Category Biology/Biotechnology

The design could help restore motor function after stroke, enhance virtual gaming experiences. When you pick up a balloon, the pressure to keep hold of it is different from what you would exert to grasp a jar. And now engineers at MIT and elsewhere have a way to precisely measure and map such subtleties of tactile dexterity.

The team has designed a new touch-sensing glove that can “feel” pressure and other tactile stimuli...

KAIST researchers fabricated a brain-inspired highly scalable neuromorphic hardware by co-integrating single transistor neurons and synapses. Using standard silicon complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology, the neuromorphic hardware is expected to reduce chip cost and simplify fabrication procedures.

The research team led by Yang-Kyu Choi and Sung-Yool Choi produced a neurons and synapses based on single transistor for highly scalable neuromorphic hardware and showed the ability to recognize text and face images. This research was featured in Science Advances on August 4.

Neuromorphic hardware has attracted a great deal of atten...

A study by University of Liverpool researchers has identified new factors accompanying previous findings that frequent consumption of peanuts by cancer patients could increase risk of cancer spread.

The study, published in Carcinogenesis, shows that Peanut agglutinin (PNA) — a carbohydrate-binding protein that rapidly enters into the blood circulation after peanuts are eaten — interacts with blood vascular wall (endothelial) cells to produce cytokines.

The cytokines in question, IL-6 and MCP-1 are well-known promoters of cancer metastasis. The increased cytokine production causes other endothelial cells to express more cell surface adhesion molecules, making them more attractive to the circulating tumour cells and thus potentially promoting metastasis.

In an earlier study, Co...

The average American eats roughly 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day – more than three times the recommended amount for women and more than double the recommended amount for men.

Although this overconsumption is known to contribute to Type 2 diabetes and other disorders, the exact ways in which eating too much sugar sets the stage for metabolic diseases on a cellular level has been less clear. Now, a team led by Van Andel Institute scientists has found that surplus sugar may cause our cellular powerplants – mitochondria – to become less efficient, reducing their energy ouput.

The findings, published today in Cell Reports, highlight the cellular implications of excessive sugar consumption and provide an important new model to study the initial metabolic events that may contribute ...