INSIDER

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, and the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center have discovered that patterns of electric signals sent by a computer into nerves in a patient’s arm and to his brain, can give distinct sensations of touch to the patient’s...

The safe use of silver ions in antibacterial textiles has been a matter of debate worldwide, with consumers increasingly seeking a proven alternative. Sweden’s national agency for chemical inspection has ruled silver a health risk, citing possible damage to human genetic material,...

A scientist at the University of Eastern Finland has developed a new, easy-to-use electroencephalography (EEG) electrode set to measure electrical activity of the brain. The new design allows the user to attach the electrode set to the patient quickly, without any special treatment of the skin. Its design also pays...

Engineers at Oregon State University, Corvallis, have developed an implantable device using a simple pulley mechanism to improve hand function after surgery. They say that this is one of the first instruments ever created that could improve the transmission of mechanical forces and movement while implanted...

Chips that could use light, instead of electricity, to move data would consume much less power—a growing concern as chips’ transistor counts rise. Of the three chief components of optical circuits—light emitters, modulators, and detectors—emitters are the toughest to build....

Silicon is generally the material of choice in the electronics industry. Yet transistors, the switchable valves that control the flow of electrons in a circuit, cannot simply keep shrinking to meet the needs of powerful, compact devices. Physical limitations like energy consumption and heat...

A team of scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, invented a Wearable Artificial Kidney device, designed to untether patients from large dialysis machines. The device can give patients with end-stage renal failure a degree of mobility and freedom for such routine activities as...

By creating easy to snap together components, a team of scientists at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering, Los Angeles, say that it is now possible to build a 3D microfluidic system quickly and cheaply. Microfluidic systems are used to precisely manipulate small volumes of...

While wearable electronic activity monitors may help users reach their fitness and health goals, choosing the right one and remaining motivated enough to wear it may be the bigger hurdle. A team of researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston took on the task of analyzing more than a dozen...

When a patient has sepsis, in which bacteria or fungi multiply too swiftly in a patient's blood for antibiotics to help, the result is often deadly. However, a new device inspired by the human spleen and developed by a team at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Boston, MA,...

To get an accurate MRI, the patient must lie completely still for a long period in a confined space, be able to hold their breath on command, and withstand loud banging noises. That’s why it’s often very difficult to get young children to comply, even though they may need the scans for their healthcare.

A team of scientists in a collaboration between the Cambridge Graphene Centre at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Plastic Logic Ltd., also in Cambridge, have created a prototype of a flexible display incorporating graphene in its pixels’ electronics, marking the first time that graphene has...

Researchers in the George Washington UniversitySchool of Engineering and Applied Science, Washington, DC, have created a smartphone-controlled liquid handling system that could make handheld diagnostic testing a reality. Their technology is operated by a smartphone, using a mobile app that they also designed,...

New research has confirmed that a technique developed previously at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Gaithersburg, MD, can enable optical microscopes to measure the 3D shape of objects at nanometer-scale resolution—far below the normal resolution limit for optical...

A new device that fits around the head like a halo, developed by a physician at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and a researcher at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, delivers therapy to quickly bust blood clots that could cause stroke. When ultrasound is typically used in...

A team of engineers at Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, has developed an innovative method of using off-the-shelf 3D printers and materials to fabricate custom medical implants that can contain antibacterial and chemotherapeutic compounds for targeted drug delivery.

A team of scientists from the University of Surrey, UK, and Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, report that they have developed a new type of flexible sensor that is inexpensive yet sensitive enough to measure a patient’s breathing, heart rate, or movement, alerting doctors to any irregularities.

A team of researchers at the University of California, San Diego, has designed a sensor applied as a temporary tattoo that can not only monitor a person’s progress during exercise but produce power generated by their perspiration that may be used to energize small electronic devices.

Defects in the head, face, or jaw, whether from disease, injury, or birth defect, can dramatically impact a person’s appearance. A team of researchers at Texas A&M University, College Station, report that they have developed a specialized material that can expand with warm salt water to...

Following surgery, a physician generally listens to the abdomen of a patient for signs of digestion before allowing that patient to be fed, in order to avoid a condition called post-operative ileus, a malfunction of the intestines. Dr. Brennan Spiegel, a professor of medicine at the David...

Chemists at Stanford University have developed a non-invasive technique using lasers and carbon nanotubes that visualizes blood flow in the brain, which could help provide powerful insights into strokes and possibly Alzheimer's disease. Current non-invasive technologies like CT scans or MRI visualize...

When seeking chemical compounds with just the right properties to create new products, including medical devices, researchers can spend years of trial and error testing them in the lab. To aid researchers in this quest, a team of scientists at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at...

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 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.

A team of researchers at the National Taiwan University Hospital and National Chiao-Tung University has developed a new optical technology that can hang on eyeglasses that, they say, may detect diabetic autonomic neuropathy at an earlier stage, when it is more easily treated. This...