Category Health/Medical

Carbon nanofibers coated with PEDOT in a scanning electron microscope image. Credit: Juan Guzman and Meryem Pehlivaner/Provided

Cornell materials scientists and bioelectrochemical engineers may have created an innovative, cost-competitive electrode material for cleaning pollutants in wastewater. The researchers created electro-spun carbon nanofiber electrodes and coated them with a conductive polymer, called PEDOT, to compete with carbon cloth electrodes available on the market. When the PEDOT coating is applied, an electrically active layer of bacteria – Geobacter sulfurreducens – naturally grows to create electricity and transfer electrons to the novel electrode...

Georgia Tech’s Regents Professor Mostafa El-Sayed (front) is one of the most highly decorated and cited living chemists. With his team for this research from left to right: Yue Wu, Professor Ronghu Wu, and Yan Tang. Credit: Georgia Tech / Christopher Moore

Researchers have found a way to virtually halt cell migration, a key component in metastasis, in vitro, in human cells. In past in vivo studies in mice, treated cancer did not appear to recur. No significant side effects were observed. Cancer cells often cover themselves bristly leg-like protrusions that enable them to creep. The researchers have used minuscule gold rods heated gently by a laser to mangle the protrusions, according to a new study.

The treatment can also easily kill cancer cells, but in this experiment, it was vital to sp...

This comparison shows images of breast tissue taken by the open-top light-sheet microscope (left), traditional pathology techniques (middle) and frozen sectioning during surgery (right). The first two images reveal crisp details of cellular and nuclear features, while the frozen-section image is distorted due to the challenges of freezing fatty breast tissues. While the formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded section requires hours of preparation, the open-top light-sheet microscope image is captured in minutes. Credit: Glaser et al., Nature Biomedical Engineering

Currently there’s no reliable way to determine during surgery whether the excised tissue is completely cancer-free at its margins – the proof that doctors need to be confident that they removed all of the tumor...

Microscope photo of adipose tissue. Credit: jxfzsy/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Discovered more than 2 decades ago, the hormone leptin has been widely hailed as the key regulator of leanness. Yet, the pivotal experiments that probe the function of this protein and unravel the precise mechanism of its action as a guardian against obesity are largely missing. Flier, the HMS George Higginson Professor of Physiology and Medicine, and Maratos-Flier, HMS professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, have made significant contributions to the understanding of the metabolism of obesity and starvation in general, and of leptin in particular.

The commentary highlights what the authors say is a startling lack of experimental evidence detailing the biologic roles of leptin in metabolism, ...