The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Move Over, Mary Poppins
In the Disney classic, the redoubtable nanny Mary Poppins told her charges that “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.” But a Penn State chemical engineer says ultrasound and electric fields could work even better, at least when it comes to transporting medicine through your skin via trans-dermal patches.
Such patches are already on the market for motion sickness, quitting smoking and hormone replacement therapy. Trans-dermal delivery is preferred when a drug is difficult to take by mouth or when passage through the liver would result in breakdown of the drug. But it is difficult to deliver medicine this way without harming the skin. Currently, only nine drugs on the market use trans-dermal delivery.
Penn State’s Dr. David Edwards, associate professor of chemical engineering, set out to come up with a theory and set of equations that describe just how medicine gets through your skin. And he has found that the process can sometimes be enhanced by electric fields or by ultrasound.
Electric fields can enhance trans-dermal delivery in medicines like insulin and some growth hormones that carry an electric charge: The ebb and flow of an alternating electric field can disperse or spread out the drug, making it more penetrable.
Ultrasound, on the other hand, is best suited for steroids such as prednisone or hydrocortisone and hormones such as testosterone. In the ultrasound process, gas trapped in the skin forms bubbles which temporarily break up the barriers to the drug’s passage.
The new information should enable pharmaceutical researchers to develop formulations that allow more drugs to be delivered through the skin.
Click-On Energy Efficiency: A new software design system that automatically incorporates energy-saving features into computer-based designs will soon be available, thanks to a collaboration between the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest Laboratory, the University of Oregon and Softdesk Inc., based in Henniker, N.H.
Called Softdesk Energy, the program, which should be out later this month, integrates specialized software, computer-aided-design drafting tools and commonly used manual techniques for estimating energy use. It provides immediate feedback on a building’s energy consumption during the design process.
Designers simply click a mouse to determine the energy-use impacts for every wall, window, door and other exterior component. The system also determines energy-use effects of internal factors such as lighting needs, temperature, humidity, ventilation and building usage. All estimates are based on energy estimation techniques published by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, commonly used in the industry. The program will be available for architects and engineers who use Autodesk’s AutoCAD with Softdesk Auto-Architect.
Turning Over a New Leaf for Tobacco: What’s bad for your lungs may be good for your car’s radiator--and for its fenders and bumpers too. University of Maryland at Baltimore Prof. Anthony von Fraunhofer has identified and refined anti-corrosive elements found in tobacco that could lace toxic corrosion inhibitors into antifreeze, paint and rustproofing treatments.
Tobacco, it turns out, contains high concentrations of alkaloids--fatty acids and compounds that have the ability to inhibit metallic corrosion. The process works not only with tobacco leaves but with waste such as stems and twigs as well, and the resulting concoction can be applied by dipping or spraying, or even incorporated into paint. Ironically, von Fraunhofer, who has a patent pending on the process, has tried but failed to win support for his research from major tobacco companies who are only interested in tobacco research related to health, he says.
Don’t Miss Those Misfires: Engine misfires cause so much pollution that new smog rules in California require warning lights in cars to alert drivers when the engine is misfiring. A misfire is a complete lack of combustion in one or more cylinders and is most commonly caused by bad spark plugs or a faulty fuel injection system. Unfortunately, you can’t hear an engine misfire, and even experienced mechanics may not detect the problem.
Now a team of researchers at Ohio State University have developed a new approach for detecting misfires. Many current methods have caused consumer complaints because of their tendency to produce false alarms: They measure a momentary drop in the energy sent to the engine following combustion, but that drop can be caused by outside events such as bumps in the road or changing gears.
The approach used by the Ohio State researchers is based on the fact that under normal conditions, engine combustion follows a specific pattern. Their system takes the measurement of engine rotation provided by electronic sensors, and then an on-board computer system corrects for outside disturbances and identifies misfires. The technique has been tested by several auto manufacturers in the United States, Asia and Europe.
