132. Tinnitus Treatment on Your Phone, Nanoscale 3D Printing Sped Up, Lab-Grown Meat

Summary: "Polytherapeutic" tinnitus treatment app delivers impressive results | New Atlas (00:49) Tinnitus is when you experience ringing or other noises in one or both of your ears.  5% of people experience tinnitus at some point in their lives A team of researchers at the University of Auckland has found it's new smartphone app treatment is getting strong results This polytherapeutic “combines goal-based counseling with personalized passive and active game-based sound therapy."  It has tailored the digital tools in the app to the user's own experience of tinnitus. The primary measurement of effectiveness was the Tinnitus Functional Index, a standard scale used to quantify a person's experience of tinnitus A 13 point change is regarded as a clinically meaningful difference. It is a survey so take this with a grain of salt The group using the polytherapeutic reported an average improvement of 16.36 points after six weeks, and 17.83 points after 12 weeks 55% of participants experiencing a clinically meaningful improvement after six weeks 65% at 12 weeks. The Auckland team is working on obtaining regulatory approval for the polytherapeutic app, and hope to have it clinically available within six months or so. Rare Elephant Twins are Born in 'Historic Moment’ at Syracuse Zoo | Today (05:54) Twin Asian elephant calves were born at the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse, New York, in what the zoo is calling a “miracle.” Born on Oct. 24 Ten hours after Mali’s (Mama Elephant obviously) first male calf was born, weighing in at 220 pounds, a second male calf arrived, weighing 237 pounds.  The zoo commented on this improbability and rarity: “To date, there has never been a recorded case of surviving elephant twins in the United States …  The few successful twin births have only taken place in their range countries in Asia and Africa and nowhere else in the world.” Additionally, less than 1% of elephant births worldwide are twins When twins do occur, the calves are often stillborn or do not survive long after birth. Engineers designed a new nanoscale 3D printing material that can be printed at a speed of 100 mm/s | Interesting Engineering (09:43) A new nanoscale 3D printing material developed by Stanford University engineers may provide superior structural protection for satellites, drones, and microelectronics An improved lightweight, a protective lattice that can absorb twice as much energy as previous materials of a similar density Nanoscale 3D printing material creates structures that are a fraction of the width of a human hair. Enabling the printing at very small scales. The engineers added metal nanoclusters (tiny groupings of atoms) to their printing medium to create a superior 3D printing material. Effective in kicking off the reaction to harden the material  Produced a substance that was a mixture of the metal and the polymer printing medium. The printing process was accelerated by the nanoclusters. They were able to print at a speed of 100 millimeters per second using the nanoclusters and proteins. Roughly 100 times faster than what had previously been possible with nanoscale protein printing. The engineers are in some ways imitating what nature has already mastered. For instance, the mix of a hard exterior, nanoscale porosity, and trace amounts of soft substance gives bone its durability. Where to go from here? Wendy Gu, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a corresponding author on the paper stated: “Since the nanoclusters are able to polymerize these different classes of chemicals, we may be able to use them to print multiple materials in one structure … That’s one thing we’d like to aim for.” Researchers develop a new method for analyzing rock glaciers | Phys.org (15:20) Scientists at the University of Arizona developed a new method to determine rock glaciers' ice thickness and the ratio of ice to debris, allowing for more precise measuremen