From 2005 to 2020, the digital universe is expected to grow from 130 to 40,000 exabytes.

While many older Americans use technology, it’s rarely designed with them in mind.

Since kidneys are the filtering agents in our body, they are keen to get rid of small particles that they sense do not belong. And if the kidney does not filter out a particle, excreting it through urine, it may be eliminated by the liver, which uses macrophages to search for and get rid of foreign bodies. Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, along with colleagues from the Keck School of Medicine at USC, have engineered pept...

Walking around at the Electronic Entertainment Expo — commonly known as E3 — gamers stopped in their tracks when they came upon Gabriela Gomes’ booth. The video game convention draws industry juggernauts like Playstation and Xbox, but Gomes’ booth was a little different. There were no controllers or consoles. And there was no use of the latest in VR or AR, like so many of the surrounding booths at the Los Angeles...

While many older Americans use technology, it’s rarely designed with them in mind. Discover what people are predicting about the adoption of technology by Americans over age 65, barriers to usage, and strategies to engage seniors with technology.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death for both men and women, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In the U.S., one in every four deaths is a result of heart disease, which includes a range of conditions from arrhythmias, or abnormal heart rhythms, to defects, as well as blood vessel diseases, more commonly known as cardiovascular diseases.

Researchers have been pushing the capabilities of materials by carefully designing precise structures that exhibit abnormal properties that can control acoustic or optical waves. However, these metamaterials are constructed in fixed geometries, meaning their unique abilities are always fixed. Now, new 3D printed metamaterial developed by a team led by USC Viterbi researchers can be remotely switched between active control and passive states.

Scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center and the University of Southern California (USC) have demonstrated the successful implementation of a prosthetic system that uses a person’s own memory patterns to facilitate the brain’s ability to encode and recall memory. In the pilot study, published in the Journal of Neural Engineering, participants’ short-term memory performance showed a 35 to 37% improvement over ba...

Fabien Pinaud’s big vision for treating cancer homes in on the smallest of targets. Along with a team of scientists, he created a new hybrid nano-probe that could lead to noninvasive detection and treatment of the disease at the level of a single cell. Pinaud, assistant professor of biological sciences, chemistry and physics and astronomy at USC Dornsife, developed a method for amplifying a biochemical signal on the surface of can...

A team of scientists at the Keck School of Medicine of USC is looking to some deep sea dwellers to create a better way to develop cancer-fighting therapies. Harnessing the power of the enzymes that give these marine animals the ability to glow, the team created a test that makes it easy for researchers to see whether a therapy is having its intended effect — killing cancer cells. Results of the study were published in Scientific Report...

When a soldier sustains a traumatic eye injury on the battlefield, any delay in treatment may lead to permanent vision loss. With medical facilities potentially far away and no existing tools to prevent deterioration, medics are in a high-stakes race against the clock. A multidisciplinary team of scientists and engineers at USC are close to solving the problem. They have developed a reversible, temperature-sensitive temporary seal that chang...

A team of researchers with the University of Southern California and the Wake Forest School of Medicine has conducted experiments involving implanting electrodes into the brains of human volunteers to see if doing so might improve memory recall. The group gave a presentation at this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting recently outlining the study and what they found.

Some people are better than others at recovering from a wounded heart, according to a USC Stem Cell study published in Nature Genetics. In the study, first author Michaela Patterson, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Henry Sucov, and her colleagues focused on a regenerative type of heart muscle cell called a mononuclear diploid cardiomyocyte (MNDCM).

Can a fish with a malformed jaw tell us something about hearing loss in mice and humans? The answer is yes, according to a publication in Scientific Reports. In one of the fascinating twists of evolution, the structures supporting the jaws of ancestral fish gave rise to three tiny bones in the mammalian middle ear: the malleus, incus, and the stapes, which transmit sound vibrations.

An image analysis technique makes finding important biological molecules—including tell-tale signs of disease—and learning how they interact in living organisms much faster and far less expensive. Called Hyper-Spectral Phasor analysis, or HySP, it could even be useful for diagnosing and monitoring diseases using cell phone images. Researchers use fluorescent imaging to locate proteins and other molecules in cells and tissues.

Recent news reveals that a detailed 3D face can be created just from a single picture. You input a 2D image and the output is a good, textured 3D face model. Sidney Fussell in Gizmodo said the researchers' results were "remarkably accurate." The team is from the University of Southern California and USC Institute for Creative Technologies. They have their paper on arXiv and it is titled "Photorealistic Facial Texture Inference Using Dee...

  According to the American Cancer Society approximately 5.4 million basal and squamous cell skin cancers are diagnosed each year. Yet, the sun does contribute to the production of Vitamin D, which is necessary for bone health, and perhaps even useful in preventing some cancers. So how does one know how much sun exposure is enough?

USC researcher Megan L. McCain and colleagues have devised a way to develop bigger, stronger muscle fibers. But instead of popping up on the bicep of a bodybuilder, these muscles grow on a tiny scaffold or "chip" molded from a type of water-logged gel made from gelatin. First authors Archana Bettadapur and Gio C. Suh describe these muscles-on-a-chip in a new study published in Scientific Reports.

What if industrial waste water could become fuel? With affordable, long-lasting catalysts, water could be split to produce hydrogen that could be used to power fuel cells or combustion engines. By conducting complex simulations, scientists showed that adding lithium to aluminum nanoparticles results in orders-of-magnitude faster water-splitting reactions and higher hydrogen production rates compared to pure aluminum nanoparticles. The lithium all...

Today, talking to a computer or an app can be an infuriating experience. But is it possible that one day we will have conversations with computers that feel as fluid and natural as talking to another person? David DeVault, a research assistant professor at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies, believes so—and his research is developing high-speed language processing systems whose speed and efficiency c...