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Gamers unleash swarms of nanoparticles on tumours
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One Per Cent
CANCER is nothing to play around with. But a new online game encourages people to do just that, fiddling with swarms of nanoparticles to come up with promising strategies for attacking tumours. The game, called NanoDoc, trains players on a few basic rules, including the types of nanoparticles in their arsenal and how they swarm through tissue to find cancerous cells. It then lets players try challenges, which feature real configurations of tumour cells, some of which researchers have yet to find an effective treatment for. The idea is that, as crowds of online users chip away at these tough problems, they will find solutions researchers haven’t thought of yet, leading to improved treatments. “We want bioengineers to come in and design the scenarios,” says Sabine Hauert, a swarm engineer at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, who released NanoDoc online last week. Hauert was inspired by the protein-folding game FoldIt, in which online users help determine the optimal folding patterns of proteins. The difference is that, in playing NanoDoc, citizen scientists are designing treatments for specific tumour scenarios. Players can adjust a range of variables to design nanoparticles
for a particular job – the size of each particle, the number of them in a swarm, the coating on those particles and the dose of drugs they carry. These can be combined to produce a range of effects, including searchand-destroy behaviour, where one kind of particle seeks out a tumour, then signals the location to drugbearing particles. Any solutions that NanoDoc players come up with will be verified in computer models, and using swarms of nanobots in a lab, to
“The nanoparticles have a range of effects, including search-anddestroy behaviour” make sure the particles move efficiently and leave healthy tissues alone. If the simulations are successful, researchers can move on to biological testing. Aaron Becker, who works on swarm simulation at Rice University in Houston, Texas, says he is looking forward to seeing what will come out of NanoDoc, and adds that it is a great platform for education. “My 4-yearold son Logan was delighted to see those ugly grey tumour cells ‘pop’ out of existence, and stayed engaged as we completed the tutorials,” he says.
Hal Hodson n
disneyresearch
Gamers get to work on hard-to-treat tumours
Whispered secrets at your fingertips Send a secret whisper with a touch of your finger. That’s the idea behind an electronic art project called Ishin-Denshin. The set-up encodes sound recorded through a microphone as an electrical signal. The signal modulates an electrostatic field around your body, and when you touch your finger to someone else’s ear, the field causes the ear to vibrate slightly, reproducing the sound. The project’s name comes from a Japanese expression meaning an unspoken understanding.
“Who knew in 1984… that this would be big brother… and the zombies would be paying customers?” So reads the caption on what German magazine Der Spiegel says is a US National Security Agency PowerPoint slide picturing Apple founder Steve Jobs. The magazine claims the NSA has access to user data on iPhones, Android and BlackBerry.
Elon Musk’s Iron Man moment As a rocketeer, sports-car designer and internet billionaire, SpaceX chief Elon Musk is often likened to Tony Stark – aka Iron Man. Perhaps playing up to this image, Musk has made a video in which he demonstrates the emerging technologies used to design Falcon rocket engines at SpaceX. These involve a Leap Motion gesture interface, glass projection displays (as used in the film Iron Man), the Oculus Rift VR headset and a 3D printer to output rocket nozzles in laserfused titanium.
nanodoc
Air gets all emotional A burst of air can change your mood. Mehdi Ammi of the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France, has developed a moving nozzle capable of blasting air at different strengths. Changing the movement and intensity of the blast altered the emotional responses of his 16 volunteers. The results could create more emotion-based telepresence systems – or add another dimension to video games.
–”Pop” goes the tumour– 14 September 2013 | NewScientist | 21
One Per Cent
CANCER is nothing to play around with. But a new online game encourages people to do just that, fiddling with swarms of nanoparticles to come up with promising strategies for attacking tumours. The game, called NanoDoc, trains players on a few basic rules, including the types of nanoparticles in their arsenal and how they swarm through tissue to find cancerous cells. It then lets players try challenges, which feature real configurations of tumour cells, some of which researchers have yet to find an effective treatment for. The idea is that, as crowds of online users chip away at these tough problems, they will find solutions researchers haven’t thought of yet, leading to improved treatments. “We want bioengineers to come in and design the scenarios,” says Sabine Hauert, a swarm engineer at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, who released NanoDoc online last week. Hauert was inspired by the protein-folding game FoldIt, in which online users help determine the optimal folding patterns of proteins. The difference is that, in playing NanoDoc, citizen scientists are designing treatments for specific tumour scenarios. Players can adjust a range of variables to design nanoparticles
for a particular job – the size of each particle, the number of them in a swarm, the coating on those particles and the dose of drugs they carry. These can be combined to produce a range of effects, including searchand-destroy behaviour, where one kind of particle seeks out a tumour, then signals the location to drugbearing particles. Any solutions that NanoDoc players come up with will be verified in computer models, and using swarms of nanobots in a lab, to
“The nanoparticles have a range of effects, including search-anddestroy behaviour” make sure the particles move efficiently and leave healthy tissues alone. If the simulations are successful, researchers can move on to biological testing. Aaron Becker, who works on swarm simulation at Rice University in Houston, Texas, says he is looking forward to seeing what will come out of NanoDoc, and adds that it is a great platform for education. “My 4-yearold son Logan was delighted to see those ugly grey tumour cells ‘pop’ out of existence, and stayed engaged as we completed the tutorials,” he says.
Hal Hodson n
disneyresearch
Gamers get to work on hard-to-treat tumours
Whispered secrets at your fingertips Send a secret whisper with a touch of your finger. That’s the idea behind an electronic art project called Ishin-Denshin. The set-up encodes sound recorded through a microphone as an electrical signal. The signal modulates an electrostatic field around your body, and when you touch your finger to someone else’s ear, the field causes the ear to vibrate slightly, reproducing the sound. The project’s name comes from a Japanese expression meaning an unspoken understanding.
“Who knew in 1984… that this would be big brother… and the zombies would be paying customers?” So reads the caption on what German magazine Der Spiegel says is a US National Security Agency PowerPoint slide picturing Apple founder Steve Jobs. The magazine claims the NSA has access to user data on iPhones, Android and BlackBerry.
Elon Musk’s Iron Man moment As a rocketeer, sports-car designer and internet billionaire, SpaceX chief Elon Musk is often likened to Tony Stark – aka Iron Man. Perhaps playing up to this image, Musk has made a video in which he demonstrates the emerging technologies used to design Falcon rocket engines at SpaceX. These involve a Leap Motion gesture interface, glass projection displays (as used in the film Iron Man), the Oculus Rift VR headset and a 3D printer to output rocket nozzles in laserfused titanium.
nanodoc
Air gets all emotional A burst of air can change your mood. Mehdi Ammi of the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France, has developed a moving nozzle capable of blasting air at different strengths. Changing the movement and intensity of the blast altered the emotional responses of his 16 volunteers. The results could create more emotion-based telepresence systems – or add another dimension to video games.
–”Pop” goes the tumour– 14 September 2013 | NewScientist | 21