Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)

One of the consolations of spending far too much time online is that you get to witness the birth of new ideas and new terms, along with new uses of existing ones. On Medium, Chris Messina points out two recent examples of creative re-purposing of older ideas and words. The first is the apparently trivial

New method for synthesizing a biocompatible hydrogel could speed up research and development of several promising applications in tissue engineering f you opt to wear soft contact lenses, chances are you are using hydrogels on a daily basis. Made up of polymer chains that are able to absorb water, hydrogels used in contacts are flexible

New animal study confirms the dramatic effects of a natural formula against aggressive prostate cancer tumors.   Researchers at the Methodist Research Institute at Indiana University conducted the study on mice, using a human prostate cancer xenograft model (outlined below). These latest results have been presented to hundreds of researchers and medical doctors in Rhodes,

Research-funding agencies that require scientists to declare at the proposal stage how their projects will be “transformative” may actually be hindering discovery, according to a study by Oregon State University ecologists. The requirement can result in decreased funding for the “incremental” research that often paves the way for paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, the OSU scientists assert. Their

A new class of carbon nanotubes could be the next-generation clean-up crew for toxic sludge and contaminated water, say researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology. Enhanced single-walled carbon nanotubes offer a more effective and sustainable approach to water treatment and remediation than the standard industry materials—silicon gels and activated carbon—according to a paper published in

Image via Wikipedia Stem cells, which have the ability to become various other types of cells, are at the heart of the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine – if a patient’s stem cells could be raised outside of their body, and their growth dictated, they could ultimately be used to grow replacement body parts that

Image via Wikipedia Last summer, Saudi Arabia put the final bolt in its largest oil expansion project ever, opening a new field capable of pumping 1.2 million barrels a day — more than the entire production of Texas. The field, called Khurais, was part of an ambitious $60 billion program to increase the kingdom’s production

An ambitious 3D-printed heart project aims to make a natural organ replacement for patients possible within a decade. But the researcher heading the “moonshot” effort also believes 3D-printing technology must harness the self-organizing power of biology to get the job done. The idea of a 3D-printed heart grown from a patient’s own fat stem cells comes from

How are robots most useful in a classroom setting?   The idea of having a robot as a classmate or a learning tool in the classroom is no longer just a psy-fi fantasy- today’s robots are already appearing in schools. The question that remains is, how are robots most useful in a classroom setting. It

How the climate can rapidly change at tipping points During the last glacial period, within only a few decades the influence of atmospheric CO2 on the North Atlantic circulation resulted in temperature increases of up to 10 degrees Celsius in Greenland – as indicated by new climate calculations from researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute