Professor Lee Cronin has turned a 3D printer into a universal chemistry set that could make its own prescription drugs via downloadable chemistry.
Cronin is the leader of a world-class team of 45 researchers at Glasgow University, primarily making complex molecules.
The “inks” are simple reagents, from which more complex molecules are formed.

Click here for the Cronin Group website.

Click here for Lee Cronin on the TED blog.

A noninvasive way to identify women with anemia, a dangerous blood disorder, in developing nations has been developed by Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering undergraduates.
The device, HemoGlobe, is designed to convert  existing cell phones of health workers into a “prick-free” system for detecting and reporting anemia at the community level.
The device’s sensor, placed on a patient’s fingertip, shines different wavelengths of light through the skin to measure the hemoglobin level in the blood. On a phone’s screen, a community health worker quickly sees a color-coded test result, indicating cases of anemia, from mild to moderate and severe.

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Our brains are a dense tangle of billions of nerve cells connected together at synapses. Knowing how everything links up is key to understanding how the brain works — but it’s a huge challenge. Figuring out the brain’s wiring diagram is the aim of ‘connectomics’. It’s done at many scales: from the ‘super highways’ linking brain areas down to individual cells and their connections. This video shows how, for the first time, scientists have reconstructed the wiring of tiny pieces of the mouse brain and related it to the function of individual cells.

According to Madeleine Keehner, PhD, a research scientist for the Educational Testing Service and director of the Spatial Cognition Laboratory at the University of Dundee in Scotland, spatial cognition is the ability to mentally represent and manipulate spatial information.
She pointed out that because most medical images show a 2D representation of a 3D object, physicians reading that image need to mentally reconstruct the object. “So spatial cognition involves taking that image and constructing a 3D recreation in your mind,” she said, “and there are big individual differences in how well people can do that.”…

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