Important Innovations

New Shape-Changing, Swimming Tiny Robot Source:  Dartmouth College Promises Targeted Drug Delivery in the Body to Fight Cancer Engineers at Dartmouth College and the City University of Hong Kong have invented a tiny, shape-changing, swimming microrobot that can instantly stop and go inside the human body.  Researchers believe this tiny, soft robot can deliver drugs much more accurately in the human body.  It is light- controlled, swims, changes shape and can instantly stop and go on command.  It is cutting edge medicine and robotics. Targeted Medical Therapies to Defeat Cancer The researchers combined cardiac tissue engineering, a 3D printed wing and a light-sensitive gel to produce the soft robot.  Near infra-red light causes it to change shape and stop and go in fluid like the bloodstream.  It is specifically designed to target and destroy cancer cells by accurately delivering medication. Tiny Whale-like Tail The robot is remotely controlled...

New Device Captures the Heart's Energy Source:  Dartmouth College Implants Powered By Electricity from Heart Beats This is fascinating and very promising research from Dartmouth College engineers funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH),  The Dartmouth team have created a dime sized device that harvests the kinetic energy of a beating heart to generate electricity and power a biomedical device indefinitely. It's an implant, a heart pacemaker, powered by a beating heart. Dime-Sized Device What is so interesting is this is a dime sized device.  It relies on a thin film - piezoelectric film - attached to a pacemaker's lead.  It converts heart beats' kinetic energy into electricity to power the pacemaker implant. NIH Funded Research with Other Implant Device Applications This is essentially an organ energy harvesting device that could work beyond the heart and for other organs such as kidneys.  The Dartmouth team's three years of research res...