A Brief History Of Viruses

February 22, 2021 by Will Sweatman 23 Comments

It was around the year 1590 when mankind figured out how to use optical lenses to bring into sight things smaller than the natural eye can observe. With the invention of the microscope, a new and unexplored world was discovered. It will likely be of great surprise to the reader that scientists of the time did not believe that within this new microscopic realm lay the source of sickness and disease. Most would still hold on to a belief of what was known as Miasma theory, which dates back to the Roman Empire. This theory states that the source of disease was contaminated air through decomposing organic materials. It wouldn’t be until the 1850’s that a man by the name of Louis Pasteur, from whom we get “pasteurization”, would promote Germ Theory into the spotlight of the sciences.

Louis Pasteur experimenting in his lab. — Louis Pasteur. Source

Pasteur, considered by many as the father of microbiology, would go on to assist fellow biologist Charles Chameberland in the invention of the aptly named Pasteur Chamberland filter — a porcelain filter with a pore size between 100 and 1000 nanometers. This was small enough to filter out the microscopic bacteria and cells known at that time from a liquid suspension, leaving behind a supply of uncontaminated water. But like so many other early scientific instrumentation inventions it would lead to the discovery of something unexpected. In this case, a world far smaller than 100 nanometers… and add yet another dimension to the ever-shrinking world of the microscopic.

This is when we began to learn about viruses.

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Listening In On Muscles With The BioAmp EMG Pill

February 15, 2021 by Maya Posch 49 Comments

Ever felt like what your MCU of choice misses is a way to read the electrical signals from your muscles? In that case [Deepak Khatri] over at Upside Down Labs has got your back with the BioAmp EMG Pill. Described as an affordable, open source electromyography (EMG) module, based around a TL074 quad low-noise JFET-input opamp. At just over 32×10 millimeters, it’s pretty compact as well.

The onboard opamp ensures that the weak electrical signals captured from the muscles when they move are amplified sufficiently that the ADC of any microcontroller or similar can capture the signal for further processing. Some knowledge of how to set up an EMG is required to use the module, of course, and the TL074 opamp prefers an input voltage between 7-30 V. Even so, it has all the basics onboard, and the KiCad project is freely available via the above linked GitHub project.

In addition, [Deepak] also tweeted about working on an affordable, open source active prosthetics controller (and human augmentation device), which has us very much interested in what other projects may come out of Upside Down Labs before long. After, all we’re no strangers to hacking with biosignals.

This Isn’t Your Father’s Yellow Card

February 1, 2021 by Chris Lott 59 Comments

As the global vaccination effort rolls out in many countries, people will increasingly be required to provide evidence for various reasons, especially travelers. Earlier this month a coalition which includes Microsoft, the Mayo Clinic, Oracle, MITRE, and others announced an effort to establish digital vaccination records called the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI). This isn’t going to be a brand new thing, but rather an initiative to provide digital proof-of-vaccination to people who want it, using existing open standards:

Verifiable Credentials, per World Wide Web Consortium Recommendation (VC Data Model 1.0)
Industry standard format and security, per the Health Level Seven International (HL7) FHIR standard

In addition, the World Health Organization formed the Smart Vaccination Certificate Working Group in December. Various other countries and organizations also have technical solutions in the works or already deployed. If a consensus doesn’t form soon, we can see this quickly becoming a can of worms. Imagine having to obtain multiple certifications of your vaccination because of non-uniform requirements between countries, organizations, and/or purposes.

Older readers and international travelers may be wondering, “don’t we already have a vaccination card system?” Indeed we do: the Carte Jaune or Yellow Card. The concept of a “vaccination passport” was conceived and agreed upon at the International Sanitary Convention for Aerial Navigation in 1933. Over the years the names and diseases of interest have changed, but since 2007 it has been formally called the International Certificate of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP). In recent times, yellow fever was the only vaccination of interest to travelers, but other vaccinations or booster shots can be recorded as well. One problem with the paper Yellow Card is that it is ridiculously easy to forge. Nefarious or lazy travelers could download it from the WHO site, print it on appropriate yellow card stock, and forge a doctor’s signature. The push for a more secure ICVP is not completely unreasonable.

Reading the instructions on the Yellow Card brings up a couple of interesting points:

This certificate is valid only if the vaccine or prophylaxis used has been approved by the World Health Organization — Currently the Pfizer vaccine is the only one to be approved by WHO, and even that is only an emergency approval. If you receive a non-Pfizer vaccination, what then?
The only disease specifically designated in the International Health Regulations (2005) for which proof of vaccination or prophylaxis may be required as a condition of entry to a State Party, is yellow fever — This one is interesting, and suggests that member states cannot require proof of Covid19 vaccination as an entry requirement, a situation that will no doubt be quickly revised or ignored.

Note: This writeup is about vaccinations, not about immunity. While immunity certificates have been used from time to time throughout modern history, the concept of an international immunity passport is not well established like the ICVP.

