Biotech

A wireless musical glove developed at Georgia Tech not only teaches users to play songs on the piano, but may also improve the sensation and mobility of the hands of people who have suffered spinal cord injuries, researchers report.

The Mobile Music Touch (MMT) device, which works alongside a computer and a keyboard, improved rehabilitation even in patients who had sustained the injury more than a year earlier -- a point at which improvements tend to be minimal at best.… Read more

Modifications to the world's fastest camera are enabling the real-time identification of rare breast cancer cells in blood, with a record low false-positive rate of one cell in a million, according to new research out of UCLA.

"This technology can significantly reduce errors and costs in medical diagnosis," lead author Keisuke Goda, a UCLA program manager in electrical engineering and bioengineering, said in a school news release.

The team's approach could not only pave the way for earlier detection of cancer and monitoring of drug and radiation therapy but also prove useful in urine analysis, water … Read more

Vascular systems -- i.e., networks of blood vessels -- are like highways for the delivery of nutrients and removal of waste; without them, cells die quickly. The ability to bioengineer new vasculature is a crucial step toward creating new replacement organs such as livers or kidneys from a patient's own cells.

Bioengineers are already working on creating and assembling single layers of cells that have direct access to nutrients and oxygen -- a process known as "bioprinting." But creating a full-fledged array of new vessels remains a major hurdle. Fluidic pressure coursing through these tiny systems … Read more

Let's get one thing straight up front: the term "cinematic" does not in this instance mean it's time to order up some popcorn. There's no color, no dramatic score, no super slow-mo to announce the climax. This is gritty black-and-white footage of a woman giving birth.

But don't let the grit fool you into thinking it's low tech. The world's first birth in an MRI machine was announced by scientists at Charite University Hospital in Berlin back in December 2010, and they're only now releasing the 25-second video, which was made … Read more

In the Fox TV show "Lie to Me," Dr. Cal Lightman was able to tell whether someone was lying by observing what he called "micro expressions" on their faces. The twitch of an eye, the quickening of a pulse, the beads of sweat on a brow -- he looked for clues too subtle for most of us to catch.

Now, researchers out of MIT are developing a video technology they call Eulerian Video Magnification that could do that and more -- by amplifying the motion in a standard video sequence to detect information not visible to … Read more

After the H1N1 "swine flu" virus jumped from pigs to human in 2009, more than 18,000 people died and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called it the first global pandemic in more than 40 years.

Today, biomedical engineers out of Brown University and Memorial Hospital in Rhode Island hope that their prototype flu detector biochip will help contain the next major flu outbreak by enabling the quickest, most accurate, and most affordable diagnosis possible.

The team's assay, which they call SMART (short for A Simple Method for Amplifying RNA Targets), consists of a series … Read more

On October 4, 2004, the idea of incentive prizes hit the mainstream when Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites launched SpaceShip One into orbit for the second time and won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Since then, prizes like that have become more and more common, and though the X Prizes are still the gold standard, there are now similar competitions from medical research to science to business, and beyond.

Not long ago, however, the U.S. government got into the business (PDF) of using competitions like these to come up with new ways to solve existing … Read more

Some tech just sounds too good to be true. A removable, wireless sensor that adheres to dental enamel and can detect trace amounts of harmful bacteria just might fall into the too-much-information category for the squeamish among us.

But the silk, gold, and graphene-based sensor that looks a bit like a temporary tattoo could play a key role in detecting and treating various diseases and conditions, the developers at Princeton University say.

"This is a real-time, wireless response from a sensor that can be directly interfaced with a variety of biomaterials," principal investigator Michael McAlpine, an assistant professor … Read more

Synthetic biology startups have a new friend in Silicon Valley.

Today, Singularity University pulled back the wraps on its new SynBio Startup Launchpad, an accelerator program designed to boost the prospects of entrepreneurs in the blossoming field.

As part of the unveiling of the accelerator program, Singularity University announced the first three companies that are "seeking to apply the rapid-cycle, low-cost approaches employed by tech and biotech startups."

Those companies are Evolutionary Solutions, which is building a genome synthesis device; Modern Meadow, which is using tissue-engineering techniques to generate large amounts of animal protein for textiles and food; … Read more