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Sleep apnea (where your brain doesn't properly send breathing signals while resting) is horrible enough by itself, but the solutions to it can be scary: you may have to take medication, rely on ungainly breathing machines or opt for invasive surgery. You might have a gentler treatment going forward, though. The US Food and Drug Administration has approved an implantable device, Respicardia's Remede System, that fights more serious cases of sleep apnea. The hardware amounts to a battery pack (slipped under your skin in the upper chest) and wires that enter the blood vessels near the nerve that stimulates your breathing. If you stop breathing normally in mid-sleep, Remede stimulates that nerve to move your diaphragm and keep you breathing. Think of it as an on-demand jumpstart for your respiratory system. This isn't a surefire fix. While there's evidence that Remede works, only about half of study subjects saw the hoped-for dramatic reduction in breathing problems. A...

Closing up wounds typically calls for sutures or staples, but neither are able to create a complete seal. And when it comes to internal injuries that are harder to get to and wounds on organs that move a significant amount, such as lungs, treatment becomes even more difficult. Sealants offer a solution to those problems, but none of those available meet all of the requirements of an effective surgical tool. However, researchers have just developed a new type of sealant that may actually check all of the boxes. Their work was published this week in Science Translational Medicine. "A good surgical sealant needs to have a combination of characteristics: it needs to be elastic, adhesive, non-toxic and biocompatible," Nasim Annabi, an author of the study and a researcher at Northeastern University, said in a statement. "Most sealants on the market possess one or two of these characteristics, but not all of them. We set out to engineer a material that could have all of t...