What if you didn’t need surgery to implant a pacemaker on a faulty heart? What if you could control your blood sugar levels without an injection of insulin, or mitigate the onset of a seizure without even pushing a button? I and a team of scientists in my laboratory at the Salk Institute are [...]
Guided by artificial intelligence and powered by a robotic platform, a system developed by MIT researchers moves a step closer to automating the production of small molecules that could be used in medicine, solar energy, and polymer chemistry. The system, described in the August 8 issue of Science, could free up bench chemists from a [...]
Thin, flexible fibers made of carbon nanotubes have now proven able to bridge damaged heart tissues and deliver the electrical signals needed to keep those hearts beating. Scientists at Texas Heart Institute (THI) report they have used biocompatible fibers invented at Rice University in studies that showed sewing them directly into damaged tissue can restore electrical [...]
The lab of Cheryl Kerfeld at Michigan State University has created a synthetic nano-sized factory, based on natural ones found in bacteria. This research could someday lead to new medical, industrial or bioenergy applications. The new study is published in Metabolic Engineering ("A designed bacterial microcompartment shell with tunable composition and precision cargo [...]
Melanoma in skin biopsy with H&E stain — this case may represent superficial spreading melanoma. Credit: Wikipedia/CC BY-SA 3.0 Researchers at Tel Aviv University have developed a novel nano-vaccine for melanoma, the most aggressive type of skin cancer. Their innovative approach has so far proven effective in preventing the development of melanoma in mouse [...]
You know you have a skeleton, but did you know that your cells have skeletons, too? Cellular skeletons, or cytoskeletons, are shapeshifting networks of tiny protein filaments, enabling cells to propel themselves, carry cargo, and divide. Now, an interdisciplinary team of Caltech researchers has designed a way to study and manipulate the cytoskeleton in [...]
Modern light microscopic techniques provide extremely detailed insights into organs, but the terabytes of data they produce are usually nearly impossible to process. New software, developed by a team led by MDC scientist Dr. Stephan Preibisch and presented in Nature Methods ("BigStitcher: Reconstructing high-resolution image datasets of cleared and expanded samples"), is helping researchers [...]
It has long been known that gold can be used to do things that philosophers have never even dreamed of. The Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Cracow has confirmed the existence of 'gold glue': bonds involving gold atoms, capable of permanently bonding protein rings. Skilfully used by an [...]
Finding out you have cancer is bad enough, but to then have to go to hospital for a painful and invasive biopsy to try to identify the exact type of tumor can be deeply traumatic. But that may soon be a thing of the past: new, cheap devices the size of a silicon chip [...]
“We’ll have nanobots that… connect our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud. Our thinking will be a…. biological and non-biological hybrid.” Ray Kurzweil, TED 2014 UPDATE - August 6 2019 Since it's publication on March 29 2019 in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the "Human Brain/Cloud Interface" paper has attracted considerable attention and [...]
