Skeleton Recharge
It’s not quite Mary Shelley’s image of a corpse brought to life by electricity, but biomedical engineers have found a way of using electricity to bring artificial bone to life. The method could one day...
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Nanobiotech Makes the Diagnosis
Gazing at an electrical meter, Yi Cui, a graduate student in the Harvard University lab of chemist Charles Lieber, waits for evidence of a remarkable feat in simple, ultrasensitive diagnostics. His...
View ArticleSweet Spots
Doctors commonly diagnose infectious diseases by checking patients’ blood for evidence of proteins or genes unique to different bacteria and viruses. Soon, they may be able to look instead for...
View ArticleThe State of Biomedicine
Your dirt-biking expedition has ended painfully-a few ribs broken in a tumble on the trail-and the emergency-room doctor has sent you home with a bottle of codeine. It should be enough to tide you over...
View ArticleMind Magnets
Alvaro Pascual-Leone holds a figure-eight-shaped paddle to his head and flips a switch. His left arm begins to twitch. He turns off the device-quelling its pulsing magnetic field, which was inducing an...
View ArticlePolymer Memory
While microchip makers continue to wring more and more from silicon, the most dramatic improvements in the electronics industry could come from an entirely different material: plastic. Labs around the...
View ArticlePrecision Brain Scans
The main skill in diagnosing neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease: educated guesswork. Indeed, today’s doctors rely primarily on interviews, physical examination...
View ArticleNanotech Goes Mainstream
The new NanoMechanical Technology Laboratory brings a burgeoning field closer to the real world.
View ArticleNano Biomaterials
Detergent manufacturers have long used enzymes in their formulations for fighting really tough dirt. Jonathan Dordick, a chemical engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, is taking the...
View ArticleMolecular Bloodhounds
Antibodies, the body’s own biosensors, recognize and bind to foreign molecules with astonishing precision. Antibodies are incorporated in many medical diagnostic tests, but researchers have long hoped...
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