New bandage fights main cause of burn-related deaths

materialsscienceandengineering: Smart skin made of recyclable materials may transform medicine...

materialsscienceandengineering:

Smart skin made of recyclable materials may transform medicine and robotics

Smart skin that can respond to external stimuli could have important applications in medicine and robotics. Using only items found in a typical household, researchers have created multi-sensor artificial skin that’s capable of sensing pressure, temperature, humidity, proximity, pH, and air flow.

The flexible, paper-based skin is layered onto a post-it note, with paper, aluminum foil, lint-free wipes, and pencil lines acting as sensing components. Being made of recyclable materials, this paper skin presents a large number of sensory functions in a cheap and environmentally friendly way.

“Democratization of electronics will be key in the future for its continued growth. In that regard, a skin-type sensory platform made with recyclable materials only demonstrates the power of human imagination,” said Prof. Muhammad Mustafa Hussain, senior author of the Advanced Materials Technologies paper. “This is the first time a singular platform shows multi-sensory functionalities close to that of natural skin. Additionally they are being read or monitored simultaneously like our own skin.”

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Cool.

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materialsscienceandengineering: Scientists prove feasibility...

materialsscienceandengineering:

Scientists prove feasibility of ‘printing’ replacement tissue

Using a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer, regenerative medicine scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have proved that it is feasible to print living tissue structures to replace injured or diseased tissue in patients.

Reporting in Nature Biotechnology, the scientists said they printed ear, bone and muscle structures. When implanted in animals, the structures matured into functional tissue and developed a system of blood vessels. Most importantly, these early results indicate that the structures have the right size, strength and function for use in humans.

“This novel tissue and organ printer is an important advance in our quest to make replacement tissue for patients,” said Anthony Atala, M.D., director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) and senior author on the study. “It can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue of any shape. With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation.”

With funding from the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine, a federally funded effort to apply regenerative medicine to battlefield injuries, Atala’s team aims to implant bioprinted muscle, cartilage and bone in patients in the future.

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This will be huge.

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npr: At 46 years old, Oliver Bogler’s reaction to a suspicious...

npr:

At 46 years old, Oliver Bogler’s reaction to a suspicious lump in his chest might seem typical for a man. He ignored it for three to four months, maybe longer. “I couldn’t really imagine I would have this disease,” Bogler says. But when he finally “grew up” and went to the doctor, he was pretty quickly diagnosed with invasive breast cancer.

Now what’s interesting here is that Bogler is a cancer biologist who regularly works with cancer cells, as senior vice president of academic affairs at the University of TexasMD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Even so, he figured the lump was a benign swelling of breast tissue.

And he had good reason to think so. Breast cancer is rare among men. Only 1 percent of all breast cancer cases are in men. Still, that means about 2,600 men receive a diagnosis of breast cancer every year.

When Men Get Breast Cancer, They Enter A World Of Pink

Illustration: Maria Fabrizio for NPR

Breast cancer is far more deadly in men than in women. It’s nothing to joke about.

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Forget The Gizmos: Exercise Works Best For Lower-Back Pain

Forget The Gizmos: Exercise Works Best For Lower-Back Pain:

Who would have thought: get up and move, and you’ll be healthier. That’s some fancy science right there.

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engineeringisawesome: How the GyroGlove Steadies Hands of...

engineeringisawesome:

How the GyroGlove Steadies Hands of Parkinson’s Patients 

When he was a 24-year-old medical student living in London, Faii Ong was assigned to care for a 103-year-old patient who suffered from Parkinson’s, the progressive neurological condition that affects a person’s ease of movement. After watching her struggle to eat a bowl of soup, Ong asked another nurse what more could be done to help the woman. “There’s nothing,” he was grimly told.

GyroGlove’s design is simple. It uses a miniature, dynamically adjustable gyroscope, which sits on the back of the hand, within a plastic casing attached to the glove’s material. When the device is switched on, the battery-powered gyroscope whirs to life. Its orientation is adjusted by a precession[sic] hinge and turntable, both controlled by a small circuit board, thereby pushing back against the wearer’s movements as the gyroscope tries to right itself.

MIT Technology Review

Crazy. Weird. Cool.

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Frightening! E. Coli Bacteria Can Transfer Antibiotic Resistance To Other Bacteria

materialsscienceandengineering: Surface roughness puts off...

materialsscienceandengineering:

Surface roughness puts off bacteria

A simple process that roughens the surface and alters the grain size of metallic biomedical implants could deter the bacteria that cause infections and complications after surgery, according to researchers from Politecnico di Milano, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, University of Cambridge, and King Abdulaziz University [S. Bagherifard et al., Biomaterials (2015), DOI: 10.1016/j.biomaterials.2015.09.019].

Stainless steel is widely used for medical devices and weight-bearing bone implants where its surface roughness and grain structure are known to have a profound effect on cell function. In fact, mechanical cues like these can have a greater effect than chemical ones on bacterial adhesion and the formation of undesirable bacterial colonies known as biofilms.

“The growing resistance of bacteria to conventional antibiotics, the need to develop advanced orthopedic implants with improved biocompatibility, along with the necessity of using a mechanically strong material able to withstand physiological strains and stresses, gave us the impetus for the development of advanced materials for bone implants,” explains Sara Bagherifard of Politecnico di Milano.

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This.

This is huge.

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materialsscienceandengineering: Cleaner, safer medical...

materialsscienceandengineering:

Cleaner, safer medical equipment with metallic glass coatings

Cells, like social teenagers, like to get together in groups. Some gatherings are harmless, but in medical settings the cells’ get-togethers are less like carefree soda-fuelled game nights, and more like hanging out in dark alleys committing acts of violence – if the alleys were catheters and syringes. When cells stick to medical devices they can cause potentially lethal problems like bacterial infections, cancer metastases and blood clots. To prevent cells of all kinds from hanging out in medical equipment, researchers at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology have recently developed a novel anti-adhesive coating that can be easily sputtered onto a variety of medical tools.

The coating is a zirconium-based thin film metallic glass (TFMG), said Jinn P. Chu, a professor at the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. Metallic glasses are metals that have a disordered atomic structure. They conduct electricity like crystalline metals, but, like glass, they soften and flow easily with heating, which makes them easy to process.

“Our coatings are used as functional materials, such as diffusion barriers in electronic devices and hydrophobic coatings,” Chu said. “The reason for using zirconium as the main component in TFMGs is mainly because of its good glass-forming ability and non-toxic properties.” Chu and his colleagues will speak about their research during the AVS 62nd International Symposium and Exhibition, held Oct. 18-23 in San Jose, Calif.

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This is awesome.

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txchnologist: First 3-D Printed Ribcage Successfully...

txchnologist:

First 3-D Printed Ribcage Successfully Implanted

It’s a story Wolverine would appreciate. A 54-year-old Spanish man suffering from a cancer of the chest wall has received a 3-D-printed implant made of titanium alloy to replace his sternum and a section of his ribcage. 

The patient’s surgical team at Salamanca University Hospital in Spain scanned his chest using high-resolution CT. From that they were able to develop a precise plan to remove the chest wall sarcoma and the portion of bone that it had invaded. The question was what they would replace it with. Learn more and see a video below.

Keep reading

What? 3D printed rib cage!?! So, this is a thing…

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To Thrive, Many Young Female Athletes Need A Lot More Food

To Thrive, Many Young Female Athletes Need A Lot More Food:

I mean, I can’t say that I totally didn’t know this was a thing, but it’s cool to see actually research awareness coming forward.

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