Toggle light / dark theme

UChicago scientists invent breakthrough device to detect airborne signs of disease

If you’ve ever sat waiting at the doctor’s office to give a blood sample, you might have wished there was a way to find the same information without needles.

But for all the medical breakthroughs of the 20th century, the best way to detect molecules has remained through liquids, such as blood. New research from the University of Chicago, however, could someday put a pause on pinpricks. A group of scientists announced they have created a small, portable device that can collect and detect airborne molecules—a breakthrough that holds promise for many areas of medicine and public health.

The researchers envision the device, nicknamed ABLE, could detect airborne viruses or bacteria in hospital or public spaces, improve neonatal care or allow people with diabetes to read glucose levels from their breath. The entire device is just four by eight inches across.


Portable tech captures molecules in breath to aid medical care from diabetes to at-risk newborn development.

Groundbreaking project to make artificial human DNA begins

In a groundbreaking development, scientists have started working on the building blocks of human life from scratch.

The project, dubbed the Synthetic Human Genome Project, is being funded by London-based Wellcome Trust, the World’s largest medical charity, with an initial investment of £10 million (approximately $12.7 million).

The research has been largely considered taboo due to fears that it could lead to designer babies or unintended consequences for future generations.

(That’s not my taboo. Creating Synthetic DNA can lead to the creation of synthetic humans. It can be useful in stopping wildlife extinction, but we don’t know the implications of what happens when we do. TheThe BBC also reported on this. Link in comments)


Work has started on a groundbreaking, yet contentious, project to create artificial human DNA from scratch, marking a potential world first.

Quantum simulation of chemical dynamics achieved for the first time

Researchers at the University of Sydney have successfully performed a quantum simulation of chemical dynamics with real molecules for the first time, marking a significant milestone in the application of quantum computing to chemistry and medicine.

Understanding in real time how atoms interact to form new compounds or interact with light has long been expected as a potential application of quantum technology. Now, quantum chemist Professor Ivan Kassal and Physics Horizon Fellow Dr Tingrei Tan, have shown it is possible using a quantum machine at the University of Sydney.

The innovative work leverages a novel, highly resource-efficient encoding scheme implemented on a trapped-ion quantum computer in the University of Sydney Nanoscience Hub, with implications that could help transform medicine, energy and materials science.


University of Sydney scientists have made a big step towards future design of treatments for skin cancer or improved sunscreen by modelling photoactive chemical dynamics with a quantum computer.

New technique tracks blood sugar with light

Diabetes is a very prevalent disease that, unfortunately, still has no treatment. People with diabetes need to monitor their blood glucose levels (BGLs) regularly and administer insulin to keep them in check. In almost all cases, BGL measurements involve drawing blood from a fingertip through a finger prick. Since this procedure is painful, less invasive alternatives that leverage modern electronics are being actively researched worldwide.

What Shapes the Lives of the Gut’s Microbial Inhabitants

A biophysical model sheds light on how the subtle interplay of fluid dynamics and bacterial growth controls the fluctuating population of microbes in the human gut.

The human body harbors large numbers of bacteria—about as many as human cells—most of which are located in the gut, mainly in the colon. Together, diverse microorganisms including multiple species and strains of bacteria constitute the gut microbiota, which is thought to play a central role in human health, affecting the immune response and the progression of different diseases. However, despite a vast body of microbiota studies based on gene sequencing and on experiments with animal models, the dynamics of microbial populations in the human gut remain poorly understood. Alinaghi Salari of the University of Toronto and James Cremer of Stanford University have now proposed a biophysical model of the gut environment that incorporates a broad set of features of the human large intestine [1].

Scientists discover unknown organelle inside our cells

The discovery of an unknown organelle inside our cells could open the door to new treatments for devastating inherited diseases.

The , a type of specialized structure, has been dubbed a “hemifusome” by its discoverers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. This little organelle has a big job helping our cells sort, recycle and discard important cargo within themselves, the scientists say. The new discovery could help scientists better understand what goes wrong in genetic conditions that disrupt these essential housekeeping functions.

“This is like discovering a new recycling center inside the cell,” said researcher Seham Ebrahim, Ph.D., of UVA’s Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics. “We think the hemifusome helps manage how cells package and process material, and when this goes wrong, it may contribute to diseases that affect many systems in the body.”

The ‘pivot penalty’: Exploring career risks for researchers who don’t stay in their own lane

In 2020, Yian Yin teamed up with economists at Northwestern University to look at the impact of researchers who had shifted their focus to study the COVID pandemic. He saw that these researchers faced a “pivot penalty”—their COVID-related work received less attention than previous contributions in their old field—and the greater the pivot, the worse the penalty.

As Yin and his colleagues continued their analyses, however, they discovered the pivot penalty wasn’t just a side effect of the pandemic. It occurred any time a scientist, inventor, or organization struck out in a new direction instead of staying in their lane.

“This is really a universal pattern that appears very widespread across science and technology—across different fields, research outcomes, , and team sizes,” said Yin, who was then a research fellow at Northwestern, and is now an assistant professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science.

A high-protein diet improves birds’ ability to tolerate infection, study finds

Whether you feed bread to ducks at the local pond or hang a bird feeder on your back porch, the food you’re offering wild birds plays a role in their ability to tolerate infection. New research from the University of Arkansas has found that canaries fed a high-protein diet fared better when it came to immune function and tolerating infection than canaries fed a high-lipid (fatty) diet.

The findings included molecular analysis of blood draws, revealing how different diets trigger the expression of different immune-related genes, both before and after .

“Our results are exciting because of the importance of human-supplemented food in wildlife disease systems, especially , which are commonly provided with supplemental food via ,” said Erin Sauer, a first co-author of the study.

Boson sampling finds first practical applications in quantum AI

For over a decade, researchers have considered boson sampling—a quantum computing protocol involving light particles—as a key milestone toward demonstrating the advantages of quantum methods over classical computing. But while previous experiments showed that boson sampling is hard to simulate with classical computers, practical uses have remained out of reach.

Now, in Optica Quantum, researchers from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) present the first practical application of boson sampling for image recognition, a vital task across many fields, from forensic science to medical diagnostics. Their approach uses just three photons and a linear optical network, marking a significant step towards low energy quantum AI systems.