Industries
Berkeley startup to train robots like puppets
Pieter Abbeel, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, and his students, Peter Chen, Rocky Duan and Tianhao Zhang, have launched a startup, Embodied Intelligence Inc., to use the latest techniques of deep reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence to make industrial robots easily teachable.
Can VR be used to manage pain at a paediatric hospital?
VR has emerged into popular culture with an ever-widening array of applications including clinical use in a pediatric healthcare center. Children undergo necessary yet painful and distressing medical procedures every day, but very few non-pharmaceutical interventions have been found to successfully manage the pain and anxiety associated with these procedures. Investigators at Children's Hospital Los Angeles have conducted a study to determine if ...
World's smallest fully implantable SCS receives CE Mark
Medtronic has announced that it received CE Mark for the Intellis platform for both Spinal Cord Stimulation (SCS) and Peripheral Nerve Stimulation (PNS) as an aid in the management of certain types of chronic pain. Intellis, the world's smallest fully implantable SCS neurostimulator, simplifies and improves the patient experience with improved battery performance that can power the EvolveSM workflow, which standardises guidance and balances high-...
TKR coaching and monitoring improves patient compliance
Claris Healthcare has launched Claris Reflex, a medical device and patient monitoring system to help orthopedic practices across North America monitor the recovery of Total Knee Replacement (TKR) patients. Claris Reflex is the only system to offer continuous coaching at home, from surgical preparation to postoperative care.
A potential cancer treatment with nanoporous acupuncture needles
Professor Su-Il In’s research team from the department of Energy Science and Engineering has presented the possibility of cancer treatment, including colorectal cancer, using acupuncture needles that employ nanotechnology for the first time in the world.
System for treating colorectal cancer can lead to complete cure
Researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston have developed a new, three-step system that uses nuclear medicine to target and eliminate colorectal cancer. In this study with a mouse model, researchers achieved a 100% cure rate—without any treatment-related toxic effects. The study is reported in the November featured article in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine...
Physical model explains the origin of Earth’s water
Equipped with Newton’s law of universal gravitation (published in Principia 330 years ago) and powerful computational resources (used to apply the law to more than 10,000 interacting bodies), a young Brazilian researcher and his former postdoctoral supervisor have just proposed a new physical model to explain the origin of water on Earth and the other Earth-like objects in the Solar System.
Model reveals possibility of pumping antibiotics into bacteria
Researchers in the University of Wisconsin–Madison Department of Biochemistry have discovered that a cellular pump known to move drugs like antibiotics out of E. coli bacteria has the potential to bring them in as well, opening lines of research into combating the bacteria. The discovery could rewrite almost 50 years of thinking about how these types of transporters function in the cell.
Impressive cognitive ability might make you feel sheepish
Sheep can be trained to recognise human faces from photographic portraits – and can even identify the picture of their handler without prior training – according to new research from scientists at the University of Cambridge. The study, published in the journal Royal Society: Open Science, is part a series of tests given to the sheep to monitor their cognitive abilities.
Mini robot gets a schooling when swimming with fish
Researchers from EPFL have developed a new miniature robot that can swim with fish to learn how they communicate with each other and make them change direction or come together. These capabilities have been proven on schools of zebrafish.