Category Biology/Biotechnology

Dr. Akhilesh K. Gaharwar, associate professor, has developed a highly printable bioink as a platform to generate anatomical-scale functional tissues. This study was recently published in the American Chemical Society’s Applied Materials and Interfaces.

Bioprinting is an emerging additive manufacturing approach that takes biomaterials such as hydrogels and combines them with cells and growth factors, which are then printed to create tissue-like structures that imitate natural tissues.

One application of this technology could be designing patient-specific bone grafts, an area that is gaining interest from researchers and clinicians. Managing bone defects and injuries through traditional treatments tends to be slow and expensive...

Neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh Brain Institute have traced neural pathways that connect the brain to the stomach, providing a biological mechanism to explain how stress can foster ulcer development.

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, build a scientific basis for the brain’s influence over organ function and emphasize the importance of the brain-body connection.

Until now, research exploring the gut-brain interaction has largely focused on the influence of the gut and its microbiome on the brain. But it’s not a one-way street – the brain also influences stomach function.

“Pavlov demonstrated many years ago that the central nervous system uses environmental signals and past experience to generate anti...

A Duke University research team has found a small area of the brain in mice that can profoundly control the animals’ sense of pain.

Somewhat unexpectedly, this brain center turns pain off, not on. It’s also located in an area where few people would have thought to look for an anti-pain center, the amygdala, which is often considered the home of negative emotions and responses, like the fight or flight response and general anxiety.

“People do believe there is a central place to relieve pain, that’s why placebos work,” said senior author Fan Wang, the Morris N...

Novel training method could shrink carbon footprint for greener deep learning. Engineers have found a way to train deep neural networks for a fraction of the energy required today. Their Early Bird method finds key network connectivity patterns early in training, reducing the computations and carbon footprint for training deep learning.

Early Bird is an energy-efficient method for training deep neural networks (DNNs), the form of artificial intelligence (AI) behind self-driving cars, inte...