Bar-Ilan University

Artificial muscles made from polymers can now be powered by energy from glucose and oxygen, just like biological muscles. This advance may be a step on the way to implantable artificial muscles or autonomous microrobots powered by biomolecules in their surroundings. The motion of our muscles is powered by energy that is released when glucose

A new type of balloon may make delivering people and provisions to inaccessible places easier TRANSPORTING large, clunky bits of equipment has always posed a challenge. Roads and railways do not reach everywhere, and even if they did, many cumbersome and heavy constructions need to be hauled in pieces, only to be put together at

Scientists at Aston University and Russells Hall Hospital have discovered that an extract from a common plant in Pakistan may help cure breast cancer. The plant, Fagonia cretica, and known as Virgon’s Mantlem, is commonly used in herbal tea. It has been traditionally used to treat women in rural Pakistan who have breast cancer, but

The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in services like Apple’s Siri virtual personal assistant Using an artificial intelligence technique inspired by theories about how the brain recognizes patterns, technology companies are reporting startling gains in fields as diverse as computer vision, speech recognition and the identification of promising new molecules

A UB clinical professor is one of five winners of an international crowdsourcing contest held to develop new approaches to polio vaccination that finally will rid the planet of the disease. Crowdsourcing harnesses the “wisdom of the crowd” to solicit innovative ideas to society’s most intractable problems from beyond the boundaries of the professionals traditionally

From trial and error to brute force A Franco-Japanese research group at the University of Tokyo has developed a new “brute force” technique to test thousands of biochemical reactions at once and quickly home in on the range of conditions where they work best. Until now, optimizing such biomolecular systems, which can be applied for

‘Beautiful accident’ leads to advances in high pressure materials synthesis Unexpected results from a neutron scattering experiment at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory could open a new pathway for the synthesis of novel materials and also help explain the formation of complex organic structures observed in interstellar space. In a paper published

Scientists have discovered a molecular process in the brain triggered by cocaine use that could provide a target for treatments to prevent or reverse addiction to the drug. Reporting in the Journal of Neuroscience, Michigan State University neuroscientist A.J. Robison and colleagues say cocaine alters the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s pleasure center that responds to