Swine Of The Times: Pig-to-Human Organ Transplants On Track For 2021

January 28, 2021 by Kristina Panos 73 Comments

Every day in the US, seventeen people die because they couldn’t get a organ transplant in time. An American biotech company called United Therapeutics is looking to pick up the lifesaving slack by producing a line of genetically-modified pigs for the purpose of harvesting their organs, among other therapeutic uses. United Therapeutics’ pig-farming subsidiary Revivicor is a spin-off of PPL Therapeutics, the company that gave us Dolly the cloned sheep back in 1996. They intend to start transplanting pig organs into humans as early as this year.

Baby Fae after transplant surgery. Image by Duane Miller-AP via Time Magazine

Although it sounds like science fiction, the idea of transplanting animal cells, organs, and tissue into humans has been around for over a hundred years. The main problem with xenotransplantation is that it usually triggers severe immune system reactions in the recipient’s body. In one of the more noteworthy cases, a baby girl received a baboon heart in 1984, but died a few weeks later because her body rejected the organ.

The leading cause of xenotransplant rejection is a sugar called alpha-gal. This sugar appears on the cell surfaces of all non-primate mammals. Alpha-gal is problematic for other reasons, too: a condition called alpha-gal syndrome usually begins when a Lone Star tick bites a person and transmits alpha-gal cells from the blood of animals they have bitten. From that point on, the person will experience an allergic reaction when eating red meat such as beef, pork, and lamb.

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A Surefire Way To Make Masks

January 15, 2021 by Jenny List 41 Comments

By now, the wearing of a facemask to protect ourselves from pandemic infection is for many of us a daily fact of life. Perhaps that means a cheap disposable mask, but there’s no reason that has to be the case. It’s easy to make more durable masks that can be washed and re-used time and time again, and our Hackaday colleague [Kristina Panos] has shared her pattern and workflow to help you do it.

Her pattern isn’t a complex cut-out but a simple rectangle, and the trick of sewing them together and flipping them inside out makes for a very tidy result. With three pleats pressed in and the elastic sewn up the result is a mask that’s neat, attractive, effective, and cheap, which is a win in our book.

It’s worth repeating her important point that these are not for use in medical environments, instead they’re the standard street-wear aerosol catchers we’re all used to. This isn’t the first time we’ve looked at masks here at Hackaday, or indeed though [Kristana]’s are by far the tidier neither is it first time one of us has made a mask. We looked at them in depth last year in our surviving the pandemic as a hacker series.

How A Quadriplegic Patient Was Able To Eat By Himself Again Using Artificial Limbs

January 2, 2021 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

Thirty years ago, [Robert “Buz” Chmielewski] suffered a surfing accident as a teenager. This left him as a quadriplegic due to a C6 spinal cord injury. After becoming a participant in a brain-computer interface study at Johns Hopkins, he was recently able to feed himself through the use of prosthetic arms. The most remarkable thing about these prosthetic arms is primarily the neural link with [Buz’s] brain, which allows him to not only control the artificial arms, but also feel what they are touching, due to a closed-loop system which transfers limb sensory input to the patient’s brain.

The prosthetic limb in question is the Modular Prosthetic Limb (MPL) from Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). The Johns Hopkins Medicine Brain-Computer Interface study began a year ago, when [Buz] had six microelectrode arrays (MEA) implanted into his brain: half in the motor cortex and half in the sensory cortex. During the following months, the study focused on using the signals from the first set of arrays to control actuators, such as the MPL. The second set of arrays was used to study how the sensory cortex had to be stimulated to allow a patient to feel the artificial limb much as one feels a biological limb.

What makes this study so interesting is not only the closed-loop approach which provides the patient with feedback on the position and pressure on the prosthetic, but also that it involves both hemispheres of the brain. As a result, after only a year of the study, [Buz] was able to use two of the MPLs simultaneously to feed himself, which is a delicate and complicated tasks.

In the video embedded after the break one can see a comparison of [Buz] at the beginning of the study and today, as he manages to handle cutlery and eat cake, without assistance.

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A Gesture Recognizing Armband

January 2, 2021 by Danie Conradie 4 Comments

Gesture recognition usually involves some sort of optical system watching your hands, but researchers at UC Berkeley took a different approach. Instead they are monitoring the electrical signals in the forearm that control the muscles, and creating a machine learning model to recognize hand gestures.

The sensor system is a flexible PET armband with 64 electrodes screen printed onto it in silver conductive ink, attached to a standalone AI processing module. Since everyone’s arm is slightly different, the system needs to be trained for a specific user, but that also means that the specific electrical signals don’t have to be isolated as it learns to recognize patterns.

The challenging part of this is that the patterns don’t remain constant over time, and will change depending on factors such as sweat, arm position, and even just biological changes. To deal with this the model can update itself on the device over time as the signal changes. Another part of this research that we appreciate is that all the inferencing, training, and updating happens locally on the AI chip in the armband. There is no need to send data to an external device or the “cloud” for processing, updating, or third-party data mining. Unfortunately the research paper with all the details is behind a paywall.

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