Had your sugar fix today? Treating sugar as an addiction, Bart Hoebel demonstrates withdrawal, binging and brain chemistry changes in rats. PRINCETON (US)—Scientists now have proof why those sugar cravings are so hard to ignore. New evidence suggests sugar can be addictive, wielding its power over the brain in a manner similar to drugs like nicotine and cocaine. “We have the first set of comprehensive studies showing the strong suggestion of sugar addiction in rats and a mechanism that might underlie it,” says Princeton professor Bart Hoebel, who led the study. Hoebel believes the findings eventually could have implications for treating people with eating disorders. Hoebel’s team and researchers from the Princeton Neuroscience Institute have been studying signs of sugar addiction in rats for years. “If bingeing on sugar is really a form of addiction, there should be long-lasting effects in the brains of sugar addicts,” Hoebel says. Hungry rats that binge on sugar provoke a surge of dopamine in their brains.
No Place Like Home, GPS shoes | Dominic Wilcox The left shoe points in the desired direction, the right shoe acts as a progress bar. Connect the shoes to the laptop via USB. Plot on the map where you wish to go and press Upload to Shoe. Sole etched with Dominic Wilcox drawing. Preparing the leather Integrating electronics Slim Chips by Hafsteinn Juliusson Milan 2010: designer Hafsteinn Juliusson of Iceland and Italy presented flavoured paper snacks in Milan last week. Called Slim Chips, the snacks are made of edible paper with organic colours and flavours in peppermint, blueberry and sweet potato. See all our stories about Milan 2010 in our special category. Here's a tiny bit of text from Juliusson: Slim Chips are good and they contain no calories. See also:
MIT's New Self-Assembly Lab Is Building A Paradigm Shift To 4-D Manufacturing Sitting on a table in Skylar Tibbits’s lab, at MIT’s new Center for International Design, is a 200-gallon-fish tank--it's large enough to hold one of Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks. If Tibbits’s experiment goes according to plan, within the next few weeks, it will be the scene of a sort of fractal monster movie. A 50-foot-long strand of coded mystery material will be dumped into the water-filled tank, and transform--without benefit of human hands!--into a sweet little 8-inch square Hilbert curve. How long will it take? Nobody knows. “It will probably depend on how hot the water is, or if I add a little salt,” jokes Tibbits, the 28-year-old wunderkind architect-designer-computer scientist behind what may be the next wave in manufacturing: 4-D printing. The concept of self-assembly isn’t new: It has been used at nanoscale for years. On the wall is a large aluminum and polyethylene structure called a Voltadom, bent into curves that mimic a vaulted ceiling. But Tibbits is no ordinary grunt.
Blocking natural, marijuana-like chemical in the brain boosts fat burning Stop exercising, eat as much as you want ... and still lose weight? It sounds impossible, but UC Irvine and Italian researchers have found that by blocking a natural, marijuana-like chemical regulating energy metabolism, this can happen, at least in the lab. To create this hypermetabolic state, UCI pharmacology professor Daniele Piomelli and colleagues engineered neurons in the forebrains of mice to limit production of an endocannabinoid compound called 2-AG. As a result, these modified mice ate more and moved less than typical mice but did not gain any weight, even when they were fed a high-fat diet. "We discovered that these mice were resistant to obesity because they burned fat calories much more efficiently than normal mice do," said Piomelli, the Louise Turner Arnold Chair in the Neurosciences. Does this mean that a drug limiting 2-AG levels may one day become a weight-loss panacea? Findings appear in the March issue of Cell Metabolism. About endocannabinoids
3 | Students Design An AR Device To One-Up Google Glass The strange thing about Google Glass is and isn’t its lame design. Google has produced something that, however clumsily, genuinely attempts to alter the body’s sensory perception. But the product doesn’t fully realize its potential. Eidos, a different kind of augmented reality (AR) device, claims to do just that. Eidos differs from Google Glass in one fundamental way: The device lets users tune into specific perceptions, be they sounds or images, and scale their magnitude to the exclusion of rival stimuli. The two prototypes that the team presented in February at the Royal College of Art’s Work In Progress were the result of months of intense work. The visor, which wraps around the eyes and temples, contains a camera that feeds live footage to an external processor; it then applies special effects to visuals in real-time, teasing out patterns or movements from, say, live sports and entertainment events.
Feeding the Tiny Humans of the Future: Amsterdam's Disproportionate Restaurant - Lifestyle Since the dawn of space travel, scientists have approached the problem of human survival in such a hostile environment from two opposing angles: adapting the environment to humans, or vice-versa. The former approach has provided most of the solutions so far: spacesuits and spaceships shield humans from extreme temperatures and radiation, and one day, greenhouses may allow earth's crops to grow on Mars. But, out on the fringes, big thinkers such as Manfred Clynes, who coined the word cyborg more than 50 years ago, and Craig Ventner, famous for sequencing the human genome, have wondered whether it might not be more effective to just re-design humans—using drugs, technology, and, most recently, genetic engineering—so that we can survive in space. Ventner is experimenting with engineering synthetic bacteria that could repair damaged DNA or help astronauts absorb nutrients more effectively, and then introducing them into the human microbial biome. Hendrik explains to Debatty:
7 | Dyson’s Latest Coup: A $1,500 Sink Faucet That Dries Hands, Too It took 125 engineers three years and 3,300 prototypes to develop Dyson’s latest innovation, a hand dryer called the Airblade Tap that seeks to “reinvent the way we wash our hands.” The company unveiled the stainless-steel Tap alongside two other hand dryers: an update to their successful Airblade and a sleeker, smaller model called the Blade V. At first glance, the Tap might seem like it’s trying to do too many things at once. But as James Dyson explained at a press event last night, the combination was based on a behavioral insight about restrooms. Along with the Tap, Dyson showed off the Blade V, a sleeker dryer that’s 60% thinner than the somewhat cartoonish first-gen Airblade. Hand dryers might not seem crucial to some product designers, but for Dyson, they present a fascinating engineering challenge that pits airspeed against decibels. The Tap will cost around $1,500 when it goes on pre-sale today.
Growing Plants in the Dark While sunlight contains all colors, the dominant type of chlorophyll in plants only needs purple light to function. This simple fact has big implications for the future of farming. Crops planted in soil, of course, depend on the sun, while commercial greenhouses use white light to grow their crops. All that extra red, green and yellow energy is wasted on the plants. PlantLab has taken advantage of chlorophyll’s little quirk. By using red and blue LEDs to create purple light, they have dramatically cut the energy needed to grow plants indoors. Watch the introductory video here.
Nike Vapor Laser Talon: Football’s First 3-D Printed Shoes The name almost sounds made up--the Nike Vapor Laser Talon--like it was spit out by some Spike TV show title generator. But the Nike Vapor Laser Talons aren’t just real, they can claim a world’s first, as they’re the first football cleats to be equipped with a 3-D printed sole. Weighing a mere 5.6 ounces, the shoes were designed to enhance a player’s “zero step,” to increase the speed of off-the-line launch, which feeds into a player’s maximum momentum. Given that a laser has a fairly flexible path, the side effect of this process is that design iterations could be tested “within hours instead of months.” But of course, the most compelling possibility of such a new process is customization. See more here. [Hat tip: designboom]