INNOVATIONS

Now Its Easy to Monitor Autoimmune Disease Progression By Gene Activity December 26, 2016 By JENNIE DUSHECK (Stanford News) Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and six other institutions have designed a new diagnostic tool for a rare and deadly autoimmune disease that affects the skin and internal organs. [..]

Artificial Leaf as Mini-Factory For Medicine Eindhoven University of Technology News December 22 2016 To produce medicine sustainably and cheaply, anywhere you want. Whether in the middle of the jungle or even on Mars. A ‘mini-factory’ whereby sunlight can be captured to make chemical products. Inspired by the art of [..]

Mystery Molecule is a Key to Inhibiting Colon Cancer St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital News December 22, 2016 Immunologists at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital have discovered that a protein called NLRC3 plays a central role in inhibiting colon cells from becoming cancerous. The study, led by Thirumala-Devi Kanneganti, Ph.D., [..]

Sangar Institute Research Reveal Potential Drug Target From Largest Ever Genetic study of Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis By : Media Team Sangar Institute December 21, 2016 Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC) is a debilitating rare disease of the liver with no effective treatment. Reported in Nature Genetics researchers from the Wellcome Trust Sanger [..]

New Diabetes Approaches From Bacteria That Boost Insulin-Producing Cells By Lewis Taylor, University Communications December 21, 2016 A newly discovered bacterial protein produced in the zebrafish gut triggers insulin-producing beta cells of the pancreas to multiply during early larval development, say University of Oregon researchers. The research potentially has human health [..]

Movable Microplatform Floats On a Sea of Droplets David L. Chandler | MIT News Office December 19, 2016 Microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, are tiny machines fabricated using equipment and processes developed for the production of electronic chips and devices. They’ve found a wide variety of applications in today’s consumer electronics, [..]

A Leap in Bioinspired Robotics Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office December 19, 2016 In the not so distant future, first responders to a disaster zone may include four-legged, dog-like robots that can bound through a fire or pick their way through a minefield, rising up on their hind legs to [..]

Faster treatment for epilepsy NUS News 16 December 2016 Researchers at Duke-NUS Medical School (Duke-NUS) have identified a gene network in the brain, that when disrupted, causes epilepsy. The team’s original “network biology” approach could also possibly provide a quicker and cheaper way to accelerate the discovery of novel drug [..]

How do we keep GPS safe from sabotage? By Edmund Andrews  (Stanford News) December 16, 2016 Aerial drones are already being used to televise football games, produce 3-D maps and tend farm fields. Uber, the giant ride-sharing company, is now testing a service with self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. China deploys unmanned patrol boats in [..]

No more burning batteries? Stanford scientists turn to AI to create safer lithium-ion batteries DECEMBER 16, 2016 BY: MARK SHWARTZ (Stanford News) Scientists have spent decades searching for a safe alternative to the flammable liquid electrolytes used in lithium-ion batteries. Now Stanford University researchers have identified nearly two-dozen solid electrolytes [..]

U of T Researchers Make Skin Cells ‘Crawl’ Together to Heal Wounds Treated With Unique Hydrogel Layer December 16, 2016 By Marit Mitchell (University Of Toronto) Time may not heal all wounds, but a proprietary mix of peptides and gel developed by U of T researchers heals most. A team led [..]

Big Data is Manageable: MIT Research By: Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office December 15, 2016 One way to handle big data is to shrink it. If you can identify a small subset of your data set that preserves its salient mathematical relationships, you may be able to perform useful [..]

Possible Drug Treatment For Incurable Brain Cancer University of Toronto News December 15, 2016 A  team of University of Toronto researchers has identified promising drugs that could target a type of incurable brain cancer in children. That discovery is one of the potential outcomes of research described in the December 12 [..]

Drug Interactions Can Reduce Mortality in Breast Cancer Patients December 14, 2016 By: JENNIE DUSHECK (Stanford News) Patient health records revealed two drug combinations that may reduce mortality rates in breast cancer patients, according to a study led by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The drugs involved were [..]

A Cheaper and Better Blood Test to Manage Lung Cancer: Stanford Research December 14, 2016 By: JENNIE DUSHECK (Stanford News) Profiling the genes of lung-tumor cells from patient blood samples may be a cheap, noninvasive way to help doctors choose the right treatments, according to a study led by researchers at [..]

