The research is published today in Advanced Materials, a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering materials science. The author also holds the patent for 3D-printed semiconducting devices.

“Bionic eyes are usually thought of as science fiction, but now we are closer than ever using a multimaterial 3D printer,” said Michael McAlpine, a co-author of the study and University of Minnesota Benjamin Mayhugh Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Researchers started with a hemispherical glass dome to show how they could overcome the challenge of printing electronics on a curved surface. Using their custom-built 3D printer, they started with a base ink of silver particles. The dispensed ink stayed in place and dried uniformly instead of running down the curved surface. The researchers then used semiconducting polymer materials to print photodiodes, which convert light into electricity. The entire process takes about an hour.

McAlpine said the most surprising part of the process was the 25 percent efficiency in converting the light into electricity they achieved with the fully 3D-printed semiconductors.

“We have a long way to go to routinely print active electronics reliably, but our 3D-printed semiconductors are now starting to show that they could potentially rival the efficiency of semiconducting devices fabricated in microfabrication facilities,” McAlpine said. “Plus, we can easily print a semiconducting device on a curved surface, and they can’t.”

McAlpine and his team are known for integrating 3D printing, electronics, and biology on a single platform. They received international attention a few years ago for printing a “bionic ear.” Since then, they have 3D printed life-like artificial organs for surgical practice, electronic fabric that could serve as “bionic skin,” electronics directly on a moving hand, and cells and scaffolds that could help people living with spinal cord injuries regain some function.

McAlpine’s drive to create a bionic eye is a little more personal.

“My mother is blind in one eye, and whenever I talk about my work, she says, ‘When are you going to print me a bionic eye?'” McAlpine said.

McAlpine says the next steps are to create a prototype with more light receptors that are even more efficient. They’d also like to find a way to print on a soft hemispherical material that can be implanted into a real eye.

McAlpine’s research team includes University of Minnesota mechanical engineering graduate student Ruitao Su, postdoctoral researchers Sung Hyun Park, Shuang-Zhuang Guo, Kaiyan Qiu, Daeha Joung, Fanben Meng, and undergraduate student Jaewoo Jeong.

The research was funded by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering of the National Institutes of Health (Award No. 1DP2EB020537), The Boeing Company, and the Minnesota Discovery, Research, and InnoVation Economy (MnDRIVE) Initiative through the State of Minnesota.

Related video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2_zhpXZkS0

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Minnesota. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

The study, led by researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro) and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Aug. 28, 2018, was an examination of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and cognitive test data from 1,200 individuals, supplied as part of the Human Connectome Project.

Researchers found that people with higher a body mass index (BMI) showed reduced cognitive flexibility, ability to delay gratification, visuospatial ability and verbal memory. They also found that people with increased BMI tended to have a thicker left prefrontal cortex and a thinner right prefrontal cortex. Previous studies have shown damage to the right prefrontal cortex can lead to increased eating.

Subjects with higher BMI also had increased volume in the left amygdala, which is believed to play a role in response to food cues. They also had decreased volume in the entorhinal-parahippocampal structures, which are associated with episodic memory and context mediation. This suggests a model where people prone to obesity are more sensitive to visual food cues, and less able to resist them by considering the negative context of eating, like weight gain.

Many of the subjects were siblings, including fraternal and identical twins. This allowed researchers to determine the heritability of the traits as well as obesity, measured by BMI. Using statistical methods, researchers found that many of the cognitive and neurological traits have genetic links with obesity. This suggests the role genetics play in obesity is manifested at least partially through brain anatomy and cognitive functions.

“This research will be useful in developing interventions to help people with obesity,” says study’s lead author, Uku Vainik, a researcher at The Neuro and the Institute of Psychology at University of Tartu, Estonia. “Modifying neurobehavioural factors with cognitive training, to improve people’s ability to resist food, for example, could hold promise. Interventions shouldn’t just focus on diet, but also acknowledge the neurobehavioural profile that obesity is genetically intertwined with. Such interventions might help people to stay lean despite their genetic signature.”

