Welcome to this week's edition of the Engineering360 news brief.

New Device for Heart Attack Patients

A new device for heart attack patients is designed to mitigate the cardiac events that can lead from a Source: Second Bay Studios/Harvard SEASdamaged heart to heart failure by attaching directly to the organ tissue itself. The new device, called Therepi, administers localized, non-invasive therapies as many times as needed. It enables delivery of therapy doses from a port under a patient's skin. The port is connected to a refill line that feeds into a reservoir attached to damaged heart tissue, and can accept injections either by the patient or a healthcare professional. Moreover, the reservoir for the device can be implanted in just one surgical procedure. In addition, the reservoir provides a unique opportunity as a cell factory for stem cell therapies. Those cells can be kept within the reservoir, where they will produce paracrine factors to promote healing. The capabilities of the device go beyond treating heart disease. It can also be used as a tool to identify the exact dosage appropriate for a host of conditions.

Ancestry Site is Hacked

According to reports, data about customers of the ancestry site MyHeritage had been stolen from pre-October 26 users. The data, which included customer email addresses and hashed passwords, was held on a private server until an unaffiliated security researcher notified the company. Although MyHeritage has assured that the breach did not include data such as family trees and DNA, it does advise that information such as medical histories and biological relationships can be made available via legal avenues. According to the site, MyHeritage will, in some cases, release data to third parties in “limited circumstances,” including to honor requests made by law enforcement with a court order. Responding to the hack, MyHeritage is asking users to change their passwords and is assuring customers that it will soon be launching a two-factor identification authentication system.

New Method for Analyzing Organic Compounds

With research that sits at the crossroads of physics, nanotechnology and big data, scientists have developed a new method for detecting and analyzing organic compounds that solves some of the challenges of the benchmark technique of infrared spectroscopy. Instead of relying on conventional spectroscopy, it relies on nanophotonics. It uses an engineered surface covered with hundreds of metapixels, tiny sensors that can generate a distinct barcode for every molecule with which the surface comes into contact. The potential applications are many. For instance, it could be used to make portable medical testing devices that generate bar codes for each of the biomarkers found in a blood sample.

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