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Effective cure for baldness just a hair’s breadth away The screen touches back, feel it midair Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE Trends |
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Effective cure for baldness just a hair’s breadth away An effective treatment for chronic hair loss in both men and women has come a step closer with a study showing that it is possible to grow new hair follicles from human skin cells. The results promise to break a 40-year deadlock in attempts to regenerate the crucial structures in the skin that cause hair to grow, which could lead to radically different therapies for treating unwanted baldness, especially in women. Human hair follicles have proved notoriously difficult to replicate in the laboratory, but a new technique has shown that they can be stimulated to grow in skin tissue and made to produce hair shafts. Instead of simply transplanting hair follicles from one part of the body to another — which is how hair transplants are currently carried out — a patient’s own skin tissue could be used to produce virtually unlimited quantities of follicles for hair-transplant operations, scientists said. An Anglo-American team of researchers believes the research represents a “milestone advance” in the attempt to stimulate active hair growth in people suffering from chronic hair loss, such as burn victims and women with alopecia, as well as male baldness. “This approach has the potential to transform the medical treatment of hair loss,” said Professor Angela Christiano of Columbia University in New York, one of the lead authors of the study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Current hair-loss medications tend to slow the loss of hair follicles or potentially stimulate the growth of existing hairs, but they do not create new hair follicles. Neither do conventional hair transplants, which relocate a set number of hairs from the back of the scalp to the front,” Professor Christiano said. “Our method, in contrast, has the potential to actually grow new follicles using a patient’s own cells. This could greatly expand the utility of hair-restoration surgery to women and to younger patients — now it is largely restricted to the treatment of male-pattern baldness in patients with stable disease,” she said. About nine out of ten women with serious hair loss cannot undergo conventional hair transplants because they do not have enough of the necessary hair follicles elsewhere in the body. This new method could generate large numbers of new hair follicles, or regenerate existing follicles, from just a few hundred donor hair, Professor Christiano said. “It could make hair transplantation available to individuals with a limited number of follicles, including those with female-pattern hair loss, scarring alopecia and hair loss due to burns,” she said. Specialised cells called the dermal papillae can be induced to form hair follicles in laboratory rats but the same process has evaded scientists working on human dermal papillae for 40 years, said Professor Colin Jahoda of Durham University, the co-leader of the study. Human dermal papilla cells do not respond in the same way as rat cells when grown in conventional, flat culture dishes. But when they are grown in three-dimensional “spheroids” — drops hanging down from a glass slide — they can be re-programmed into dermal papillae that can trigger the formation of hair follicles when transplanted into human skin grown on the backs of mice, Professor Jahoda said. Seven patients donated skin cells for the research and in five cases the resulting hair follicles caused the regrowth of human hair on the back of the experimental mice which lasted for at least six weeks, he said. “It’s a key step because it is saying that you can multiply the process. It’s not just about one-for-one replacement. But you need to get hair that is the right colour and texture and this will need further work before human clinical trials can begin,” he said. “We also think that this study is an important step toward the goal of creating a replacement skin that contains hair follicles for use with, for example, burn patients,” he said. — The Independent
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The screen touches back, feel it midair It goes by the decidedly unsexy name ‘ultrahaptics’, but a new technological prototype announced by researchers from the University of Bristol is reminiscent of the gloves Tom Cruise uses in sci-fi classic “Minority Report” — and is nothing short of astonishing. The device is essentially a touchscreen so sensitive that a user doesn’t actually need to touch it. Instead, it is manipulated via the vibrations from soundwaves alone — and feedback from it can be ‘felt’ in midair. Ultrahaptics uses an array of tiny speakers — called ‘ultrasonic transducers’ — which use waves of ultrasound to create vibrations that can be felt at quite precise points in midair. And now engineers at the Bristol Interaction and Graphics (BIG) group have found a way to beam the signals through a screen, creating an invisible layer of vibrations above it and allowing it to be used as a computer interface. Haptic feedback is something you’ll be familiar with from smartphones and game controllers. It’s what happens when you press a virtual button on a smartphone screen, for instance, touch-sense feedback that tells you when you’ve done something. However, this new technology represents something of a breakthrough in the field, which has always previously required physical contact with the device feeding back. Tom Carter, a Ph.D student with the BIG research group, told The Engineer that there were plenty of possible applications for the new technology, including in-things like in-car sat-navs for drivers who