Medical

Hops, those little cone-shaped buds that give beer its bitter flavor, pack a surprisingly healthful punch. They are widely studied for their ability to halt bacterial growth and disease. Now, researchers report that they are close to synthesising the healthful hops compounds in the lab. This advance could one day help scientists create medicines from these compounds without having to extract them from plants.

Remember those colorful "grow capsules" that blossom into animal-shaped sponges in water? Using a similar idea, scientists have developed biodegradable polymer grafts that, when surgically placed in damaged vertebrae, should grow to be just the right size and shape to fix the spinal column. The researchers present their work at the 251st National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

In collaboration with Suncall Corporation, and with support provided by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) under the Center of Innovation (COI) Program, Professor Tadao Tsuboyama of the Graduate School of Medicine and his collaborators have recently succeeded in developing an "Attached Robotic Unit Knee-Ankle-Foot Orthothesis", a modular wearable walking assist device designed to aid the rehabilitation of people with walking difficulti...

Magnetic resonance image isn't everything. A new University of Alberta study shows that vibrating the spine may reveal more when it comes to treating back pain. Teaming with the University of South Denmark to study the lumbar spine of twins, Greg Kawchuk and his team demonstrate that structural changes within the spine alter its vibration response significantly.

A common theme in medicine is that detecting a disease early on can lead to more effective treatments. This relies partly on luck that the patient gets screened at the right time, but more important is that the testing techniques are sensitive enough to register the minuscule hints that diseases leave in the blood stream.

A team led by Rice University synthetic organic chemist K.C. Nicolaou has developed a new process for the synthesis of a series of potent anti-cancer agents originally found in bacteria. The Nicolaou lab finds ways to replicate rare, naturally occurring compounds in larger amounts so they can be studied by biologists and clinicians as potential new medications. It also seeks to fine-tune the molecular structures of these compounds through analog ...

The issue of global food security is a problem for us now, and for future generations. Perhaps the most visible issue is malnutrition, which affects millions in the developing world and poses a risk to many vulnerable people in the developed world. But the issue of global food security is much broader than the supply of food – it also refers to the challenges of our dependence on globally imported food, rising food prices, food waste and th...

New scanning technology which will give a much clearer picture of lung disease has taken a major step forward thanks to scientists at The University of Nottingham. The experts at the Sir Peter Mansfield Imaging Centre have developed a process using specially treated krypton gas as an inhalable contrast agent to make the spaces inside the lungs show up on an MRI scan. It's hoped the new process will eventually allow doctors to virtually see inside...

A team of researchers at Merck has found a way to make anti-bacterial agents that have lost their ability to kill certain types of bacteria, become deadly again. In their paper published in Science Translational Medicine, the team describes the exhaustive study they conducted in searching for a molecule capable of interfering with one of the main defenses mechanisms bacteria have developed to resist antibacterial agents, the molecules they found ...

People with epilepsy suffer from recurrent, unprovoked seizures that can cause injury and even death from "sudden unexpected death in epilepsy" (SUDEP), a condition that occurs minutes after a seizure ends. Now Empatica, co-founded by MIT professor and wearables pioneer Rosalind Picard, has developed a medical-quality consumer wristband, called Embrace, that monitors stress signals to detect potentially deadly seizures and alert wearers and careg...