Earlier studies have confirmed that a tenacious hardy bacterial population manages to persist and survive throughout a spacecraft assembly process. The widespread detection of these organisms underscores the challenges in eliminating them completely....

A Queen's University researcher has created a Star Trek-like human-scale 3D videoconferencing pod that allows people in different locations to video conference as if they are standing in front of each other. Two people simply stand in front of their own life-size cylindrical pods and talk to...

Current planetary protection policies require that spacecraft targeted to sensitive solar system bodies be assembled and readied for launch in controlled cleanroom environments. A better understanding of the distribution and frequency at which high-risk...

A mobile pill transmitter system moves through, or adjacent to, one or more organs in an animal or human body, while transmitting signals from its present location and/or present angular orientation. The system also provides signals from which the present roll angle of the pill, about a selected...

A new Northwestern Medicine brain-machine technology delivers messages from the brain directly to the muscles -- bypassing the spinal cord -- to enable voluntary and complex movement of a paralyzed hand. The device could eventually be tested on, and perhaps aid, paralyzed patients.The...

An inorganic, biodegradable silica gel fiber (SGF) acts as a physical scaffold to aid the growth of new cells and the collagen structure that supports them. As a scaffold, it can also be used to deliver drugs over a wide area to aid in healing. The material is integrated into the tissues and...

Since the Viking missions in the mid- 1970s, traditional culture-based methods have been used for microbial enumeration by various NASA programs. Viable microbes are of particular concern for spacecraft cleanliness, for forward contamination of extraterrestrial bodies...

This invention is a means of radiation protection, or cellular oxidative stress mitigation, via a sequence of quenching radical species using nano-engineered scaffolds, specifically single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) and their derivatives. The material can be used as a means of...

This week's Question: As part of a five-year, $1.58 million research project named AudACiOus, a group of University of Nottingham scientists will attempt to program the genetic components of a cell to perform any desired function, without requiring extensive modification...

A team led by Ki Chon, professor and head of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), has developed a smart phone application that can measure not only heart rate, but also heart rhythm, respiration rate and blood oxygen saturation using the phone's built-in video camera....

In a first-ever demonstration of a two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body, two monkeys trained at the Duke University Center for Neuroengineering learned to employ brain activity alone to move an avatar hand and identify the texture of virtual objects.Without moving...

"Create the Future" Design Contest sponsored by PTC®, COMSOL, and Tech Briefs Media attracts over 900 innovative product ideas from engineers and students in 50 countries. New York, NY – A new invention could protect millions from contracting...

Improved devices have been proposed for collecting sweat for biochemical analysis — especially for determination of the concentration of Ca2+ ions in sweat as a measure of loss of Ca from bones. Unlike commercially available sweat-collection patches used previously in monitoring...

This invention relates to surface modification of porosified silicon (pSi) structures with poly(alkylene) glycols for the purpose of controlled degradation of the silicon matrix and tailored release of encapsulated substances for biomedical applications. The pSi structures are currently...

Although suited astronauts are currently cooled with a Liquid Cooled Ventilation Garment (LCVG), which can remove up to 85 percent of body heat, their effectiveness is limited because cooling must penetrate layers of skin, muscle, fat, bone, and tissue to reach the bloodstream, where its...

Tissue lithography will enable physicians and researchers to obtain macromolecules with high purity (>90 percent) from desired cells in conventionally processed, clinical tissues by simply annotating the desired cells on a computer screen. After identifying the desired cells, a suitable lithography mask will be generated t...

A cytometer now under development exploits spatial sorting of sampled cells on a microarray chip followed by use of grating-coupled surface-plasmon-resonance imaging (GCSPRI) to detect the sorted cells. This cytometer on a chip is a prototype of contemplated future miniature cytometers that would be suitable for rapidly...

Varicella zoster virus (VZV) causes chicken pox on first exposure (usually in children), and reactivates from latency causing shingles (usually in adults). Shingles can be extremely painful, causing nerve damage, organ damage, and blindness in some cases. The virus can be life-threatening in...

This innovation uses partially miscible fluids to form nano- and microdroplets in a microfluidic droplet generator system.

The aim of tissue engineering (TE) is to restore tissue and organ functions with minimal host rejection. TE is seen as a future solution to solve the crisis of donor organs for transplant, which faces a shortage expected only to increase in the future. In this innovation, a flexible and...

The principle of tissue microfluidics and its resultant techniques has been applied to cell analysis. Building microfluidics to suit a particular tissue sample would allow the rapid, reliable, inexpensive, highly parallelized, selective extraction of chosen regions of tissue for...

A process has been developed that can confer novel properties, such as metal resistance, to a host bacterium. This same process can also be used to produce RNAs and peptides that have novel properties, such as the ability to bind particular compounds. It is inherent in the method that the peptide or RNA...

A novel approach for the immediate sealing of traumatic wounds is under development. A portable microwave generator and handheld antenna are used to seal wounds, binding the edges of the wound together using a biodegradable protein sealant or “solder.” This method could be used for...

This innovation is derived from a proprietary amplification scheme that is based upon random fragmentation of the genome into a series of short, overlapping templates. The resulting shorter DNA strands (