Category Biology/Biotechnology

Rubbery electronics offer promise for new applications. A medical robotic hand could allow doctors to more accurately diagnose and treat people from halfway around the world, but currently available technologies aren’t good enough to match the in-person experience.

Researchers report in Science Advances that they have designed and produced a smart electronic skin and a medical robotic hand capable of assessing vital diagnostic data by using a newly invented rubbery semiconductor with high carrier mobility.

Cunjiang Yu, Bill D...

Discovery opens new possibilities for treating COVID-19 by disrupting virus’ ability to bind the carbohydrate, potentially by using a repurposed drug. Researchers discovered that the SARS-CoV-2 virus can’t grab hold of cell receptor ACE2 without a carbohydrate called heparan sulfate, which is also found on lung cell surfaces – disrupting that interaction with a repurposed drug may help treat COVID-19.

A molecule known as ACE2 sits like a doorknob on the outer surfaces of the cells that line the lungs...

Bioengineers have created miniature intestines in a dish that match up anatomically and functionally to the real thing better than any other lab-grown tissue models. The biological complexity and longevity of the new organoid technology is an important step towards enabling drug testing, personalized medicine, and perhaps, one day, transplantations.

Organoids are fast-becoming one of the most cutting-edge tools of modern life sciences. The idea is to use stem cells to build miniature tissues and organs that accurately resemble and behave like their real counterparts.

One can immediately appreciate the value of organoids for both research and medi...

A new ‘global atlas’ study published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes [EASD]) is the first to identify insomnia as a risk factor associated with increased risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2D). The study identifies 34 risk factors that are thought to increase (19) or decrease risk (15), as well as a further 21 ‘suggestive’ risk factors where evidence was not quite as strong.

The study by Associate Professor Susanna Larsson and by Shuai Yuan of the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden, used a technique called ‘Mendelian Randomisation’ (MR), which uses genetic variation as a natural experiment to investigate the causal relations between potentially modifiable risk factors and health outcomes in observational data...