Author Archives: Ryłko Jakub

10 February 2019
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Smart pills to help diabetics?

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Scientists from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Novo Nordisk collaborate on creating a new kind of drug which aim is to make diabetics’ lives easier and less painful.

Nowadays people suffering from diabetes have to inject insulin multiple times per day to maintain a proper blood glucose level. For the last 100 years scientists tried to find a way to make insulin possible to be taken orally, which is quite a challenge, because many pharmaceutical compounds can’t survive the stomach’s harsh, acidic environment.

The new device created by previously mentioned scientists is about to finally allow diabetics to put injections off and make the whole process a lot easier. The smart pill works by attaching itself to the inside of the stomach and then injecting a payload through the gastric wall. Once the sugar glass that surrounds it is dissolved by acid in the stomach a tiny needle is released and a patient gets a proper dose of insulin.

The current injection is not the most comfortable process because of the pain related to inserting the needle into veins, right? Taking this smart pill orally means the injection will be done inside your stomach, which exactly means that you will not feel any pain. Why? According to Robert Langer, coauthor of the whole project, there are no pain receptors within the gastrointestinal tract.

Leopard Tortoise (Geochelone pardalis), Kruger National Park, South Africa

Moreover, the shape of the pill is inspired by the shape of a leopard tortoise’s shell, which automatically self-rights no matter how it lands – that kind of structure ensures that the device will attach to the gastric wall every time. It’s worth noting that the whole project is still at the proof-of-concept stage and has only been tested in animals, so the device won’t be available in the nearest future.

So, what are your thoughts on this topic? Do you think that in the futue smart pills will be a common thing? Let me know down below!

 

Sources:

https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/612917/smart-pills-filled-with-tiny-needles-could-inject-medicine-directly-into-your/

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/02/pills-armed-tiny-needles-could-inject-insulin-other-important-meds-directly-stomach?r3f_986=https://www.google.com/

 

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25 January 2019
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The biggest problem of the ecommerce fashion industry

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Year by year we can observe a huge increases in fashion sales. Online sales are slowly becoming the most important part of fashion companies’ revenues. But the Internet creates kind of a wall, which is slowing the whole process and contains us from successful shopping.

In the recent years, fashion and apparel has become the fastest growing e-commerce category and the second largest after consumer electronics, growing form $375.6 billion in 2012 to $481 billion last year. Analysts predicts that the revenue will reach over $700 billion by 2022.

Buying clothes online means that we are not able to try them on and make sure the size fits us. This is why fashion companies have to struggle with a huge percentage of returned products (especially in the winter holiday season), which is something between 30-50% of the whole sales, which causes tremendously high costs connected not only with a return shipping, but also other processes needed to get the product back to the stock. Returns are growing even faster than the revenues, increasing 94.8% over the most recently measured five-year period. Moreover, over 4B pounds of returned apparel end up in landfills annually.

“What we hope to do with technology is make that growth rate slower.” Said Roger Graell, director of e-commerce at Spain’s Mango, which expects to make at least one-fifth of sales online by 2020.

Since 2012 there was plenty of startups which were trying to solve the problem with size fitting. Millions of dollars were invested in projects which were making kind of virtual fitting rooms (Avametric, Fitiquette), 3D scanners (Body Labs, Nettelo) and AI based algorithms (Virtusize, Pixibo). Most of them do not survive these days.

However, in 2016 three Ukrainian engineers created a technology, which allows people to scan their bodies using a smartphone’s camera. Their startup (called 3DLook) is implementing its technology to fashion retailers’ online stores. Thanks to that customers are able to measure themselves by taking 2 photos (from the front and from the side) and thanks to that can find out what is the perfect size for them. Technology is simply comparing customer’s measurement with producer’s size table.

3DLook claims to use advanced machine learning, AI and image processing to achieve their results. Recently, they got funding of $1 million for further development. Their technology can be a huge step forward successful apparel online shopping and, according to my research, fashion retailers hope it to be so.

And what is your opinion on this case? How many times did you buy a wrong size of some new clothes? Do you think that such technology is going to solve this problem? Let me know down below!

