A group of researchers headed by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has discovered an innovative method to find out the local temperature of a material from an area with a width of just one-billionth of 1 m, or roughly 100,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair. This finding has [...]
Tiny floating robots could be useful in all kinds of ways, for example, to probe the human gut for disease or to search the environment for pollutants. In a step toward such devices, researchers describe a new marriage of materials, combining ultrathin 2-D electronics with miniature particles to create microscopic machines. The researchers will [...]
It started like any other day. Dr. Hao Yin walked into the lab at MIT, ready to check on his transgenic mice. He had no idea he was about to make history. Yin’s mice harbored a single mutated gene that gave them a terrible liver disease. Left untreated, the deteriorating liver fails to process [...]
An international research team discovered a new type of curved light beams, dubbed a "photonic hook". Photonic hooks are unique, as their radius of curvature is two times smaller than their wavelength. This is the smallest curvature radius of electromagnetic waves ever recorded. Photonic hook can improve the resolution of optical systems and [...]
A promising discovery for advanced cancer therapy reveals that the efficiency of drug delivery in DNA nanostructures depends on their shapes, say researchers at Missouri University of Science and Technology and the University of Kansas. “For the first time, a time-lapse live cell imaging system was used to observe the absorption and controlled release of [...]
MIT bioengineers have developed a new microfluidic platform technology that could be used to evaluate new drugs and detect possible side effects before the drugs are tested in humans. The microfluidic platform can connect 3D tissues from up to 10 organs. Replacing animal testing, it can accurately replicate human-organ interactions for weeks at a time [...]
Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed new wound dressings that dramatically accelerate healing and improve tissue regeneration. The two different types of nanofiber dressings, described in separate papers, use naturally-occurring proteins in plants and animals to promote [...]
In a step toward accelerating the production of new gene therapies, scientists report in ACS Nano ("Precision-Guided Nanospears for Targeted and High-Throughput Intracellular Gene Delivery") that they have developed remote-controlled, needle-like nanospears capable of piercing membrane walls and delivering DNA into selected cells. They say the new technique, which can ferry biological materials to cells [...]
Artificial ion channels developed by A*STAR researchers could pave the way for new kinds of antibacterial agents and biomedical sensors (J. Am. Chem. Soc., "Combinatorial evolution of fast-conducting highly selective K+-channels via modularly tunable directional assembly of crown ethers"). Ion channels are biochemical superhighways that enable ions of metals such as potassium and sodium to [...]
With the goal of minimizing the side effects of chemotherapy on healthy tissues, a team of researchers at the Center for Self-assembly and Complexity, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) have developed novel nanocontainers able to deliver anticancer drugs at precise timing and location. Published in Angewandte Chemie International Edition ("Mono-allyloxylated Cucurbit[7]uril Acts as [...]
