{"id":135488,"date":"2022-02-11T22:22:44","date_gmt":"2022-02-12T06:22:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/this-bizarre-looking-helmet-can-create-better-brain-scans"},"modified":"2022-02-11T22:22:44","modified_gmt":"2022-02-12T06:22:44","slug":"this-bizarre-looking-helmet-can-create-better-brain-scans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/this-bizarre-looking-helmet-can-create-better-brain-scans","title":{"rendered":"This bizarre looking helmet can create better brain scans"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

It may look like a bizarre bike helmet, or a piece of equipment found in Doc Brown\u2019s lab in Back to the Future, yet this gadget made of plastic and copper wire is a technological breakthrough with the potential to revolutionize medical imaging. Despite its playful look, the device is actually a metamaterial, packing in a ton of physics, engineering, and mathematical know-how.<\/p>\n

It was developed by Xin Zhang, a College of Engineering professor of mechanical engineering, and her team of scientists at BU\u2019s Photonics Center. They\u2019re experts in metamaterials<\/a>, a type of engineered structure created from small unit cells that might be unspectacular alone, but when grouped together in a precise way, get new superpowers not found in nature. Metamaterials, for instance, can bend, absorb, or manipulate waves\u2014such as electromagnetic waves, sound waves<\/a>, or radio waves. Each unit cell, also called a resonator, is typically arranged in a repeating pattern<\/a> in rows and columns; they can be designed in different sizes and shapes, and placed at different orientations, depending on which waves they\u2019re designed to influence.<\/p>\n

Metamaterials can have many novel functions. Zhang, who is also a professor of electrical and computer engineering, biomedical engineering<\/a>, and materials science<\/a> and engineering, has designed an acoustic metamaterial that blocks sound without stopping airflow (imagine quieter jet engines and air conditioners) and a magnetic metamaterial that can improve the quality of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines used for medical diagnosis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It may look like a bizarre bike helmet, or a piece of equipment found in Doc Brown\u2019s lab in Back to the Future, yet this gadget made of plastic and copper wire is a technological breakthrough with the potential to revolutionize medical imaging. Despite its playful look, the device is actually a metamaterial, packing in [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,38,2229,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-135488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-engineering","category-mathematics","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}