don’t want to take their eyes off the road. “Even if you provide [haptic] feedback on a touchscreen you have to fumble around pressing all the buttons, whereas with our system you can wave your hand vaguely in the air and you’ll get the feeling on the hand,” he said. “We can give different points of feeling at the same time that feel different so you can assign a meaning to them. So the “play” button feels different from the “volume” button and you can feel them just by waving your hand.” It works in a quite simple fashion. Waves of ultrasound are projected above the screen and displace the air, creating a pressure difference. This is called acoustic radiation pressure. By focusing ultrasound waves at a specific point in midair, a noticeable pressure difference is created. Then the device creates a focal point by triggering ultrasound tranducers with specific phase delays so that all sound waves arrive at the point concurrently. We perceive the waves as vibration on the skin, and by varying the modulation frequency or pulsing the feedback, different ‘textures’ can be created. The technology is still in its infancy, but researchers are developing ideas, including midair gestures. If all goes to plan, it could usher in the kind of technology used by Tom Cruise’s character in the film “Minority Report”, in which he’s seen manipulating complex layers of crime-scene information on glass at a distance, using
special gloves. — The Independent
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THIS UNIVERSE How does the Sun burn even as
there is no oxygen in space due to vacuum? Oxygen is not burning in the Sun in the manner we normally see it in a fire on earth. Let us try to understand the manner in which chemicals like oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, etc., operate in the working of the Sun. Most of the fuel in the Sun, to start with, is hydrogen. Other elements of low mass act as catalysts for converting atoms of hydrogen into abundant production of helium and low mass chemical elements and lot of energy. Indeed, while sitting on a cold planet receiving life-giving light and heat from the Sun, we might begin to think of our Sun as a factory for heat and light production. That it certainly is, but its real purpose of existence can be considered as a factory for manufac-turing the stuff of which most of familiar world is made. Confusing, you would say, and you would be right. So, please wipe away your simple ideas about burning when thinking about transformations in astrophysics. Can a candle burn in zero gravity? Of course, the candle will need oxygen for burning. However, it may seem strange that the candle will not produce its characteristic flame if you are in a spacecraft in microgravity. The reason for that uncharacteristic behaviour of the candle would lie in the fact that there would be no convection in zero gravity; the flame of the candle comes from the fact that the heated air rises while it is replaced by the cool air coming from below. In a weightless environment there is no ‘up’ or ‘below’.
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Trends WASHINGTON: US researchers studying young bonobos in an African sanctuary have found striking similarities between the emotional development of the bonobos and that of children, suggesting these great apes regulate their emotions in a human-like way. Researchers from Emory University employed video analysis to show bonobos handle their own emotions as well as how they react to the emotions of others. They found bonobos that recovered quickly and easily from their own emotional upheavals, such as after losing a fight, and showed more empathy for their fellow great apes. Planet hunters find Earth-like twin beyond the solar system CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida:
For the first time, scientists have found a planet beyond the solar system that not only is the same size as Earth, but also has the same proportions of iron and rock, a key step in an ongoing quest to find potentially habitable sister worlds. The planet, known as Kepler-78b, circles a star that is slightly smaller than the Sun located in the constellation Cygnus, about 400 light years away. Learning photography may keep an ageing mind sharp WASHINGTON: Learning a mentally demanding skill such as photography can improve cognitive functioning in older adults, a new study has found. However, less demanding activities such as listening to classical music or completing word puzzles probably won’t bring noticeable benefits to an ageing mind, scientists said. “It seems it is not enough just to get out and do something — it is important to get out and do something that is unfamiliar and mentally challenging, and that provides broad stimulation mentally and socially,” said psychological scientist Denise Park of the University of Texas at Dallas. — Agencies
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An effective treatment for chronic hair loss in both men and women has come a step closer with a study showing that it is possible to grow new hair follicles from human skin cells. The results promise to break a 40-year deadlock in attempts to regenerate the crucial structures in the skin that cause hair to grow, which could lead to radically different therapies for treating unwanted baldness, especially in women.
It goes by the decidedly unsexy name ‘ultrahaptics’, but a new technological prototype announced by researchers from the University of Bristol is reminiscent of the gloves Tom Cruise uses in sci-fi classic “Minority Report” — and is nothing short of astonishing. The device is essentially a touchscreen so sensitive that a user doesn’t actually need to touch it. Instead, it is manipulated via the vibrations from soundwaves alone — and feedback from it can be ‘felt’ in midair.
