University of Hamburg

The diagnostic tests fit on a postage stamp and cost less than a penny. While other scientists successfully shrank beakers, tubes and centrifuges into diagnostic laboratories that fit into aluminum boxes that cost $50,000, George Whitesides had smaller dreams. The diagnostic tests designed in Dr. Whitesides’s Harvard University chemistry laboratory fit on a postage stamp

The future of medicine is contained in “The Four P’s”: Personalised, Predictive, Preventative, and Participatory. Aaron Ciechanover, speaking on a panel on the future of biomedicine at the Lindau meeting, explains: “We may have the ability to profile patients before they get sick, therefore we may have the ability to predict diseases – and also ‘preventative’

Just weeks after producing its first batch of synthetic diesel fuel made from carbon dioxide and water, Audi has laid claim to another synthetic, clean-burning and petroleum-free fuel called “e-benzin.” The fuel was created by Audi’s project partner Global Bioenergies, in France. In late 2014, Global Bioenergies started up the fermentation unit for a pilot

Scientists from the University of Granada and the Spanish National Research Council—members of the SCImago research group—have found that, worldwide, there are three major ‘clusters’ of countries, defined by the thematic areas they investigate and that their governments invest in most. The study, published in Plos One, analysed the scientific production of more than 80

‘Enhanced Attribution’ will anonymise threat data, reveal past and future crimes The US Military skunkworks Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is hoping to build a platform to help bolster the treacherous world of attack attribution that would generate, anonymise, and share threat data. The agency is seeking proposals for an “Enhanced Attribution” program which

Data from crop trials underline the threat climate change poses to farmers FOR a scientist, there are few happier accidents than finding a trove of data that were gathered for other purposes, but which apply to your pet problem. That happened to David Lobell, a researcher at Stanford University, when he started talking to Marianne

Focus on increasing throughput of processes has favoured poorer models with lower chances of success The search for new medicines is becoming unsustainably expensive despite huge technological advances because researchers are using the wrong methods, experts say. They say drug discovery should focus on ‘validity’ – how well the results of experiments predict results in

Two years ago, Chinese scientists coated one side of a flag with a thin sheet of nanotubes, then played a song using the flapping sheet-coated flag as a speaker. It was a demonstration of flexible speaker technology, in which nanotubes can be made to generate sound waves via a thermoacoustic effect – every time an

Cinnamon: Can the red-brown spice with the unmistakable fragrance and variety of uses offer an important health benefit? The common baking spice might hold the key to delaying the onset of –– or warding off –– the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. That is, according to Roshni George and Donald Graves, scientists at UC Santa Barbara.

Using magnetically controlled nanoparticles to force tumour cells to ‘self-destruct’ sounds like science fiction, but could be a future part of cancer treatment, according to research from Lund University in Sweden. WATCH: How rotating nanoparticles target cancer cells “The clever thing about the technique is that we can target selected cells without harming surrounding tissue.