Insect-Inspired Sensor to Detect Airborne Chemicals

Scientists, including those of Indian origin, have developed a novel sensor – inspired by hairy, flying insects – that can quickly detect a broad range of dangerous airborne chemicals. Most insects have tiny hairs on their body surfaces, but it is not clear what the hairs are for. Trying to make sense of what these hairs are capable of, researchers designed experiments involving a “forest” of tiny hairs on a thin vibrating crystal chip. When using resonators as sensors, most people want to get rid of dissipation or friction because it is considered highly undesirable, it tends to obscure what you are trying to measure. They have taken that undesirable thing and made it useful.

A One-Dose Cure For Ear Infections

A single dose of a new bioengineered gel may deliver a full course of antibiotic therapy for middle ear infections, making treatment for this common childhood illness much easier and potentially safer. Middle-ear infection, or otitis media, is the number one reason for pediatric antibiotic prescriptions, but getting oral antibiotics into young children several times a day for seven to 10days is a daunting task. With oral antibiotics, you have to treat the entire body repeatedly just to get to the middle ear. With the gel, a pediatrician could administer the entire antibiotic course all at once, and only where it’s needed. Squirted into the ear canal, the gel quickly hardens and stays in place, gradually dispensing antibiotic across the eardrum into the middle ear.

Lab-Grown 3D Lungs to Help Study Diseases

Scientists, including those of Indian origin, have successfully grown 3D lungs in the lab, using stem cells, which can be used to study diseases that are difficult to understand with conventional methods. By coating tiny gel beads with lung-derived stem cells and then allowing them to self-assemble into the shapes of the air sacs found in human lungs, researchers created 3D “organoids”. The laboratory-grown tissue can be used to study diseases including idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, which has been difficult to study using conventional methods.

While researchers haven’t built a fully functional lung, they’ve been able to take lung cells and place them in the correct geometrical spacing and pattern to mimic a human lung. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis is a chronic lung disease characterized by scarring of the lungs. The scarring makes the lungs thick and stiff, which over time results in progressively worsening shortness of breath and lack of oxygen to the brain and vital organs.

Finally, Tech to Boost Old Drugs With Hydrogen is Here

Drug makers are breathing new life into old drugs – with hydrogen. Substituting a heavier form of the gaseous element in drugs can slow their breakdown by the body, leaving them in the bloodstream longer. That means a patient can take them less frequently – and that, in theory, might reduce the severity of side effects. While the technology has been around for 40 years, it’s taken that long to understand it well enough to bring such a treatment before the US Food and Drug Administration. The regulator is reviewing that would be the first medicine made with deuterium, or heavy hydrogen.

 This is new concept, and FDA approval will make it a lot clearer for the field. Deuterium provides unique properties that cannot be attained in any other way. The approach interferes with one of the ways that the body metabolizes or eliminates drugs, involving enzymes that “nibble away” at the hydrogen in the molecule. Deuterium is essentially armored hydrogen, tougher and more difficult for the enzymes to break down, so it sticks around longer in the body. Other than that, the drug works the same as the original.