Printable functional 'bionic' ear melds electronics and biology

May 1, 2013 ? Scientists at Princeton University used off-the-shelf printing tools to create a functional ear that can "hear" radio frequencies far beyond the range of normal human capability.

The researchers' primary purpose was to explore an efficient and versatile means to merge electronics with tissue. The scientists used 3D printing of cells and nanoparticles followed by cell culture to combine a small coil antenna with cartilage, creating what they term a bionic ear.

"In general, there are mechanical and thermal challenges with interfacing electronic materials with biological materials," said Michael McAlpine, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton and the lead researcher. "Previously, researchers have suggested some strategies to tailor the electronics so that this merger is less awkward. That typically happens between a 2D sheet of electronics and a surface of the tissue. However, our work suggests a new approach -- to build and grow the biology up with the electronics synergistically and in a 3D interwoven format."

McAlpine's team has made several advances in recent years involving the use of small-scale medical sensors and antenna. Last year, a research effort led by McAlpine and Naveen Verma, an assistant professor of electrical engineering, and Fio Omenetto of Tufts University, resulted in the development of a "tattoo" made up of a biological sensor and antenna that can be affixed to the surface of a tooth.

This project, however, is the team's first effort to create a fully functional organ: one that not only replicates a human ability, but extends it using embedded electronics.

"The design and implementation of bionic organs and devices that enhance human capabilities, known as cybernetics, has been an area of increasing scientific interest," the researchers wrote in the article which appears in the scholarly journal Nano Letters. "This field has the potential to generate customized replacement parts for the human body, or even create organs containing capabilities beyond what human biology ordinarily provides."

Standard tissue engineering involves seeding types of cells, such as those that form ear cartilage, onto a scaffold of a polymer material called a hydrogel. However, the researchers said that this technique has problems replicating complicated three dimensional biological structures. Ear reconstruction "remains one of the most difficult problems in the field of plastic and reconstructive surgery," they wrote.

To solve the problem, the team turned to a manufacturing approach called 3D printing. These printers use computer-assisted design to conceive of objects as arrays of thin slices. The printer then deposits layers of a variety of materials -- ranging from plastic to cells -- to build up a finished product. Proponents say additive manufacturing promises to revolutionize home industries by allowing small teams or individuals to create work that could previously only be done by factories.

Creating organs using 3D printers is a recent advance; several groups have reported using the technology for this purpose in the past few months. But this is the first time that researchers have demonstrated that 3D printing is a convenient strategy to interweave tissue with electronics.

The technique allowed the researchers to combine the antenna electronics with tissue within the highly complex topology of a human ear. The researchers used an ordinary 3D printer to combine a matrix of hydrogel and calf cells with silver nanoparticles that form an antenna. The calf cells later develop into cartilage.

Manu Mannoor, a graduate student in McAlpine's lab and the paper's lead author, said that additive manufacturing opens new ways to think about the integration of electronics with biological tissue and makes possible the creation of true bionic organs in form and function. He said that it may be possible to integrate sensors into a variety of biological tissues, for example, to monitor stress on a patient's knee meniscus.

David Gracias, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins and co-author on the publication, said that bridging the divide between biology and electronics represents a formidable challenge that needs to be overcome to enable the creation of smart prostheses and implants.

"Biological structures are soft and squishy, composed mostly of water and organic molecules, while conventional electronic devices are hard and dry, composed mainly of metals, semiconductors and inorganic dielectrics," he said. "The differences in physical and chemical properties between these two material classes could not be any more pronounced."

The finished ear consists of a coiled antenna inside a cartilage structure. Two wires lead from the base of the ear and wind around a helical "cochlea" -- the part of the ear that senses sound -- which can connect to electrodes. Although McAlpine cautions that further work and extensive testing would need to be done before the technology could be used on a patient, he said the ear in principle could be used to restore or enhance human hearing. He said electrical signals produced by the ear could be connected to a patient's nerve endings, similar to a hearing aid. The current system receives radio waves, but he said the research team plans to incorporate other materials, such as pressure-sensitive electronic sensors, to enable the ear to register acoustic sounds.

In addition to McAlpine, Verma, Mannoor and Gracias the research team includes: Winston Soboyejo, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton; Karen Malatesta, a faculty fellow in molecular biology at Princeton; Yong Lin Kong, a graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton; and Teena James, a graduate student in chemical and biomolecular engineering at Johns Hopkins.

The team also included Ziwen Jiang, a high school student at the Peddie School in Hightstown who participated as part of an outreach program for young researchers in McAlpine's lab.

"Ziwen Jiang is one of the most spectacular high school students I have ever seen," McAlpine said. "We would not have been able to complete this project without him, particularly in his skill at mastering CAD designs of the bionic ears."

