Antiviral PPE For The Next Pandemic

August 19, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 34 Comments

In what sounds like the plot from a sci-fi movie, scientists have isolated an incredibly rare immune mutation to create a universal antiviral treatment.

Only present in a few dozen people worldwide, ISG15 immunodeficiency causes people to be more susceptible to certain bacterial illnesses, but it also grants the people with this condition immunity to known viruses. Researchers think that the constant, mild inflammation these individuals experience is at the root of the immunoresponse.

Where things get really interesting is how the researchers have found a way to stimulate protein production of the most beneficial 10 proteins of the 60 created by the natural mutation using 10 mRNA sequences inside a lipid nanoparticle. Lead researcher [Dusan Bogunovic] says “we have yet to find a virus that can break through the therapy’s defenses.” Researchers hope the treatment can be administered to first responders as a sort of biological Personal protective equipment (PPE) against the next pandemic since it would likely work against unknown viruses before new targeted vaccines could be developed.

Hamsters and mice were given this treatment via nasal drip, but how about intranasal vaccines when it comes time for human trials? If you want a short history of viruses or to learn how smartwatches could help flatten the curve for the next pandemic, we’ve got you covered.

Be More Axolotl: How Humans May One Day Regrow Limbs And Organs

July 28, 2025 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

Although often glossed over, the human liver is a pretty amazing organ. Not just because it’s pretty much the sole thing that prevents our food from killing us, but also because it’s the only organ in our body that is capable of significant regeneration. This is a major boon in medicine, as you can remove most of a person’s liver and it’ll happily regrow back to its original volume. Obviously this is very convenient in the case of disease or when performing a liver transplant.

Despite tissue regeneration being very common among animals, most mammalian species have only limited regenerative ability. This means that while some species can easily regrow entire limbs and organs including eyes as well as parts of their brain, us humans and our primate cousins are lucky if we can even count on our liver to do that thing, while limbs and eyes are lost forever.

This raises many questions, including whether the deactivation of regenerative capabilities is just an evolutionary glitch, and how easily we might be able to turn it back on.

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Fixing Human Sleep With Air Under Pressure

July 21, 2025 by Lewin Day 68 Comments

By and large, the human body is designed to breathe from birth, and keep breathing continuously until death. Indeed, if breathing stops, lifespan trends relatively rapidly towards zero. There’s a whole chunk of the brain and nervous system dedicated towards ensuring oxygen keeps flowing in and carbon dioxide keeps flowing out.

Unfortunately, the best laid plans of our body often go awry. Obstructive sleep apnea is a condition in which a person’s airways become blocked by the movement of soft tissues in the throat, preventing the individual from breathing. It’s a mechanical problem that also has a mechanical solution—the CPAP machine.

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Do You Trust This AI For Your Surgery?

July 14, 2025 by Ian Bos 52 Comments

If you are looking for the perfect instrument to start a biological horror show in our age of AI, you have come to the right place. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have successfully used AI-guided robotics to perform surgical procedures. So maybe a bit less dystopian, but the possibilities are endless.

Pig parts are used as surrogate human gallbladders to demonstrate cholecystectomies. The skilled surgeon is replaced with a Da Vinci research kit, similarly used in human controlled surgeries.

Researchers used an architecture that uses live imaging and human corrections to input into a high-level language model, which feeds into the controlling low-level model. While there is the option to intervene with human input, the model is trained to and has demonstrated the ability to self-correct. This appears to work fairly well with nothing but minor errors, as shown in an age-restricted YouTube video. (Surgical imagery, don’t watch if that bothers you.)

It’s noted that the robot performed slower than a traditional surgeon, trading time for precision. As always, when talking about anything medical, it’s not likely we will be seeing it on our own gallbladders anytime soon, but maybe within the next decade. If you want to read more on the specific advancements, check out the paper here.

Medical hacking isn’t always the most appealing for anyone with a weak stomach. For those of us with iron guts make sure to check out this precision tendon tester!

Adapting An Old Rotary Dial For Digital Applications

June 13, 2025 by John Elliot V 27 Comments

Today in old school nostalgia our tipster [Clint Jay] wrote in to let us know about this rotary dial.

If you’re a young whippersnapper you might never have seen a rotary dial. These things were commonly used on telephones back in the day, and they were notoriously slow to use. The way they work is that they generate a number of pulses corresponding to the number you want to dial in. One pulse for 1, two pulses for 2, and so on, up to nine pulses for 9, then ten pulses for 0.

We see circuits like this here at Hackaday from time to time. In fact, commonly we see them implemented as USB keyboards, such as in Rotary Dial Becomes USB Keyboard and Rotary Dialer Becomes Numeric Keypad.

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Hacking T Cells To Treat Celiac Disease

June 11, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 14 Comments

As there is no cure for celiac disease, people must stick to a gluten free diet to remain symptom-free. While this has become easier in recent years, scientists have found some promising results in mice for disabling the disease. [via ScienceAlert]

Since celiac is an auto-immune disorder, finding ways to alter the immune response to gluten is one area of investigation to alleviate the symptoms of the disease. Using a so-called “inverse vaccine,” researchers “engineered regulatory T cells (eT_regs) modified to orthotopically express T cell receptors specific to gluten peptides could quiet gluten-reactive effector T cells.”

The reason these are called “inverse vaccines” is that, unlike a traditional vaccine that turns up the immune response to a given stimuli, this does the opposite. When the scientists tried the technique with transgenic mice, the mice exhibited resistance to the typical effects of the target gluten antigen and a related type on the digestive system. As with much research, there is still a lot of work to do, including testing resistance to other types of gluten and whether there are still long-term deleterious effects on true celiac digestive systems as the transgenic mice only had HLA-DQ2.5 reactivity.

If this sounds vaguely familiar, we covered “inverse vaccines” in more detail previously.

Full picture of tendon pulling actuator with Arduino elements in the backdrop

Ratcheting Mechanism Gives Tendons A Tug

May 3, 2025 by Ian Bos 3 Comments

A common ratchet from your garage may work wonders for tightening hard to reach bolts on whatever everyday projects around the house. However, those over at [Chronova Engineering] had a particularly unusual project where a special ratchet mechanism needed to be developed. And developed it was, an absolutely beautiful machining job is done to create a ratcheting actuator for tendon pulling. Yes, this mechanical steampunk-esk ratchet is meant for yanking on the fleshy strings found in all of us.

The unique mechanism is necessary because of the requirement for bidirectional actuation for bio-mechanics research. Tendons are meant to be pulled and released to measure the movement of the fingers or toes. This is then compared with the distance pulled from the actuator. Hopefully, this method of actuation measurement may help doctors and surgeons treat people with impairments, though in this particular case the “patient” is a chicken’s foot.

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