Smaller is better when it comes to implanted medical devices. Cochlear (Centennial, Colorado) has just reported FDA approval of its smallest, most water resistant sound processor, the Nucleus 5 System for adults and children with severe-to-profound hearing loss. (Medical Device Daily)

Twenty-eight years after the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) was invented at IBM (Armonk, New York) enabling the advent of nanotechnology research and earning its inventors the Nobel Prize, a new group of scientists there has adapted an iteration of that technology so powerful that they are able to see the anatomy of a single molecule for the very first time. (Medical Device Daily)

What's the price of living longer? New mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC; Atlanta) reveal that human life expectancy is at an all-time high and death rates have reached new lows. But quality of life for those extra years was not assessed. (Medical Device Daily)