hydrogel

Shape-shifting hydrogel takes cue from plants, moves to light

The emerging field of soft robotics, which involves mimicking the squishiness and stickiness of such creatures as octopuses, starfish, and squid, may be taking its next cue from a different source: plants.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley describe in the journal Nano Letters a new hydrogel that, inspired by phototropism (the phenomenon of plants moving toward light), can actually expand and shrink in a very controlled fashion via light.

"Shape-changing gels such as ours could have applications for drug delivery and tissue engineering," principal investigator Seung-Wuk Lee, associated professor of bioengineering, said in a school … Read more

How injectable nanogel could help fight diabetes

For diabetics who have to constantly manage their blood-sugar levels, insulin works. The problem is, many people with Type 1 diabetes have to prick their fingers multiple times a day to monitor their levels, and inject themselves with insulin when those levels are too high. And they don't always administer the right amount at the right time.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Children's Hospital hope to automate insulin delivery with a novel nanotech approach that involves injecting a gel that detects blood-sugar levels and secretes insulin when needed -- with a single injection doing do the trick for as many as 10 days.… Read more

IBM says it has tool to kill deadly drug-resistant superbugs

Hospital-acquired infections have become a major killer in the United States, mainly because the drug-resistant "superbugs" that cause them have proven nearly impossible to stop.

But now IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology say they have come up with what they're calling an antimicrobial hydrogel that can successfully fight the superbugs that are behind killers like MRSA.

In an announcement today, IBM Research and its partner on the project said that their antimicrobial hydrogel was designed to cut through diseased biofilms and almost instantly kill off drug-resistant bacteria. The collaborators on the project said that … Read more

This Day in Tech: Data leaked from BART police union Web site; Turning toys into medical devices

Too busy to keep up with the tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Wednesday, August 17.

It looks like hackers haven't given up on BART. Last week, SF subway officials shut down cell phone service and have since taken the media spotlight as hackers respond to the communication lockdown. Today, data containing full names, passwords, e-mail addresses, and passwords was leaked from the BART Police Officers Association's Web site, making it the second site, affiliated with BART, to be hacked.

And of course, here's more news on Google's Motorola … Read more

New hydrogel stanches blood flow fast, cheaply

A synthetic new gel made of water and the fibrous polymer acrylamide kick into gear the blood-clotting protein known as factor VII, thereby stanching blood flow from deep wounds in just minutes, report researchers from the University of Maryland in College Park.

"You just apply it to the surface of a wound," says Brendan Casey, a biomedical engineer at the university who began investigating polymeric hydrogels in 2007 and presented his latest findings from experiments on sheep at this week's American Chemical Society fall meeting.

Hydrogels are by no means novel, but many are made of biological … Read more