Imagine having an entire pharmacy’s worth of drugs implanted in your body primed for release upon demand. It’s like a medical “OnStar”. This idea of an implantable microchip for programmable multi-dose drug delivery finally shows proof of concept with the osteoporosis drug teriparatide.
Wonder what a comparison of helmet impact forces between high school, college, and NFL football players by position would look like?
Peer Review Process
Send Your Secret Message Hidden in Bacteria
LeGoo, an Innovative Gel That Stops Blood Flow During Vascular Surgery, Gains FDA Approval
Paralyzed Patient Moves Prosthetic Arm With Thoughts Alone
Ummm … did you hear me?! That’s amazing. There he is above giving his girlfriend a high-five.
The doctors placed a postage stamp-sized sensor on his brain connected to wires that lead to the prosthetic arm. After some tweaking, he was able to control simple motions simply with his thoughts!
Check out the video below for more:
Facebook likes Science!
Nobel Prize winner Bruce Beutler is coming back to work at UT Southwestern where I attend graduate school… I’m impressed!
Plant RNAs Found in mammals … you are what you eat, apparently?
MicroRNA (miRNAs) are small molecules of RNA that affect everything from viral infection to gene expression levels. They are an ancient and unique way to control how other nucleic acids behave in cells.
It now appears that miRNAs from plants can cross over into their mammalian consumers, ending up in their cells. They might even inhibit some of the plant-eater’s genes, as was seen for a rice miRNA and a low-density lipoprotein-related gene.
A very surprising discovery, for sure, but more work will have to be done to figure out if these miRNAs actually have a function in the cells of their consumers.
(via The Scientist)
A small group of diverse individuals living on at least three continents have solved the structure of a protein that has stumped scientists for more than 10 years. And they did so playing an online protein folding game called Foldit.
Tiny camera mounted on mouse take live video of the brain
A new thumbnail-sized microscope will give researchers a way to see what’s happening in the brain of a mouse as it moves around and goes about its business. The microscope, described earlier this week in Nature Methods, weighs less than 2 grams—little enough that it can be fitted atop a rodent’s head—and tracks the activity of up to 200 brain cells.
To watch a living brain in action, researchers usually have to make sure the animal that brain belongs to is keeping very still, be it a human in an
MRI machine or a mouse under a benchtop microscope. That’s not such a problem for researchers studying, say, vision or memory—but it’s difficult to investigate the neuroscience of movement or behavior when your subjects can’t move around and behave.The new device is a fluorescence microscope, meaning it shines light on a sample, then captures the glow that bounces back. Despite the scope’s tiny size, the researchers fit all the necessary optical components—lenses, sensors, a mirror, an LED light, and more—inside it. In addition to being mobile, the microscope captures the activity of more cells than a traditional benchtop microscope does, letting researchers see what’s happening in a larger area of the brain.
The video is seriously amazing. Make sure to check it out.
This is a MUST SEE, I could stare at this all day. Amazing! I can only think of how this technology would be useful in my old lab.
About 8 years ago, heart researchers were abuzz with excitement. Studies in mice had found that infusing bone marrow into the heart after a heart attack could heal the organ and prevent subsequent heart failure. Given that there are about 500,000 new cases of heart failure each year in the United States and only 2000 heart transplants, a new therapy for failing hearts was badly needed. But when researchers tried the same approach in humans, it didn’t work as well. Now scientists think they may have pinpointed one big reason why.
