July 2015

The Future With Nanoionics

July 28, 2015

Future devices may run on ions flowing in nano-sized channels. An ion-conducting nano-channel viewed under an atomic force microscope (left) and scanning electron microscope (right) Living systems such as the brain conduct electric signals [more...]

Is Now the Time to Move Your Research to 3D Cell Culture?

July 28, 2015

Cancer Spheroids, Image Courtesy of Molecular Devices Introduction Mammalian cell culture has been used in research and drug discovery for many years. The use of this technology has resulted in many key discoveries in developmental [more...]

Magnetic Field Sensor Unearthed in Worms

July 28, 2015

Caenorhabditis elegans. (Image Credit: Amy Pasquinelli, courtesy of NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences) Researchers identified a sensor that detects the Earth’s magnetic field in nerve cells of tiny worms. The ability [more...]

Single-Cell Proteomics Is in the Chips

July 28, 2015

At Northeastern University, researchers are developing ScanDrop, a lab-on-a-chip biosensor approach that utilizes a well-mixed microfluidic device and a microsphere-based assay capable of performing near real-time diagnostics. ScanDrop has [more...]

Microlasers Track Cells from the Inside

July 28, 2015

Artist rendering of a group of cells that have absorbed microlasers. The spectral composition of the laser light from each cell is different, which provides a barcode-type tag and enables reliable noncontact optical tracking of a large [more...]

Health Care Microfluidics Market to Hit $4 Billion by 2020

July 28, 2015

Microfluidics can offer portable, cheap, single-use devices that replace centralized laboratory equipment in health care facilities. As the technology advances and medicine grows more personalized, the overall health care market for [more...]

Infertility Diagnosis Comes to Your iPad with Microfluidic Chip

July 28, 2015

Sperm fertility analyzer with iPad (Image from aidmics) It’s certainly no secret that the movement of medtech out of hospitals and doctors’ offices and into the homes of people is a major trend in the industry. Offering cost savings [more...]

Device Delivers Drugs to Brain Via Remote Control

July 20, 2015

A team of researchers has developed a wireless device the width of a human hair that can be implanted in the brain and activated by remote control to deliver drugs. The technology, demonstrated for the first time in mice, one day may be [more...]

Inkjet Printing Innovation Opens The Door To Instant Personalised Health Testing

July 20, 2015

New technology from product design and development firm Cambridge Consultants is set to bring radical innovation to the diagnostics market. Ingenious use of inkjet printing techniques has made it possible to create a diagnostic test [more...]

Programming Gut Bacteria to Detect and Destroy Disease

July 12, 2015

The illustration depicts Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron (white) living on mammalian cells in the gut (large pink cells coated in microvilli) and being activated by exogenously added chemical signals (small green dots) to express specific [more...]

How a Jet Engine Sensor Became a Tiny Heart Failure Monitor

July 12, 2015

The current version of St. Jude Medical’s CardioMEMS HF device is about the size of a paper clip (Image Credit: CardioMEMS) A decade ago, Jay Yadav, MD, former director of vascular intervention at the Cleveland Clinic, had the idea [more...]

IBM Chip Features Cross The 10 nm Barrier

July 12, 2015

Michael Liehr (left) of SUNY Polytechnic Institute’s Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering and Bala Haran (right) of IBM Research inspect a wafer comprised of 7 nm node test chips in a clean room in Albany, NY. IBM Research, [more...]

EV Group Ramps Nanoimprint Lithography Into High-volume Manufacturing

July 12, 2015

EV Group (EVG), a leading supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS, nanotechnology and semiconductor markets, today unveiled the HERCULES® NIL—a fully integrated track systemthat combines cleaning, resist coating [more...]

Nanowire Yarns Supercharge Wearables

July 8, 2015

Yarn made of niobium nanowires, seen here in a scanning electron microscope image (background), can be used to make very efficient supercapacitors, MIT researchers have found. Adding a coating of a conductive polymer to the yarn (shown in [more...]

Review on Exosome Isolation: A Microfluidic Road-map

July 6, 2015

Ciliated structures for exosome isolation and capture by Wang et al. The hierarchical geometry of the device does not allow cells larger than 1 μm to access the wired area, due to the distance between the pillars (b) being too narrow (900 [more...]

DEPArray™ Technology to Sort and Isolate Rare Cells with Microfluidics

July 5, 2015

DEPArray™ technology is based on the ability of a non-uniform electric field to exert forces on neutral, polarizable particles, such as cells, that are suspended in a liquid. This electrokinetic principle, called dielectrophoresis (DEP), [more...]

Chemists Design A Quantum-dot Spectrometer

July 5, 2015

The Quantum Dot (QD) spectrometer device is printing QD filters — a key fabrication step. Other spectrometer approaches have complicated systems in order to create the optical structures needed. Here in the QD spectrometer approach, the [more...]

Your Smartphone Could One Day Tell You You Are Pregnant

July 5, 2015

A fiber optic surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-sensor developed for smartphones is pictured. (Image Credit: Kort Bremer, Hanover Centre for Optical Technologies) Researchers at the Hanover Centre for Optical Technologies (HOT), University [more...]

Biodegradable, Flexible Silicon Transistors

July 5, 2015

A fresh CNF based microwave silicon transistor chip. After 3 weeks of putting it in a woodpile, the chip was partially degraded with the help of fungi. (Image Credit: Courtesy of Jung-Hun Seo, Shaoqin Gong and Zhenqiang Ma, University of [more...]

Flexible FeRAM Fabricated with CMOS-compatible Approach

July 5, 2015

Fabrication process flow for flexing the silicon substrate. a–c) Silicon substrate with prefabricated FeRAM devices undergoes soft etch back process (upside down) to thin down the substrate to achieve d) an ultrathin version of flexible [more...]