A new method has been developed to make drugs 'smarter' using nanotechnology so they will be more effective at reaching their target. Scientists from the University of Lincoln, UK, have devised a new technique to 'decorate' gold nanoparticles with a protein of choice so they can be used to tailor drug to more accurately target an area on the body, such as a cancer tumour.

The new technology has been developed jointly by teams headed by Prof Dr Georg Schmitz at the Chair for Medical Engineering at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and by Prof Dr Fabian Kiessling at the Institute for Experimental Molecular Imaging at the University Hospital Aachen. They published their report in the journal Nature Communications from April 18, 2018.

From live-streaming funerals to online memorial pages and even chat-bots that use people's social media footprints' to act as online ghosts, the digital afterlife industry (DAI) has become big business. Our internet activity, commonly referred to as digital remains, lives on long after we die. In recent years, as firms such as Facebook and experimental start-ups have sought to monetize this content by allowing people to socialise with the dead online, the boundaries around acceptable afterlife activity and grief exploitation, have become increasingly blurry.

Researchers at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering have demonstrated that deep learning, a powerful form of artificial intelligence, can discern and enhance microscopic details in photos taken by smartphones. The technique improves the resolution and color details of smartphone images so much that they approach the quality of images from laboratory-grade microscopes.

For thousands of years, micro-organisms have been used to facilitate chemical reactions - in beer brewing, for example. However, biochemical processes are incredibly complex, with a multitude of reactions taking place simultaneously and influencing one another. There are countless parameters that play a role, not all of which can be directly measured.

For every two mobile apps released, one is a clone of an existing app. However, new research published in the INFORMS journal Information Systems Research shows the success of the original app is not always adversely affected by the creation of clone apps. In fact, the study, which was conducted by Carnegie Mellon University researchers, found that whether the copycat app increases or decreases the number of downloads of the original is dependent upon the quality of the copy.

Parkinson's disease, a progressive brain disorder, is often tough to treat effectively because symptoms, such as tremors and walking difficulties, can vary dramatically over a period of days, or even hours. To address this challenge, Johns Hopkins University computer scientists, working with an interdisciplinary team of experts from two other institutions, have developed a new approach that uses sensors on a smartphone to generate a score that reliably reflects symptom severity in patients with Parkinson's disease.