Showing Spotlights 385 - 392 of 547 in category All (newest first):
Neural interfaces used for such purposes as electroencephalography are noninvasive, but suffer from relatively poor spatial and temporal resolution of signals. The type of neural interface that uses electrodes inserted in the brain and measures neuronal activities is more effective, but might leave behind irreversible lesions in the cerebrum because of the need to implant electrodes in brain tissue. Other problems with this type of neural interface include the difficulty of obtaining information about individual organs. Believing that an effective solution to these problems lies in designing a neural interface that attaches not to the cerebrum but to peripheral nerves, scientists in Japan have developed an electrode for a peripheral nerve interface.
Jul 9th, 2009
Environmental and behavioral factors may lead the body to produce superoxide radicals known as reactive oxygen species (ROS) that could cause cell damage through oxidation. Oxidative stress from ROS is implicated in aging and most diseases including cancer, heart disease, liver fibrosis, neurodegenerative diseases, autoimmune disorders. An excess of these reactive molecules can lead to oxidative stress and cellular damage, and toxicologists have identified ROS generation as a likely mechanism of nanoparticle toxicity. Since ROS plays an important role in various pathogenic processes, it has been recognized as an early indicator for cytotoxic events and cellular disorders. However, conventional chemical ROS probes have not fulfilled the rising need of in vitro and in vivo analysis of ROS generation due to auto-oxidation problems and poor specificity and sensitivity. Scientists in South Korea have now demonstrated a novel ROS-sensitive gold nanoprobe prepared from bio-inspired immobilization of fluorescein-labeled hyaluronic acid onto the surface of gold nanoparticles. This probe is highly stable under exposure to natural light and laser sources and extremely sensitive and specific to certain oxygen species.
Jul 2nd, 2009
A broad spectrum of therapeutics or effector molecules that address several areas of medicine, from inflammation, to cancer, and regenerative medicine, are insoluble in water (they are soluble primarily in solvents generally regarded as unsuitable for injection). The water insolubility of these therapeutics limits the means by which those compounds can be administered to the body. Rapid strategies to package and disperse these drugs in biocompatible vehicles while also maintaining their potent activity can have major implications in advancing fundamental, translational, and commercial/scale-up aspects of accelerating their clinical impact. A new study now shows a way in which nanodiamonds can be applied towards enhancing water dispersion of otherwise poorly watersoluble therapeutics. It realizes a high throughout strategy to solubilize a broad range of water-insoluble drugs, which coupled with the innate biocompatibility of nanodiamonds, provides an important foundation towards a nanotechnology platform approach for advanced drug delivery.
Jun 22nd, 2009
The fight against infections is as old as civilization. Silver, for instance, had already been recognized in ancient Greece and Rome for its infection-fighting properties and it has a long and intriguing history as an antibiotic in human health care. Modern day pharmaceutical companies developed powerful antibiotics - which also happen to be much more profitable than just plain old silver - an apparent high-tech solution to get nasty microbes such as harmful bacteria under control. However, thanks to emerging nanotechnology applications, silver is making a comeback in the form of antimicrobial nanoparticle coatings. As even the most powerful antibiotics become less and less effective, researchers have begun to re-evaluate old antimicrobial substances such as silver and as a result, antimicrobial nano-silver applications have become a very popular early commercial nanotechnology product. Researchers in China have now further advanced the nanotechnology application of silver be developing a novel multi-action nanofiber membrane containing four active components, each playing a different role in the membrane's excellent antibacterial function.
Jun 2nd, 2009
A major concern in microbiology is to determine whether a bacterium is dead or alive. This crucial question has major consequences in food industry, water supply or health care. While culture-based tests can determine whether bacteria can proliferate and form colonies, these tests are time-consuming and work poorly with certain slow-growing or non-culturable bacteria. They are not suitable for applications where real-time results are needed, e.g. in industrial manufacturing or food processing. A team of scientists in France has now discovered that living and dead cells can be discriminated with a nanotechnology technique on the basis of their cell wall nanomechanical properties.
May 26th, 2009
One of the key issues in building implantable neural interfaces is the guidance of axons, the individual nerve fibers that act as the primary transmission lines of the nervous system. The ability to control the connections between neurons by guiding their axons on a chip surface offers several advantages. Among them is the possibility to address axons from different types of neurons, e.g., motor neurons from sensory neurons. This is a prerequisite condition for bidirectional neural implants such as brain machine interfaces. Axonal guidance has been achieved before, and there are various chemical and topographical modification techniques to do so. However, scientists only managed to control the orientation of the nerve fibers. In new work, a Swedish team shows that it is possible to impose a growth direction at a specific location on a substrate, something which is very important for neural chip construction for example. The first application for this research would be in neural network design.
May 13th, 2009
New work at the University of Arkansas has, for the very first time, demonstrated that Raman spectroscopy can be used to detect and monitor circulating carbon nanotubes in vivo and in real time. These findings could have a significant impact on the knowledge of how nanomaterials interact with living biological systems. Carbon nanotubes can be used for various advanced bio-medical applications. Before any clinical application of nanoparticles, it is imperative to determine critical in vivo parameters, namely pharmacological profiles including nanoparticle clearance rate from the circulation and their biodistribution in various tissue and organs. Until now, their distribution was only monitored by collecting samples after various time intervals, but this new research shows the ability of monitoring their concentration in vivo and in real time, while the animal is alive. Moreover, this work can be extended to the detection of circulating cancer cells that have been tagged by carbon nanotubes.
May 12th, 2009
Online breath analysis via an array of chemiresistive random network of single walled carbon nanotubes coated with organic materials showed excellent discrimination between the various breath states. An important implication of these findings, besides the detection of diseases directly related to the respiratory, cardiovascular, and renal systems, is the fact that volatile organic compounds are mainly blood borne and the concentration of biologically relevant substances in exhaled breath closely reflects that in the arterial system. Therefore, breath is predestined for monitoring different processes in the body. The excellent discrimination between the various breath states obtained in this study provides expectations for future capabilities for diagnosis, detection, and screening various stages of kidney disease, especially in the early stages of the disease, where it is possible to control blood pressure, fat, glucose and protein intake to slow the progression.
May 7th, 2009
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