Duke University School of Medicine

Preventing the transmission of inherited genetic diseases, and increasing food production rates in farmed animals are two potential applications of genome editing technologies that require urgent ethical scrutiny, according to a new report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. The Council, which includes academics from King’s, has today published the first findings of its review

The University of Oklahoma Natural Products Discovery Group has taken an unconventional approach to finding new compounds with therapeutic relevance by launching a crowdsourcing initiative with citizen scientists from around the country. With this approach, OU researchers team with the public to sample soils from all across the United States for the purpose of identifying

Electric assist range is estimated at 40 km (25 miles) with two kids and groceries Bakfiets, the distinctive Dutch cargo bikes with the cargo bed located in front of the rider, are becoming increasingly popular outside of The Netherlands. Practical as they are for hauling things like groceries, however, they’re heavy. Their beds also tend

Two-qudit gate on a photonic platform achieves massive entangled quantum state Quantum information processing promises to be much faster and more secure than what today’s supercomputers can achieve, but doesn’t exist yet because its building blocks, qubits, are notoriously unstable. Purdue University researchers are among the first to build a gate – what could be

The next generation of communications systems could be built with a sewing machine. To make communications devices more reliable, Ohio State University researchers are finding ways to incorporate radio antennas directly into clothing, using plastic film and metallic thread. In the current issue of the journal IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters, they report a

Novel tool expected to speed research on brain and drug development Studying a new type of pinhead-size, lab-grown brain made with technology first suggested by three high school students, Johns Hopkins researchers have confirmed a key way in which Zika virus causes microcephaly and other damage in fetal brains: by infecting specialized stem cells that

  Making smartphones smarter with see-through sensors Your smartphone’s display glass could soon be more than just a pretty face, thanks to new technology developed by researchers from Montreal and the New York-based company Corning Incorporated. The team has created the first laser-written light-guiding systems that are efficient enough to be developed for commercial use.

Instead of a traditional street grid, the design employs a network of public squares surrounded by massive, interconnected skyscrapers. In 1980, only 30,000 people lived in Shenzhen, China. Today the population is over 15 million, and Shenzhen is the most crowded city in the country, with more people per square mile than famously packed Hong

A new way to test anti-hearing-loss drugs in people could help land those medicines on pharmacy shelves sooner. University of Floridaresearchers have figured out the longstanding problem of how to safely create temporary, reversible hearing loss in order to see how well the drugs work. The findings are described in the November/December 2012 issue of

Swiss researchers have achieved a major breakthrough in the development of bioengineered skin. The new grafts, which are about to undergo clinical trials, work a lot like the real thing — because they actually contain functioning blood vessels and lymph capillaries. The breakthrough was made by Daniela Marino and her team from the Tissue Biology Research Unit