The number of melanoma skin cancer cases has risen above 20,000 a year for the first time in the UK.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 23
A new light-based sensor could help make ultrasensitive disease testing more portable
When we think about highly sensitive medical testing, we often imagine a hospital laboratory filled with large instruments, trained technicians, and carefully controlled conditions. This is especially true for optical biosensing, where scientists try to detect extremely small changes caused by biomolecules binding to a sensor surface.
These tiny changes can carry important information about disease, treatment response, or biological function. But detecting them often requires precise spectrometers, stable light sources, and carefully aligned instruments. This makes many advanced biosensing technologies powerful in the laboratory, but difficult to use in smaller clinics, remote regions, or point-of-care settings.
In our recent study, now published in Nature Photonics, we asked a simple question: Can we make high-performance label-free biosensing smaller, more robust, and easier to scale, without sacrificing sensitivity?
Embodied Mini-Brains Learn To Navigate A Virtual World By Smell
Further Reading.
Embodied Neurocomputation:
A Framework for Interfacing Biological Neural.
Cultures with Scaled Task-Driven Validation.
https://arxiv.org/html/2605.13315v1
Computing with Living Neurons: Chaos-Controlled Reservoir Computing with Knowledge Transplant.
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/202…
Goal-directed learning in cortical organoids.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…
A feedback-driven brain organoid platform enables automated.
maintenance and high-resolution neural activity monitoring.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…
Human assembloid model of the ascending neural sensory pathway.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s4158…
Encoding Tactile Stimuli for Braille Recognition with Organoids.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.
Scientists reversed memory loss by recharging the brain’s tiny engines
Researchers have shown for the first time that malfunctioning mitochondria — the cell’s energy generators — may directly cause cognitive decline in neurodegenerative diseases. By creating a new tool that temporarily boosts mitochondrial activity in the brain, scientists restored memory performance in mouse models of dementia. The discovery hints that energy failure inside neurons could happen before brain cells die, potentially offering a new target for future Alzheimer’s treatments.
Scientists use light to create tiny molecules that could transform medicine
Researchers have developed a light-driven method for creating tiny, high-energy “housane” molecules that are valuable for drug development and materials science. These compact ring-shaped structures are difficult to produce because of the intense internal strain they contain. By using photocatalysis and carefully tuning the starting molecules, the team managed to guide the reaction into a clean and efficient pathway.
Quantum sensors use atoms, electrons and light as ultra‑steady rulers
Quantum computers get a lot of attention, even though they are not ready for prime time, but quantum sensors are already doing useful work. These sensors measure fields, forces and motion so small that ordinary background noise can drown them out. Some sensors are already in daily use, while others are moving from research labs into flight tests, hospitals and field instruments.
For example, a human brain produces magnetic signals in the femtotesla-to-picotesla range—billions of times weaker than a refrigerator magnet—far weaker than the magnetic noise in an ordinary room. That is why brain scanners that measure these signals need ultrasensitive detectors and strong magnetic shielding. In some hospitals, these detectors use quantum technology to help map brain activity before epilepsy surgery, without touching the brain.
Quantum sensors are showing up in other fields as well, including in navigation when GPS signals are jammed or spoofed, mapping gravity to reveal what’s underground, and boosting astronomers’ ability to measure gravitational waves. I am a photonics and quantum technologies researcher. My lab applies physics to develop a range of devices, including quantum sensors.
AI atlas reveals hidden whole-body-damage caused by obesity
Obesity affects far more than metabolism and fat storage. It alters immune activity, nerve structure, and tissue organization across multiple organ systems, increasing the risk of diseases including type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, neuropathy and cancer. Yet despite these systemic effects, researchers have lacked tools capable of studying disease-associated changes across the entire body in intact organisms and at high resolution.
A team led by Prof. Ali Ertürk, Director of the Institute for Biological Intelligence (iBIO) at Helmholtz Munich and Professor at the LMU, has now developed MouseMapper, a suite of foundation-model-based deep-learning algorithms designed to analyze whole-body biological imaging data. The framework automatically segments 31 organs and tissue types while quantitatively mapping nerves and immune cells throughout the body, enabling comprehensive multi-system analysis in intact mice.
“MouseMapper is built on a foundation model, which means it generalizes far beyond the data it was originally trained on,” says Ying Chen, co-first author of the study published in Nature.