 

Sources:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-onlineapparel-returns-focus/online-clothing-retailers-hunt-for-better-fit-to-cut-costly-returns-idUSKCN1OK1E2

https://www.ted.com/talks/aparna_mehta_where_do_your_online_returns_go?language=en#t-98979

https://www.retaildive.com/news/forrester-online-fashion-spending-outpaces-overall-digital-sales/522227/

https://independentretailer.com/2018/12/27/ecommerces-serial-return-problem/

https://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/fashion-tech/can-technology-solve-fit-problem-fashion-e-commerce

https://www.shopify.com/enterprise/ecommerce-fashion-industry

https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/30/body-scanning-app-3dlook-raises-1-million-to-measure-your-corpus/

https://3dlook.me

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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9 January 2019
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A NEW GREEN REVOLUTION TO BEGIN?

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Tobacco plants that grow as much as 40% larger than usual have been designed by genetic engineers in Illinois. This is the first step in producing larger plants like potatoes which could be distributed to the poor countries throughout the world.

The genetically modified plants are wider and taller from the regular ones. As a team at the University of Illinois and the United States Department of Agriculture said, they gave tobacco something called “photorespiratory bypass”. It is a kind of a cassette of genetic changes that let the plants turn sunlight into energy more efficiently.

What is interesting, in 2016 University of Illinois bioengineers managed to make tobacco plants grow 20% bigger by helping them respond more quickly to changes in light and shade. This time actually they made plants that use less energy during photorespiration, which is a process that plants need to clear out a toxin called glycolate created during photosynthesis. To achieve this, the team had to add about 16,000 letters of novel DNA instructions to tobacco plants.

You are probably wondering why all of these experiments were carried out with the use of tobacco. Not only do tobacco plants grow quickly, but also are easy to genetically modify. The team is known to be already working on similar gene changes to potatoes, soybeans , and cowpeas.

However, as Heike Sederoff, a plant scientist at North Carolina State University claims, there is a long way for researchers to prove that these modifications actually work. He believes that we should not expect such plants in the markets earlier than 20 years from now.

 

Nevertheless, there are plenty of philanthropes and foundation which are hoping that genetic engineering could lead to a huge step forward in farm productivity. Scientists at Illinois were donated by more than $80 million by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

The goal of the whole project, which is called RIPE (Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency) is to increase the yields of staple food crops and improve global food security. As we can find out from their website, the Green Revolution’s advances have already reached their biological limits. They find it crucial to keep pace with this century’s growing population (which is forecasted to grow to nearly 10 billion by 2050) and provide food to the biggest possible number of people by making new innovations to agriculture industry.

There are also other organizations trying to find new solutions, like C4 consortium led by Paul Quick at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, which is developing a process called C4 photosynthesis. It boosts plants’ growth by capturing carbon dioxide and concentrating it in specialized cells in the leaves, which allows the photosynthetic process to operate much more efficiently. Researchers claim that engineering C4 photosynthesis into rice and wheat could increase yields per hectare by roughly 50 percent. Alternatively, they believe that it would be possible to use far less water and fertilizer to produce the same amount of food.

What are your thoughts on this topic? Would you buy such genetically modified plants without any concerns? Let me know down below!

 

Sources:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/535011/supercharged-photosynthesis/

https://ripe.illinois.edu/objectives/our-story

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612710/gene-engineers-make-super-sized-plants-that-are-40-larger/

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18 December 2018
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LONGEVITY CLOSER THEN WE THINK?

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Humans are thinking about immortality since the dawn of time. Thanks to the current progress in technology we are witnessing a discovery that potentially could rewrite our lives. Senolytics are new class of drugs which may provide us with a better, healthier lives.

Judith Campisi is a professor at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging in Novato, California, and cofounder of a company called Unity Biotechnology in 2011. She is known as a leading figure in the biology of ageing since the early 1990s, when her research revealed that cells enter a phase known as senescence that prevents them from becoming cancerous.

Her research is currently focused on the role of cellular senescence in cancer and other age-related diseases. So, what cellular senescence basically means? According to Wikipedia, it is „one phenomenon by which normal cells cease to divide”. In 1960’s, Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorhead found out that normal human fetal fibroblasts in culture reach a maximum of approximately 50 cell population doublings before becoming senescent. This phenomenon was called Hayflick limit and is known or overturning a 60-year-old dogma which maintained that all cultured cells are immortal.

It is worth noting that senescent cells in some point come to the kind of twilight state where they are still active but no longer dividing. Campisi’s and other scientists’ researches showed that this was a ‘strategy’ of the evolution process to derail incipient cancer cells, which are known to spread thanks to the cells division.

