Fortunemagazine reports on some exciting research related to male infertility. As the headline says, “This Robot Is Like a Chauffeur for Slow Sperm”. Basically, researchers have developed tiny metal helices that wrap around the tail of a sperm cell. The helix effectively turns the sperm into a micromotor that can be directed a magnetic field. They are calling the invention a “spermbot”.
The video above lets you see how spermbots can propel once immobile sperm toward an egg. So far scientists haven’t been able to actually fertilize an egg using the spermbot, but they are optimistic that with further study and development, this might someday improve success of in vitro fertilizations.
Take a look at the original research paper here in Nano Letters. Caged Oligo explains some of the science behind the machine.
A monthly vaginal ring can prevent HIV transmission in women.
Bob Roehr at Scientific American reports on how the insertion of a vaginal ring can prevent HIV transmission in women. From the article:
Women use a silicone elastomer vaginal matrix ring that dispenses an anti-HIV drug—similar to ones used to dispense birth control hormones—and are protected from HIV infection for a month.
According to researchers who tested the ring on more than 4,500 African women between the ages of 18 and 45, the concept works. Women who used the ring were 27 percent less likely to become infected with the HIV virus, according to data presented last Monday at the annual Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in Boston.
The ring must remain inserted the entire month for the treatment to work most effectively. Researchers are currently working on ways of improving the ring to make it easier for women to adhere to the treatment.
“We need to figure out what women really want,” says Carl Dieffenbach, director of the Division of AIDS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who oversees more than a billion dollars of National Institutes of Health–funded AIDS research and was not involved with the study. “This is just a step along the way. Do we do better if we offer women protection from pregnancy as well as protection from HIV?” The next studies might have both birth control and antiviral properties or perhaps just contraception instead of a placebo.
Einstein hypothesized the existence of gravitational waves way back in 1916. And now, almost 100 years later, they’ve finally been detected. Physicists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory have announced they have detected the ripples in spacetime. The video above from nature.com tells you all about gravitational waves in just 3 minutes.
Sean Carrol discusses how monumental this discovery is:
What I want to do here is to make sure, in case there was any danger, that nobody loses sight of the extraordinary magnitude of what has been accomplished here. We’ve become a bit blasé about such things: physics makes a prediction, it comes true, yay. But we shouldn’t take it for granted; successes like this reveal something profound about the core nature of reality.
Some guy scribbles down some symbols in an esoteric mixture of Latin, Greek, and mathematical notation. Scribbles originating in his tiny, squishy human brain. (Here are what some of those those scribbles look like, in my own incredibly sloppy handwriting.) Other people (notably Rainer Weiss, Ronald Drever, and Kip Thorne), on the basis of taking those scribbles extremely seriously, launch a plan to spendhundreds of millions of dollars over the course of decades. They concoct an audacious scheme to shootlaser beams at mirrors to look for modulated displacements of less than a millionth of a billionth of a centimeter — smaller than the diameter of an atomic nucleus. Meanwhile other people looked at the sky and tried to figure out what kind of signals they might be able to see, for example from the death spiral of black holes a billion light-years away. You know, black holes: universal regions of death where, again according to elaborate theoretical calculations, the curvature of spacetime has become so pronounced that anything entering can never possibly escape. And still other people built the lasers and the mirrors and the kilometers-long evacuated tubes and the interferometers and the electronics and the hydraulic actuators and so much more, all because they believed in those equations. And then they ran LIGO (and other related observatories) for several years, then took it apart and upgraded to Advanced LIGO, finally reaching a sensitivity where you would expect to see real gravitational waves if all that fancy theorizing was on the right track.
