Alan Jasanoff is designing imaging sensors that could help reveal the brain’s inner workings.
After finishing his PhD in molecular biophysics, Alan Jasanoff decided to veer away from that field and try looking into some of the biggest questions in neuroscience: How do we perceive things? What happens in our brains when we make decisions?
After a few months, however, he realized that he didn’t have the tools he wanted to use — so he decided to start making his own.
Watch any TV medical drama and you’ll see a defibrillator in action. During tense moments, defibrillators bring patients back from the brink of death with a dramatic shock. But what you don’t see on TV is the cell membrane, muscle, and skin damage that a defibrillator’s shock can cause. Even implanted defibrillators are painful to patients and damaging to tissue. But gentler devices may be on the way. A research team led by Stefan Luther of the Max Planck Institute and Flavio Fenton of Cornell University has found a new approach that greatly reduces the intensity of defibrillating shocks.
A team of experts at the Yale University has recently announced that it has developed a new series of nanosensors, a class of devices that is able to analyze whole blood samples, and detect the presence of cancer biomarkers in them. The latter are chemical agents that tumors and cancer cells produce, and their existence in the body can only mean one thing. The amazing achievement could soon enable physicians to cut the cancer-detection process short, leaving more time for the actual treatments.
