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Innovation / Health & Medicine

Seedsheet bills itself as the best way to know where your food comes from by allowing you to grow it yourself. The container gardens come with pre-selected plants that can spice up a salad, garnish a cocktail or fill a taco.

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This Invention Makes a Gardener Out of Anyone

Seedsheets founder and CEO Cameron MacKugler designs the garden. You just have to water it.

Ultrasonic “tractor beam”

Five Ways Ultrasound Is Changing Medicine, Martian Exploration and Even Your Phone

If you thought ultrasound was only for prenatal care, think again

Bowery's indoor farm

Bespoke Produce? A New Farming Venture Tweaks Veggies To Suit Consumers’ Needs

Bowery, a new indoor farming company, offers “customized” greens and herbs

Frances Oldham Kelsey, a pharmacologist with the Food & Drug Administration, helped prevent a generation of children born with congenital deformities in the United States.

Women Who Shaped History

The Woman Who Stood Between America and a Generation of ‘Thalidomide Babies’

How the United States escaped a national tragedy in the 1960s

Premature infant in a traditional incubator

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Will This Artificial Womb One Day Improve the Care of Preemies?

A new treatment, tested on lambs, involves letting fetuses mature in fluid-filled sacs

Unlikely savior: The remarkable properties of spaghnum moss help preserve long-dead bodies, sequester carbon and even heal wounds.

World War I: 100 Years Later

How Humble Moss Healed the Wounds of Thousands in World War I

The same extraordinary properties that make this plant an “ecosystem engineer” also helped save human lives

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In an Emergency, You’ll Want This Hi-Tech First Aid Kit

Ram Fish, founder and CEO of 19Labs, talks about developing his clinic-in-a-box

Ensilicated proteins

Innovation for Good

Keeping Vaccines Safe in Tiny “Cages”

By encasing vaccines in silica, researchers could eliminate the need to refrigerate them during transportation

Hemingway led a life of adventure and, sometimes, violence. The author is shown here holding a tommy gun aboard the Pilar in 1935.

Multiple Concussions May Have Sped Hemingway’s Demise, a Psychiatrist Argues

The troubled author may have suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the disease that plagues modern football players

Why We Need To Start Listening To Insects

You may not think of the buzz and whine of insects as musical, but the distinctive pitch of mosquito wingbeats could tell us how to fight malaria

One of Empa's temperature sensors in the shape of a Braeburn apple

A New Sensor That Looks and Acts Like Fruit Could Reduce In-Transit Produce Waste

Swiss scientists have developed a temperature sensor that provides important data while packed with fruit in transport and storage

Trauma surgeon Sarah Murthi tests an AR headset prototype, which uses a Microsoft HoloLens and custom software with an ultrasound, on a volunteer "patient."

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Augmented Reality Could Change Health Care—Or Be a Faddish Dud

Doctors and engineers at the University of Maryland team up to build a tool that projects images and vital information right above a patient

A recipe for an eyesalve from ‘Bald’s Leechbook’

Medieval Medical Books Could Hold the Recipe for New Antibiotics

A team of medievalists and scientists look back to history—including a 1,000-year-old eyesalve recipe—for clues

A new safety test for foodborne pathogens involves an interaction between a droplet and bacterial proteins that can be seen through a smartphone camera.

Can a Camera, a QR Code and Some Bubbles Test For E. Coli In Our Food?

MIT researchers are pursuing a newer, faster test for foodborne pathogens

A new study recommends that the peanut-allergic try consuming other nuts—but only under the supervision of a licensed allergist.

New Research

Tree Nut Allergies May Be Massively Overdiagnosed

But don’t go for the jar of almond butter just yet

Researchers can remotely detect buried land mines using a bacterial sensor and a laser-based scanning system.

How Glowing Soil Can Help Find Land Mines

Using genetically engineered bacteria and lasers, Israeli scientists have devised a unique way to detect buried explosives

A noninvasive brain-computer interface based on EEG recordings from the scalp.

Melding Mind and Machine: How Close Are We?

Researchers separate what’s science from what’s currently still fiction when it comes to brain-computer interfacing

The mechanical lung would function outside the patient's body.

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An Artificial Lung That Fits In a Backpack

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh are developing a device that works like the sophisticated organ

The Carnes arm had a complicated mechanism that controlled the movement of wrist and fingers.

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How World War I Influenced the Evolution of Modern Medicine

Medical technology and roles during World War I are highlighted in a new display at the National Museum of American History

A fern repeats its pattern at various scales.

Art Meets Science

Fractal Patterns in Nature and Art Are Aesthetically Pleasing and Stress-Reducing

One researcher takes this finding into account when developing retinal implants that restore vision

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