Category Biology/Biotechnology

A digital clock continues to run as damaged circuits instantaneously heal themselves, rerouting electrical signals without interruption. Credit: Nature Materials

Many natural organisms have the ability to repair themselves. Now, manufactured machines will be able to mimic this property. In findings published this week in Nature Materials, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a self-healing material that spontaneously repairs itself under extreme mechanical damage.

This soft-matter composite material is composed of liquid metal droplets suspended in a soft elastomer. When damaged, the droplets rupture to form new connections with neighboring droplets and reroute electrical signals without interruption...

These are reactive microglia (red+green) in irradiated mouse hippocampus. (Blue stain is cell nuclei for anatomical reference.) Credit: Rosi lab / UCSF

Novel drug protects memory function in mice exposed to simulated cosmic radiation. Planning a trip to Mars? You’ll want to remember your anti-radiation pills. NASA and private space companies like SpaceX plan to send humans to the red planet within the next 15 years – but among the major challenges facing future crewed space missions is how to protect astronauts from the dangerous cosmic radiation of deep space.

Now the lab of UCSF neuroscientist Susanna Rosi, PhD, has identified the first potential treatment for the brain damage caused by exposure to cosmic rays – a drug that prevents memory impairment in mice exposed to simulated space ra...

Image reveals Purkinje cells (gray) and their dendrites, as well as an accumulation of protein deposits (red dots). Credit: Ackerman Lab/UC San Diego

Protein ‘proofreading’ errors lead to neurodegenerative disease. UCSD researchers found that the ‘Ankrd16’ gene acts like a failsafe in proofreading and correcting errors to avoid the abnormal production of improper proteins. Usually, the information transfer from gene to protein is carefully controlled – biologically “proofread” and corrected – to avoid the production of improper proteins...

A human-like 3D-printed smart gel walks underwater. Credit: Daehoon Han/Rutgers University-New Brunswick

New technology has biomedical, soft robot and other applications. Engineers have created a 3D-printed smart gel that walks underwater and grabs objects and moves them. The watery creation could lead to soft robots that mimic sea animals like the octopus, which can walk underwater and bump into things without damaging them. It may also lead to artificial heart, stomach and other muscles, along with devices for diagnosing diseases, detecting and delivering drugs and performing underwater inspections.

Soft materials like the smart gel are flexible, often cheaper to manufacture than hard materials and can be miniaturized...