Ever wonder what it would be like if a device could decode your thoughts into actual speech or written words? While this might enhance the capabilities of already existing speech interfaces with devices, it could be a potential game-changer for those with speech pathologies, and even more so for "locked-in" patients who lack any speech or motor function.

More than 40 million people worldwide are blind, and many of them reach this condition after many years of slow and progressive retinal degeneration. The development of sophisticated prostheses or new light-responsive elements, aiming to replace the disrupted retinal function and to feed restored visual signals to the brain, has provided new hope. However, very little is known about whether the brain of blind people retains residual capacity to process restored or artificial visual inputs.

Teens use smartphones successfully to do almost anything: learn new skills, communicate with friends, do research and catch Pokémon. But a new study finds smartphones aren't as useful for helping teens maintain weight loss. In a 24-week behavioral study that combined traditional weight control intervention with smartphone-assisted helps, researchers found that teens lost weight initially, but couldn't maintain it when smartphones were the only tool helping them stay on track.

It's not so bad to hand your child an iPad once in a while depending on how it's used.

Playing a game together or Skyping with Grandma? That's OK.

Helping your little one calm down or trying to keep peace in the house? Not so much.

An international team comprising engineers, mathematicians and doctors has applied a technique used for detecting damage in underwater marine structures to identify cancerous cells in breast cancer histopathology images. Their multidisciplinary breakthrough, which has the potential to automate the screening of images and improve the detection rate, has been published in leading journal, PLOS ONE.

Washington State University researchers have developed a low-cost, portable laboratory on a smartphone that can analyze several samples at once to catch a cancer biomarker, producing lab quality results. The research team, led by Lei Li, assistant professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, recently published the work in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Toward the ultimate goal of engineering human tissues and organs that can mimic native function for use in drug screening, disease modeling, and regenerative medicine, a Wyss Institute team led by Core Faculty member Jennifer Lewis, Sc.D., has made another foundational advance using three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting. This work builds upon their demonstrated ability to bioprint tissue constructs composed of multiple types of living cells patterned alongside a vascular network in an extracellular matrix.