Tech

For patients with type 1 diabetes (T1D), the burden of constantly monitoring their blood sugar and judging when and how much insulin to self-inject, is bad enough. Even worse, a miscalculation or lapse in regimen can cause blood sugar levels to rise too high (hyperglycemia), potentially leading to heart disease, blindness and other long-term complications, or to plummet too low (hypoglycemia), which in the worst cases can result in coma or even death.

Researchers have engineered a way to use human liver cells, derived from induced pluripotent stem cells, to screen potential antimalarial drugs and vaccines for their ability to treat the liver stage of malaria infection. The approach may offer new opportunities for personalized antimalarial drug testing and the development of more effective individually tailored drugs to combat the disease, which causes more than 500,000 deaths worldwide each year.

Amid the growing debate about the high price of powerful new drugs in the United States, a recent analysis suggests that breakthrough therapies for blood cancers may, in many cases and with some important caveats, provide reasonable value for money spent. Researchers present this viewpoint, based upon a comprehensive analysis of published cost-effectiveness ratios, online today in Blood, the Journal of the American Society of Hematology (ASH).

By combining experimental data from X-ray crystallography, NMR spectroscopy, cryoelectron microscopy and lipidomics (the study of cellular lipid networks), researchers at the University of Oxford have built a complete model of the outer envelope of an influenza A virion for the first time.

Organic solar cells are based on chemistry before Whole Foods shopper hijacked the definition of organic - organic chemistry. But they are actually plastic and use polymers instead silicon to convert energy from sunlight into electricity. The use of plastic as a basic material reduces the cost and weight of these solar cells, and makes them flexible. But their efficiency still remains below that of commercial silicon solar cells.

New research indicates that hormonal intrauterine devices (IUDs) and contraceptive implants remain highly effective one year beyond their approved duration of use, according to a study at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

The preliminary findings are reported online Feb. 5 in Obstetrics & Gynecology and will appear in the journal's March 15 print edition.

For decades, researchers in artificial intelligence, or AI, worked on specialized problems, developing theoretical concepts and workable algorithms for various aspects of the field. Computer vision, planning and reasoning experts all struggled independently in areas that many thought would be easy to solve, but which proved incredibly difficult.

Hundreds of ships go missing each year, but we have the technology to find them

By Nigel Bannister, Senior Lecturer in Astronomy at University of Leicester

Unlike slow and steady batteries, supercapacitors gulp up energy rapidly and deliver it in fast, powerful jolts. A growing array of consumer products is benefiting from these energy-storage devices, reports Chemical & Engineering News, with cars and trucks -- and their drivers -- poised to be major beneficiaries.

Inserting a specific strain of bacteria into the microenvironment of aggressive ovarian cancer transforms the behavior of tumor cells from suppression to immunostimulation, researchers at Norris Cotton Cancer Center and the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth have found. The findings, published in OncoImmunology, demonstrate a new approach in immunotherapy that can be applied in a variety of cancer types.

By Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Co-Director Centre for Commercial Law at Bond University.

Cloud computing, by its very nature, transcends location, geography and territorial boundaries. Data accessed in one country might be stored half way across the world, or even in servers in multiple countries.

International law, on the other hand, sees the world through the lens of various jurisdictions, which are inherently linked to location, geography and territorial boundaries.

Public participation should be at the heart of big data projects in health care and biomedical research, according to the findings of a new report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. The report calls for greater transparency about how people's data are used, and recommends the introduction of criminal penalties in the UK for the misuse of data.

The report warns that by not taking into account people's preferences and values, projects that could deliver significant public good may continue to be challenged and fail to secure public confidence.

Which breast cancer patients need to have underarm lymph nodes removed? Mayo Clinic-led research is narrowing it down. A new study finds that not all women with lymph node-positive breast cancer treated with chemotherapy before surgery need to have all of their underarm nodes taken out. Ultrasound is a useful tool for judging before breast cancer surgery whether chemotherapy eliminated cancer from the underarm lymph nodes, the researchers found. The findings are published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

A new technique reported in The FASEB Journal suggests that during early stages, it might be possible to reverse age-related macular degeneration, a leading cause of blindness that is currently irreversible. The treatment involving a nanosecond laser may also have further implications for other eye diseases such as diabetic macular edema, diabetic retinopathy and retinopathy of prematurity.

Three UC San Diego researchers say they can predict the spread of flu a week into the future with as much accuracy as Google Flu Trends can display levels of infection right now.

The study - appearing in Scientific Reports, an online journal from the publishers of Nature - uses social network analysis and combines the power of Google Flu Trends' "big data" with traditional flu monitoring data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).