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The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded $1.3 million to faculty in North Carolina State University’s Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) Systems Center to improve the batteries that help power plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Continue Reading »

Faculty and staff are invited to an open forum on the university’s budget on Thursday, July 9 from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in Stewart Theatre, located in the Talley Student Center.

Interim Provost Warwick Arden and Vice Chancellor for Finance and Business Charles Leffler will discuss current budget planning and reductions. Time will be allotted for a question-and-answer session.

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Tiny flying machines can be used for everything from indoor surveillance to exploring collapsed buildings, but simply making smaller versions of planes and helicopters doesn’t work very well. Instead, researchers at North Carolina State University are mimicking nature’s small flyers – and developing robotic bats that offer increased maneuverability and performance.

Small flyers, or micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs), have garnered a great deal of interest due to their potential applications where maneuverability in tight spaces is necessary, says researcher Gheorghe Bunget. For example, Bunget says, “due to the availability of small sensors, MAVs can be used for detection missions of biological, chemical and nuclear agents.” But, due to their size, devices using a traditional fixed-wing or rotary-wing design have low maneuverability and aerodynamic efficiency.

So Bunget, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at NC State, and his advisor Dr. Stefan Seelecke looked to nature. “We are trying to mimic nature as closely as possible,” Seelecke says, “because it is very efficient. And, at the MAV scale, nature tells us that flapping flight – like that of the bat – is the most effective.”

The researchers did extensive analysis of bats’ skeletal and muscular systems before developing a “robo-bat” skeleton using rapid prototyping technologies. The fully assembled skeleton rests easily in the palm of your hand and, at less than 6 grams, feels as light as a feather. The researchers are currently completing fabrication and assembly of the joints, muscular system and wing membrane for the robo-bat, which should allow it to fly with the same efficient flapping motion used by real bats.

“The key concept here is the use of smart materials,” Seelecke says. “We are using a shape-memory metal alloy that is super-elastic for the joints. The material provides a full range of motion, but will always return to its original position – a function performed by many tiny bones, cartilage and tendons in real bats.”

Seelecke explains that the research team is also using smart materials for the muscular system. “We’re using an alloy that responds to the heat from an electric current. That heat actuates micro-scale wires the size of a human hair, making them contract like ‘metal muscles.’ During the contraction, the powerful muscle wires also change their electric resistance, which can be easily measured, thus providing simultaneous action and sensory input. This dual functionality will help cut down on the robo-bat’s weight, and allow the robot to respond quickly to changing conditions – such as a gust of wind – as perfectly as a real bat.”

In addition to creating a surveillance tool with very real practical applications, Seelecke says the robo-bat could also help expand our understanding of aerodynamics. “It will allow us to do tests where we can control all of the variables – and finally give us the opportunity to fully understand the aerodynamics of flapping flight,” Seelecke says.

Bunget will present the research this September at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Conference on Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems in Oxnard, Calif.

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Pinpointing the genes involved in human brain cancer can be like looking for a needle in a haystack, and sometimes the needle you find may not be the right one. By comparing human and canine genomes, researchers at North Carolina State University have discovered that a gene commonly believed to be involved in meningiomas-tumors that affect the meninges, or thin covering, of the human brain and account for one out of four adult brain tumors -may not be as key for tumor formation as previously thought, and they’ve narrowed the search for the real culprit.

Meningiomas are intracranial tumors, meaning that they do not grow within brain tissue itself, but in the space between the brain and the skull. In humans, they are associated with genetic defects of large segments of chromosomes, which makes isolating the specific genes involved extremely difficult. Humans suffering from meningioma frequently lose one copy of almost the entire length of human chromosome 22. This chromosome is made of almost 50 million base pairs of DNA that code for more than 500 genes.

“The dog has been man’s best friend for centuries, and now the genome of the dog could well be man’s next best friend,” says Dr. Matthew Breen, professor of genomics at NC State.

“With so much genetic material to consider, one can see why figuring out which genes play a key role in meningiomas is extremely difficult,” says Breen. “By looking at tumors seen in both humans and dogs we have a simple way to narrow the search: we compare the affected areas of a human chromosome with related areas on dog chromosomes. This works because dogs and humans are genetically similar and both get the same kinds of cancers. While we share much of our genetic material, the DNA of a dog is organized differently to our own and this makes it possible to isolate smaller ‘shared’ regions of genetic data rather than looking at an entire chromosome.”

Breen, NC State colleagues Rachael Thomas and veterinary neurologist Natasha Olby, along with researchers from the University of California-Davis and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK collaborated on the project, sharing samples of canine meningiomas for research. Their results were published in the Journal of Neurooncology.
Previous researchers had pinpointed a particular tumor-suppressing gene on human chromosome 22, known as NF2, as a possible contributor to meningioma. They believed that the deletion of NF2, with its tumor suppressing abilities, could trigger tumor growth.

In looking at genetic changes across the whole genome, Breen’s team compared human chromosome 22 to its canine counterpart. In dogs, the region shared with 22 is “split up” across three separate dog chromosomes – numbers 10, 26 and 27- with the NF2 gene appearing on dog chromosome 26. The researchers discovered that in dogs with meningioma, chromosome 26, and hence NF2, was rarely affected, casting doubt on this gene as playing a significant role in the disease. Instead, dogs with meningioma frequently showed loss of parts of dog chromosome 27. This led the researchers to focus on the portion of human chromosome 22 that corresponds to canine chromosome 27.

“Now, instead of looking at 50 million base pairs that contain several hundred genes, we can focus on the portion of human chromosome 22 that is evolutionarily conserved with dog chromosome 27,” Breen says. “By looking at dog and human meningiomas together we reduce the amount of searching we need to do 50-fold. It’s the old needle/haystack dilemma, except that using information from dog and human tumors allows us to concentrate our search on the two percent of the haystack that actually contains the needle, and not spend time and resources on the other 98 percent.”

Breen also noticed that the other chromosome involved for canines that suffer from meningioma is dog chromosome 17, which correlates with part of human chromosome 1. Defects of this chromosome are involved in almost 70 percent of human meningioma cases and are associated with a poor patient outcome. He hopes that he can use this correlation to further narrow the search for specific genes involved with the disease.

In addition the team looked also at gliomas, another kind of brain tumor, and have shown common genetic features shared between human and canine tumors that are now under further investigation.

“The data support that dog and human tumors are very similar at the genetic level, so both species will benefit from this research,” Breen says. “It’s proof of the ‘One Medicine’ concept – the idea that human and animal health relies on a common pool of medical and scientific knowledge and is supported by overlapping technologies and discoveries.”

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