A Means to Control Catalytic Reactions: By U of Toronto Chemist December 14, 2016 By Sean Bettam Scientists at the University of Toronto have found a way to make catalysis – the use of catalysts to facilitate chemical reactions – more selective, breaking one chemical bond 100 times faster than [..]

Three Diseases and One Stone By: Elizabeth Dougherty December 14, 2016 In large swaths of rural Latin America, an insect called the kissing bug spreads a silent killer: Chagas disease. A bug bite can transfer a single-celled organism that takes up residence in several different tissues. People can live with these [..]

Sand Absorbs High-Speed Ballistic Impact Better Than Steel: NUS Research BY: National University of Singapore News December 13, 2016 While sand has been used traditionally for military fortification, very little is known about the unique energy absorption capability of the material. In a recent study, a team of researchers from [..]

DNA From Wastewater Can be Useful for Early Detection of Disease: Stanford Research  By Ula Charobak (Stanford News) December 13, 2016 With every toilet flush, valuable information encrypted in DNA is lost. Wastewater may hold a wealth of insight for public health officials, and an interdisciplinary team of Stanford researchers [..]

New Networks for Verbal Working Memory Architecture : Useful For Artificial Intelligence NYU News The neural structure we use to store and process information in verbal working memory is more complex than previously understood, finds a new study by researchers at New York University. It shows that processing information in [..]

Direct Programming of Stem Cells into Motor Neurons: By NYU Scientist NYU News December, 12 2016 A team of scientists has uncovered details of the cellular mechanisms that control the direct programming of stem cells into motor neurons. The scientists analyzed changes that occur in the cells over the course [..]

Faster Test for Leukemia Patients By University of Toronto Scientist  By: University Of Toronto News December 11, 2016 A new, rapid gene-expression test could help clinicians determine the best management for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) by making it possible to accurately predict a patient’s response to chemotherapy within one [..]

Now Unwanted CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Edits Can be Controlled By: University Of Toronto News December 11, 2016 CRISPR genome editing is quickly revolutionizing biomedical research, but the new technology is not yet exact. The technique can inadvertently make excessive or unwanted changes in the genome and create off-target mutations, limiting safety and [..]

Common Human Cancer Mutation Targeted by Cellular Immunotherapy NIH News 11 December 2016 In a study of an immune therapy for colorectal cancer that involved a single patient, a team of researchers at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) identified a method for targeting the cancer-causing protein produced by a mutant [..]

Personality Traits and Psychiatric Disorders Linked to Specific Genomic Locations A meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has identified six loci or regions of the human genome that are significantly linked to personality traits, report researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine in this week’s advance online [..]

New Evidence Shows how Bacterium In Undercooked Chicken Causes Guillain-Barre Syndrome By: Linda Mansfield, Sarina Gleason (Michigan State University) A  Michigan State University research team is the first to show how a common bacterium found in improperly cooked chicken causes Guillain-Barre Syndrome, or GBS. The federally funded research, now published in the [..]

Flexible Device Captures Energy From Human Motion By: Nelson Sepulveda, Andy Henion (Michigan State University) December 10, 2016 The day of charging cellphones with finger swipes and powering Bluetooth headsets simply by walking is now much closer. Michigan State University engineering researchers have created a new way to harvest energy from [..]

Wall-jumping robot is most vertically agile ever built By Brett Israel, Media relations UC Berkeley DECEMBER 9, 2016  Roboticists at UC Berkeley have designed a small robot that can leap into the air and then spring off a wall, or perform multiple vertical jumps in a row, resulting in the highest [..]

Protein Disrupts Infectious Biofilms  Many infectious pathogens are difficult to treat because they develop into biofilms, layers of metabolically active but slowly growing bacteria embedded in a protective layer of slime, which are inherently more resistant to antibiotics. Now, a group of researchers at Caltech and the University of Oxford [..]

Agitating the aluminum pot Denis Paiste | Materials Processing Center December 8, 2016 Industrial aluminum slabs are typically produced by blending small amounts of copper or manganese in a reservoir of molten aluminum that is rapidly cooled, a process known as direct-chill casting. Variations in the way these elements solidify [..]