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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Lukas Wartman, a leukemia doctor and researcher, developed the disease himself. As he faced death, his colleagues sequenced his cancer genome. The result was a totally unexpected treatment….

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For the first time, a person lying in an fMRI machine has controlled a robot hundreds of kilometers away using thought alone.
”The ultimate goal is to create a surrogate, like in Avatar, although that’s a long way off yet,” says Abderrahmane Kheddar, director of the joint robotics laboratory at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan.
Teleoperated robots, those that can be remotely controlled by a human, have been around for decades. Kheddar and his colleagues are going a step further. “True embodiment goes far beyond classical telepresence, by making you feel that the thing you are embodying is part of you,” says Kheddar. “This is the feeling we want to reach.”
To attempt this feat, researchers with the international Virtual Embodiment and Robotic Re-embodiment project used fMRI to scan the brain of university student Tirosh Shapira as he imagined moving different parts of his body. He attempted to direct a virtual avatar by thinking of moving his left or right hand or his legs.

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RadMiner, a tool that the developers hope will revolutionize radiological Web searches, looks set to improve computer-based research after a successful pilot project in Germany, attendees learned during the teleradiology and e-learning session at the Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery (CARS) congress in Pisa, Italy.

This radiology-dedicated data mining system is the coproduct of the departments of radiology in the University Hospitals of Leipzig and Freiburg, and the University of Freiburg’s commercial spin-off company, Averbis. It aims to bring a new quality of searching to daily clinical practice and academic research, according to its creators.

Under way for three years, the project combines semantic technology with search engine capacity to facilitate much faster and more precise retrieval of radiology cases in the departments’ large databases. At Freiburg, the University Hospital generates 150,000 CT reports a year, and each report may contain up to 2,000 images — and to date, there have been 25 years of electronic reporting.

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