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Story Source:

The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Princeton University, Engineering School, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.

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Journal Reference:

1. Manu S Mannoor, Ziwen Jiang, Teena James, Yong Lin Kong, Karen A Malatesta, Winston Soboyejo, Naveen Verma, David H Gracias, Michael C. McAlpine. A 3D Printed Bionic Ear. Nano Letters, 2013; : 130501101451003 DOI: 10.1021/nl4007744

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/matter_energy/technology/~3/zUICGgK3jVo/130501193208.htm

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APNewsBreak: Judge axes federal suit over lake

LOS ANGELES (AP) ? A federal judge has thrown out a lawsuit filed by Los Angeles against air quality regulators who are requiring the city to do more to control dust on a lake that was siphoned dry a century ago to provide water for the booming metropolis.

U.S. District Judge Anthony W. Ishii granted a motion Wednesday to dismiss the lawsuit in the latest chapter in a decades-old spat over water rights in the arid region 200 miles north of Los Angeles. The lawsuit was filed last year in U.S. District Court in Fresno.

The conflict began in 1913, when Los Angeles began diverting water from Owens Lake, which then went dry in 1926. The lakebed has since been plagued with massive dust storms and poor air quality despite efforts by the city to keep dust down.

The scandal created by the diversion project was fodder for the 1974 film "Chinatown," and an aqueduct carrying away the water was dynamited repeatedly by angry residents after increased pumping in the 1920s combined with a drought ruined many farms.

Since a 1998 agreement, Los Angeles has spent more than $1 billion to tamp down the dust as part of the nation's largest dust mitigation project, mainly by putting water back into more than 40 square miles of the lakebed.

The utility is currently working to control dust on another 3-square-mile parcel, said Ted Schade, air pollution control officer for the Great Basin Air Pollution Control District.

The city alleged in its lawsuit that 2011 orders from the pollution control district to further increase the mitigation were excessive and questioned whether Los Angeles was even responsible for problems in that area of the lake.

Joe Ramallo, spokesman for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said in an email Thursday that the judge's ruling was largely procedural and didn't address the core issue.

"We remain committed to exploring all available means for stopping the enormous waste of California's scarce water supply and protecting consumers from the wasteful spending of Owens Valley regulators," he said.

The city has a lawsuit still pending in state court and has proposed a project that would reduce water use at Owens Lake by 50 percent by using vegetation, ground water, gravel and other means to reduce dust.

The federal lawsuit, which also named the California Air Resources Board, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, had asked the court for relief from the "systematic and unlawful issuance to the city of dust control orders and fee assessments."

The department said last year when it filed the action that additional dust control would cost up to $400 million when each ratepayer already provides $90 a year to improve air quality around Owens Lake. The city uses 30 billion gallons annually ? enough to fill the Rose Bowl each day to overflowing for one year ? to keep dust down, the city said.

The latest legal ruling could come at a particularly bad time for the city.

Survey results released Thursday showed snow pack in California was at 17 percent of normal, an ominous situation for a state that depends on a steady stream of snowmelt to replenish reservoirs throughout the summer.

Owens Lake air quality regulators agreed this summer will be particularly dry and are working with the city to use less water on dust, said Schade, whose pollution district covers Inyo, Mono and Alpine counties in a vast region northeast of Los Angeles.

One solution, in addition to placing vegetation and gravel, includes spot-treating areas that are producing the most dust, he said.

"We realize that this is a dry year," Schade said. "We acknowledge the fact that they are putting water on the lakebed, and we recognize the value of that water."

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Follow Gillian Flaccus on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/gflaccus

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/apnewsbreak-judge-axes-federal-suit-over-lake-234259095.html

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May Day activists cheer state immigration laws

SALEM, Ore. (AP) ? As Congress debates the first national immigration overhaul in decades, a state-level push advancing rights for people in the U.S. illegally has picked up momentum across the country.

Among the patchwork changes to state law taking effect from Maryland to Oregon are provisions that lower tuition rates, advance employment opportunities and repeal hard-line regulations approved within the last decade.

Crowds at May Day rallies across the nation cheered the developments and urged federal progress. Legislative action in several states, meanwhile, coincided with speeches and marches.

"I have a message for Congress and the president," said Jeff Stone, representing Oregon's nursery industry at a rally of about 2,000 in Salem.

"Stop talking, and start acting," he said.

Stone spoke shortly after Oregon's Democratic governor, John Kitzhaber, signed a bill that will grant immigrants the ability to drive legally in the state.

Many such state-level proposals go beyond what is being discussed on Capitol Hill, and the significant, if piecemeal, shift shows lawmakers reacting to a pendulum swing in public opinion that helped usher many of them into office. But experts also say state legislators have been spurred ahead by halting progress in Washington, D.C.