(PRNewsFoto/UNITY Biotechnology)

Now, Campisi is conducting researches on new class of drugs called senolytics, which eliminate senescent cells and restore more youthful characteristics (in animal experiments). The company called Unity Biotechnology, which she cofounded in 2011, launched a human trial of its first senolytic drug last July.

This actions can cause a moral dilemma whether we should live longer than we already do. Campisi points out that we should not confuse aging and death. She expects that, thanks to senolytics, we will be able to extend our “health span”, which basically means that there is a possibility that we will extend the duration of good health condition of our bodies while living the same amount of time as we currently do.

Today we can observe a debate about the limit to the human life span. Some say it can be 110 years, others claims it to be 150 years. Speaking of this case, Campisi provides us with examples such as world record for extending the life span of a little worm called C. elegans, which is 10-fold. On the other hand, most of the really intensive experiences extend mouse life span (which is about 97% genetically identical to human being) by 20-30%. In the end we just simply do not know what the maximum life span of human being, but there is a possibility that we can extend it even more than we already did, for example thanks to the discovery of vaccines.

 

So, what are your expressions on this topic? Would you like to live longer? Why? Or why not? Would you like to extend your “health span” or you believe that ageing is a necessary part of our lives? Let me know in the comment section!

 

Sources:

https://www.wikipedia.org

https://www.technologyreview.com

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2 December 2018
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RIVIAN – THE ULTIMATE VEHICLE?

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Last week, on the 2018 Los Angeles Auto Show, we could witness a birth of a new player in the electric cars’ game – Rivian.

To start with, I’ll explain what is hiding under this rather modern name. Rivian’s owner describes his products (because they already launched two, not one) as “The world’s first Electric Adventure Vehicles”. As it turned out, they’ve been working on their project for the last seven years in their headquaters in California (obviously), developing their product with the smallest details and avoiding mistakes previously made by competitors.

So, they made two models – a seven-seat SUV called R1S and R1T, which is a five-seat pick-up. Both of them are based on Rivian’s invention named ‘skateboard’ platform (sounds cool, doesn’t it?), which basically means that parts like the battery, suspension or drive units are placed below the height of each wheel. Not only does it provide much more passenger space, but also a low centre of gravity, which might make the difference in the car that weights 2.6-tonnes.

Potential buyers can opt for three battery sizes: 180kWh (400 mile range) and 135kWh (300 mile range) and a 105kWh battery (230 mile range). Rivian also promises that their products’ interiors are provided with the best quality materials, such as actual wood on the dashboard.

Right, but it all sounds like we’ve already heard that story about a complete revolution in the electric cars industry, best materials, biggest batteries and even bigger numbers attached. Rivian’s owner, RJ Scaringe claims  that he “started Rivian to deliver products that the world didn’t already have.” So, what is so special about this brand?

First of all, their cars are provided with kind of artificial intelligence of the new level. While driving the Rivian, an algorithm constantly analyze your driving style and learn how to better optimize its charge. Welcome to the future!

 

As the Electric Adventure Vehicles, they are expected to provide you some load space, right? Well, in the R1T, there’s 330-litres under the hood (because there’s no engine inside), a 350-litre space in the R1T’s so called ‘gear tunnel’, and a 200-litre bin beneath the rear bed floor.

 

Moreover, both models are equipped with tools like cameras, lidar, radar, ultrasonic and GPS, which allow for ‘Level 3’ autonomy. What does it exactly mean? In Level 3 cars, you’re still needed as a driver, but you are able to transfer safety-critical functions to the vehicle, depending on traffic and other conditions, so they are really close to producing fully autonomous cars with a highest Level 5 autonomy.

And the last but not least – speed. These things are TREMENDOUSLY quick. Both are claimed to reach 60mph in 3 seconds. In a car of this weight, these numbers are far more than impressive.

 

You can already order both of Rivian’s models. The pick-up is expected to be delivered in 2020, and the SUV no earlier than a year after.

So, what do you think about the whole project, apart from the these cars’ names which you probably associate more with a Star Wars’ characters rather than cars? Will Rivian find its niche or make a huge loss? Let me know below!

 

References:

https://www.topgear.com

https://cleantechnica.com/2017/12/02/autonomous-driving-levels-0-5-implications/

 

 

 

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