An international team of researchers from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, and other institutions, have created an inexpensive diagnostic device that, they say, can be used by health care workers in the world’s poorest areas to monitor diabetes, detect malaria, discover environmental pollutants,...

A team of engineers at The University of Texas (UT) at Austin have designed an optical device that, they say, may offer a fast, comprehensive, noninvasive, and lower-cost solution to detect melanoma and other skin cancer lesions, thereby reducing unnecessary biopsies. Their device is a probe that uses light in...

A team of engineers at MIT, Cambridge, MA, have fabricated a new elastic material covered with microscopic, hair-like structures that tilt in response to a magnetic field. Depending on the field’s orientation, they say, the microhairs uniformly tilt to form a path through which fluid can flow. They...

A team of engineers at The University of Texas at Austin has developed a tiny, low-power device that mimics a fly’s hearing mechanism, which could be used to build the next generation of hypersensitive hearing aids with intelligent microphones that could adaptively focus only on those...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued new draft guidance that would exempt certain Class I and Class II medical devices from premarket, or 510(k),submission requirements. If a device is “exempted from premarket notification,” then the FDA would allow a device that was...

The race is on to design smaller, cheaper, and more efficient rechargeable batteries to meet power storage needs. Now, a team of researchers at Stanford University report that they have taken a big step toward designing a pure lithium anode, which, they say, would greatly advance current lithium ion batteries.

Remember when you were a child and broke your arm and had to wear a heavy, hot plaster cast in the Summer? Your arm felt heavy and itchy, your muscles atrophied, you had to wear a plastic bag over your cast to shower, and, after a couple of weeks, the cotton padding inside stunk. The only good thing about it,...

Visual acuity (clearness of vision) usually is measured by an eye doctor using an eye chart. It measures the smallest letters that can be reliably identified by the patient at a specified distance. The traditional test requires the patient to look and report which letters they see.