Research

Routine mammography screening, widely considered crucial in early breast cancer detection, may in fact be doing its job too well.

It turns out that as many as a quarter of the early cancers detected by mammography would not progress. That suggests early detection results in a great deal of unnecessary treatment and stress, according to a Harvard School of Public Health analysis of a nationwide screening program in Norway.

"Radiologists have been trained to find even the smallest of tumors in a bid to detect as many cancers as possible to be able to cure breast cancer," lead … Read more

During the H1N1 flu pandemic of 2009, which spread across more than 200 countries and killed more than 18,000 people, it became clear that flu diagnosis was often taking too long and resulting in frequent false negatives.

Today, researchers from Boston University, Harvard, and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are reporting in the journal PLoS ONE that they have built a microfluidic chip that rivals in accuracy the gold-standard diagnostic test known as RT-PCR but is faster, cheaper, and disposable.

For their four-year study, which involved 146 patients with flu-like symptoms and was funded by the National Institutes … Read more

After describing a living, breathing "lung-on-a-chip" in Science back in the summer of 2010, Harvard researchers are now reporting in the journal Lab on a Chip on their latest endeavor: a human gut-on-a-chip.

These bio-inspired micro devices that mimic the structures, behaviors, and environments of human organs could help scientists better understand the inner workings of a variety of diseases and disorders -- in this case intestinal ones such as Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis -- without resorting to often less reliable animal testing.

The latest so-called "gut-on-a-chip" is a silicon polymer device whose central … Read more

Japanese researchers led by Masaharu Komori, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Kyoto University, recently demoed the Permoveh, or Personal Mobility Vehicle, as a prototype next-generation wheelchair.

The Permoveh has four wheels of the same size, and each wheel contains 32 rollers that can rotate in a perpendicular direction to the rim. As the vid below shows, the vehicle can move in any direction when the user operates a hand-held control.

When the user wants to travel forward or back, the wheels alone move; when going sideways, the rollers move. When traveling diagonally, both wheels and rollers move. … Read more

In a famous surgery in the early 1900s, Canadian neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield, trying to treat epilepsy, found that stimulating specific neurons while patients were under local anesthesia caused them to vividly recall complex events. The mind, then, is based on matter, Penfield concluded.

Now researchers at MIT say they put this observation to the test in a rigorous study showing that the direct reactivation of specific hippocampus neurons can lead to very specific memory recall. And to do this, all they used was light.

"We demonstrate that behavior based on high-level cognition, such as the expression of a specific … Read more

In the video game Re-Mission, players are tasked with piloting the microscopic robot Roxxi to blast away cancer cells as she navigates the bodies of fictional cancer patients.

A new study that took real-time functional MRI scans of 57 people randomly assigned to either play the game or watch it being played has found that those who played exhibited increased activity in the brain's positive motivation circuits, while those who merely observed exhibited no increase in activity.

"Identifying a direct connection between the stimulation of neural circuits and game play is a key step in unlocking the potential … Read more

Finnair business travelers flying between Helsinki and Shanghai will soon have the chance to be test subjects on the effect that "brain stimulation" headphones have on jet lag.

The $240 earbuds, made and tested by Finnish company Valkee, already blast LED lights instead of music into desperate and willing ear canals with the intention of alleviating seasonal affective disorder. (The company has claimed, too, that the light helps improve reaction time--at least in Finnish hockey players.)

Now Valkee is working with the airline Finnair to determine whether the lights may instill a sense of well-being in long-distance … Read more

New experimental evidence is helping disprove last year's highly surprising finding of neutrinos breaking established physics laws by traveling faster than light.

The finding involved clocking the neutrinos--tiny, nearly massless subatomic particles--as they traveled from the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 730km away. An experiment called Opera found the neutrinos taking less time to arrive than light would, but now another Gran Sasso experiment, Icarus, showed neutrinos making the journey at a more sedate pace under light speed, CERN said.

That finding comes after news in February that a fiber-optic connection problem … Read more

The New England Journal of Medicine, the oldest continuously published medical journal in the world (it celebrated its 200th anniversary in 2012), is now offering up its content on the iPad.

The journal says the iPad edition of its weekly, peer-reviewed content includes audio, video, expandable images, and features such as sharing, searching, and notating.

"We know that you're busy, and you want to have the relevant clinical information you need, right at your fingertips," reported the journal on its blog this week.

The app is available free for download at the iTunes App Store. Current journal … Read more