News by Subject Technology & Engineering

University of Utah researchers led by chemical engineering and chemistry professor Marc Porter and U surgeon and professor Courtney Scaife have developed a rapid portable screening test for liver cancer that doesn't involve sending a specimen to a blood lab and cuts the wait time for results from two weeks to two minutes. This inexpensive test can be administered wherever the patient is, which will be valuable for developing nations with little access to hospitals.

According to Dr. Emmanuel Levy and his group in the Weizmann Institute of Science's Structural Biology Department, Lego-like assemblies should have formed relatively frequently during evolution. Could this assembly method be common, or even easy to reproduce? Their answer, which was recently published in Nature, may have implications for both biological research and nanoscience.

A powerful shockwave from the H.L. Hunley's own weapon killed the crew of the Confederate combat submarine as it sunk a Union ship. This finding comes from a four-year research project that involved repeatedly setting blasts near a scale model, shooting authentic weapons at historically accurate iron plate and many calculations on human respiration and the transmission of blast energy by Rachel Lance, a 2016 Ph.D. graduate of Duke Engineering.

A new medical-diagnostic device made out of paper detects biomarkers and identifies diseases by performing electrochemical analyses -- powered only by the user's touch -- and reads out the color-coded test results, making it easy for non-experts to understand.

By capturing the crystal structure of RNA polymerase during a nontraditional form of transcription -- reiterative transcription -- researchers have identified a new pathway used by RNA to exit an enzyme.

When bacteria develop antibiotic resistance, treatment with these medications becomes ineffective. Similarly, tumor cells can also change in such a way that renders them resistant to particular medications. This makes it vitally important for cancer patients and their doctors to determine as early as possible whether a specific therapy is working or not. A new blood test developed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich can predict drug resistance in patients with advanced prostate cancer.