drugs

The emerging field of soft robotics, which involves mimicking the squishiness and stickiness of such creatures as octopuses, starfish, and squid, may be taking its next cue from a different source: plants.

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley describe in the journal Nano Letters a new hydrogel that, inspired by phototropism (the phenomenon of plants moving toward light), can actually expand and shrink in a very controlled fashion via light.

"Shape-changing gels such as ours could have applications for drug delivery and tissue engineering," principal investigator Seung-Wuk Lee, associated professor of bioengineering, said in a school … Read more

Some people drive high.

They shouldn't, but they're high, so they don't really know what's good for them and what isn't.

Should they get stopped by police, the long nose of the law can sometimes sniff the presence of marijuana in their car.

Should they happen to have nosed their way into some cocaine, there might be traces of white powder around their nostrils.

As yet, though, there hasn't been a machine that can detect the presence of such drugs on one's breath, as there is for alcohol.

Scientists in Sweden, however, believe they have made some progress in creating such a device.… Read more

Researchers who shined a laser light in a certain region of the brain -- stimulating the area associated with decision-making and impulse control -- were able to zap what they call "cocaine seeking" behaviors in addicts.

And while their work was on rats, their hope is that a similar technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS, currently used to improve symptoms of depression) will work on humans as well.… Read more

What if you could "street view" the human body, navigating its interactive components all the way down to a metabolic level? An international group of scientists is working on that right now with a map of the human metabolism, which they call Recon 2.

Metabolism plays a key role in many diseases, and while scientists have already managed to reconstruct several models of it, each "represents only a subset of our knowledge" with "only partially overlapping content," the team writes in the journal Nature Biology.

"It's like having the coordinates of all the cars in town, but no street map," Bernhard Palsson, a professor of bioengineering at the University of California San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and one of the authors of the paper, said in a statement. "Without this tool, we don't know why people are moving the way they are."… Read more

When it comes to scientific research, size matters -- and yes, bigger is better.

So it may come as no surprise that scientists at Stanford, Columbia, and Microsoft have used Internet search data to uncover prescription drug side effects faster than the FDA's current gold standard, the Adverse Event Reporting System. After all, the data miners had the activity of some 6 million Internet users at their disposal, whereas the FDA relies on physicians to notice and report problems.

Reporting today in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, the researchers write that by analyzing Google, Microsoft, and … Read more

Hospital-acquired infections have become a major killer in the United States, mainly because the drug-resistant "superbugs" that cause them have proven nearly impossible to stop.

But now IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology say they have come up with what they're calling an antimicrobial hydrogel that can successfully fight the superbugs that are behind killers like MRSA.

In an announcement today, IBM Research and its partner on the project said that their antimicrobial hydrogel was designed to cut through diseased biofilms and almost instantly kill off drug-resistant bacteria. The collaborators on the project said that … Read more

Just when it seemed like Etsy was the perfect place to pick up some human bones, poison, or drug paraphernalia, the online artisan e-commerce site announced it was banning these products and more.

It actually seems a bit laughable that Etsy had to earnestly state that it was forbidding these items, which include all smokeable products, human remains or body parts, hazardous materials, motor vehicles, and drugs -- but it did.

Here's what Etsy policy manager Lauren Engelhardt wrote in a blog post last week:

Google doesn't just want to just "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," as its mission statement says. It also wants to figure out how to use technology to improve the world under the auspices of its think tank, Google Ideas.

Google Ideas, which launched 18 months ago, is working with the Council on Foreign Relations and the Tribeca Film Festival to sponsor a conference, "Illicit Networks: Forces in Opposition" in Los Angeles this week. The aim is to bring together government officials, tech leaders, researchers and victims to explore … Read more

Police did not violate the privacy rights of a Washington state man who responded to a text message from the iPhone of his suspected drug dealer only to get arrested on drug charges after arranging to meet up, a Washington appeals court says.

Police had arrested Daniel Lee on drug charges and one officer searched through the text messages on Lee's iPhone, found some suspicious messages from a "Z-Jon" and texted from Lee's phone to ask if Z-Jon "needed more." Then, according to court papers, Z-Jon followed up with a message using drug slang … Read more