News by Subject Technology & Engineering

A new synthetic enzyme, crafted from DNA rather than protein, flips lipid molecules within the cell membrane, triggering a signal pathway that could be harnessed to induce cell death in cancer cells. This is the first such synthetic enzyme to outperform its natural counterpart -- and it does so by three orders of magnitude.

A new SLAS Discovery review article summarizes new methods of fragment-based lead discovery (FBLD) to identify new compounds as potential antibiotics. It explains how FBLD works and illustrates its advantages over conventional high-throughput screening.

Researchers have developed a new method for correcting the errors that creep into DNA barcodes -- labels used in a wide range of biological experiments -- yielding far more accurate results and paving the way for more ambitious medical research in the future.

Engineers have created an electronic 'skin' in an effort to restore a real sense of touch for amputees using prosthetics.

Carnegie Mellon University's Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering Professors Bob Tilton and Todd Przybycien recently co-authored a paper with Ph.D. students Brittany Nordmark and Toni Bechtel, and alumnus John Riley, further refining a process that could soon help provide clean water to many in water-scarce regions. The process, created by Tilton's former student and co-author Stephanie Velegol, uses sand and plant materials readily available in many developing nations.

In a pilot study by a team of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, crystalline particles of titanium dioxide -- the most common white pigment in everyday products ranging from paint to candies -- were found in pancreas specimens with Type 2 diabetes, suggesting that exposure to the white pigment is associated with the disease.

A new microscope system can image living tissue in real time and in molecular detail, without any chemicals or dyes, report researchers at the University of Illinois. It enables researchers to study concurrent processes within cells and tissue, and could give cancer researchers a new tool for tracking tumor progression and physicians new technology for tissue pathology and diagnostics.