University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS)

Many major advances in medicine, especially in neurology, have been sparked by recent advances in electronic systems that can acquire, process, and interact with biological substrates. These bioelectronic systems, which are increasingly used to understand dynamic living organisms and to treat human disease, require devices that can record body signals, process them, detect patterns, and

Spring is coming earlier to parts of the Arctic, and so are some migratory birds. But researchers have yet to get a clear picture of how climate change is transforming tundra life. That’s starting to change as automated tools for tracking birds and other animals in remote places come online, giving researchers an earful of

A young robotics engineer has developed a perching mechanism that could be invaluable to the field of Micro Air Vehicles, or MAVs. Mirko Kovac, of Switzerland’s Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), envisions a system wherein swarms of tiny robotic gliders would be deployed over scenes of disasters, such as forest fires or earthquakes. The

The results have been nothing short of mind-blowing, and the people who are buying in are not who you would think. Sunrun’s Lynne Jurich helped create a new industry–selling solar instead of as an expensive home improvement. Stanford business school grad Lynn Jurich has always been an environmentalist, but after spending a summer in super-polluted

Experiments conducted on worms, zebrafish, mice and, finally, on human subjects in a limited clinical trial conclude that pimozide may be effective in treating what’s known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” Researchers from the University of Montréal Hospital Research Centre (CRCHUM) and the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM) at the University of Calgary have discovered a medication

System developed at MIT could combine power harvested from light, heat and vibrations to run monitoring systems. Researchers at MIT have taken a significant step toward battery-free monitoring systems — which could ultimately be used in biomedical devices, environmental sensors in remote locations and gauges in hard-to-reach spots, among other applications. Previous work from the

A smartphone app that uses a phone’s camera to analyse urine and check for a range of medical conditions has been shown off at the TED (Technology, Education and Design) conference in Los Angeles. Uchek tests for 25 different health issues and could help diagnose and treat diseases in the developing world. Increasingly mobile health

Image via Wikipedia New concerns about customer reviews on Web sites Web sites such as Amazon, TripAdvisor and Yelp have long depended on customers to rate books, hotels and restaurants. The philosophy behind this so-called crowdsourcing strategy holds that the truest and most accurate evaluations will come from aggregating the opinions of a large and

Picking faces out of a crowd is something humans are hardwired to do, but training computers to act in the same way is much more difficult. There have been various breakthroughs in this field in recent months, but the latest could be the most significant yet. Researchers from Yahoo Labs and Stanford University have developed