MIT Researchers Develop Painless Needle-Less Syringe

Injection via needle and syringe is the quickest way to transfuse medicine and fluids into one's body, but not everyone is a fan of shots. Many people have a fear of needles -- "aichmophobia," it's called -- while others frequently self-inject and simply don't want to inject themselves all the time. While completely understandable, it's a dilemma that scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are setting out to solve.

MIT researchers unveiled a prototype device on Thursday that uses a new way to administer drugs, replacing the common needle with a tiny, highly-controllable jet injector, which sends a high-pressured stream directly into the skin. The jet can both inject into and aspirate from tissue, and the device is controlled via a computer interface, which can control the volume of the drug delivery, and the velocity at which it moves.
"We were able to fire the drug out at almost the speed of sound if we need to -- the speed of sound in air is about 340 meters per second," said professor Ian Hunter, who runs the bioinstrumentation lab at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering. "It's capable of pressurizing the drug up to 100 megapascales (MPas), and we can do that in under a millisecond."

Hunter worked on this project with MIT colleague Dr. Catherine Hogan, as well as a handful of "talented post-docs and others in the lab." Hogan explains how the device works: "There's a magnet in the center of our jet injector that's surrounded by a coil of wire, and when we apply a current to the coil, we create a Lorentz Force that pushes this piston, which forces the drug out of the ampoule," Hogan said. "This gives us a tremendous amount of control depending on how much current we put in, so that we can successfully deliver a wide variety of volumes of drug at a wide variety of velocities with a very low degree of error, something a needle can't do."

There are other advantages of MIT's jet injector over needles: For instance, doctors would be able to control the speed of the injection throughout the duration of the delivery, so it can be quickened or slowed depending on the drug and the patient. "We can also change the velocity over the course of a single injection, so it breaches the skin at one velocity, and then disperses the drug at another," Hogan said. "We accelerate the coil to the desired speed, hold it there for a defined time, and the decelerate to a lower velocity to disperse and absorb the drug into the tissue."

But besides giving doctors better control over injections, the best part of this technology is that it is virtually painless -- in fact, patients won't feel much of anything at all. Hunter explains why: "The drug comes out of this fine jet -- about the same diameter as a mosquito proboscis -- and as many of you know, you don't feel when a mosquito inserts its proboscis into your skin because it's so very narrow," Hunter said. "Our jet is of a similar diameter."

The thinness of the jet makes it perfect for some of the most scariest procedures that involve needles, which is why MIT's research team is developing other ways to utilize this technology. "We've also developed this device so it can for delivery of drugs right through the eye into the retina," Hunter said. "We've succeeded in delivering drugs through the tympanic membrane in your ear, so that we can deliver drugs to the middle and inner ear. And we've also done something that we think is pretty cool: We can take a drug in powdered form, put it in this device, and the device -- because of its very, very fast response -- is able to vibrate that powder so it behaves like a liquid, and then we inject it into tissue as though it was a liquid, even though it's a powder."

Even though this is not the first attempt to create a painless needle, or a new take on the needle, MIT believes this technology is superior with its highly-controlled system for limiting the injection velocity and dosage, but also it's ability to bring ease to patients with needle phobias. An instantaneous, painless injection beats a stinging shot any day of the week.

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Tidal power another awesome resource for Power

Although On paper, it looks like a blindingly obvious idea: take a version of a wind turbine and plant it on the seabed so that its blades spin in the flow of the tides and so generate electricity. The turbines, well below the waves, are also out of sight and probably out of mind. And the tidal currents are of course utterly carbon-free. For an island nation surrounded by some of the world's most powerful tides, optimistic estimates say this form of power could - and should - play a big part in keeping British lights on. It is one reason why Scotland has been described as a Saudi Arabia of renewable energy potential. Well, I've been to the baking Saudi oil fields and it was hard to conjure up a resemblance during a visit this week to Orkney, the front line of tidal energy research to the north of the Scottish mainland.

                                                                    

A launch took us between the islands where the waters surge at high speed between the Atlantic Ocean and the North Sea and back again every six hours.

