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Engineers at The Ohio State University, Columbus, discovered that bone cells grow and reproduce faster on a textured surface than on a smooth one—and grow best when they can cling to a microscopic "shag carpet" made of tiny metal oxide wires. The discovery could someday help broken bones and joint...

Mussels hang loosely from piers and rocks, attached by fine filaments known as byssus threads, which allows them to drift a bit to absorb more nutrients. So why aren't they washed away by waves? The secret is that they secrete a protein closely related to collagen, which is a combination of soft, stretchy...

The same 3D printing process used to produce an object can simultaneously generate an internal, invisible tag, say scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and Microsoft Research. The internal tags, which the researchers have dubbed InfraStructs, can be read with an imaging system using...

A team of engineers at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, found that networks of spherical nanoparticles embedded in elastic materials could make the best stretchy conductors. Flexible electronics have a wide variety of possibilities, they say, from bendable displays and batteries to medical implants that...

Researchers at Imperial College London, say that they have developed an "intelligent knife" that can alert surgeons immediately whether the tissue they are cutting is cancerous or not. The “iKnife” diagnosed tissue samples from 91 patients with 100 percent accuracy, instantly...

A team of scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland, College Park, have discovered how to make nanoscale measurements of critical properties of plasmonic nanomaterials, specially engineered nanostructures that modify the interaction of light...

Researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK say that their MXL project, which uses computational modeling to define the mechanics of an artificial joint, will enable surgeons to ensure successful surgery and fit joint replacements with longer, optimized lifespans. Using a complex interaction...

A Victoria University of Wellington School of Design student, Jake Evill, in New Zealand, created a 3D printed alternative to the traditional plaster cast for fractured limbs. Called the Cortex Cast, his design is more lightweight, breathable, and hygienic than fiberglass or plaster casts currently...

Dr. Albert Chi, a 2003 graduate of the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, and a trauma surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, MD, is part of a team of engineers and surgeons developing a Modular Prosthetic Limb—a robotic arm and hand that a person can control using their thoughts....

A team of scientists from UCLA, Iowa State, and Princeton report that they have discovered a new technique of sculpting custom fluid flows by placing tiny pillars in microfluidic channels. By altering the speed of the fluid, and stacking pillars with different width, placements, and orientations,...

Harnessing the computing power of ordinary citizens around the world could have the potential to accelerate the pace of health care research of all kinds, say a team of researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. They say that “crowdsourcing,”...

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, have created a three-piece 3D puzzle, with each piece less than 1 mm in size, which, they say, may be put together to make the smallest puzzle in the world. To create it, the researchers used a new process to manufacture the microstructures by casting...

Human hearts from the potential donors that had been deemed unsuitable for transplantation could get a second chance to save a life, say a team of researchers at the University of Sunderland in collaboration with Newcastle University, both in the UK. The scientists are working to restart hearts and develop tests to prove...

A team of scientists at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, say that using tiny gold particles and resin they have discovered how to make a new kind of flexible sensor that could some day be integrated into electronic skin (e-skin). They say that this e-skin, when attached to prosthetic...

Scientists at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, developed a 3D printing technology to create free-standing structures made out of liquid metal at room temperature. They discovered that a liquid metal alloy of gallium and indium reacts to the oxygen in the air at room temperature to form a “skin”...

Researchers at the University of Bath, UK, say that a device that can train the brain to turn sounds into images could be used as an affordable and non-invasive alternative treatment for blind and partially-sighted people. The vOICe sensory substitution device uses sounds to build an image in the minds of blind people of...

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, developing a new coating technology, combined with a novel nanoparticle-manufacturing technology developed at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, say that this could offer scientists a way to quickly mass-produce nanoparticles specially...

The University of Washington, Seattle, has received nearly $10 million from the U.S. Department of Defense to continue a project to build a prototype of their paper-based device that can test for infectious diseases on-demand in areas where diagnostic capabilities are limited. They say that the device...

Scientists at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, have developed a new algorithm that, they say, can accurately measure the heart rates of people shown in ordinary digital video by analyzing the tiny head movements that go along...

Implants used to monitor bodily functions or to provide drugs would advance personalized medicine, but there is an inherent problem—the human immune system recognizes the device as an invader and encapsulates it, preventing the device from working properly. To combat this problem, researchers at the...

The innumerable divisions of the bronchi in the lungs can baffle researchers in search of tumors, but soon, lung specialists may be able to navigate accurately inside the airways using GPS-type technology say researchers with SINTEF, the largest independent research organization in Scandinavia. A...

In a first-of-its-kind operation in the US, a team of doctors at Duke University Hospital, Durham, NC, helped create a bioengineered blood vessel and transplanted it into the arm of a patient with end-stage kidney disease. The procedure was the first US clinical trial to test the safety and...

Researchers at The Ohio State University, Columbus, say that their technology is closing in on creating low-cost electronic devices that work in contact with inside the body, and that their first planned use of the technology is a sensor that will detect the very early stages of organ transplant...

BigBrain, the first 3D microstructural model of the entire human brain, created at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital—The Neuro, McGill University, in collaboration with researchers at Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, is free and has been made publicly available to researchers...

A new study, published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine, states a significant number of children with complex medical conditions suffer from complications caused by medical devices necessary for their survival. Study authors at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center say their research...

Move over, “Fantastic Voyage”. Scientists at the University at Buffalo (UB), Buffalo, NY, are developing miniaturized sonar technology to be used inside the human body to treat diseases like diabetes and heart failure in real time, without shrinking scientists to enter a patient’s...

Doctors at Children’s National Medical Center, Washington, DC, are creating new hearts to help cardiac surgeons. Not actual hearts, but three-dimensional synthetic models using a 3D printer. The only one of its kind at a Washington area hospital, the printer uses scans from individual patients to replicate...

In the past 13 years, more than 2,000 service members have suffered amputated limbs. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA’s) research with advanced prosthetic limbs controlled by brain interfaces is well documented, but such research is currently limited to quadriplegics....

Combined with state-of-the-art micro-sculpting techniques, a new resin holds promise for making customized electrodes for fuel cells or batteries, as well as biosensor interfaces for medical uses. A rabbit sculpture, the size of a typical bacterium, was one of several shapes created by a team of Japanese...