Engineering stories whose deep dive explains health, disease and medicine, ready to use as a starter, a reading task or a real-world example. Each one links to the GCSE and A level curriculum.
Health
For people with any of the roughly 736,900 cochlear implants registered worldwide by December 2019, all devices currently on the market share one obvious…
Deep dive: From Electricity to Light, the Next Frontier in Cochlear Stimulation
HealthBreakthroughs
A rice-sized biodegradable cancer implant delivers immunotherapy drugs directly into tumours, eliminating cancer in 60% of preclinical models.
Deep dive: How a Biodegradable Cancer Implant Controls Its Own Breakdown
Health
HemaDyne, an accordion blood flow pump developed at Texas A&M, replicates human arterial waveforms on lab-on-a-chip systems with millisecond precision.
Deep dive: how the accordion blood flow pump works
Health
Some bacteria navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. They produce chains of iron-rich nanoparticles inside their own cells, using them like a biological compass…
Deep dive: The Physics and Biology Behind Magnetobot Cancer Treatment
HealthBreakthroughs
MIT engineers have developed an ultrasound wearable pacemaker sticker that corrects heart arrhythmias without surgery, published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Deep dive: Inside the Ultrasound Wearable Pacemaker
HealthBreakthroughs
MIT engineers built a carbon nanotube catheter that detects bladder cancer biomarkers 50,000 times better than standard tests and maps tumour location.
Deep dive: The Science Behind Nanotube Catheter Cancer Detection
HealthBreakthroughs
Columbia University's NOVAKnee living knee implant, a 3D-printed biodegradable scaffold seeded with stem cells, has entered preclinical testing.
Deep dive: The science behind the living knee implant
HealthBreakthroughs
Mizzou engineers developed a 4D printed bioadhesive that bonds to wet tissue and changes shape with body heat. Here's how the material science works.
Deep dive: How 4D Printing Adds a Time Dimension
HealthBreakthroughs
Organ chip space medicine technology flew on Artemis II, testing personalised bone marrow chips to study deep space radiation effects on astronaut health.
Deep dive: How an organ chip works
HealthBreakthroughs
A clinical trial shows spinal cord stimulation can restore walking and sensory feedback in people with complete spinal injuries, a biomedical engineering first.
Deep dive: How spinal cord stimulation restores walking
HealthInnovation
China has approved the world's first commercial brain computer interface implant. Neuracle's coin-sized device reads neural signals to restore hand movement in paralysis patients.
Deep dive: How a Brain Computer Interface Implant Works
HealthInnovation
Nine engineers behind cochlear implants, brain-computer interfaces, and spinal stimulation share the 2026 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering.
Deep dive: How Neural Interfaces Work