In Tough climate
The first challenge is the weather. This is an unbelievably harsh environment in which to build anything, let alone manage a vast fleet of tidal machines beneath the waves. As we lurched through a heavy swell along the shores of the tiny island of Eday, icy winds racing at up to 40mph brought a succession of heavy showers of rain, sleet and even hail. In the middle of May. Harnessing this massive source of energy looks like a no-brainer but will be a lot harder than laying a pipeline in the desert. We were being taken to see one of the latest devices to go through the trial of everything Orkney could throw at it: a Norwegian turbine called the Hammerfest 1000, a giant three-bladed propeller perched atop nearly 1000 tons of steel structure sitting on the seabed. Except that we couldn't see it because it is well below the surface, deep enough to avoid any shipping.
Only the ghostly images from a remotely-operated vehicle - a robotic submarine - confirm that the giant machine is down there, spinning in the turbulent sea. This turbine is being tested by the energy firm Scottish Power. It was chosen because it had survived off Norway for half-a-dozen years without falling apart. In an infant industry, that counts for something. Scottish Power's plan is to deploy ten of the devices off Islay next year and then, later, up to 100 in the Pentland Firth. As the boat heaves in the waves and the gusts tear at our waterproof clothing, I shout questions to the company's senior man on board, Keith Anderson.

The most obvious is one about scale, and it is something that relates to the dozen or so different marine renewable technologies now being tested in Orkney. If each Hammerfest machine delivers its advertised 1MW of power, then wouldn't you need 1000 of them to hope to match the output of a typical gas or coal-fired power station? Could one really imagine great armies of turbines scattered across the ocean floor?

Predictability challenging

The real aim is to establish the predictability which you get with tidal power, and to feed that into the energy mix which includes the less predictable sources like wind or wave. The whole point of this device is to test that it can produce power, and we believe it can, and to show it's robust and can be maintained. "We believe the UK is in a fantastic place to capture all the advantages for manufacturing and investment." Maybe he is right but by this stage we're sheltering near the stern of the boat, clinging to the railings and wedging our boots against coils of rope to avoid sliding on the wet deck. 

Some Weird inventions

The first challenge is survival. And the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), established in Orkney in 2003, is hosting trials of a range of weird and wonderful inventions so that companies can investigate which of them can cope. When I first visited EMEC in 2009, only a handful of technologies was being tested. Now all 14 of its 'berths' - areas of sea connected by cable to the shore - are booked, a sign of growing interest in this fledgling source of power. 

                                            More significant is that the list of companies involved in this work has been transformed from a collection of relatively small and little-known concerns, bravely struggling with the elements and unconvinced investors, to a roll-call of some of the biggest names in engineering and energy. Rolls Royce and Kawasaki Heavy Industries are among the giants now exploring the development of tidal power. Voith Hydro, makers of the vast turbines fitted to gargantuan dams like the Three Gorges in China, is also involved. Siemens is now backing SeaGen, the first commercial tidal system, deployed at Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland. The attraction for most is a gold rush of generous subsidies. Each unit of power fed into the grid from a marine renewable machine earns about five times more than power generated by a fossil fuel. The question is whether this will create a mature and viable set of technologies, and how soon.

New revolution

This must be a little like the pioneering days of steam or aviation: the earliest creations have passed the first credibility test and now the big powers of industry are getting interested. As we roll and lurch back to shore, most people on board, including this reporter, felt more subdued than at the start of the journey, and more admiring of the teams determined not just to endure Orkney's wild seas but to harness them. A final thought: if this particular industrial revolution does take shape, and these machines multiply across the ocean floor in an unprecedented change in the seascape and the way we get our power, we'll need a new word to describe them.

        'Farms' wouldn't quite serve for a collection of a thousand giant machines. Earlier, I mentioned 'armies' but maybe that's too militaristic. 'Hordes' is perhaps slightly pejorative. 'Fleets' is suitably marine but these things won't move as ships do. There is no rush however: deployments on this kind of scale are at least a decade away, probably more.

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Now, Viruses to power tiny device

The researchers claim their advance could help lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs.

Scientists in the US have developed a way to generate electricity using viruses. The researchers built a generator with a postage stamp-sized electrode and based on a small film of specially engineered viruses. When a finger tapped the electrode, the viruses converted the mechanical energy into electricity. The research by a team in California has been published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Materials that can convert mechanical energy into electricity are known as "piezoelectric".

"More research is needed, but our work is a promising first step toward the development of personal power generators, actuators for use in nano-devices, and other devices based on viral electronics," said Dr Seung-Wuk Lee at the University of California, Berkeley. The virus used in the research was an M13 bacteriophage, which attacks bacteria but is benign to humans. The Berkeley team used genetic engineering techniques to add four negatively charged molecules to one end of the corkscrew-shaped proteins that coat the virus. These additional molecules increased the charge difference between the proteins' positive and negative ends, boosting the voltage of the virus.

