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Smart sutures can monitor wounds as they heal
Someday, the thread holding your skin and tissues together after a surgical suture could beam info about your wound straight to your doctor. A team of Tufts University engineers have created smart threads made out of various materials, from cotton to synthetics, by dipping them into physical and chemical sensing compounds. They can sense pressure, stress, strain, temperature, pH and glucose levels, among other diagnostic data. The smart suture on your body can send those info wirelessly to medical professionals' phones or computers, so they can monitor how you're healing and see if the wound is infected.
Researchers use light and genes to fight cancer
Scientists have already shown that you can use optogenetics (that is, light-sensitive genes and cells) to treat all kinds of medical conditions. However, it now looks like that technique could conquer one of humanity's biggest nemeses: cancer. Tufts University researchers have successfully used optogenetics to prevent and even reverse tumor growth in experiments. They injected frog embryos with genes that produced light-sensitive ion channels in tumor cells; when you expose those tumors to blue light for long enough (roughly a day) and adjust their electrical signals, they go away.
Researchers build a robot inspired by caterpillars, nightmares (video)
There's a long history of robots modeled on animals, and some researchers from Tufts University have now taken things in a particularly creepy-crawly direction. They've built a robot that's able to mimic the way a caterpillar balls itself up to bounce away from predators. As you can see in the video above, while the robot (dubbed GoQBot) is quite a bit bigger than the actual bug, is does indeed do a pretty good caterpillar imitation. What might such a bot be used for? Well, the researchers say that the so-called "ballistic rolling" behavior could be used to improve on some of the many existing robots that are modeled on worms or snakes -- which could let them fling themselves into a disaster area, for instance, and then wiggle around to aid in search and rescue operations. Head on past the break to see the bot in slow-motion.
Implantable antenna designed using silk and gold
Silk: it's stronger than Kevlar, thinner than a human hair, it's biocompatible (it doesn't trigger human immune system response), and it's produced by insects (although some new-fangled metabolically engineered bacteria seem to be up to the task). Researchers at Tufts University have created a silk and gold biosensor that can be implanted in the body to keep tabs on proteins and chemicals. One possible use would be to keep track of diabetic's glucose levels, notifying the patient when things go wonky. At the present time, they've only tested the antenna itself -- it was found to resonate at specific frequencies, even when implanted in several layers of muscle tissue (from a pig, mind you). For their next trick, the team will outfit the device with proteins or other molecules to monitor in-vivo chemical reactions.
Shape-shifting, organ-probing chembots coming soon
The current generation of robots, whether they're the gun-carrying or child-coddling variety, come in all sorts of shapes and sizes to suit their intended purpose. But if research going on at Tufts University comes to fruition, future robots might feature designs that are rather more flexible. Scientists at the school are working on so-called "chemical robots" with no solid parts. Chembots could squeeze under doors, slither through cracks in walls, and even squirm into your orifices, performing internal diagnoses before slowly dissolving away, leaving nothing more than a feeling of creepy violation behind. What about assuming the shape and voice of John Connor's adopted mother? We're hoping that's still a few years off.
3D VisWall makes scientists drool, your flat-panel weep
Rest assured, we've witnessed quite a few astounding scientific displays set deep within university research labs, but it'd be mighty hard to cover up the $350,000 monolith residing at the Tufts University School of Engineering. The VisWall, unsurprisingly a product of Visbox, combines twin backscreen projectors and sophisticated software in order to display 3D imagery for DNA junkies and budding surgeons to swoon over. Aside from giving researchers and students alike the ability to investigate chemical structures and cellular makeups more closely, the 8- x 14-foot screen also dabbles in haptics, giving remote holders the ability to "guide the manipulation of virtual scalpels or surgical tweezers onscreen." Sheesh, it's like giving kids a reason to attend class -- imagine that.[Via CNET]
Futuristic headband knows when you've had too much PC
For those who just can't call it quits, a team of researchers at Tufts University has developed a head adornment which can determine when you've been overly stressed, bored or simply numb to the world around you when using your computer. The crew is studying functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) technology, which "uses light to monitor brain blood flow as a proxy for workload stress a user may experience when performing an increasingly difficult task." The band itself utilizes "laser diodes to send near-infrared light through the forehead at a relatively shallow depth," after which it can purportedly judge how intense one's workload is (or isn't). 'Course, we'd guess the most of us wouldn't need a machine to tell us that, eh?[Via InformationWeek]
