Genetic variants might also impact nicotine and other drug metabolism Depending on a person’s genetic make-up, he or she might be able to guzzle coffee right before bed or feel wired after just one cup, based on continuing research at Northwestern Medicine. Studying how genes impact coffee consumption habits is nothing new. In previous work from Marilyn Cornelis, assistant professor in the department of Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, she identif...

In a proof-of-concept study with mice, scientists at The Johns Hopkins University show that a novel coating they made with antibiotic-releasing nanofibers has the potential to better prevent at least some serious bacterial infections related to total joint replacement surgery. A report on the study, published online the week of Oct. 24 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was conducted on the rodents’ knee joints, but, the researchers say, the technology would have “broad appli...

  Needle Stick Safety Issues with Prefilled Syringe Technology Since the inception of the Needlestick Safety and Prevention Act of 2000, a transition away from traditional sharps and fixed needle syringes, toward safety engineered devices, has occurred.  Most devices utilize a variety of methods to meet OSHA safety standards and avoid needle stick injuries and bloodborne pathogen transmission.  However, prefilled syringes still do not utilize comparable needle stick preventi...

World's First 3D Scanner Powered by a Smartphone. As they worked to verify some specifications on a parabolic dish solar energy project, the team at Eora 3D began researching what it would cost them to purchase their own 3D scanner. They were stunned when they checked out the price for the type of device they needed, so they decided to confront the problem head on and build their own. They say the discovery that the cheapest 3D Scanner which would meet their needs was priced ...

Bluesound is the ultimate choice in hi-res multi-room streaming players. Made by audiophiles for audiophiles, Bluesound’s award-winning line of wireless speakers and digital music players is the first to fully support high-resolution audio. Listen to your favorite tracks, in every room of your home, as close to life-like performance as possible. The Bluesound ecosystem uses your home wireless network to stream music and communicate with other BluOS-enabled players on your network. The ecosyst...

As the focus on hospital-acquired infections intensifies, some medical device manufacturers are considering deep UV light emitting diodes for smaller, portable disinfection devices. Here's how the technology can be used in medical device design. Mark Pizzuto According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) one in every 25 hospital patients in the United States will contract a hospital-acquired infection (HAI) during their visit. Often expensive and sometime...

St. Jude Medical's Amplatzer PFO Occluder for patent foramen ovale (PFO) has received FDA approval, the company announced on October 28. The device, made of two nitinol mesh disks with thin polyester fabric, can now be used in the United States to close the PFO—a congenital hole in the tissue between the heart's left and right atria—in patients who have suffered an ischemic stroke, in order to reduce risk of recurrent stroke. Although PFO is relatively common, observed in about a quarter of a...

Northwestern Medicine scientists have discovered circadian clocks in muscle tissue that control the muscle’s metabolic response and energy efficiency depending on the time of day. Muscles have circadian clocks that control exercise response. The finding in mice sheds light on the time-of-day differences in muscle’s ability to adapt to exercise and use oxygen for energy. Muscle cells are more efficient during an organism’s normal waking hours, the study found. All cells in the body, includin...

Born out of a desire for aircraft to be able to take off and land capably at airports with shorter runways to alleviate congestion at the major hubs, the circulation control wing concept has been floated by the aeronautical community as a possible solution for decades. The technology calls for increased amounts of high-pressure air, derived from either the jet engines or separate compressors, to flow over the leading and trailing edges of the wings, creating greater lift. Given extra lift, an ai...

Mocoro Robot Cleaning Ball  robotic duster with a mind of its own; roaming freely around your home picking up dust and filth, changing direction whenever it hits an obstacle so it doesn't get stuck in tight corners or insist on trying to go upstairs. Just sit back and let it do it's thing – it's got so much personality you'll expect it to hop up on your lap and start purring. To stop this playful ball from wasting battery there's an internal timer that pauses it after 15 minutes until disturb...

Every home-brewer knows Brew Day is the best part of brewing your own beer. But then comes fermentation and bottling. Which means you’ve got, at best, 4 weeks worth of work ahead of you including bottling. Days spent lifting, sanitizing, siphoning, conditioning, worrying, and waiting. Meanwhile, the process presents risks like contamination, oxidation, and sub-optimal temps that could turn your craft beer into crap beer. That is, until Vessi™ Fermentor. Go from 4 weeks of worry and work, to...

A great looking lawn can be a lot of hard work. With a robotic lawn mower, the grass gets mowed automatically - around the clock without your supervision. Cuttings are small enough that you won't need to rake the clippings, adding fertilization back to the soil. The Husqvarna Automower® is able to maintain ½ acre lawns in any weather, with rough terrain and slopes up to 35%. When it meets an obstacle it stops and redirects itself. It also knows when it needs to be charged. With the convenient...

Nucleotide database is a collection of sequences from several sources, including GenBank, RefSeq, TPA and PDB. Genome, gene and transcript sequence data provide the foundation for biomedical research and discovery. National Library of Medicine / National Institutes of Health. Offers many important databases (PubMed, GenBank, OMIM) and some tools. GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. ...

Thromboelastography (TEG) is a method of testing the efficiency of blood coagulation. It is a test mainly used in surgery and anesthesiology. Thromboelastography is a viscoelastic hemostatic assay that measures the global visco-elastic properties of whole blood clot formation under low shear stress. it shows the interaction of platelets with the coagulation cascade (aggregation, clot strengthening, fibrin cross linking and fibrinolysis). https://youtu.be/SjH05uGSGv0 EG® measures the ph...

