Tag: "engineers" at biology news

Math that powers spam filters used to understand how brain learns to move our muscles

A team of biomedical engineers has developed a computer model that makes use of more or less predictable “guesstimates” of human muscle movements to explain how the brain draws on both what it recently learned and what it’s known for some time to anticipate what it needs to dev...

3-D ultrasound scanner provides in-depth view of the brain

Biomedical engineers at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering have adapted a three-dimensional ultrasound scanner that might guide minimally invasive brain surgeries and provide better detection of a brain tumor’s location. The “brain scope,” which is inserted into a dime...

How brain pacemakers erase diseased messages

...ase symptoms aren't well understood. Biomedical engineers at Duke University's Pratt School of Engineering have found that stimulation administered by rapid-fire electrical pulses deep in the brain produces what they call an "informational lesion." By relaying a repetitious and therefore meaningless message...

Dinosaur hearing, listening to muscle noise, quieter cubicles

...rking closely together. Acoustical scientists and engineers are using existing research to develop software that replicates acoustical conditions in and recommends solutions for these open-plan spaces. Jonathan Kemp of Cambridge Sound Management in Cambridge, MA ( jdkemp@cambridgesoundmanagement.com ) will p...

Nanotextured implant materials: blending in, not fighting back

Biomedical engineers are constantly coming up with ways to repair the human body, replacing defective and worn out parts with plastic, titanium, and ceramic substitutes ?but the body does not always accept such substitutes seamlessly. Engineers from Brown and Purdue univ...

ConocoPhillips establishes $22.5M biofuels research program at Iowa State

...ucing fuels from plants. Iowa State scientists and engineers are well positioned to put science to work advancing biofuels technologies." Robert C. Brown, the Iowa Farm Bureau Director of Iowa State's Office of Biorenewables Programs, said ConocoPhillips is especially interested in converting biomass to fue...

Nanotechnology meets biology and DNA finds its groove

...mies of Science (PNAS) by a team of scientists and engineers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "DNA is messy," says David C. Schwartz, a UW-Madison genomics researcher and chemist and the senior author of the PNAS paper. "And in order to read the molecule, you have to present the molecule." To at...

Infection detectives use disease 'fingerprints' to track common infections in children

...which family or which group it’s in, so if someone engineers a virus that has never been seen, we will have hints that it’s close to something that is known," he said. Further studies may eventually help doctors track the progression of disease and help assess risks of complications, Dr. Ramilo said. ...

New biofuels process promises to meet all US transportation needs

Purdue University chemical engineers have proposed a new environmentally friendly process for producing liquid fuels from plant matter - or biomass - potentially available from agricultural and forest waste, providing all of the fuel needed for "the entire U.S. transportation sector." ...

Rewarding fat rats

...entists use concepts and technologies developed by engineers to try to understand what makes animals tick, certain computer scientists and engineers look to the natural world for inspiration and guidance as they build intelligent machines. Ongoing r...

Bacteria could steady buildings against earthquakes

...es for buildings sitting on them. Currently, civil engineers can inject chemicals into the soil to bind loose grains together. But these epoxy chemicals may have toxic effects on soil and water, said Jason DeJong, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at UC Davis. The new process, so...

Tissue engineering for craniofacial reconstruction

...ns associated with traditional transplants. Tissue engineers attempt to repair or regenerate damaged tissue by using engineered tissue substitutes that can sustain functionality during regeneration and eventually integrate into the host tissue. The traditional tissue-engineering paradigm combines isolated cell...

Magnetic system could be key to surgery without scars

Physicians at UT Southwestern Medical Center and engineers at UT Arlington have collaborated to invent a grou... whose team of urologists and surgeons worked with engineers from UTA’s Automation and Robotics Research Institute and the Texas Manufacturing Assistance Center ...

A revolution in the monitoring of unborn babies

... the result of years of collaborative work between engineers and doctors at the University. The original research was carried out by Dr John Crowe and Dr Barrie Hayes-Gill in the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE) and Professor David James and Dr Margaret Ramsay in the School of Human Develo...

Swimming 'to the left' gets bacteria upstream, and may promote infection

Yale engineers who study both flow hydrodynamics and how bacteria propel themselves report that one reason for the high incidence of infections associated with catheters in hospital patients may be that some pathogenic bacteria swim "to the left," in a study publis...

Virtual duck bills demonstrate species coexistence

...al bills using computer software typically used by engineers to design complex machinery. "The software allowed me to create exact, three-dimensional replicas of duck bills complete with articulating joints" said Gurd. "The replicas allowed me to determine the particle sizes each duck could ingest and the rate...

Dig deeper to find Martian life

...rock. This could be crucial for the scientists and engineers planning future Mars missions to find life."...

Two nerve cells in direct contact

...nsequence for other areas of science. For example, engineers developing navigating robots and driving assistance systems rely on simple and robust algorithms such as those realized by nature in insects. The mechanisms of optical flow field analysis are supremely suitable for technical implementation. As part o...

Robotic whiskers can sense three-dimensional environment

...wakes of their prey. Two Northwestern University engineers have been studying the whisker system of rats to better understand how mechanical information from the whiskers gets transmitted to the brain and to develop artificial whisker arrays for engineering applications. Mitra J. Hartmann, assistant profe...

Mysterious 'neural noise' actually primes brain for peak performance

...ertain world. "You'd think this is crazy because engineers are always fighting to reduce the noise in their circuits, and yet here's the best computing machine in the universe--and it looks utterly random," says Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester. ...

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