Sniffing for Cancer : Nano Noses Hold Promise for Detecting Lung Cancer and Other Diseases.

Nearly two decades ago, Hossam Haick was working on a Ph.D. degree in chemical engineering at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology when terrible news hit: his friend and officemate had leukemia. It was Haick's first close encounter with cancer and the physical toll its treatment could wreak on a person. "He's fine now, but it was very difficult to see him suffer," Haick remembers.

Minibrain Storm : Cerebral Organoids Aren't Real Brains?But They Provide a Powerful Platform for Modeling Brain Diseases Like Zika Infection, Alzheimer's, and Even Autism.

Floating in a Petri dish, they look like tiny tapioca pearls in peach broth, a couple dozen in number and none much larger than the tip of a ballpoint pen. But under a microscope, dense, lumpy bodies come into focus, outlined by wispy coronas.

Cell Break: How Cell-Free Biology Is Finally Putting the Engineering Back in Bioengineering.

In 2011, the California-based company Genomatica reported its success in rigging Escherichia coli microbes to convert sugar into the industrial chemical 1,4-butanediol (BDO). It was a feat of metabolic engineering: BDO is a key ingredient in the production of goods like running shoes, solvents, and spandex. At the time of the company?s announcement, 2.8 billion tons of BDO were produced every year in a multistep, fossil fuel-based process. Genomatica?s system neatly reduced all of that into a cheap, sustainable, one-step fermentation process. The company spent another year refining its technique and finally went commercial with the platform in late 2012. From start to commercialization, the process took about five years.

What Lies Within: The Human Body Might Well Be One of the Best Sources for New Antibiotics.

In 1991, a group of Italian researchers announced that they had isolated a new antibiotic from a chemical soup brewed with a soil-dwelling bacteria called Planobispora rosea. The drug was a type of thiopeptide, effective against grampositive bacteria like Staphylococcus aureus, P. acnes, and C. difficile but uncooperative in terms of being harnessed for human medicines. Little came of that work until around 2012, when pharma giant Novartis reported that it had begun to experiment with the original drug's structure, ultimately creating a semisynthetic version with enough solubility that it could be effectively administered to human patients. In 2015, that antibiotic successfully made it through a multicenter phase II clinical trial, where it proved to be both safe and reasonably effective in the 30 C. difficile patients who completed the study.

It's All in the Eyes: The eyes as a window to the body and brain may not be a brand-new idea - but it is a newly revitalized one, thanks to improved technologies.

In a blog post in January 2014, Google unveiled one of its latest forays into the health market?a smart contact lens for diabetics. It was sleek and appealingly futuristic, with a minute microchip equipped with tiny glucose sensors, embedded in a soft, biocompatible lens material. Already, the company said, the prototype could measure tear glucose as often as once per second, and it may someday include tiny LED lights to signal warnings to the wearers when their blood sugar rises or falls to dangerous levels.

Throw Science to the Dogs: The best models for human disease may just be right under scientists' noses--if not in their laps.

Opportunities for gathering vital information on cancer, heart disease, and other complicated diseases via clinical models are missed despite the at least 70 million pet dogs and 74 million pet cats in the United States alone that experience these very illnesses. This article presents a general discussion on the current state and hindrances to comparative medicine.

Retro reproduction: an old imaging technology rewrites the rules of modern embryology.

On a video screen, against a black backdrop, 15 spherical blue-green cells vibrate with a quiet energy. Slowly at first, then faster, they begin to roil and roll. Within the confines of their round membrane cases, they divide, becoming two, three, four cells, then those, in turn, divide to become eight. One splits into two, then pauses, struggling to catch up and spinning off pieces of cellular detritus as it does. Near the top, another, by now many cells rich, hollows out and expands, contracts, expands, contracts. It falls in upon itself and then hatches, pouring out from its shell and ballooning to the side.

Inside tract: can deep brain stimulation survive its reputation for success?

When she was 37, Clare developed a tremor down her left side. At 39, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and put on a series of medications. These helped for a time, but the effect didn't last. Within a few years, her tremors had grown so severe that Clare was dropping food at her waitressing job. She couldn't seat guests, and she burned herself when she tried to help out in the kitchen. Increasingly unable to support herself and at a loss for other options, Clare began to look into something called deep brain stimulation (DBS).

The body printed.

It takes only a few minutes for the NovoGen MMX to print out a chunk of human liver cells. It?s a small chunk, only 4-mm wide and 20 cell layers thick, which wouldn't do much good in a human patient. But at a cellular level, this tiny swatch of machine-made flesh has all the essential ingredients of an original organ: tight hexagons of hepatocytes and fatty stellate cells and endothelial cells gathered into nascent capillaries. It produces cholesterol, albumin, and detoxifying P450 enzymes. After it is printed, the ensemble can survive for almost an entire week?nearly triple the endurance of classic two-dimensional (2-D) liver cultures.

Repeated anabolic/androgenic steroid exposure during adolescence alters phosphate-activated glutaminase and glutamate receptor 1 (GluR1) subunit immunoreactivity in Hamster brain: correlation with offensive aggression.

Male Syrian hamsters (Mesocricetus auratus) treated with moderately high doses (5.0mg/kg/day) of anabolic/androgenic steroids (AAS) during adolescence (P27-P56) display highly escalated offensive aggression. The current study examined whether adolescent AAS-exposure influenced the immunohistochemical localization of phosphate-activated glutaminase (PAG), the rate-limiting enzyme in the synthesis of glutamate, a fast-acting neurotransmitter implicated in the modulation of aggression in various species and models of aggression, as well as glutamate receptor 1 subunit (GluR1). Hamsters were administered AAS during adolescence, scored for offensive aggression using the resident-intruder paradigm, and then examined for changes in PAG and GluR1 immunoreactivity in areas of the brain implicated in aggression control. When compared with sesame oil-treated control animals, aggressive AAS-treated hamsters displayed a significant increase in the number of PAG- and area density of GluR1-containing neurons in several notable aggression regions, although the differential pattern of expression did not appear to overlap across brain regions. Together, these results suggest that altered glutamate synthesis and GluR1 receptor expression in specific aggression areas may be involved in adolescent AAS-induced offensive aggression.