Woman's Medical College

To commemorate International Women’s Day this March 8th, here’s a photo taken in 1885 of three women who graduated from the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. Founded in 1850, this school was one of the earliest universities in the world to train women to be medical doctors. According to the Encyclopedia of Greater Philadelphia: “The […]

skin-to-skin

Holding a newborn and especially a premature baby against skin on the chest of a caregiver, usually a parent, immediately after birth increases the probability that the baby will grow healthier in a comprehensive way. This is what a recent study confirms and what many in the medical world had already suspected from previous examination. […]

Areca palm leaf

In a natural cycle, leaves fall from Areca palm trees in the city of Hyderabad, India, to make room for new ones. For centuries, people have used these leaves as plates. Bollant Industries has taken this a step further, developing an ingenious system that takes these leaves and recycled paper and presses them into eco-friendly […]

Crib A'Glow phototherapy crib

Babies get jaundice, a common and usually harmless ailment that causes yellowing of the skin and the whites of their eyes. Some 60% of all babies worldwide get jaundice and most do not require any treatment. For those who do, the first step is phototherapy, or exposure to blue light, which helps a newborn’s liver […]

Recycling carbon: it just makes sense This woman’s idea is all about turning garbage into gold. She’s Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech, and her company has invented a technology that transforms pollution, including carbon emissions, into sustainable fuels, fabrics, packaging, and other products we use daily. She is transforming waste carbon into valuable and sustainable […]

Every year, an estimated $80 billion of valuable metals are discarded in consumer and industrial waste streams (known as the urban mine). This is all the more regrettable since humanity’s appetite for the electronics that use these metals is ever-growing, leading to increased needs to mine more metals. But traditional mining takes a real toll […]

Robot finger with human-like skin in collagen Source: Shoji Takeuchi, University of Tokyo

It may sound like science fiction, but it isn’t. Researchers at the University of Tokyo have, for the first time, made “living” skin for robots out of human cells. While this may sound creepy, it is actually a technological advance that will have serious implications for both how robots work and how humans interact with […]

A new initiative is helping to address the global freshwater crisis. The World Economic Forum and multinational technology company HCL have launched the Aquapreneur Innovation Initiative. This collaboration secures funding of $15 million over five years for entrepreneurs to tackle the growing concerns of water scarcity, water pollution and water stress, a situation where not […]

The fact that ground squirrels burn almost no energy when they hibernate – with no loss of muscle mass – has implications for the many millions of people globally who experience muscle wasting as a consequence of various conditions. A decrease in muscle mass can be caused by undernourishment, for instance, which affects almost 830 […]

A cancer study sponsored by drug company GlaxoSmithKline has provided researchers with a surprising result: a 100% remission rate for the 12 participants. All of the study’s participants had a very specific type of advanced rectal cancer – mismatch-repair deficient colorectal cancer – that, due to its genetic traits, made it a good candidate for […]