#2,970 – Inverse Vaccines

Say what you will about COVID vaccines and their efficacy or potential side-effects but there isn’t much you can say when it comes to newly created inverse vaccines other than “wow”. For they could have game-changing potential when it comes to treating autoimmune disorders.

According to the University of Chicago:

“A new type of vaccine developed by researchers at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) has shown in the lab setting that it can completely reverse autoimmune diseases like multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes — all without shutting down the rest of the immune system.

A typical vaccine teaches the human immune system to recognize a virus or bacteria as an enemy that should be attacked. The new “inverse vaccine” does just the opposite: it removes the immune system’s memory of one molecule. While such immune memory erasure would be unwanted for infectious diseases, it can stop autoimmune reactions like those seen in multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes, or rheumatoid arthritis, in which the immune system attacks a person’s healthy tissues.

The inverse vaccine, described in Nature Biomedical Engineering, takes advantage of how the liver naturally marks molecules from broken-down cells with ‘do not attack’ flags to prevent autoimmune reactions to cells that die by natural processes. PME researchers coupled an antigen — a molecule being attacked by the immune system— with a molecule resembling a fragment of an aged cell that the liver would recognize as friend, rather than foe. The team showed how the vaccine could successfully stop the autoimmune reaction associated with a multiple-sclerosis-like disease.

‘In the past, we showed that we could use this approach to prevent autoimmunity,’ said Jeffrey Hubbell, the Eugene Bell Professor in Tissue Engineering and lead author of the new paper. ‘But what is so exciting about this work is that we have shown that we can treat diseases like multiple sclerosis after there is already ongoing inflammation, which is more useful in a real-world context.'”

This is amazing. Hopefully, this research continues to progress and inverse vaccines become a viable treatment option for us in the near future.

Is an Inverse Vaccine the Greatest Idea Ever?

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#2,969 – Non-Stick Toilet Bowl

We spend a lot of time during our lives going to the bathroom so the last thing we want to do is spend even more time in there cleaning up after ourselves. Thankfully, the job may have just gotten easier thanks to a toilet bowl that would be virtually impossible to stain as nothing can stick to its highly repellant surface.

New Atlas sums it up best:

“Chinese researchers claim they’ve come up with a novel 3D-printed toilet bowl, impregnated with lubricant, that’ll make toilet brushes redundant. Unlike non-stick coatings, this one stays slippery even if you sandpaper it until it’s wafer-thin…

You can wear all the Gucci you like, you can drive a Bentley and consort with royalty, but you’ve still got this unspeakable shame loitering in the corner of your bathroom, because you’re a hollow tube with eyes, and sometimes you do poops that stick to the porcelain bowl.

Not to all bowls; there are non-stick spray-on coatings for toilets – but like non-stick pots and pans in the kitchen, they become less slippery over time as the treatment wears away.

But now, researchers from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology say they’ve created a new super-slippery toilet bowl that stays slick and poop-free even if you sandpaper it down to nearly nothing.

The Abrasion-Resistant Super-Slippery Flush Toilet (ARSSFT) – a name that’ll raise some eyebrows in Britain – is 3D-printed in a mixture of plastic and hydrophobic sand grains, using a selective laser sintering technique that creates ‘a self-supporting 3D complex shape but also with a porous structure that can accommodate considerable lubricants for an abrasion-resistant super-slippery property.’

Thus, when the material is lubricated with silicon oil, it penetrates deep into the material and stays there.”

I’ll take two please.

Is a non-stick toilet the Greatest Idea Ever?

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#2,968 – Phone Purse

Earlier this week Apple unveiled their latest phones and the one thing that stood out the most was how similar the overall design has remained from version to version. Sure, the camera continues to get better and the features always change but an iPhone 11 looks pretty similar to an iPhone 15.

But the rest of the industry is changing more drastically with a wave of devices coming that fold, unfurl, and roll up thanks to new flexible screens. And as our devices become more versatile new creative possibilities are born. Such as creating a phone that doubles as a purse.

Of course, you could says that a phone already doubles as purse as it can already hold a digital wallet and our identification cards. But soon we could carry around phones with straps that we literally wear like a purse and that even looks like one when we’re not using it.

According to The Verge, “There are two key elements to the V Purse’s design. First is a series of interchangeable straps and chains that clip on to the foldable and allow it to be carried like a purse or handbag. The second is the way it uses its outward-facing display to show a series of wallpapers designed to mimic different purse styles.”

That outward-facing display is really going to be the key force driving the whole unique package. As The Verge puts it:

“Having the V Purse’s foldable display on the unprotected outside rather than the inside of the device is a bold choice. Obviously the fact that you can see the screen at all times is the whole point of the device; Honor wants to use it to show off its always-on display designs. The company says it’s worked with a series of fashion designers and artists to contribute different themes for the device, and has said it wants to open up an API in the future to allow anyone to make their own. These designs can react to your touch as well as the movement of the phone.”

So, what do you think? Would you be willing to turn your phone into a fashion accessory?! Even more so than it already is?

Will your next phone be a purse?

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