Another local UCSD researcher, nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang, said he envisions a system where the body’s glucose levels would automatically trigger nanodevices capable of administering insulin.
Toxicity still presents challenges, he said, although he envisions “many exciting opportunities and applications which are limited only by our imagination.”
Trey Ideker, who holds posts in the schools of medicine and engineering at the University of California at San Diego, has found in laboratory tests that some limited exposure to oxidants may equip cells to better withstand larger exposures. His work, if borne out in humans, could have all kinds of implications for our understanding of aging and disease.Read the original press release, by Debra Kain, here.
Surgeons at UC San Diego Medical Center are pioneering non-invasive surgical procedures that eliminate the need to open a patient’s abdominal wall—innovations that speed recovery time and significantly reduce pain for abdominal surgeries, such as gall bladder removal. Instead of cutting through the abdominal wall, surgeons deliver the camera, lights and surgical instruments by way of the natural openings in the patient’s body—the mouth, vagina or rectum. The surgery is called NOTES or Natural Orifice Translumenal Endoscopic Surgery.
The UC San Diego surgeons want a better camera for NOTES, and for that they turned to engineers from the Jacobs School and Calit2.The team just completed the first prototype, called SurgiCam. The new camera boasts auto-focus and optical zoom—a big improvement over the digital zoom in today’s surgical cameras. Optical zoom will give surgeons the ability to change the field of view and obtain some peripheral vision, explains electrical engineering professor Yuhwa Lo. Lo invented the fluid-filled lens that is at the heart of SurgiCam—a lens that incorporates elements of both fish eyes and eagle eyes. The camera also doubles as a microscope, which could improve surgeons’ ability to remove cancer tissue.
photo caption (above): The SurgiCam team includes students from across UC San Diego including (left to right) Jack Tzeng and Frank Tsai, electrical and computer engineering (ECE) grad students, Calit2 engineer Daniel Johnson, ECE grad student Sung Hwan Cho, and Cameron Francis, a medical student.
What recourse does an entrepreneur have when there is no venture capital for a start-up with a truly promising invention? At San Diego’s Biological Dynamics, 27-year-old founder Raj Krishnan’s solution is to win entrepreneur and student competitions—and so far he has won 13 awards, nine of them this year, including most recently a $40,000 first prize in the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge, where the judges were impressed with his presentation skills. “We went to the competitions because venture capital is extremely hard to find now, and we have been fortunate. It enables us now to protect our IP and pay bills,” Krishnan says.full story
As if cramped quarters and freeze-dried ice cream weren't enough, astronauts face the unpleasant necessity of urinating in near-zero gravity. Apollo crews solved this problem with condom like devices. Current models consist of a vacuum-cleaner-like hose with attachable funnels for males and females—now more sophisticated, but still sometimes uncomfortable and messy.
So 10 engineering students from the University of California, San Diego, have teamed up with thermal and fluids engineer Eugene Ungar of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, to develop something better. In January, they were accepted into NASA's Microgravity University, a program that gives undergraduates the chance to conduct experiments on board a plane that performs parabolic maneuvers to simulate ultralow gravity. By April, the students were in the air testing their "pee machine," a contraption that pushes a column of water through a simulated urethra into an acrylic box where they can track the flow dynamics with high-speed cameras.
"We're really going to hit hard with designing and testing different methods for collecting urine in the coming years," says Timothy Havard, student leader of the project. One promising design, he says, is a receptacle filled with a honeycomb network that harnesses surface tension and the velocity of the fluid to capture the urine with minimal splash-back.
Does anyone know about any cool apps made by UC San Diego students? The Web site says that the app serves up video.UCSD crafts iPhone 'app' for campus information
LA JOLLA: UC San Diego is jumping on the
iPhone bandwagon.The La Jolla campus has created a software application for the touch-screen device that gives students and others direct access to course schedules, campus maps and other university information.
The free application joins the tens of thousands of other applications that have been created for Apple's
iPhone andiPod Touch over the past year.Stanford University and other academic institutions have also created applications for the handheld gadgets, but UCSD says it's the first public university to offer such a comprehensive “app” linked to the latest campus information.
For more information about the application and download instructions, go toiphone .ucsd.edu.
PORTLAND, Ore. — Silicon-germanium (SiGe) RF chips now in lab prototype form could one day be used in millimeter-wavelength W-band imaging devices sensitive enough to "see" through clothing to reveal concealed weapons.EEs from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) presented their design at the IEEE RFIC Symposium in Boston on June 9. The chip operates in the terahertz range (1 THz = 1,000 GHz) to provide X-ray-like vision, but using safe, naturally occurring millimeter wavelengths. The designers said the chip could be produced using inexpensive silicon processing techniques. Read the full story here.
Reporter Mark McNeil added that Seracini "urged an interdisciplinary approach to university education. He encouraged students studying sciences to also explore the arts to become more rounded." The newspaper also picked up on Seracini's call in his speech for great works of art to be treated like patients. "You need to define when, how and if to restore it," the adjunct professor in UC San Diego's Jacobs School of Engineering structural engineering department is quoted as saying. "Just like you would do in the medical field. You would not accept the idea of surgery without going through a full range of diagnostics." Officials from McMaster also indicated that they hope to bring Seracini back to the campus on the western end of Lake Ontario to give guest lectures.
A biotechnology company aiming to revolutionize early-stage cancer screening last night won the UC San Diego Entrepreneur Challenge. Biological Dynamics, led by bioengineering PhD student and CEO Raj Krishnan and his fellow graduate students David Charlot and Roy Lefkowitz, took home the $40,000 first prize.
Biological Dynamics has developed a screening tool that identifies secondary cancer biomarkers such as free circulating DNA from unnatural cell death. Krishnan’s technology helps to detect signs of early stage tumors with a cost-effective blood test that takes less than 30 minutes and shows signs of almost every cancer type, according to the already much-awarded team.
Jacobs School computer science professor Rajesh Gupta has been appointed an Associate Director in the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). He says he hopes to do for the institute overall what he has been doing in his chosen field of wireless and embedded systems all along: reach out to industry.
