Australian and American biomedical engineers have developed a stretchy surgical glue that rapidly heals wounds, a "breakthrough" that has the potential to save lives in emergencies, its designers say.

The injectable glue, MeTro, is based on a naturally occurring protein called tropaelastin. It is applied directly to the wound and is then activated with UV light to form a complete seal, eliminating the need for staples or stitches. Its elasticity means it's designed to work well on shape-changing internal organs like the lungs and heart.

A study published in journal Science Translational Medicine showed the glue quickly and successfully sealed incisions in the arteries and lungs of rodents and the lungs of pigs.

Virtual reality is posed to become a fundamental technology, and outfits like Magic Leap have an opportunity to become some of the largest companies ever.

Volocopter is the first company approved to put people in the skies with what’s essentially the equivalent of a driverless car in the air, ‘pilotless aircraft’ if you will, at the consumer level.

It’s a people's drone, and it’s a fantastic idea. In places where traffic is insane, like Los Angeles, and smog is bad, also like Los Angeles, a system of efficient travel that works like an Uber in the sky sounds terrifying, but also awesome and maybe even necessary. This is the future we’ve been asking for; finally a product worth drooling over to start the year! And Volocopter just reminded everyone that CES is the biggest show in tech.

According to the company’s website: The Volocopter is the world’s first multicopter to be granted a certification for manned flights – as early as 2016. It fulfils stringent German and international safety standards. From the end of 2017 the Volocopter will get to prove this in Dubai: At the first ever autonomous air taxi test run in the history of aviation.

The Volocopter 2X turns the vision of “flight for all” into reality. Just step on board the first manned, fully electric and safe VTOLs in the world.

Biohybrid bot could one day deliver drugs or do surgery.

For decades, engineers have been trying to build medical robots that can deliver drugs or do surgery inside the human body—a somewhat less fantastic version of the 1966 sci-fi film Fantastic Voyage. Now, scientists have manipulated spirulina, a microscopic plant and food supplement, to travel through people in response to magnetic signals. The biohybrid robot could one day carry drugs to specific parts of the body, minimizing side effects. What’s more, the robot—and its magnetic coat—appear to kill cancer cells.

Spirulina, an alga, looks like a tiny coiled spring at the microscopic level. Researchers had been trying, and succeeding to various degrees, to build bots out of rods, tubes, spheres, and even cages no bigger than a cell. Outfitting these tiny devices with an ample power supply has been quite a challenge, as most potential fuels are toxic to humans. Another problem is steering such a microrobot through the body’s maze of proteins and other molecules, which requires both a way to control its movements and to see where it is.

So Li Zhang, a materials scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in Shatin, turned to magnetism—and living organisms. Magnetic fields created outside the body can penetrate living tissue without harm, allowing researchers to move magnetized objects around inside. For maximum mobility, a helical body propelled by twirling works best. Enter Spirulina. “It’s surprising that you can find in nature such a convenient structure and that it can behave so nicely,” says Peer Fischer, a physical chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, who was not involved in the study.

Several years ago, Zhang and his colleagues used the alga as inspiration for a synthetic microbot, which worked to some degree. This time, the scientists decided to use the alga itself. They needed a way to track the robot in the body, and the alga produces a fluorescent glow. The researchers wondered whether they could follow the robot's course near the body surface by detecting this fluorescence, and then use a commonly used medical imaging technology called nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to track it in deeper parts of the body. NMR works by detecting magnetic particles given to a patient before the imaging takes place.

They developed a one-step method to magnetize the alga, coating millions of Spirulina with iron oxide nanoparticles. A longer dip time allows for more control, but a shorter dip time allows researchers to detect the fluorescence more readily. When the bot is too deep for that technique to work, NMR can still follow the robot’s course because of the coating, the researchers report today in Science Robotics. Using NMR, they observed the microrobots swarm in a rat’s stomach as directed by the magnetic field.

“It’s a step forward that you can track these swimmers in the body,” says Joseph Wang, a nanoengineer at the University of California, San Diego, who is developing a different sort of medical microbot. “And it’s biocompatible and low cost.”