Category Biology/Biotechnology

Amay J. Bandodkar et al. Soft, stretchable, high power density electronic skin-based biofuel cells for scavenging energy from human sweat, Energy Environ. Sci. (2017). DOI: 10.1039/C7EE00865A

A team at the University of California has developed a skin patch that uses human sweat as a fuel source to power an external device. Scientists and engineers are convinced that consumers want easy-to-wear consumer products—health monitors that are built into clothes, for example, or that adhere to the skin. In this new effort, they have found a way to harness human sweat as an energy source and report that the device they built was able to power a Bluetooth transmitter.

Sweat can be used as an energy source because it contains lactate, which produces energy when it oxidizes with lactate oxidase...

Genes, Environment, and the Risk for Autism: Environment factors (ozone) can interact with genetic factors (copy number variation) to produce an even higher risk for autism than expected by adding the two risk factors, one that might not be found by studying the factors independently. Credit: Penn State University

Increased risk for autism when genetic variation and air pollution meet. A new analysis shows that individuals with high levels of genetic variation and elevated exposure to ozone in the environment are at an even higher risk for developing autism than would be expected by adding the 2 risk factors together...

Select Antieleptic drugs target mechanisms of epileptogenesis involving amyloid β and tau. Subclinical epileptiform activity in patients with Alzheimer’s disease can lead to accelerated cognitive decline and may be treated with AEDs like Levetiracetam.

Feasibility study suggests suppressing seizure-like activity may help patients. In the last decade, mounting evidence has linked seizure-like activity in the brain to some of the cognitive decline seen in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Patients with Alzheimer’s disease have an increased risk of epilepsy and nearly half may experience subclinical epileptic activity – disrupted electrical activity in the brain that doesn’t result in a seizure but which can be measured by electroencephalogram (EEG) or other brain scan technology.

In a rece...

DNA arrays change shape in response to an external trigger. Credit: Yonggang Ke

They look like security gates, but change shape in a cascade. Biomedical engineers have built simple machines out of DNA, consisting of arrays whose units switch reversibly between two different shapes. The arrays’ inventors say they could be harnessed to make nanotech sensors or amplifiers. Potentially, they could be combined to form logic gates, the parts of a molecular computer. The DNA machines can relay discrete bits of information through space or amplify a signal, says Yonggang Ke, PhD, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

“In the field of DNA-based computing, the DNA contains the information, but the molecules are floating aroun...