Bioelectricity Startup Raises $95M to Build the First Drug-Free Hypertension Device
Bioelectronics startup BackBeat Medical closed a $95M Series C to scale its implantable cardiac pacemaker-based system that reduces blood pressure without drugs — through precisely timed electrical pulses.
Ion Channels: The Molecular Switches Behind Every Electrical Event in Biology
Ion channels are the hardware of bioelectricity — protein pores that open and close to control the flow of charged atoms across cell membranes. Understanding them is the key to understanding everything from pain to heartbeat.
The Coming Age of Bioelectronic Pills: Swallowable Nerve Stimulators
Ingestible bioelectronic devices that stimulate the vagus nerve from inside the gut are in clinical trials — a drug-free approach to treating IBD, obesity, and hypertension.
Weakly Electric Fish Have Been Solving the Jamming Problem for 150 Million Years
Weakly electric fish generate and sense electric fields for navigation and communication — and their solution to interference from neighboring fish is a masterclass in signal processing.
The Galvanic Body: How Injury Voltage Guides Wound Healing
Every wound generates its own electric field within seconds of injury. New research shows this endogenous voltage gradient is the primary signal directing cell migration to close the wound.
Optogenetics: Controlling Brain Cells With Light Is No Longer Science Fiction
Optogenetics uses light-sensitive proteins to switch individual neurons on and off with millisecond precision — and it’s moving from animal research into human clinical trials.
How Trees Talk: The Wood Wide Web’s Electrical Signals Decoded
Trees send electrical distress signals through underground fungal networks within hours of attack — and neighboring trees respond by changing their chemistry before they’re touched.
What If We Could Rewrite the Body’s Electrical Address System to Stop Cancer?
Cancer cells have a distinctive bioelectric signature — a depolarized resting potential that marks them as abnormal. Researchers are now asking whether restoring normal voltage could reverse malignancy.
Neural Dust: Wireless Sensors the Size of a Grain of Sand Are Going Inside Your Body
UC Berkeley’s neural dust — ultrasonic wireless sensors smaller than 1mm — can record nerve signals from deep tissue without batteries, wires, or skin penetration.
Mantis Shrimp See 16 Colors. Their Eyes Are Teaching Engineers to Build Better Sensors
The mantis shrimp’s 16-channel color vision system works nothing like ours — and engineers are copying its architecture for hyperspectral imaging and cancer detection.