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Self-bending surgical staples that can hold a wound closed without pinching or damaging tissue have been developed by Alfred Cuschieri at the University of Dundee, UK. The 5-millimetre-long staples which have been tested on rats are made out of nickel-titanium shape-memory alloy. U-shaped at room temperature, the staples form a loop to keep a wound closed when heated to 70 °C.

A team at the Centre for Telecommunications Value-Chain Research in Dublin, Ireland, is about to do outdoor trials on a device that impersonates many kinds of radio. This “software-defined-radio” transforms the analogue signal to a form that it can…

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