Biotech

In the Fox TV show "Lie to Me," Dr. Cal Lightman was able to tell whether someone was lying by observing what he called "micro expressions" on their faces. The twitch of an eye, the quickening of a pulse, the beads of sweat on a brow -- he looked for clues too subtle for most of us to catch.

Now, researchers out of MIT are developing a video technology they call Eulerian Video Magnification that could do that and more -- by amplifying the motion in a standard video sequence to detect information not visible to … Read more

After the H1N1 "swine flu" virus jumped from pigs to human in 2009, more than 18,000 people died and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called it the first global pandemic in more than 40 years.

Today, biomedical engineers out of Brown University and Memorial Hospital in Rhode Island hope that their prototype flu detector biochip will help contain the next major flu outbreak by enabling the quickest, most accurate, and most affordable diagnosis possible.

The team's assay, which they call SMART (short for A Simple Method for Amplifying RNA Targets), consists of a series … Read more

On October 4, 2004, the idea of incentive prizes hit the mainstream when Burt Rutan and his team at Scaled Composites launched SpaceShip One into orbit for the second time and won the $10 million Ansari X Prize.

Since then, prizes like that have become more and more common, and though the X Prizes are still the gold standard, there are now similar competitions from medical research to science to business, and beyond.

Not long ago, however, the U.S. government got into the business (PDF) of using competitions like these to come up with new ways to solve existing … Read more

Some tech just sounds too good to be true. A removable, wireless sensor that adheres to dental enamel and can detect trace amounts of harmful bacteria just might fall into the too-much-information category for the squeamish among us.

But the silk, gold, and graphene-based sensor that looks a bit like a temporary tattoo could play a key role in detecting and treating various diseases and conditions, the developers at Princeton University say.

"This is a real-time, wireless response from a sensor that can be directly interfaced with a variety of biomaterials," principal investigator Michael McAlpine, an assistant professor … Read more

Synthetic biology startups have a new friend in Silicon Valley.

Today, Singularity University pulled back the wraps on its new SynBio Startup Launchpad, an accelerator program designed to boost the prospects of entrepreneurs in the blossoming field.

As part of the unveiling of the accelerator program, Singularity University announced the first three companies that are "seeking to apply the rapid-cycle, low-cost approaches employed by tech and biotech startups."

Those companies are Evolutionary Solutions, which is building a genome synthesis device; Modern Meadow, which is using tissue-engineering techniques to generate large amounts of animal protein for textiles and food; … Read more

The influenza A virus ranks among our planet's least-controlled pathogens, resulting in seasonal epidemics and even global pandemics. The H1N1 virus of 2009 -- a new type of influenza A virus -- caused the first influenza pandemic in more than 40 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But despite the fast and furious spread of H1N1 that year, it turned out to affect the lungs much in the way the seasonal flu does. Using a new type of test developed at the University of Leeds "might have been a way to identify how lethal … Read more

People are willing to tweet just about anything -- in 2009, Erykah Badu famously tweeted away during labor, and just this past month, the National Zoo live-tweeted the artificial insemination of a giant panda.

So it should come as no surprise that earlier today folks at the Houston-based Memorial Hermann Hospital live-tweeted via the handle @houstonhospital the "rabid play-by-play" of the removal of a tumor from a 21-year-old woman's brain.

The procedure spanned several hours and resulted in dozens of tweets, video uploads on YouTube, and a dizzying array of graphic photos via Twitter and Pinterest.

Dr. … Read more

Within a couple years, a single exhale may tell us more about our personal health than merely the current state of our oral hygiene -- and without relying on dogs to sniff out our problems.

The answer lies in a device called the Single Breath Disease Diagnostics Breathalyzer. Back in 2010, Stony Brook University researcher Perena Gouma began testing an earlier iteration in preclinical trials; for use with diabetes patients; now she has developed a sensor that might enable the detection of a range of diseases in a single exhale.

The sensor, which lives in a device about half the … Read more

In what could be a major boon for the study of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, autism, and epilepsy, researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech say they've figured out how to automate finding and recording information from neurons in live brains.

The process, described this week in the journal Nature Methods, involves a robotic arm guided by a cell-detecting algorithm that can identify and record data from neurons faster and more accurately than we mortal humans.

"In all [the abovementioned disorders], a molecular description of a cell that is integrated with [its] electrical and circuit … Read more