronauts, Robonaut 2, may still be waiting for its legs to be delivered to the International Space Station, but you can see how the humanoid automaton may dance in weightlessness with an eerie elegance in this new video.

The video waltz of NASA's Robonaut 2, set to the "The Blue Danube" by Johann Strauss, was created by SPACE.com by stitches together a series of NASA recordings of the droid's prehensile leg tests.

The $2.5 million Robonaut 2, also called R2, is designed to eventually work with the astronauts and even take over some of their duties both inside and outside the space station. An R2 unit launched to the orbiting outpost as just a torso with arms and camera-equipped head during the last flight of the space shuttle Discovery in 2011. [See more photos of NASA's Robonaut 2 humanoid robot]

Since then, the R2 unit has been performing tests and experiments in a stationary position inside the space station, but it's expected to be able to move around alongside the astronauts after it gets its legs sometime this year.

Though humanoid in form, Robonaut 2's legs move in some unnervingly inhuman ways. Instead of one knee, r2 has seven joints that bend in all different directions, and watching its legs move is almost like watching a horrible football injury in slow motion.

When fully extended, the automaton's legs will span 9 feet (2.7 meters), according to NASA. And R2 doesn't have feet. Instead, it has special tools called "end effectors" that will allow it to use sockets and handrails to climb around inside and outside the station. NASA officials, however, have said that R2's upper body still needs some upgrades before it will be ready to venture into the vacuum of space.

Last month, NASA unveiled its latest humanoid robot Valkyrie, or R5. The 6-foot, 2-inch tall (1.9 meters) robot, which has an uncanny resemblance to the Marvel superhero Iron Man, was built to compete in the recent DARPA Robotics Challenge for disaster-response robots in December.

Follow Megan Gannon onTwitterandGoogle+. Follow us @SPACEdotcom, FacebookorGoogle+. Originally published onSPACE.com.

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NASA's Humanoid Robonaut 2 Waltz Both Elegant and Creepy (Video)

Mexican University Designs Catalysts With Nanotechnology To Reduce Vehicular Pollution

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Currently, they have developed two types of nanocatalysts according to the requirements of Pemex in its process of sulfur removal, from the area of refinement, with which reducing gasoline and diesel to having only 10 parts per million of sulfur has been achieved, as according to international regulation.

This is pointed out by Sergio Fuentes Moyado, head of project and director of CNyN at UNA, located in the northwest state of Baja California. He adds that after three years of research at an experimental level at the Center and pilot tests at the National Institute of Oil, the nanotechnological catalyst counts with a national patent and is ready for tests at a refinery.

CNyN's technology uses molybdenum disulfide and is part of the fifth generation of catalytic converters, although is the first to be conceived since its origin from nanotechnology.

"We look to obtain much more efficient, resistant and cheap catalysts than what we currently can find in the market. That is why, since it design and planning are conceived under the nano concept, which improves some properties of this kind of technologies", Fuentes Moyado highlights.

He explains the process of sulfur removal. "The catalyst eliminates sulfur from the gasoline and diesel molecules, as these are deposited over small arrangements of four to five nanometers and that is where the reaction in presence of hydrogen takes place. So, at the end of the process clean molecules are obtain, that can be used for fuels".

Is important to highlight that the synthesis of the catalyst happened in the Hydrocarbon Processing Laboratory, which was created for this project in the facilities of the CNyN in Baja California.

"Currently we are testing the compound to know if it can be scalated to an industrial level to produce tons instead of kilograms and install the process at a refinery. We have presented a preview of the progress to Pemex and they are very interested in carrying out the test at a refinery. If so, the nanocatalyst would be manufactured in USA, because we don't have a company that can produce them in our country.

"A big infrastructure is required. The design we have made came from the most basic, which is understanding how the molecules bond to the catalyst and how we can force the active sites of the molecules to have more contact with the fluid, being either gasoline or diesel. There is a design involved with the application of knowledge", said the director of CNyN.

The project was funded by the Energy Secretariat (Sener) and the National Counsil of Science and Technology (CONACyT) with more than 66 million of Mexican pesos.

For the creation of the nanocatalyst the Physics and Material Research Institute, the Center of Applied Sciences and Technological Development at UNAM also contributed.

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Mexican University Designs Catalysts With Nanotechnology To Reduce Vehicular Pollution

Mass is critical at nano-scale; matters in calculations and measurements

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A UT Arlington engineering professor has proven that the effect of mass is important, can be measured and has a significant impact on any calculations and measurements at the sub-micrometer scale.

The findings help to better understand movement of nano-sized objects in fluid environments that can be characterized by a low Reynolds number, which often occurs in biological systems. The unconventional results are consistent with Newton's Second Law of Motion, a well-established law of physics, and imply that mass should be included in the dynamic model of these nano-systems. The most widely accepted models omit mass at that scale.

Alan Bowling, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, collaborated with Samarendra Mohanty, an assistant physics professor, and doctoral students Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani, Bryan Black and Sarvenaz Ghaffari, as well as graduate student James Drake to make the discovery.

A key advantage of the new model is that it can be used to build computer simulations of nano-sized objects that have drastically reduced run times as compared to a conventional model based on Newton's second law. These conventional models have run times of days, weeks, months and years while the new model requires only seconds or minutes to run.

In the past, researchers attempted to address the long run time by omitting the mass terms in the model. This resulted in faster run times but, paradoxically, violated Newton's second law upon which the conventional model was based. The remedy for this paradox was to argue that mass was unimportant at the nano-scale.

However, the new model retains mass, and predicts unexpected motion of nano-sized objects in a fluid that has been experimentally observed. The new model also runs much faster than both the conventional and massless models.

It is expected that this new model will significantly accelerate research involving small-scale phenomena.

Research areas that Bowling and collaborators at UT Arlington are currently investigating include cell migration, protein function, bionic medical devices and nanoparticle suspensions for storing thermal energy. However, the applications for the computer simulation in medicine, biology, and other fields are endless.

The research is detailed in the paper "Dynamics of Microscopic Objects in Optical Tweezers: Experimental Determination of Underdamped Regime and Numerical Simulation using Multiscale Analysis" and published online by the Journal of Non-Linear Dynamics. The paper is scheduled for publication in the journal's print version later this year.

Khosrow Behbehani, dean of the College of Engineering, said the team's findings may alter ways of thinking throughout the engineering and scientific worlds.

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Mass is critical at nano-scale; matters in calculations and measurements