"The vacuum created by inactivity at the federal level is certainly a major factor, if not the major factor, in states' action on this issue," said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the New York division of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

At least 15 states are in various stages of considering bills that would further integrate immigrants, and several others already have passed such legislation this year. This group is larger than the handful of states moving the other direction, though there are exceptions.

Matt Mayer, a visiting fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said he doesn't think this year has been significantly different at the state-level than previous years, because such immigration proposals have been around for more than a decade.

"It's just states trying to deal with what they perceive to be the problem," Mayer said.

Georgia lawmakers, for example, expanded a law passed in 2011 to crack down on illegal immigration. And Arizona and Nebraska officials have refused to grant driver's licenses to young immigrants who are authorized to be in the country under the Obama administration's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals directive.

But this is nothing compared with the political climate of recent years where anti-illegal immigration attitudes dominated the national debate.

"This is an interesting evolution," Chishti said.

As recently as few years ago, lawmakers around the nation were passing strict regulations that made immigrants in the U.S. without legal permission the subject of police crackdowns and raids.

"The last few years were so harsh at the state level," said Wendy Feliz, a spokeswoman for the American Immigration Council.

Colorado legislators have been on both sides. In 2006, Democrats and Republicans came together and passed a law requiring local police to notify federal authorities when they arrested someone suspected of living illegally in the U.S. Last month, behind a push from newly elected Democrats, the law was repealed. Activists praised the move as especially symbolic, saying the law was precursor to more high-profile, hard-line regulations in Arizona and Alabama.

Feliz and other immigrants' rights activists are content to support the state-by-state changes, since they can have a more immediate effect on the 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally.

Federal legislation moves at a far slower pace in both approval and implementation. Also, proposals in the nation's capital affect policy, such as how a person becomes a citizen. The state-level changes deal more in daily concerns, such as the cost of education.

Under laws approved recently in Colorado and Oregon, immigrant students will qualify for resident tuition rates, reducing how much they pay for school by more than two-thirds in some cases. Such DREAM Act proposals have failed repeatedly in both states in recent years.

In Minnesota, such a tuition plan easily passed the state Senate on Wednesday, hours ahead of an immigrants' rights rally that attracted hundreds to the Capitol. The measure faces several legislative hurdles, and it has been rejected twice since 2007. But for the first time the proposal has support from the state's governor, a Democrat who took office in 2011 following a two-term Republican who opposed the plan.

Another immigrants' rights provision advancing in at least a dozen states allows people in the U.S. without legal permission to obtain a driver's card. Besides Oregon, lawmakers in Illinois and Maryland passed such legislation this year, and experts predict that other states also will pass plans.

In Colorado, lawmakers on Wednesday advanced such a proposal. The legislation is likely to become law, and the House committee vote came as a May Day immigration rally drew hundreds of people to its Capitol in support of such measures despite a spring snow storm.

Notably, Texas lawmakers introduced a version of the policy just two years after passing a slate of bills tightening immigration regulations.

"This driver's license stuff is remarkable because it was such a political issue just a few years ago," said Jonathan Blazer of the national American Civil Liberties Union.

The business community ? including Stone's Oregon Association of Nurseries ? has been a strong force behind the state's new driving law. They say it's an economic issue and that the proposal creates job opportunities that will boost the state.

But the changes are also politically motivated, Blazer said. To his point, voters in Colorado, Oregon and Minnesota all supported President Barack Obama in November and handed control of their statehouses to Democrats.

"If Republicans would change their stance on immigration, we would probably vote Republican," said Victor Mena, an Oregon resident. Mena supports immigrants' rights in part because he has family members who live in the U.S. without legal permission.

His attitude is indicative of a national trend, as more than 7 in 10 Hispanic voters supported Obama for re-election.

"Every level and stripe of every party has gotten the memo that Latinos are an important voting bloc," said Feliz, of the American Immigration Council.

The GOP has softened its stance on the issue, evidenced by the federal immigration overhaul negotiations and the bipartisan support some state-level proposals are receiving.

Still, there are those who disagree.

"We seem to be reaching out and inviting them to stay through policies like this, rather discouraging illegal behavior," said Oregon Republican Rep. Kim Thatcher.

She says her state, and to a degree, her party, is moving the wrong direction on immigration.

"It's not about appealing to voters," Thatcher said. "I believe it's about doing the right thing."

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AP Writers Pat Condon in St. Paul, Minn., Ivan Moreno in Denver and Will Weissert in Austin, Texas, contributed to this report.

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Follow Lauren Gambino on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lgamgam

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/may-day-activists-cheer-state-immigration-laws-084951961.html

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