Tiny Pill

A pill that vibrates to relieve constipation, a sensor that can be tracked in the gut -- medical researchers are turning to tiny robots to treat or diagnose gastrointestinal disorders.

This tiny pill just three millimeters in diameter is likely to worsen the nation's drug crisis, according to critics and the head of the FDA's advisory committee on painkillers.

So a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are at work on a tiny battery made of our own chemicals they could put in a pill you'd swallow - a micro power plant that could deliver controlled-release therapies to fight disease with previously impossible precision and safety.

As The Washington Post's Liz Sly recently noted, the war in Syria has become a tangled web of conflict dominated by "al-Qaida veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist ideologues and Western volunteers."

The Rani capsule contains tiny needles made of sugar that are pushed into the wall of the intestine to deliver the drug.

A pill coated with tiny needles that can deliver drugs directly into the lining of the digestive tract has been developed by scientists, an advance that may eliminate the need for injections. In animal studies, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital found that the capsule delivered insulin more effic...

A pill that vibrates to relieve constipation, a sensor that can be tracked in the gut -- medical researchers are turning to tiny robots to treat or diagnose gastrointestinal disorders.

This tiny pill just three millimeters in diameter is likely to worsen the nation's drug crisis, according to critics and the head of the FDA's advisory committee on painkillers.

So a group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University are at work on a tiny battery made of our own chemicals they could put in a pill you'd swallow - a micro power plant that could deliver controlled-release therapies to fight disease with previously impossible precision and safety.

As The Washington Post's Liz Sly recently noted, the war in Syria has become a tangled web of conflict dominated by "al-Qaida veterans, hardened Iraqi insurgents, Arab jihadist ideologues and Western volunteers."

The Rani capsule contains tiny needles made of sugar that are pushed into the wall of the intestine to deliver the drug.

A pill coated with tiny needles that can deliver drugs directly into the lining of the digestive tract has been developed by scientists, an advance that may eliminate the need for injections. In animal studies, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital found that the capsule delivered insulin more effic...