Brain Prostheses Create a Sense of Touch
The rats sensed the light as a sensation of touch after Duke neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis and his team fitted the animals with an infrared detector...
NEWS INDEX
Building a Biochemistry Lab on a Chip
Miniaturized laboratory-on-chip systems promise rapid, sensitive, and multiplexed detection of biological samples for medical diagnostics, drug discovery, and high-throughput screening. Cross-section of device with a...
Chronic pain alters how DNA works in brain
Epigenetic changes may be caused by environmental factors, including diet, exposure to contaminants, and social conditions such as poverty—and may have a long-term effect on...
Streamlined engineering for synthetic biology
Researchers are injecting ever more conscious design into their bioengineering workflow.
Bionic eye approved
The Food and Drug Administration has approved what's being called the first bionic eye, which may restore limited vision for adults suffering a rare genetic...
Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney
Surgeon Anthony Atala demonstrates an early-stage experiment that could someday solve the organ-donor problem: a 3D printer that uses living cells to output a transplantable...
Todd Kuiken: A prosthetic arm that "feels"
Physiatrist and engineer Todd Kuiken is building a prosthetic arm that connects with the human nervous system -- improving motion, control and even feeling. Onstage,...
Sheila Nirenberg: A prosthetic eye to treat blindness
Sheila Nirenberg studies how the brain encodes information -- possibly allowing us to decode it, and maybe develop prosthetic sensory devices.
Bonnie Bassler: How bacteria "talk"
Bonnie Bassler studies how bacteria can communicate with one another, through chemical signals, to act as a unit. Her work could pave the way for...
‘Robot’ cells answer call to arms
By thinking of cells as programmable robots, researchers at Rice University hope to someday direct how they grow into the tiny blood vessels that feed...
USC scientists turn off the ability to feel cold
USC neuroscientists have isolated chills at a cellular level, identifying the sensory network of neurons in the skin that relays the sensation of cold.
Human brain cells made from reprogrammed skin cells
Published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the new study is the first successful attempt to use human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC) to produce...
RNA sets the ‘rhythm’ for protein folding
Your average musical melody doesn't chug along at a single, mechanical speed. It mixes whole notes, quarter notes, sixteenth notes and so on to lay...
Cell circuits remember their history
MIT engineers have created genetic circuits in bacterial cells that not only perform logic functions, but also remember the results, which are encoded in the...
Bionic Eye
A radical new approach to “bionic eye” implants holds out the hope of restoring near-normal sight to the blind, scientists claim. Researchers have dramatically boosted...