A new type of high-sensitivity and low-cost sensors, called plasmonic biosensors, could ultimately become a key asset in personalised medicine by helping to diagnose diseases at an early stage 

A special interaction between light and matter, plasmons, will increase the sensitivity and ease in using biosensors for detecting disease biomarkers. 

Bone defects, like a damaged femoral head, are usually replaced by metal implants. This has many disadvantages, but now scientists in Germany have created bone material from human stem cells that could bring significant improvement to the patient’s welfare.

Regenerating bones based on a mixture of tissue engineering approaches is coming of age.

A toolbox of diverse tissue engineering approaches may help to meet the increasing demand in bone grafts. But translating the approaches into clinical praxis is not an easy task.

Researchers have found a new way to study how the DNA and proteins interact inside a cell structure. These reactions last only a fraction of a second, and therefore required a new approach to conventional observing methods. Within the European research project ATLAS, scientists in Naples have now created a LASER-based prototype that fixates these cross-links and thus makes the brief interactions inside the cell observable. This innovation could revolutionize medicine and our knowledge of the human genome.

Protein-DNA binding is fundamental to gene regulation. Now, new methods based on laser pulses allow fast interactions between proteins and DNA to be followed.

Femtosecond lasers constitute new tools for investigating the dynamic of how proteins control our genes. This technology offers potential new insights that could be used in cancer research.

Comparing data between hospitals across Europe helps health care professionals better manage patients’ pain.

Handling and analysing large volumes of data related patient-reported pain is a challenging task, which could help patient experience less pain after surgery.

2014 is the Year of The Brain in Europe, a programme to raise awareness to our most important and most fascinating organ. Understanding the human brain, and getting unprecedented insights into its mysterious processes, is the aim of one of Europe´s mammoth research projects: The Human Brain Project.

An experimentally guided computational model describes how our brains make complex motor decisions. The abstract model may have uses in medicine and robotics.

Using various experimental and computational approaches, scientists unravel how our brain selects the actions we make.

This year’s World Health Day (April 7^th) focuses on vector-borne diseases, like malaria. Malaria still kills more than half a million people every year, mainly children. In the battle against this disease researchers in Switzerland have developed a new eco repellent that stops mosquitoes from attacking humans.

Repellents derived from Greek herb extracts show potent effects against malaria carrying mosquitoes. They constitute a more sustainable solution that traditional repellent.

Repellents derived from Greek herb extracts show potent effects, as spatial repellents, against malaria carrying mosquitoes, and possibly others.

Combining two imagine technologies, such as MRI for structure and MEG for activity, could provide a new understanding of our how our brain works

Scientists have been devising new ways of looking inside the human mind, via brain imaging. 

Scientists in Finland have presented the first prototype of a new hybrid brain scanner that takes both pictures of the brain and measures its activity at the same time. For neurologists this could be the beginning of a new era in brain research.