Circumventing your eyes entirely, this chip beams images from the world onto the brain to help restore sight
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Wireless power could enable ingestible electronics
Small sensors or drug delivery devices could reside in the GI tract indefinitely
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Dogs can sniff out Parkinson’s disease years before symptoms appear
Dogs could soon be used to sniff out Parkinson’s disease years before symptoms start to show.
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Organoids proposed to screen patients for high priced drugs
Medical scientist Hans Clevers thinks tests in lab-grown mini-organs could help make expensive drugs more cost-effective by identifying patients who are and aren’t likely to benefit.
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Beyond the five senses
The world we experience is not the real world. It’s a mental construction, filtered through our physical senses. Which raises the question: How would our world change if we had new and different senses? Could they expand our universe?
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Scientists built an external womb to help premature infants survive
For expecting parents, 24 weeks is an important milestone. It’s a little more than halfway through pregnancy, and it’s at this age that the fetus has at least a fighting chance of surviving outside its mother’s body. The odds of survival aren’t great—only about half of babies birthed at this age survive—but it’s possible.
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The factories of the future could float in space
This past summer, a plane went into a stomach-churning ascent and plunge 30,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico. The goal was not thrill-seeking, but something more genuinely daring: for about 25 seconds at a time, the parabolic flight lifted the occupants into a state of simulated weightlessness, allowing a high-tech printer to spit out cardiac stem cells into a two-chambered, simplified structure of an infant’s heart.
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Adding VR to you next trip to the dentist, will it get rid of the pain?
Dentists and patients alike want to know how to make dental work less traumatic — and one possible solution may be to combine it with virtual reality. That’s why researchers in the UK enlisted 80 people who needed a cavity filled or a tooth pulled, and separated them into three groups. They gave the first two groups VR headsets, but not the unlucky third control group.
The VR groups either got to explore a beach or navigate a city. The people in the control group just stared at the ceiling while the dentist yanked on their teeth. (Everyone in the study got pain meds or sedation if they needed it.) Patients were surveyed both immediately after their appointments, and a week later.
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Photographing people in 3D through walls using Wi-Fi
Wi-Fi can pass through walls.
This fact is easy to take for granted, yet it’s the reason we can surf the web using a wireless router located in another room. But not all of that microwave radiation makes it to (or from) our phones, tablets, and laptops. Routers scatter and bounce their signal off objects, illuminating our homes and offices like invisible light bulbs.
Now, German scientists have found a way to exploit this property to take holograms, or 3D photographs, of objects inside a room — from outside it.
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Robot completes 2-hour brain surgery in just 2.5 minutes
Brain surgery is precision business, and one slip can spell doom for affected patients. Even in one of the most skilled jobs in the world, human error can still be a factor.
Researchers from the University of Utah are looking to provide less opportunity for those errors to occur. A robot that the team is developing is able to reduce the time it takes to complete a complicated procedure by 50 times.
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We’re beginning to see the medical revolution CRISPR had promised
There’s a revolution happening in biology, and its name is CRISPR.
CRISPR (pronounced “crisper”) is a powerful technique for editing DNA. It has received an enormous amount of attention in the scientific and popular press, largely based on the promise of what this powerful gene editing technology will someday do.
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Regrowing our own body parts
The ability to regenerate body parts has always been a fascinating prospect, inspiring characters like Wolverine who can instantly heal themselves and regrow body parts they’ve lost — and now regeneration has inspired scientific research.
Many species in the animal kingdom can regenerate: arthropods (like scorpions) can regrow appendages, some annelids (like worms) can regenerate from only a few segments of their body, echinoderms (like starfish) can both self-amputate and re-grow limbs, amphibians (like salamanders and newts) can regenerate a limb in as little as a month, and some reptiles can regenerate their tails.
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