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We have previously covered Brainbow , a collection of one-of-a-kind, colorful images of the myriad connections in the brain and nervous system obtained through the use of unique color fluorescing proteins. Professors Jeff Lichtman and Josh Sanes, leaders of the Brainbow initiative, taught this author neurobiology at Harvard. I remember being amazed at the beautiful pictures of neuronal collections that gave life to a sometimes dull topic. Now, as reported in a May 5 paper in Nature Methods, the team behind Brainbow made a host of technical improvements in the imaging technique to yield more informative...

As medical devices are becoming more energy hungry thanks to new capabilities, batteries that are used to power them are not keeping up. Lithium ions have essentially plateaued the development of new batteries for now, but a way to overcome this challenge is to generate power continuously and feed it to hungry devices as needed. A team of engineering students at Rice University have been tasked with developing a new device that can harvest the body’s motion to produce useful electric power. In the process of researching where it’s best to gather the energy they settled on the heel of...

Brain injuries and strokes can sometime require surgeons to relieve pressure on the brain by drilling burr holes through the skull using a trephine. The device is straight out of the good old days of medicine when surgical tools and torture implements were made by the same manufacturers. Yet, while even dentistry has moved on, performing burr hole craniotomies is still very much a manual cranking operation prone to causing injury and even leading to meningitis. Researchers at Fraunhofer Institutes for Photonic Microsystems, Laser Technology, and Integrated Circuits have developed a new laser system...

We at Medgadget have a fascination with the brain, and it shows in our reporting of various brain-computer interface technologies. Today another consumer-based electroencephalogram (EEG) offering, the Melon, is being launched on Kickstarter . Melon bills itself as the lifestyle-inspired headband and syncs with a mobile phone to track your data over the course of the day. Only time will tell if it will be part of the yet-to-be-determined generation of mainstream EEG devices, or if it will go the route of the Zeo (R.I.P). Read More Read More...

Some time ago, researchers at Massachusetts General developed a microfluidic device that uses magnetically tagged particles coupled with antibodies to detect cancer. They’ve been attempting to transfer the technology to identifying bacterial strains in body fluid samples, but finding matching antibodies has proven a challenge. To overcome this, the team targeted the DNA directly, developing sequences of nucleic acids (AGTC) that couple to specific bacterial strains. Nuclear magnetic resonance is then used to spot these paired particles within a sample. The team showed that it’s practical...

One way of imaging tiny vasculature like that found in the brain requires injections of fluorescing particles that emit a glow that can be picked up by external equipment. The quality of the obtained image depends to a large degree on the fluorescence intensity of the injected particles. The brighter they glow, the more we can learn about the details of the brain and other small scale bits of anatomy. A team of researchers based in France has synthesised a new material that glows better than any other similar substance. This Lem-PHEA chromophore has been successfully tested in imaging the cerebral...

A new health startup accelerator has launched in South Carolina that’s accepting applications for new companies looking to commercialize ideas in the medical tech space. The Iron Yard Digital Health Program is specifically focusing on software and software/hardware products to stay away from pure medical devices. Chosen firms will receive $20,000 in initial capital, three months of mentorship, a year of free co-working space, and everything that Greenville, SC has to offer. The application deadline is June 7 and the program starts on July 15th. Read More Read More...