Tag: microscopic

Water bears can replace all the fluid in their bodies with a glass matrix

Enlarge / The image shows a scanning electron micrograph of 6 tardigrades in their tun state. When tardigrades dry out they retract their legs and heads within their cuticle, forming these little balls. (credit: Thomas Boothby) One of the great mysteries of the microscopic animals known as tardigrades is their uncanny ability survive almost anything: extreme heat, extreme cold, desiccation or drying out, and even the vacuum of space. Now, we are a little closer to understanding how they do it. The key, at least for surviving desiccation, is a special protein that tardigrades use to replace the water in their bodies with a form of glass. Tardigrades are also known as water bears, and they normally live in moist, mossy environments. But when those environments dry up, tardigrades go into a state known as “tun”—it’s a kind of suspended animation, which the animals can remain in for up to 10 years. When water begins to flow again, water bears absorb it and return to life. Tardigrades aren’t the only creatures who do this. Brine shrimp and certain kinds of worms can also dry up and come to life again. But what makes tardigrades different is that they use a special kind of disordered protein, unique to these animals, to literally suspend their cells in a glasslike matrix that prevents damage. Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Water bears can replace all the fluid in their bodies with a glass matrix

Robots can perform surgery inside your eyeballs

Doctors at Oxford University made medical history recently by successfully completing the first robot-assisted intraocular surgery. Robert MacLaren, Professor of Ophthalmology at the university, and his team managed to gently peel off a 1/1000th millimeter membrane from the inside of a patient’s eye. To do so, the team relied on a cutting-edge medical device known as the Robotic Retinal Dissection Device, or R2D2. The R2D2, developed by Dutch medical robotics firm Preceyes BV, is designed to perform keyhole surgery, entering and exiting the eyeball through a single, sub-millimeter hole. What’s more, it’s built to be exceedingly steady, especially given the tight tolerances within which it works. It employs a series of seven, independently computer controlled motors to navigate within the eye and can move as little as 1/1000th of a millimeter at a time. This is done to eliminate any semblance of tremors in the surgeon’s hands — including even the most minute tics like those generated by the doctor’s own heartbeat. “Current technology with laser scanners and microscopes allows us to monitor retinal diseases at the microscopic level, but the things we see are beyond the physiological limit of what the human hand can operate on, ” Dr. MacLauren told the BBC. “With a robotic system, we open up a whole new chapter of eye operations that currently cannot be performed.” In this case, the surgical team was tasked with exorcising a tiny growth of membrane that had contracted around the patient’s retina and distorted his vision to resemble the hall-of-mirrors scene from Enter the Dragon. The existing method calls for doctors to time their movements between heartbeats but with the help of the joystick-controlled R2D2, that procedure can be completed in a fraction of the time. For the record, this is not how it’s supposed to go. The R2D2 is still undergoing clinical trials. In fact, this was the first of 12 such tests, each being more complex than the last. However, should the device gain government approval, it could become, as MacLauren states, “a vision of eye surgery in the future.” Source: Oxford University

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Robots can perform surgery inside your eyeballs