The hygiene hypothesis proposes that a 20th century surge in allergies and asthma is because people are living in increasingly hygienic environments. Rather than the rural farm life of the agricultural 19th century, families live in urban and suburban communities, have fewer children who can exchange infections, bathe and wash their hands more frequently, and use antibiotics excessively. This all means reduced infant exposure to microbes that would have tempered excessive immune reactions, such ...

In a study led by the University of Leeds, scientists have solved one of the most long-standing challenges in atmospheric science: to understand how particles are formed in the atmosphere. Fundamental questions remain about the origin of newly formed atmospheric aerosol particles because data from laboratory measurements have been insufficient to build global models. In contrast, gas-phase chemistry models have been based on laboratory kinetics measurements for decades. Here we build a global...

New training technique would reveal the basis for machine-learning systems’ decisions. In recent years, the best-performing systems in artificial-intelligence research have come courtesy of neural networks, which look for patterns in training data that yield useful predictions or classifications. A neural net might, for instance, be trained to recognize certain objects in digital images or to infer the topics of texts. But neural nets are black boxes. After training, a network may be very ...

Hanging around the kitchen waiting for the kettle to boil is a thing of the past. Whether you’re super efficient or ultra lazy the iKettle will save you over two days a year. With the iKettle 2.0 you can check your water level remotely. Never will you have to re-boil the kettle when you have more than a few guests. Now you can control all products via the Smarter app using one single interface. The centre dial allows you to customise your brew within seconds giving you complete control and...

British label Emel + Aris has launched a smart coat range for men and women using infrared-heating technology. Founder Rana Nakhal Solset is working with a proprietary fabric and a special polymer in the lining of the coat that produces the heat. “There’s three levels of heating — low, medium and high — so you can regulate it,” Solset said. “The technology ensures you that you can’t overheat. It’s like wearing a warm blanket so you can be at ease and comfortable. The heat that it generates...

One day, microrobots may be able to swim through the human body like sperm or paramecia to carry out medical functions in specific locations. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart have developed functional elastomers, which can be activated by magnetic fields to imitate the swimming gaits of natural flagella, cilia and jellyfish. Using a specially developed computer algorithm, the researchers can now automatically generate the optimal magnetic conditions ...

Fossil fuels have ushered in the modern industrial age, but carbon-neutral methods of electricity production are needed for the future. Salinity gradient energy (SGE) is one approach that is based on using two solutions with large differences in salt concentration to produce electricity. These include naturally occurring water sources with different salinities, such as river water and seawater, and salt brines and seawater or river water, or treated used waters and seawater prior to discharge in...

A microbial fuel cells (MFC) or biological fuel cell is a bio-electrochemical system that drives a current by using bacteria and mimicking bacterial interactions found in nature. MFCs can be grouped into two general categories: mediated and unmediated. Renewable and clean forms of energy are one of society's greatest needs.  At the same time, 2 billion people in the world lack adequate sanitation and the economic means to afford it.  In this research, we are working to address both of these hum...

Robots have traditionally been made from hard materials such as metal and plastic. They have been driven by motors and other heavy electro-mechanical actuators. These robots are more like machines than biological organisms. Soft robotics on the other hand seeks to make robots that are soft, flexible and compliant, just like biological organisms. The ‘body’ of a soft robot is soft like natural tissue. A soft robot is driven not by heavy motors but by soft artificial muscles. The energy stor...

U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved pembrolizumab (KEYTRUDA, Merck & Co., Inc.) for the treatment of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose tumors express PD-L1 as determined by an FDA-approved test. This is the first FDA approval of a checkpoint inhibitor for first-line treatment of lung cancer. This approval also expands the indication in second-line treatment of lung cancer to include all patients with PD-L1-expressing NSCLC. The FDA approval ad...

Kidney cancer—also called renal cell cancer—is one of the major types of cancer for which new immune-based cancer treatments are currently in development. This page features information on kidney cancer and immunotherapy clinical trials for kidney cancer patients, and highlights the Cancer Research Institute’s role in working to bring effective immune-based cancer treatments to kidney cancer patients. In its early stages, kidney cancer typically has no symptoms. As a tumor grows, symptoms may...

Colorado Therapeutics LLC, a privately held medical device company with a proprietary technology platform for the production of innovative cross-linked tissue products, announced today that it has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) for a novel xenogenic biologic tissue matrix. The Colorado Therapeutics xenograft implant is intended to be used for implantation to reinforce soft tissue where weakness exists and for the surgical repair of damaged or rupt...

Identifying whether a potential drug is having an effect on cancer cells is not always obvious. If enough cells change their morphology, it’s fairly easy to see the change under a microscope. Spotting individual cells that are unique among millions of others is what researchers at Brown University have been working on. They developed a high speed vision system that outlines cells that just went through an epithelial–mesenchymal transition (EMT). Within tumors such cells lead to greater malignanc...

Mooltipass Mini connects to your computer or smartphone and stores your passwords using a PIN-protected smart card. When you get started, the Mooltipass browser extension or smartphone app asks you to enter your password for each account, which it then saves. It also acts as a USB keyboard for adding in passwords manually. After that you’ll only need to log in by connecting the device and hitting its login button. In theory, it cuts out the need to remember and enter passwords each time you logi...

Food Safety has become one of the major priorities of the EU, with impact in public health and economy. The seriousness with which the Food Safety issue is addressed in Europe is reflected in the stringent national legislations and EU directives that have been issued over the recent years. The numerous food scandals that have The numerous food scandals that have been occurred during the last decade have increased consumers’ awareness concerning food safety, leading to calls for tighter food s...