Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at Tampere University have developed the world’s first soft touchpad that can sense the force, area and location of contact without electricity. The device utilises pneumatic channels, enabling its use in environments such as MRI machines and other conditions that are unsuitable for electronic devices. Soft devices like soft robots and rehabilitation aids could also benefit from this new technology.

Researchers at Tampere University have developed the world’s first soft touchpad that is able to sense the force, area and location of contact without electricity.

That has traditionally required electronic sensors, but the newly developed touchpad does not need electricity as it uses pneumatic channels embedded in the device for detection.

Over the past decades, electronics and biomedical engineers have developed increasingly sophisticated biosensors, devices that can pick up biological signals from human users. These sensors, which are generally embedded in wearable or implantable technologies, often do not perform as well in settings where users are moving a lot, such as within a vehicle.

Researchers at the National University of Singapore and Tsinghua University have recently developed a new sensor that can pick up and track biological signals, such as the heartbeat and respiration, without being in contact with the body of users. This sensor, presented in a paper published in Nature Electronics, could be used to pick up the cardiopulmonary signals of humans while they are in dynamic and closed environments, such as a plane cabin, a moving car or a bus.

“Monitoring drivers’ alertness or stress is essential for road safety,” Xi Tian, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “Existing sensors designed to measure physiological markers of fatigue, such as heart rate and respiration, face challenges in moving vehicles due to the unpredictable vibrational noise. To overcome these challenges, our research focused on developing an automotive biosensor capable of non-contact and reliable health monitoring in dynamic environments.”

As efficient as electronic data storage systems can be, they’ve got nothing on nature’s own version – DNA. A new technique for writing data to DNA works like a printing press and makes it easy enough that anyone could do it.

Writing data to DNA usually involves synthesizing strands one letter at a time, like threading beads onto a string. That’s obviously a very slow process, especially when there can be billions of those letters, or bases, in a given DNA sequence.

But the new DNA printing press drastically speeds the process up. The team created a set of 700 DNA bricks, each containing 24 bases, that work like movable type pieces. These can be arranged into a desired order and then used to ‘print’ their data onto DNA template strands.

Proteins in people’s blood could be used to find and even one day prevent cancers, according to the team behind two of our latest studies.

Lung cancer is among the leading causes of cancer-related deaths globally, and one of its most prevalent and distressing symptoms is a persistent cough. It’s a startling reality that lung cancer can remain asymptomatic for far too long, with a cough being one of the first indications of its presence.

Among the myriad of symptoms attributed to lung cancer, coughing bears a significance difficult to understate. Here, we outline the basic features of a cough caused by lung cancer.

A team of scientists led by Northwestern Medicine investigators has created an implant capable of reversing an opioid overdose, according to findings published in Science Advances.

More than 100,000 people died from an opioid overdose in 2022, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Synthetic opioid drugs including fentanyl have accelerated the rise in overdose deaths in the U.S. and are responsible for roughly 70 percent of all overdose deaths.

Although naloxone, sold as an over-the-counter nasal spray or injectable, can reverse an overdose, administering the medication requires a knowledgeable bystander, limiting its lifesaving potential.

People with a phobia of needles may soon experience relief with an innovative blood sampling method inspired by leeches.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and their collaborators have discovered a new way in which RAS genes, which are commonly mutated in cancer, may drive tumor growth beyond their well-known role in signaling at the cell surface.

Mutant RAS, they found, helps to kick off a series of events involving the transport of specific nuclear proteins that lead to uncontrolled tumor growth, according to a study published November 11, 2024, in Nature Cancer.

RAS genes are the second most frequently mutated genes in cancer, and mutant RAS proteins are key drivers of some of the deadliest cancers, including nearly all pancreatic cancers, half of colorectal cancers, and one-third of lung cancers.

A small study found ChatGPT outdid human physicians when assessing medical case histories, even when those doctors were using a chatbot.