Neuroscientists are scrambling to play with the new toys of optogenetic technology, but with the explosion of popular science articles and even videos of light-controlled dancing mice (1), it is important to step back and evaluate how this technology can be most effectively used to solve meaningful problems in neuroscience. Continue reading
Engineering New method for small animal molecular imaging developed Thayer School of Engineering professor Brian Pogue and his research team introduced a new small animal imaging system that greatly enhanced the performance of current fluorescence tomography (FT) and may eventually aid in cancer therapy for humans. The findings were published … Continue reading
Henry Ford’s assembly line changed the entire concept of manufacturing. With it, his factory was able to produce cars faster, cheaper, and more consistently than anyone else. In the hundred years since, the technique has been greatly enhanced—robots can now do most of the manual labor, for example. The next … Continue reading
X-ray crystallography stems from a desire to find seemingly invisible internal order. Eighteenth century crystallographer Rene Just Hauy first identified the foundational notion that external symmetry is linked to internal order by illustrating that dog-tooth spar could be described by the packing of little rhombs. However, Johannes Kepler may have … Continue reading
In terms of biomass and prevalence in various environments, bacteria are the most successful forms of life (1). Among bacteria’s numerous remarkable survival mechanisms are biofilms. From human teeth to industrial sites, biofilms can form wherever there is water and sufficient nutrients (2). Due to this powerful ability to survive, … Continue reading