2020, Xu, Haifeng, Medina-Sánchez, Mariana, Maitz, Manfred F., Werner, Carsten, Schmidt, Oliver G.

Micromotors are recognized as promising candidates for untethered micromanipulation and targeted cargo delivery in complex biological environments. However, their feasibility in the circulatory system has been limited due to the low thrust force exhibited by many of the reported synthetic micromotors, which is not sufficient to overcome the high flow and complex composition of blood. Here we present a hybrid sperm micromotor that can actively swim against flowing blood (continuous and pulsatile) and perform the function of heparin cargo delivery. In this biohybrid system, the sperm flagellum provides a high propulsion force while the synthetic microstructure serves for magnetic guidance and cargo transport. Moreover, single sperm micromotors can assemble into a train-like carrier after magnetization, allowing the transport of multiple sperm or medical cargoes to the area of interest, serving as potential anticoagulant agents to treat blood clots or other diseases in the circulatory system.

2020, Aziz, Azaam, Pane, Stefano, Iacovacci, Veronica, Koukourakis, Nektarios, Czarske, Jürgen, Menciassi, Arianna, Medina-Sánchez, Mariana, Schmidt, Oliver G

Medical microrobots (MRs) have been demonstrated for a variety of non-invasive biomedical applications, such as tissue engineering, drug delivery, and assisted fertilization, among others. However, most of these demonstrations have been carried out in in vitro settings and under optical microscopy, being significantly different from the clinical practice. Thus, medical imaging techniques are required for localizing and tracking such tiny therapeutic machines when used in medical-relevant applications. This review aims at analyzing the state of the art of microrobots imaging by critically discussing the potentialities and limitations of the techniques employed in this field. Moreover, the physics and the working principle behind each analyzed imaging strategy, the spatiotemporal resolution, and the penetration depth are thoroughly discussed. The paper deals with the suitability of each imaging technique for tracking single or swarms of MRs and discusses the scenarios where contrast or imaging agent's inclusion is required, either to absorb, emit, or reflect a determined physical signal detected by an external system. Finally, the review highlights the existing challenges and perspective solutions which could be promising for future in vivo applications.

2020, Elias, Mirette, Tavakoli, Mohammadreza, Lohmann, Steffen, Kismihok, Gabor, Auer, Sören, Gurreiro, Tiago, Nicolau, Hugo, Moffatt, Karyn

Open Educational Resources are becoming a significant source of learning that are widely used for various educational purposes and levels. Learners have diverse backgrounds and needs, especially when it comes to learners with accessibility requirements. Persons with disabilities have significantly lower employment rates partly due to the lack of access to education and vocational rehabilitation and training. It is not surprising therefore, that providing high quality OERs that facilitate the self-development towards specific jobs and skills on the labor market in the light of special preferences of learners with disabilities is difficult. In this paper, we introduce a personalized OER recommeder system that considers skills, occupations, and accessibility properties of learners to retrieve the most adequate and high-quality OERs. This is done by: 1) describing the profile of learners with disabilities, 2) collecting and analysing more than 1,500 OERs, 3) filtering OERs based on their accessibility features and predicted quality, and 4) providing personalised OER recommendations for learners according to their accessibility needs. As a result, the OERs retrieved by our method proved to satisfy more accessibility checks than other OERs. Moreover, we evaluated our results with five experts in educating people with visual and cognitive impairments. The evaluation showed that our recommendations are potentially helpful for learners with accessibility needs.

2022, Diebold, Steffen M.

The corona pandemic poses major challenges for society. Many people lack (basic) scientific knowledge. They are skeptical and distrust fundamental research principles and concepts. Esotericism and superstition replace them access to reality. Not only facts are recently considered "alternative". Pseudo-scientific healing methods and occult procedures have long been presented to the public as equivalent alternatives to modern medicine, despite the lack of evidence of their effectiveness. Just as if reason or nonsense were just a question of personal taste, a different world view. Seconded by talk of an "exaggeratedly scientific world view", empiricism and logic were systematically defamed. As a result of this distorted picture, all kinds of conspiracy theories are now rampant. Spiritual healers, seers, shamans, charlatans, quacks, sectarians, and zealots of all stripes and persuasions are in demand. Diffuse pandemic management and miserable communication do the rest and contribute to the fact that infection control measures are often flatly rejected and vaccination rates can hardly be increased significantly.

2020, Brack, Arthur, Hoppe, Anett, Stocker, Markus, Auer, Sören, Ewerth, Ralph, Hall, Mark, Merčun, Tanja, Risse, Thomas, Duchateau, Fabien

Current science communication has a number of drawbacks and bottlenecks which have been subject of discussion lately: Among others, the rising number of published articles makes it nearly impossible to get a full overview of the state of the art in a certain field, or reproducibility is hampered by fixed-length, document-based publications which normally cannot cover all details of a research work. Recently, several initiatives have proposed knowledge graphs (KGs) for organising scientific information as a solution to many of the current issues. The focus of these proposals is, however, usually restricted to very specific use cases. In this paper, we aim to transcend this limited perspective by presenting a comprehensive analysis of requirements for an Open Research Knowledge Graph (ORKG) by (a) collecting daily core tasks of a scientist, (b) establishing their consequential requirements for a KG-based system, (c) identifying overlaps and specificities, and their coverage in current solutions. As a result, we map necessary and desirable requirements for successful KG-based science communication, derive implications and outline possible solutions.