“This work adds support to the theory that body weight in humans is partly under control of higher-level brain systems involved in cognition, decision-making and motivation,” says Dr. Alain Dagher, the paper’s senior author. “Furthermore, individual differences in these brain systems that regulate food intake appear to be moderately heritable.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by McGill University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Physicists at Princeton University led one of the two main teams that today announced the detection of the Higgs particle via its decay into two particles called bottom quarks. This pathway is the last to be detected of the five main signature pathways that can identify the Higgs particle.

“We found it exactly where we expected to find it and now we can use this new pathway to study the Higgs’ properties,” said James Olsen, professor of physics and leader of the team at Princeton. “This has been a truly collaborative effort from the beginning and it is exciting to see the amplification of effort that comes from people working together.”

Long-sought because it confirms theories about the nature of matter, the Higgs particle exists only fleetingly before transforming into other, so-called “daughter” particles. Because the boson lasts only for about one septillionth of a second, researchers use the particle’s offspring as evidence of its existence.

These daughter particles are scattered among the shower of particles created from the collision of two protons at the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The Higgs particle was observed for the first time in 2012 through three of the other modes of decay.

Of these lineages or decay patterns, the decay into two bottom quarks occurs most often, making up about 60 percent of the decay events from the Higgs, according to Olsen.

But at the LHC, the bottom-quark pattern is the hardest to trace back definitively to the Higgs because many other particles can also give off bottom quarks.

Quarks are tiny constituents of protons, which themselves are some of the building blocks of atoms. The bottom quark is one of the six types of quarks that make up the menagerie of particles in the “standard model” that explains matter and their interactions.

Discerning which bottom quarks came from the Higgs versus other particles has been the main challenge facing the LHC’s two Higgs detectors, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) with which Olsen works, and its companion, ATLAS. The detectors operate independently and are run by separate teams of scientists.

Once produced, these bottom quarks split into jets of particles, making them hard to trace back to the original parent particles. Because of this background noise, the researchers required more data than was needed for the other pathways to be sure of their finding.

Both detectors are adept at spotting particles such as electrons, photons and muons, but are more challenged by quarks. The quarks due to their nature are not observed as free particles. Instead they are bound and appear as other particles such as mesons and baryons or decay quickly.

“It is a messy business because you have to collect all of those jets and measure their properties to calculate the mass of the object that decayed into the jets,” Olsen said.

The two detectors are massive, complex structures that sit at the end of the LHC tunnel where protons are accelerated and smashed together at high energy levels. The structures contain layers of smaller detectors arranged like layers of an onion.

The devices detect particles at each layer of the onion to reconstruct their paths. This allows researchers to trace the path of a particle back to its source in a manner analogous to following the trail of a firework’s light back to the place where the first burst occurred. By following many of these paths, the researchers can identify where and when the Higgs first formed in the proton-proton collision.

“The Higgs-to-bottom-quark decay is important because it is the most frequent decay, so a precise measurement of its rate tells us a lot about the nature of this particle,” said Christopher Palmer, an associate research scholar at Princeton, who describes the work in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfCgbGtVZCo

Additional Princeton researchers on the team included physics graduate student Stephane Cooperstein and undergraduate Jan Offerman, Class of 2018. The team also included collaborators at the University of Florida and Fermilab, as well as groups from Italy, Switzerland and Germany.

The main challenge in detecting the bottom-quark decay mode was the amount of background bottom quarks produced by non-Higgs events. In addition to gathering more data from collisions, the researchers searched for a distinct way that the Higgs gave rise to the bottom quarks.

Olsen began working on this challenge 10 years ago, before the LHC had switched on and when physicists were running simulations on computers. Around that time, Olsen learned about a theoretical study showing that it is possible to find bottom quarks created from the Higgs recoiling off another particle, such as a Z boson or a W boson.

“It was an idea that nobody had before, to search for it in that channel, and the only question was whether it was possible experimentally and whether it really would pay off,” Olsen said.

Olsen said it is exciting to see the work come to fruition. “This is a very satisfying moment.”

Princeton University’s research at the LHC is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation.