Research

If researchers at the University of Illinois have their say, bandages are about to get a whole lot cooler.

A team of engineers has created a bandage that in just one week not only encourages new blood vessel growth but helps guide that growth as well.

"The ability to pattern functional blood vessels at this scale in living tissue has not been demonstrated before," co-principal investigator and electrical and computing engineering professor Rashid Bashir says in a school news release.

The team, whose findings will grace the cover of a January 2012 issue of the journal Advanced Materials, … Read more

'Tis the season to be jolly. And a lot of us are during the holidays, if statistical analyses of our tweets provide sufficient measure.

But overall happiness appears to be on a gradual decline since 2009, according to a University of Vermont analysis of some 46 billion words tweeted by 63 million users since 2009.

The team compared a wide range of words and phrases--including hahaha and lol--to "happiness scores" of the 10,000 most common English words. Words such as happy and laughter appear at the top of the 1-to-9 scale, while terrorist gets 1.30.

Not … Read more

It's often the case that a device or substance with a known benefit also comes with known risks--typically referred to as side effects and listed quickly at the ends of commercials. So it seems worth noting when a product's side effect may in fact be useful.

The Valkee, a portable headset launched in August of 2010, directs 8- to 12-minute doses of bright light through the ear canal and into the brain to improve seasonal affective disorder. It turns out that this concentration of bright light into the brain may also improve motoric reaction time, according to a study conducted by Verve Research in Finland.

The placebo-controlled study (meaning some were given the treatment and others a placebo in its place) tested the effects of the Valkee headset on Finnish national league ice hockey players and found that those exposed to 12 minutes of light via the headset sped up their already fast reaction times by 20 percent.

"The placebo-controlled study showed a significant improvement in motoric reaction times of top athletes using bright light via the ear canal," says lead researcher Mikko Tulppo in a news release.… Read more

Patches of tiny needles have already been shown to effectively deliver medications painlessly, and without a bloody mess. Now the tiny needles could also be used to monitor body chemistry in real time.

The new tech, developed by a team of biomedical engineers out of North Carolina State University, the University of California at San Diego, and Sandia National Laboratories, employs electrochemical sensors in the hollow channels of microneedles to detect certain molecules. The researchers reported their findings in the chemistry journal Talanta.

Current body chemistry monitoring involves taking samples, often before or after an event. Wearable micro-sensors, on the … Read more

Researchers at the CERN particle accelerator have found "intriguing hints" of the Higgs boson, a moment of major progress in years of previously unfruitful searching for the elusive subatomic particle.

The search for the Higgs boson is the top priority of CERN's massive and expensive Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Its Atlas experiment showed a statistically suspicious increase in activity that indicates the Higgs could be pinned down with a mass of 126 giga-electron-volts, and showing some important agreement, its independent CMS experiment found a possible result nearby at 124GeV.

"We observe an excess of … Read more

It's been a good year for video gamers--and not just the epic legions of Call of Duty fans enjoying Modern Warfare 3.

A few months after Foldit players helped decode the structure of a protein key to the way HIV multiplies, another group of gamers taking on DNA sequencing in the game Phylo have contributed more than 350,000 solutions, the game's designers at McGill University report.

When University of Washington researchers unveiled Foldit in 2008, it wasn't clear whether the protein-folding game would be a one hit wonder. But one-year-old Phylo, already averaging 1,000 eureka … Read more

Tracking where humans migrate and cluster in any given country from season to season is, in some places, a tall order. Which makes tracking the risk of infectious disease outbreaks that thrive in dense populations tricky as well.

Satellite images of nighttime lights could be the answer, according to researchers at Princeton, who report on their findings today in the journal Science.

Using nighttime images taken of Niger's three largest cities between 2000 and 2004 by a U.S. Department of Defense satellite, and checking those images against public health records compiled by Niger's Ministry of Health, they … Read more

Texting while driving jumped 50 percent from 2009 to 2010, according to a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) study released this week.

But that rather ominous-sounding jump should bear an asterisk, because according to the administration, only 0.9 percent of the drivers it observed at selected stoplights and intersections were texting, up from 0.6 percent the year before--which means that in spite of the 50 percent jump, texting was observed among fewer than 1 out of 100 drivers. What's more, the 2010 number was still lower than the recent peak of one percent measured in 2008.… Read more

Mobile health technology continues to prove itself. The latest example comes in the form of on-the-go diabetes management.

In a recent small trial, 30 patients with type 2 diabetes spent 12 months using a smartphone app that provided real-time feedback on their blood-sugar levels, prompted them when to eat or take other action, and sent digital logbooks of their readings back to their doctors.

The surprising result: these patients had 58 percent fewer ER and hospital visits over the year of the study than they'd had the previous year.

It's important not to overinterpret that result. Not only … Read more