You Might Be Saved by an Ambulance Drone in the Future

#ThursdayRocks! Welcome to another day of the latest in science & technology news in the software industry today!

You Might Be Saved by an Ambulance Drone in the Future

We’ve covered a lot of drone technology news here at Q3 Technologies’ Blogspot, such as the Ehang flying drone being used for organ delivery. Developed by Tactical Robotics LTD., a subsidiary of Urban Aeronautics LTD. in Yavne, Israel, the Urban Aeronautics AirMule - a single-engine unmanned VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) aircraft that can carry 500kg upto a distance of 48km - looks to make its mark in the drone emergency services industry.

"[It is capable of flying to] anyone out in the field who needs water, food, batteries, supplies, medical equipment, and so forth. There are plenty of situations where you cannot send a helicopter — for example, in the middle of fighting where you want to evacuate people from a street or from a narrow roof. Eventually, there could be civilian applications, such as rescue missions in the mountains or flying into disaster areas — for example, nuclear facilities where no person in a helicopter could get in," says Rafi Yoeli, CEO of UrbanAero, “Later, it could be used to fetch soldiers that you don't want to leave behind or are wounded.”

Safety, you ask? “Our vehicles are designed from the outset to meet FAA safety requirements for manned helicopters. This is to ensure that down the road the public will be allowed to purchase and fly these vehicles legally and safely,” Yoeli adds.

 Using Nano-biotechnology to Accelerate Cancer Detection

We regularly feature Lab-on-a-Chip technologies on our blog, such as how they increase accuracy in medical testing. Partnering with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, IBM has come up with a technology that enables chip-level separation of bio-particles down to exactly 20 nanometers in diameter. Previously, we could only separate bio-particles, which were 50 times larger.

“Separating bioparticles is by no means a new concept, but in their latest experiments, Smith and Stolovitzky’s team is the first to have successfully separated nanoscale biomolecules – specifically exosomes (cell-derived vesicles found in bodily fluids containing genetic cargo released from the mother cell) down to just 20nm in diameter, roughly 1/5,000th of a human hair,” reads IBM’s Research Blog, “At this scale, a host of important bioparticles can be separated, including the aforementioned exosomes, DNA, viruses, and protein complexes, which can potentially signal the early onset of a disease state, existence of a virus soon after exposure, or be used to monitor disease progression.”

“The societal impact of this research is that it could enable physicians to detect cancer early…when there are more possibilities of being cured. We wanted this research to be in the area of cancer and also the area of detecting DNA and viruses like Zika. Everything reduces down to the same thing: being able to have a small and affordable diagnostic tool that can detect minute quantities of biomarker particles that tell physicians something about a person’s health,” said Dr. Gustavo Stolovitzky, Program Director of IBM’s Translational Systems Biology and Nano-biotechnology unit.

Q3 Technologies offers software development services to businesses worldwide. With a team of highly-skilled software developers having a high level of technical expertise, Q3 has helped clients with their software & application development needs by providing Offshore Software Product Development services to the IT industry worldwide.