Innovation

Earlier this year, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, published a study identifying genetic markers found in people's stomachs that appear related to obesity and other diseases.

After that, "I got between 50 and 100 e-mails from regular people having problems with the stomach or diarrhea and wondering if we can help them," Peer Bork, a biochemist at the lab, told Nature last week. "They were long e-mails. There must be a lot of frustrated people out there."

Given the interest level, Bork and his colleagues launched MyMicrobes, which could be … Read more

When Army National Guardsman Ed Salau's Bradley Fighting Vehicle filled with smoke on November 15, 2004--"sometime after George Bush declared victory on the aircraft carrier and sometime before we won the war in Iraq," he likes to say--Salau and his gunner managed to crawl out of the hatch.

The first thing that hit them was that they'd somehow managed to survive two rocket-propelled grenades that had been fired at their vehicle. But Salau's leg seemed to dangle and flop below him. With the battle still raging around him, he grabbed the radioman's belt … Read more

We've written about mirrors that tell us more than whether we have a piece of spinach stuck between our teeth. A year ago, a Harvard-MIT student showed off a mirror that's able to read certain vital signs.

Now The New York Times Research & Development Lab is taking things a step further--bringing body tracking, shopping, news, and of course advertising to one's most intimate of places: the bathroom.

The group's "magic mirror" uses LCD and Kinect technology (it's really more of a computer with a reflective surface) that lets users browse the Web while brushing their teeth.

How is this better than using a smartphone in the bathroom? For one, it's hands-free. In fact, in the group's demo, one of the designers simply places a box of meds on the mirror's small ledge; it uses RFID tagging to recognize the type of meds and pull up information about dosages and where to buy more.… Read more

Way back in the early days of 2011, the world's smallest electric motor was so...big. At 200 nanometers wide, it was a whopping 1/300th the size of a human hair.

Now, chemists at Tufts University's School of Arts and Sciences have smashed that record, which was set in 2005, with this weekend's unveiling of their single-molecule electric motor, which at 1 nanometer wide could be the first in an entirely new class of devices with potential use in medicine and engineering.

That's right: 1 nanometer. That's been estimated to be about 1/60,… Read more

Those with a condition commonly referred to as lazy eye may soon be assigned video game therapy, thanks to results of a new study published in the August issue of the journal PLoS Biology.

Participants in the UC Berkeley study who spent at least 40 hours playing off-the-shelf video games throughout the course of the study enjoyed better visual acuity and 3D depth perception scores than prior to playing the games. (Don't get too excited; these improvements have not been seen in people with normal vision.)

"This study is the first to show that video game play is … Read more

Radiation therapy requires oxygen to be effective, which makes cancers that tend to be hypoxic (meaning they are deprived of oxygen)--such as pancreatic and cervical cancers--harder to treat. (Tumors can become hypoxic for a few reasons, e.g. they grow so quickly they actually outgrow blood supply, or cells proliferate so many times that the density taxes the available oxygen.)

So researchers at Purdue have been building and testing tiny devices that can be implanted in tumors and then generate oxygen, thereby making the area far more susceptible to radiation and chemotherapy.… Read more

A good nose can be a curse. Dogs, for instance, have been shown to be able to sniff out lung cancer in humans, which means the poor creatures have to smell our breath, with a lot of smokers in the mix, one sample at a time.

Good news out of Germany, then, for man's best friend. A team of scientists at the University Hospital Jena is testing an electronic nose system that's able to distinguish between people without heart failure and people with it, and even between two types of heart failure (compensated and decompensated) with almost 90 percent accuracy--higher than what canines were able to achieve in the lung cancer study.

The system includes three thick-film metal oxide-based gas sensors with heater elements. Each is tailored to sense different odorant molecular types. As oxygen reacts to the heated sensor surface, the molecules interact with the sensors and change the free charge carrier concentrations, and thus conductivity, in the metal oxide layer.… Read more

Chemists at Yale University are unveiling what they call the first practical method to create the compound huperzine A, which is a naturally occurring extract of Chinese club moss.

The enzyme inhibitor has been used widely in China and now beyond to treat memory loss in disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, and some research indicates it might help fight the effects of chemical warfare agents in primates.

But the plant, whose scientific name is Huperzia serrata, is both slow-growing and overharvested, resulting in a price tag upwards of $1,000 per milligram. The Yale team's success creating a … Read more

As anyone who has broken a bone knows, keeping up with physical therapy post-injury can be painful and annoying, and without a clear way to gauge progress, the regimen is as tempting to avoid as a bland diet.

Recent Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design graduate Pedro Nakazato Andrade hopes to keep people motivated--and thus improve recovery time--via a prototype cast that employs electromyographic sensors, which measure the electrical activity produced by a muscle when it moves.

Called "Bones," his cast prototype can keep a running tally of how much the injured area is being exercised.

The idea behind the design is rooted in the idea behind weight loss programs such as Weight Watchers: people who can track their progress using real, hard data are more likely to stay motivated and keep doing what they have been told to do.… Read more