Finding New Ways To Treat Tremors.

An estimated ten million people in the United States have a condition known as essential tremor (ET). Yet although it's been recognized for over a century-it was originally known as senile tremor-there is relatively little awareness of it as a distinct medical condition. Sometimes mistaken for Parkinson's disease, ET can lead to shaking of the arms and hands, and sometimes the head or torso. When severe, it can interfere with eating or drinking, writing, dressing, and even make some tasks impossible. Now, new approaches for treating the condition are emerging, potentially offering options to many patients whose life activities have been curtailed by ET.

Carbon Nanotubes Show Promise in Biomedicine.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), those tiny cylindrical configurations of pure carbon that have been finding myriad applications in a wide variety of fields, have been the subject of headlines for well over a decade for their potential uses in biological research and medical treatment. Progress toward those goals has been slowed by questions about the safety of the tiny particles when injected directly into the body, where they can sometimes accumulate in certain organs with unknown long-term effects.

DNA-like Materials Could Open New Computing Frontiers.

As computers have progressed over the last few decades, with their component transistors getting ever smaller and ever more numerous on a single chip, that relentless progress, famously described by Moore's Law, has begun to bump up against fundamental physical limits to what can be done with the present etched-lines-on-silicon technology. But now, a new twist involving an inorganic molecule that has a DNA-like helical shape may provide an alternative pathway that could shrink transistors down to atom-sized scales. And even DNA molecules themselves might ultimately become the bits and bytes and logic gates of the future.

Discovering Cancer Earlier: A New US$100 Million X Prize Aims to Shift the Odds in Cancer Survival.

According to the National Cancer Institute, 4 million people die of cancer worldwide every year-almost 500 every hour. But the most shocking thing about that statistic is this: more than a third and possibly even the vast majority of those deaths could have been prevented through sufficiently early detection. Now, a new competition aims to turn that situation around.

The Eye as a Window to Health: Albeit Slow, Research is Progressing on Contact Lenses for Medical Diagnostics.

The idea is a compelling one: a device that looks and feels like an ordinary contact lens but that can continuously monitor a variety of health indicators. For a diabetic, such a lens might update blood glucose levels and, using a built-in flashing LED indicator light, signal when a condition needs attention. Diabetic patients might be saved from the need for repeated finger prick tests and could be monitored for longer periods of time and for a greater variety of parameters at once.

Biomedical Materials Learn to Heal Themselves: Self-Healing Polymers, Hydrogels, and Artificial Muscles Are Mimicking Nature's Repair Mechanisms.

Maintaining sterility in emergency and operating rooms can be challenging, especially in cases of highly infectious disease outbreaks or toxic spills. A simple nick in a surgical glove under such circumstances could have deadly consequences. But, now, a variety of promising new materials in development may lead to everything from self-healing gloves and bandages to bone, blood vessel, and muscle scaffolding implants that could repair themselves the way tissues do. In some cases, repair might be triggered by an external stimulus, such as heat; in other cases, these materials would naturally heal by themselves over time.

ARMI Tackles Regenerative Medicine: A New Initiative is Bringing Industrial-Scale Engineering Approaches to the Biomedical World.

Pulmonary arterial hypertension is a rare and potentially life-threatening disorder. But when prominent entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt (Figure 1), founder of Sirius radio, learned in the 1990s that her daughter had been diagnosed with this little-known condition and given only three months to live, she refused to accept that grim prognosis. Instead, Rothblatt transformed her life.

Making Clothing Smarter: Rita Paradiso of Smartex is Engineering Clothes That Can Monitor a Wearer?s Condition.

As bedtime approaches, take note! Your pajamas may have something important to tell you.

Realizing a Clearer View: New Augmented Reality Systems Provide Medical Students with a Surgeon?s Sight.

In March 2017, Dr. Marc Tewfik performed a delicate operation to remove cancerous tissue from a patient's sinus cavity, something that he has done many times before at the McGill University Health Center (MUHC) in Montr?al, Canada. But this time, things were a bit different. Before performing such a minimally invasive surgery using a thin laparoscopic device inserted through the nose, the exact surgical plan was worked out in meticulous detail. Tewfik (Figure 1) used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to plot a pathway for the surgical tools to reach the target tissue without endangering arteries or nerves in an area just fractions of an inch from the optic nerve and from the brain itself.

Discovering Ways to Mend Growing Bodies: The Bioengineering of Devices for the Youngest Patients Brings Unique Challenges and Rewards.

Some babies are born with a rare condition known as esophageal atresia, in which part of the connection between the throat and stomach is missing or nonfunctional. While this was once untreatable and fatal, in recent years surgeons have developed a method using traction to stretch the tissues out on each end until, over time, they are long enough to be sewn together and so substitute for the missing portion of the esophagus. The procedure has allowed many infant patients to go home with a full, normal life ahead of them. But the procedure, which costs US$500,000 and upwards, requires that the patient be fully sedated and unconscious in an intensive-care unit (ICU) for between one and two months to avoid any bodily motions that could tear out internal sutures.

Opening New Worlds for Those with Autism: Technology Is Creating Great New Possibilities for Those on Every Part of the Spectrum.

In April 2016, in honor of Autism Acceptance Month, Apple released a video that quickly went viral, racking up more than 4 million views in its first few days (https://youtube/oMN2PeFama0). It shows a teenage boy named Dillan whose life has been completely transformed by the use of an iPad. As a nonverbal person, until he learned to use the device, he had no way of showing people that he was aware, thoughtful, paying attention, and eager to communicate. He just didn't have the necessary control over his body?s vocal apparatus to let people know he was really there. Suddenly, this little piece of 21st-century technology gave him that ability. For him, the technology has been literally life-changing.

John Rogers and the Ultrathin Limits of Technology: His Flexible, Skin-Mounted Biostamp is Changing the Game for Wearable Diagnostic Devices.

In this paper, a flexible, skin-mounted Biostamp changed the game for wearable diagnostic devices.

The heart of the matter: from guided microtools to 3-D printing and precision genome editing, promising research could lead to new advances in pediatric cardiology.

The smooth, powerful muscles of a newborn baby?s heart are pulsing normally, squeezing in and letting go rhythmically as a 3-mm-wide catheter-like tube snakes its way through, entering via an artery and being guided slowly by a surgeon. When it reaches its target?a protruding knot of malformed muscle tissue within a ventricle that has been partly blocking the valve?the tip of the precisely controlled tube whirs into action, with tiny scissor-like rotating blades gently grinding up the excess tissue as those pieces are sucked back into the device, leaving no floating particles that could lead to a blockage elsewhere. The defect is fully removed, and the heart?s function is restored to normal, leaving the child with the prospect of a normal life. The whole minimally invasive process takes place inside a beating heart and would otherwise have required open-heart surgery, with the heart stopped for a cardiopulmonary bypass.