        

Another advantage of using viruses for such tasks is that they arrange themselves into an orderly film that enables the generator to work. This attribute, known as "self-assembly" is much sought after in the field of nanotechnology. The scientists enhanced the system by stacking films composed of single layers of the virus on top of each other. They found that a stack about 20 layers thick exhibited the strongest piezoelectric effect. For the demonstration, they took a multilayered film of viruses measuring 1 sq cm and sandwiched it between two gold-plated electrodes. These were connected by wires to a liquid-crystal display. When pressure was applied to the generator, it was able to produce up to a quarter of the voltage of a common battery. This was enough current to flash the number "1" on the display.

                                                                                                          

This isn't much, but Dr Lee said he was hopeful of improving on the "proof-of-principle" device. The researchers claim their advance could help lead to tiny devices that harvest electrical energy from the vibrations of everyday tasks such as shutting a door or climbing stairs. 

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Milestone in Wi-Fi Technology with 'T-rays'

Researchers in Japan have smashed the record for wireless data transmission in the terahertz band, an uncharted part of the electro-magnetic spectrum. The data rate is 20 times higher than the best commonly used wi-fi standard. As consumers become ever more hungry for high data rates, standard lower-frequency bands have become crowded. The research, published in Electronics Letters, adds to the idea that this "T-ray" band could offer huge swathes of bandwidth for data transmission.

                                                                                                           

The band lies between the microwave and far-infrared regions of the spectrum, and is currently completely unregulated by telecommunications agencies. Despite the name, the band informally makes use of frequencies from about 300 gigahertz (300GHz or about 60 times higher than the current highest wi-fi standard) to about 3THz, 10 times higher again. It is used principally for imaging in research contexts, as terahertz waves penetrate many materials as effectively as X-rays but deposit far less energy and therefore cause less damage.

                                                                                                                                            

Until recently, the technology required both to generate and detect these "T-rays" has been too bulky, costly or power-hungry to offer a plausible alternative to existing devices tucked within smartphones or wi-fi routers. That looks set to change; in November electronic component firm ROHMdemonstrated a 1.5Gb/s (1.5 billion bits per second) transfer rate at a frequency of 300GHz. Terahertz wi-fi would probably only work over ranges of about 10m, but could in theory support data rates up to 100Gb/s - close to 15 times higher than the next-generation 802.11ac wi-fi standard that is under development. The new work, by researchers from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, demonstrated 3Gb/s transmission at 542GHz. Tunnelling diodes have the unusual characteristic that the voltage they produce can sometimes go down as current is increased. RTDs are designed such that this process makes the diode "resonate", which in the current work's design means it sprays out waves in the terahertz band.

                                                          

The team is now working to improve their proof-of-principle device and extend its range deeper into the terahertz regime, as well as increasing its power output.

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Convert 2-D Patterns Into 3-D Objects, Using Light

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a simple way to convert two-dimensional patterns into three-dimensional (3-D) objects using only light. “This is a novel application of existing materials, and has potential for rapid, high-volume manufacturing processes or packaging applications,” says Dr. Michael Dickey, an assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper describing the research.

The process is remarkably simple. Researchers take a pre-stressed plastic sheet and run it through a conventional inkjet printer to print bold black lines on the material. The material is then cut into a desired pattern and placed under an infrared light, such as a heat lamp. A video demonstration can be seen here. The bold black lines absorb more energy than the rest of the material, causing the plastic to contract – creating a hinge that folds the sheets into 3-D shapes. This technique can be used to create a variety of objects, such as cubes or pyramids, without ever having to physically touch the material. The technique is compatible with commercial printing techniques, such as screen printing, roll-to-roll printing, and inkjet printing, that are inexpensive and high-throughput but inherently 2-D.

By varying the width of the black lines, or hinges, researchers are able to change how far each hinge folds. For example, they can create a hinge that folds 90 degrees for a cube, or a hinge that folds 120 degrees for a pyramid. The wider the hinge, the further it folds. Wider hinges also fold faster, because there is more surface area to absorb energy.

“You can also pattern the lines on either side of the material,” Dickey says, “which causes the hinges to fold in different directions. This allows you to create more complex structures.”

The researchers developed a computer-based model to explain how the process works. There were two key findings. First, the surface temperature of the hinge must exceed the glass transition temperature of the material, which is the point at which the material begins to soften. Second, the heat has to be localized to the hinge in order to have fast and effective folding. If all of the material is heated to the glass transition temperature, no folding will occur.

“This finding stems from work we were doing on shape memory polymers, in part to satisfy our own curiosity. As it turns out, it works incredibly well,” Dickey says.

The paper, “Self-folding of polymer sheets using local light absorption,” was published Nov. 10 in the journal Soft Matter, and was co-authored by Dickey; NC State Celanese Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Jan Genzer; NC State Ph.D. student Ying Liu; and NC State undergraduate Julie Boyles. The work was supported, in part, by the U.S.

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