On the morning of Oct. 7, I woke up with the message from a colleague saying that “HIF got the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine whoo hooo.” That’s exciting news for young researchers like me who are beginning our careers studying hypoxia, when the levels of oxygen are low in the cells.

If you are wondering what on Earth that means, HIF, or hypoxia-inducible factor, is a protein that increases inside the cell when the oxygen levels fall, helping the cell survive.

The recipients of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine are William G. Kaelin of Harvard Medical School, Sir Peter J. Ratcliffe of Oxford University and Gregg L. Semenza of Johns Hopkins University. They won for their pioneering research into how the cells sense and adapt to low oxygen conditions.

There’s little that the left and the right agree on these days. But surely one thing is beyond question: that national governments must protect citizens from the gravest threats and risks they face. Although our government, wherever we are in the world, may not be able to save everyone from a pandemic or protect people and infrastructure from a devastating cyberattack, surely they have thought through these risks in advance and have well-funded, adequately practiced plans?

MIT researchers have invented a way to efficiently optimize the control and design of soft robots for target tasks, which has traditionally been a monumental undertaking in computation.

Soft robots have springy, flexible, stretchy bodies that can essentially move an infinite number of ways at any given moment. Computationally, this represents a highly complex “state representation,” which describes how each part of the robot is moving. State representations for soft robots can have potentially millions of dimensions, making it difficult to calculate the optimal way to make a robot complete complex task.

In today’s factories and warehouses, it’s not uncommon to see robots whizzing about, shuttling items or tools from one station to another. For the most part, robots navigate pretty easily across open layouts. But they have a much harder time winding through narrow spaces to carry out tasks such as reaching for a product at the back of a cluttered shelf, or snaking around a car’s engine parts to unscrew an oil cap.

Now MIT engineers have developed a robot designed to extend a chain-like appendage flexible enough to twist and turn in any necessary configuration, yet rigid enough to support heavy loads or apply torque to assemble parts in tight spaces. When the task is complete, the robot can retract the appendage and extend it again, at a different length and shape, to suit the next task

Providing seeds with a protective coating that also supplies essential nutrients to the germinating plant could make it possible to grow crops in otherwise unproductive soils, according to new research at MIT.

A team of engineers has coated seeds with silk that has been treated with a kind of bacteria that naturally produce a nitrogen fertilizer, to help the germinating plants develop. Tests have shown that these seeds can grow successfully in soils that are too salty to allow untreated seeds to develop normally. The researchers hope this process, which can be applied inexpensively and without the need for specialized equipment, could open up areas of land to farming that are now considered unsuitable for agriculture.

About 2 billion people around the world suffer from deficiencies of key micronutrients such as iron and vitamin A. Two million children die from these deficiencies every year, and people who don’t get enough of these nutrients can develop blindness, anemia, and cognitive impairments.

MIT researchers have now developed a new way to fortify staple foods with these micronutrients by encapsulating them in a biocompatible polymer that prevents the nutrients from being degraded during storage or cooking. In a small clinical trial, they showed that women who ate bread fortified with encapsulated iron were able to absorb iron from the food.

“We are really excited that our team has been able to develop this unique nutrient-delivery system that has the potential to help billions of people in the developing world, and taken it all the way from inception to human clinical trials,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

The researchers now hope to run clinical trials in developing nations where micronutrient deficiencies are common.

Langer and Ana Jaklenec, a research scientist at the Koch Institute, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science Translational Medicine. The paper’s lead authors are former MIT postdocs Aaron Anselmo and Xian Xu, and ETH Zurich graduate student Simone Buerkli.

According to the World Health Organization, cervical cancer is the fourth most common type of cancer affecting women worldwide. Currently, early screenings of pre-cancerous tissues and vaccination have proven to be the most effective treatment strategies. However, the lack of such interventions in developing nations has led to its high occurrence. Among the South East Asian nations alone, India has the highest incidence rate of cervical cancer.

A recent paper from the lab of Prof. Sudhir Krishna at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bangalore, reviews the progress made in cervical cancer research over the past 25 years. This extensive coverage published in the journal of Experimental Cell Research highlights the role of a popular signaling molecule called Notch in human cervical cancer progression.

Scientists from Imperial and the University of Bergen have found a new way to predict how a disease will likely progress in individual patients. This could help patients receive more targeted treatments earlier in the progress of their disease.

