NTU

In what's been called "a medical breakthrough on the verge of happening," scientists have built a soft robot with the capacity to carry different types of drugs through the body – in a device the size of a grain of rice, steered by magnetic fields.

Scientists have created a lab-grown microbiome like the one found in a tiny plastics-munching worm, and it has the potential to efficiently and sustainably biodegrade the world's most common and troublesome plastics – all without the need for the worms.

The human brain can be primed to learn more than three times faster, simply by flashing a light at its individual alpha brainwave frequency for 1.5 seconds, suggests a fascinating new neuroplasticity study from Cambridge and Singapore's NTU.

Researchers have built an “inexact” prototype silicon chip that is allowed to make the occasional mistake, but which they claim is at least 15 times more efficient than current technology in terms of speed, energy consumption and size.