Inspired by tiny nanostructures on transparent butterfly wings, engineers at Caltech have developed a synthetic analogue for eye implants that makes them more effective and longer-lasting. A paper about the research was published in Nature Nanotechnology on April 30.

Sections of the wings of a longtail glasswing butterfly are almost perfectly transparent. Three years ago, Caltech postdoctoral researcher Radwanul Hasan Siddique—at the time working on a dissertation involving a glasswing species at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany—discovered the reason why: the see-through sections of the wings are coated in tiny pillars, each about 100 nanometers in diameter and spaced about 150 nanometers apart. The size of these pillars—50 to 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair—gives them unusual optical properties. The pillars redirect the light that strikes the wings so that the rays pass through regardless of the original angle at which they hit the wings. As a result, there is almost no reflection of the light from the wing's surface. 

Using existing smartphone components—including the microphone, touch screen, and accelerometer—app gathers valuable diagnostic data in a non-clinical setting

Parkinson's disease, a progressive brain disorder, is often tough to treat effectively because its symptoms—such as tremors and walking difficulties—can vary dramatically over a period of days, or even hours.

To address this challenge, Johns Hopkins University computer scientists, working with an interdisciplinary team of experts from two other institutions, have developed a new approach that uses smartphone sensors to generate a score that reliably reflects symptom severity in patients with Parkinson's disease.

Using the gene-editing tool CRISPR to snip at DNA is often akin to using scissors to edit a newspaper article. You can cut out words, but it’s difficult to remove individual letters or instantly know how the cuts affect the meaning of the text. Someday, CRISPR could be used to “clip” disease-causing genetic mutations in patients. But such precision medicine is impossible so long as CRISPR remains a clumsy tool.

In work that will help make the gene-editing process more precise, researchers at the Joint Institute of Metrology and Biology (JIMB, a collaboration between Stanford University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST), have developed a new kind of CRISPR platform called MAGESTIC. 

EPFL scientists have developed a new type of "double-bridged peptide" that can be tailored to bind tightly to disease targets of interest. The peptides’ highly efficient binding, combined with their small size and high stability make them ideal for drug therapies. The work is published in Nature Chemistry.

Peptides are short chains of amino acids that can bind to proteins and change their function. They show high binding affinity, low toxicity, and are easy to synthesize, all of which makes peptides ideal for use in drug development, and many naturally occurring peptides such as insulin, oxytocin, somatostatin and the antibiotics vancomycin or polymyxin B, are already successfully used like that

Researchers at MIT’s Little Devices Lab have developed a set of modular blocks that can be put together in different ways to produce diagnostic devices. These “plug-and-play” devices, which require little expertise to assemble, can test blood glucose levels in diabetic patients or detect viral infection, among other functions.

“Our long-term motivation is to enable small, low-resources laboratories to generate their own libraries of plug-and-play diagnostics to treat their local patient populations independently,” says Anna Young, co-director of MIT’s Little Devices Lab, lecturer at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and one of the lead authors of the paper.