Research

It may be benign, but researchers have turned the virus M13 into a sophisticated engineering tool that could lead to the manufacturing of materials with biomedical properties that can be fine-tuned, such as bone, skin, and corneas.

"We took our inspiration from nature," said Seung-Wuk Lee, an associate professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley who describes the team's self-templating material assembly process in the journal Nature. "Nature has a unique ability to create functional materials from very basic building blocks. We found a way to mimic [this]."

Lee points to the protein collagen as the … Read more

The latest creation from University of California at Berkeley's robotics researchers draws its inspiration from that seemingly indestructible insect: the cockroach.

Known as DASH Plus Wings, it scampers along at 1.3 meters per second and climbs 17-degree inclines. (DASH stands for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod.) The researchers hope that some day, with further development, the robots used in large numbers could aid in search efforts for survivors of disasters such as earthquakes. … Read more

In 1999, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement that discouraged electronic media use by children under the age of 2. Today, the same group is releasing a follow-up statement that not only maintains its previous recommendations, but backs them up with a great deal of data to boot.

In 1999, as display screens were making their way into parents' and children's bedrooms alike, the pediatricians had limited data with which to work. But they had something of an expert hunch that kids younger than 2 reaped more negative than positive effects from media exposure.

In today's … Read more

As scientists unveil artificial organs and prosthetics to improve the function of our hearts, kidneys, hands, and even eyes, it's easy to gloss over these devices' Achilles' heel: power.

Even building devices that run on very low power, such as pacemakers, tend to require additional invasive surgeries just to replace their batteries. Meanwhile, artificial limbs can be huge energy hogs, with the power source needing to be swapped out as frequently as every few weeks. Impractical is an understatement.

Biofuel cells could very well solve this problem. Researchers around the world are investigating how to use a body's own energy to power various devices, and one team out of France last year successfully implanted in a rat a biofuel cell that uses glucose and oxygen to generate electricity.… Read more

In 12 cities across England this past spring, researchers took almost 400 samples from cell phones and hands on the hunt for bacteria.

The researchers--from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Queen Mary, University of London--found that 16 percent of both the phones and hands contained E. coli, a form of bacteria that inhabits our intestines and is typically spread through fecal matter.

At 400, the sample size is by no means large, but if those percentages are accurate, there is simply no getting around the conclusion: traces of our own poop and the resulting bacteria are hanging out on 1 in 6 of our phones and hands.… Read more

In my neighborhood in Portland, Ore., the hipsters all like to ride minimalist fixed-gear bikes (aka fixies). Without a freewheel, a fixie generally requires pedaling forward to move forward and pedaling backward to brake. Brakes with wires are just so last year. Shoot, even handlebars are starting to look a tad frilly.

Good thing, then, that a team out of Saarland University in Germany has devised a wireless braking system that does away with those protruding brake levers and messy wires altogether. What's more, the mathematical calculations the team applied to determine safety--the same used in control systems for aircraft or chemical factories--deem the brake 99.999999999997 percent reliable.… Read more

What do you get when you combine an Android smartphone, cell phone image sensor, Lego building blocks, and a handful of Caltech engineers and biologists? The ePetri, which isn't Petri Dish 2.0, but a full reworking of a technology that dates back to the late 1800s.

Traditionally, the Petri dish (named after German bacteriologist Julius Richard Petri) has been used in the medical field to identify bacterial infections by studying samples via microscope as the cultured cells grow in an incubator.

The Caltech researchers have a few choice words for such an approach in 2011, including "expensive," "labor-intensive," and "suboptimal." So they set out to improve not just the dish, but the entire process.… Read more

It may not be terribly surprising that many of us find our moods dipping over the course of the day, and that by nightfall we light up again. Or that our moods are perkiest on weekends, regardless of which days our weekends fall on (i.e., Fridays and Saturdays in the United Arab Emirates).

What's of note, according to an analysis of 2.4 million tweets in 84 countries by researchers out of Cornell, is that these mood trends hold steady across cultures and borders, hinting at some sort of deeper trend whose basis is in being human, not … Read more

The airflow of a typical human breath travels at less than 2 meters per second. Instead of lamenting its weakness, engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to try to make a material that could react to this airflow in such a way as to convert it to electrical energy.

So they turned to polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), a material in which an electrical charge can build up in response to applied mechanical stress. (There's even a name for this: the piezoelectric effect.) The trick, then, was to get this material thin enough to be sufficiently stressed by human breath.

"We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face," says Xudong Wang, a materials science and engineering assistant professor who reports on these findings in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Wang's team had go about thinning this material very carefully, so as to preserve its piezoelectric properties. They used an ion-etching process that, with some improvements, might eventually enable them to control thickness to the submicron level.

The obvious benefits of using respiration to power biomedical devices (think blood glucose monitors or pacemakers) are that the source is local and it is consistent.… Read more