R&D

Providing Surgical Robots with New Intelligence

Providing surgical robots with a new type of machine intelligence to make them easier and more intuitive for surgeons to operate is the goal of a major new five-year grant from the National...

R&D Roundup: December 2013

Accelerator on a Chip Could Lead to Improved Lasers, X-Rays Cutting-edge research being conducted by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University could...

Using Light to Restart Hearts

When heartbeats slip into an irregular, life-threatening rhythm, a pacemaker or defibrillator can jolt the heart back into rhythm. But because electricity can cause pain, tissue damage, and other side-effects, a...

Teleconcussion Robot to Be Tested at College Football Games

The Mayo Clinic, Phoenix, AZ, will be working with Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, to test the feasibility of using a telemedicine robot to assess athletes with suspected...

Jetprinting Nanostructures with Self-Assembling Material

A team of engineers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Chicago, and Hanyang University in Korea has developed a new approach to fabricating...

Bendable Ceramics with Shape Memory

Ceramics are brittle and tend to crack under stress. But, researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, along with colleagues in Singapore, say that they have found a way around that...

Novel Transparent Skull Implant Allows Peek at Brain

A team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside, College of Engineering and School of Medicine have developed a novel transparent skull implant that could eventually lead...

First Thought-Controlled Bionic Leg Revealed

A team of researchers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) has revealed clinical applications for the world’s first thought-controlled bionic leg—a significant milestone for lower...

R&D Roundup: November 2013

First Thought-Controlled Bionic Leg Revealed A team of researchers at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago has revealed clinical applications for the world’s first thought-controlled bionic vleg—a...

Micro-Machines for Bionic Body Parts and Medical Devices

A team of electrical and mechanical engineers at Israel’s Tel Aviv University (TAU) has developed a way to print biocompatible components for microelectromechanical systems (MEMS),...

Creating New Device Coatings from Cocoa Compounds

Researchers at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, discovered that natural products, like green tea leaves, red wine, dark chocolate, and cacao beans could inspire excellent antibacterial...

Break Up to Make Up Stronger Materials

Scientists at Duke University, Durham, NC, report that microscopic stresses and tears in a new kind of man-made material could help the substance bulk up like an athlete building stronger muscles. They...

Adding Color to 3D Medical Imaging

A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) announced that they have developed the first technique to...

Silver Printed Fabric for Wearable Electronics

Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory, Middlesex, UK, Electronics Interconnection group has developed a new method to produce conductive textiles. This new technique could make...

Speeding Medical Imaging with Auto Lubricant

Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, have built an experimental device that, they say, could speed up medical imaging using amorphous silicon and a surprising simple inexpensive...

R&D Roundup: October 2013

Silver Circuits Create Conductive Fabric Researchers at the National Physical Laboratory, Middlesex, UK, Electronics Interconnection group has developed a new method to produce conductive textiles, which could make...

Guiding Nanowire Growth for Self-Integrated Circuits

Those scientists working with tiny components in nanoelectronics say that the nano-components are so small that arranging them with external tools is impossible. Their only solution is to...

Glass Scaffolds for Bone Implants

Engineers at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, have developed a glass-based scaffold that could one day be used as an implant to repair injured bones in the arms, legs, and other...

Careful Monitoring Eases Prosthetic Leg Pain

When a person experiences a leg amputation, the residual limb will shrink after the surgery. Putting weight onto a prosthetic leg may cause discomfort in the socket, the connection point of the limb...

Ultrasound Patch Heals Venous Ulcers

In a small clinical study, researchers at Drexel University, Philadelphia, administered a new method to treat chronic wounds using a novel ultrasound applicator that can be worn like a bandage. The...

Creating a ‘Bioartificial’ Kidney

Nephrologist William Fissell IV, MD, associate professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, is intent on creating and mass-producing an implantable bioartificial...

R&D Roundup: September 2013

Glass Scaffolds for Bone Implants Engineers at Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, have developed a glass-based scaffold that could one day be used as an implant to repair injured weight-bearing...

Telescopic Contact Lens Could Help Patients with AMD

While normal contact lenses correct many people’s eyesight, they can’t improve the blurry vision of people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), because correcting the eye’s...

Fiber-Optic Pen Allows View into Children’s Brains

Scientists at the University of Washington, Seattle, say that for less than $100, they have designed a computer-interfaced drawing pad that can help scientists see inside the brains of...

R&D Roundup: August 2013

Student Device May Help Avoid Repeated Breast Cancer Surgeries During a lumpectomy, surgeons can’t immediately tell whether all the cancer cells were removed. The excised tissue must be preserved and analyzed in a...

Advanced Materials Research Center Announced

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) plans to establish a new Advanced Materials Center of Excellence to facilitate collaborations between NIST and researchers from academia and...

Auditory Stem Implant Help Tot Hear for First Time

The first-ever auditory stem implant in a child was recently performed on a three-year-old boy from Charlotte, NC, named Grayson Clamp. He was given the device, which allows his brain to...

New MRI Technique for MS Research

Researchers at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, have developed a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique that detects signs of multiple sclerosis (MS) in finer detail than ever...

Student Device Could Help Avoid Repeated Breast Cancer Surgeries

During a lumpectomy for a breast tumor, doctors can’t immediately tell whether all of the cancerous tissue has been removed, with no microscopic signs that cancer cells were...