2023 OCT 8 (VerticalNews) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at VerticalNews Health -- Electrical signals control a vast number of activities in the human body, from exchanges of messages between brain neurons and stimulation of the heart muscle to the impulses that enable hands and feet to move, among many other examples. To monitor or modulate these signals for medical purposes, a biocompatible and biodegradable optical fiber based on agar, a substance extracted from Gracilaria seaweed, has just been developed.
The research was supported by FAPESP and led by Eric Fujiwara, a professor at the State University of Campinas's School of Mechanical Engineering (FEM-UNICAMP) in Sao Paulo state, Brazil; Cristiano Monteiro de Barros Cordeiro at the Gleb Wataghin Institute of Physics (IFGW-UNICAMP); and Hiromasa Oku at Gunma University in Japan. An article about it is published in Scientific Reports, a Springer Nature...