How the same disease progresses in different patients often varies widely. Understanding this variability is important for precision medicine, where detailed knowledge of individual patients is used to design the best targeted treatments.

However, learning the varied pathways of diseases and using them to predict future outcomes is challenging. Human researchers cannot hope to remember or analyse enough examples of patient data to provide the most reliable picture.

According to the chaos theory in mathematics, a minute change such as the ‘flap of a butterfly’s wing’ could cause huge changes elsewhere. This seems to hold true at much smaller scales too—for example, within a cell. Scientists from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bangalore, have now found how a minuscule atomic change in a protein molecule enables the bacterium to shut down its host’s immune signaling system.

Shigella flexneri are sneaky and highly infective bacteria. The organisms, which cause diarrhea in humans, first attach to the cells lining the host’s gut. Then using a needle-like apparatus, S. flexneri begin pumping in their secret weapon—an enzyme that alters a single amino acid in the host cell protein UBC13 (UBiquitin Conjugating enzyme E2 13). This change renders UBC13 unable to bind to a partner protein TRAF6 (TumouR necrosis factor Associated Factor 6) and effectively blocks the host cell from signaling for an inflammatory response. Subsequently, Shigella penetrates into the host cells to multiply.

By electrically stimulating nerves, neuromodulation therapies can reduce epileptic seizures, soothe chronic pain, and treat depression and a host of other health conditions without the use of conventional drugs like opioids.

Now, University of Wisconsin–Madison biomedical engineers and their collaborators have made a significant advance that could dramatically reduce the cost of neuromodulation therapy, increase its reliability and make it much less invasive.

With a type of electrode that can be injected as a liquid and then cure in the body, the researchers have laid the groundwork for a new kind of neural interface system.

The researchers unveiled their creation, which they’ve dubbed the “injectrode,” in a paper published online in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials.

As people age, they tend to develop diseases such as heart failure, kidney failure, diabetes, and obesity, and the presence of any one disease increases the risk of developing others. Traditional drug treatments, however, each target one condition. That means patients often have to take multiple medications, increasing both the risk of negative side effects and the likelihood of forgetting one.

New research from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Harvard Medical School (HMS) suggests that it may be possible someday to tend to multiple ailments with one treatment.

In lab mice with symptoms like those seen in the human disorder, the drug improved the animals’ ability to perform several tasks, including exploring a maze and recognizing familiar places and objects, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Peter Walter, his close collaborator Mauro Costa-Mattioli at Baylor College of Medicine, and their colleagues report in the November 15, 2019 issue of Science.

The drug, a small molecule called the integrated stress response inhibitor (ISRIB), could one day offer scientists a promising avenue for treating Down syndrome and other conditions that affect the brain – including traumatic injuries and neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, Walter says. “We don’t want to over-promise,” he adds. “But at least in these mice, we can restore cognitive function with the drug.”

There are numerous things to dislike about going to the doctor: Paying copay, sitting in the waiting room, out-of-date magazines, sick people coughing without covering their mouths. For many, though, the worst thing about a doctor's visit is getting stuck with a needle. Blood tests are a tried-and-true way of evaluating what is going on with your body, but the discomfort is unavoidable. Or maybe not, say Caltech scientists.

In a new paper published in Nature Biotechnology, researchers led by Wei Gao, assistant professor of medical engineering, describe a mass-producible wearable sensor that can monitor levels of metabolites and nutrients in a person's blood by analyzing their sweat. Previously developed sweat sensors mostly target compounds that appear in high concentrations, such as electrolytes, glucose, and lactate. Gao's sweat sensor is more sensitive than current devices and can detect sweat compounds of much lower concentrations, in addition to being easier to manufacture, the researchers say.

In order to search for life in outer space, astronomers first need to know where to look. A new Northwestern University study will help astronomers narrow down the search.

The research team is the first to combine 3D climate modeling with atmospheric chemistry to explore the habitability of planets around M dwarf stars, which comprise about 70% of the total galactic population. Using this tool, the researchers have redefined the conditions that make a planet habitable by taking the star’s radiation and the planet’s rotation rate into account.

Wearable, smart technologies are transforming the ability to monitor and improve health, but a decidedly low-tech commodity — the humble toilet — may have potential to outperform them all.

That’s the conclusion of a team of metabolism scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Morgridge Institute for Research, who are working to put the tremendous range of metabolic health information contained in urine to work for personalized medicine.