When a 1991 cholera outbreak that killed thousands in Peru was traced to plankton blooms fueled by warmer-than-usual coastal waters, linking disease outbreaks to epidemics was a new idea. Now, scientists say, it is a near-certainty that global warming will drive significant increases in waterborne diseases around the world. [ read more ]

Scientists say they have a working prototype of a fully artificial heart ready for implanting in humans. The device beats almost exactly like the real thing using electronic sensors to regulate heart rate and blood flow. Developers Carmat now need approval from the French authorities before pushing ahead with clinical trials. But heart experts warned it was still early days as previous attempts to create a fully artificial heart had failed during human testing. [ read more ]

MIT researchers gauge the progress of malaria using a novel imaging technique.

Bridging physics, engineering, and microbiology, researchers at MIT have measured the frequency at which red blood cells vibrate and have shown that those frequencies reflect the health of the cells. The research could lead to better medical diagnostics. [ read more ]

Devices that self-assemble from biological molecules could represent the future of drug delivery.

Scientists in California have created molecular computers that are able to self-assemble out of strips of RNA within living cells. Eventually, such computers could be programmed to manipulate biological functions within the cell, executing different tasks under different conditions. One application could be smart drug delivery systems, says Christina Smolke, who carried out the research with Maung Nyan Win and whose results are published in the latest issue of Science. [ read more ]

Would you still watch your favorite television program if you had to cycle for an hour before you could view it?

Couch potatoes will be horrified, but fresh advances in human-powered technology — where users power appliances through their own motion — could one day see a ‘workout-to-watch’ scenario become reality.

Human power is rapidly gaining in popularity worldwide as businesses seek ‘greener’ methods of operating. [ read more ]

From sensors in workout gear that monitor sweating while you run at the gym, to underwear that aims to detect cancer cells, the contents of our wardrobes have been quietly undergoing a revolution. Over the past decade, there has been a rise in the number of ways that technology is being incorporated into items of our clothing.

Trials of smart clothes that can repel insects and mask nasty odours such as cigarette smoke have proved successful and are already being marketed.
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Compounds boost endurance and allow mice to run for substantially longer.

The elusive exercise pill just took a step closer to becoming a reality. Scientists have found that two compounds can boost endurance in mice by changing the metabolic properties of the animals’ muscle. One of the drugs appears to mimic some of the benefits of exercise even in sedentary mice. But the most dramatic benefit comes from combining one of the drugs with exercise, enabling mice to run 60 to 75 percent longer. [ read more ]

Jeff Lichtman hopes to elucidate brain development and disease with new technologies that illuminate the web of neural circuits.

Displayed on Jeff Lichtman’s computer screen in his office at Harvard University is what appears to be an elegant drawing of a tree. Thin multicolored lines snake upward in parallel, then branch out in twos and threes, their tips capped by tiny leaves. Lichtman is a neuroscientist, and the image is the first comprehensive wiring diagram of part of the mammalian nervous system. The lines denote axons, the long, hairlike extensions of nerve cells that transmit signals from one neuron to the next; the leaves are synapses, the connections that the axons make with other neurons or muscle cells. [ read more ]

Probing the salamander genome reveals clues to its remarkable ability to regrow damaged limbs and organs.

In its own way, the axolotl salamander is a mighty beast. Chop off its leg, and the gilled creature will grow a new one. Freeze part of its heart, and the organ will form anew. Carve out half of its brain, and six months later, another half will have sprouted in its place. “You can do anything to it except kill it, and it will regenerate,” says Gerald Pao, a postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in La Jolla, CA.

That extraordinary power of regeneration inspired Pao to probe the axolotl salamander’s DNA. Despite decades of research on the salamander, little is known about its genome. That began to change last year, when Pao and his collaborators won one billion bases’ worth of free sequencing from Roche Applied Science, based in Indianapolis. Now that the data is in, scientists can finally begin the hunt for the genetic program that endows the animal with its unique capabilities. [ read more ]

New research is linking dopamine to complex social phenomena and changing neuroscience in the process.

Read Montague is getting frustrated. He’s trying to show me his newest brain scanner, a gleaming white fMRI machine that looks like a gargantuan tanning bed. The door, however, can be unlocked only by a fingerprint scan, which isn’t recognizing Montague’s fingers. Again and again, he inserts his palm under the infrared light, only to get the same beep of rejection. Montague is clearly growing frustrated — “ I can’t get into my own scanning room!” he yells, at no one in particular — but he also appreciates the irony. A pioneer of brain imaging, he oversees one of the premier fMRI setups in the world, and yet he can’t even scan his own hand. “I can image the mind,” he says. “But apparently my thumb is beyond the limits of science.” [ read more ]