Category Archives: Life Science

Economic Gains from Science

For policymakers, that means: Invest in the state’s educational system, especially the University of Wisconsin System, and use tax policy to encourage investors to supply the money to make business ideas grow.
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TomoTherapy, 10 years old, already employs 500 people. Co-founded by two UW-Madison professors, it was financially backed by investment groups in Madison, Milwaukee and California. The next step may be to follow Madison-area high-tech businesses Third Wave and Sonic Foundry into the public stock market.

GenTel, employing 17, started at University Research Park, has moved to Fitchburg and plans to open an office in North Carolina. The company has found additional financing from investors, including groups in Madison and Appleton. Aruna sprouted from brainpower and research at the University of Georgia, but it licenses human em bryonic stem cell technology from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Because UW-Madison is a hotbed of stem cell research, moving its jobs and income to Wisconsin would make sense.

Fighting Elephant Poaching With Science

DNA Technology Leads Scientists to Locations of Elephant Poaching:

The illegal trade in elephant ivory continues unabated despite the fact that it was banned by international convention in 1989. In an effort to hunt down poachers who slaughter thousands of elephants a year for the animals’ tusks, scientists have turned to DNA technology to narrow the search.
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But to pinpoint the precise origin of the tusks can tell authorities where elephants are being slaughtered and which routes are being used to transport the illegal tusks. Armed with this information, the enforcement authorities would find it easier to track down poachers.
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Wasser led a group of researchers who performed a DNA analysis on 67 tusks confiscated in the 2002 Singapore seizure. The genetic material was compared to an existing database of elephant DNA. The researchers determined with near “100 percent accuracy” that the poached elephants came from the savanna within a narrow band of Southern Africa — possibly extending from Mozambique to Angola — with Zambia at its center.

Excellent use of science to gain knowledge which can help determine where best to put effort to counteract poaching.

Nanoparticles to Battle Cancer

photo of Todd Harris, Sangeeta Bhatia and Geoffrey von Maltzahn

Team develops nanoparticles to battle cancer:

One solution already under way involves using nanoparticles for cancer imaging. By slipping through tiny gaps that exist in fast-growing tumor blood vessels and then sticking together, the particles create masses with enough of a magnetic signal to be detectable by a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine. “This might allow for noninvasive imaging of fast-growing cancer ‘hot spots’ in tumors,” said Bhatia. The team will continue this research by testing the imaging capabilities in animal models.

Another solution, described in the Jan. 16 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is a novel “homing” nanoparticle that mimics blood platelets. Platelets flow freely in the blood and act only when needed, by keying in on injured blood vessels and accumulating there to form clots. Similarly, these new nanoparticles key in on a unique feature of tumor blood vessels.

Ruoslahti had identified that the lining of tumor vessels contains a meshwork of clotted plasma proteins not found in other tissues. He also identified a peptide that binds to this meshwork. By attaching this peptide to nanoparticles, the team created a particle that targets tumors but not other tissues. When injected into the bloodstream of mice with tumors, the peptide sticks to the tumor’s clotted mesh.

Photo by Donna Coveney, from related press release: MIT nanoparticles may help detect, treat tumors

Micro RNA Editing

What separates us from the worms by Tom Avril (bozos broke the link, poor usability, so I removed it):

RNA editing is thought to be just one way that humans get more out of their 30,000 genes than, say, a fruit fly does with 13,600 or a roundworm does with 19,100. Those creatures have more primitive editing machinery, said the paper’s senior author, Kazuko Nishikura of Philadelphia’s Wistar Institute.

And they have much less of what is sometimes misleadingly called “junk” DNA – a region of the genome that does not produce proteins but nevertheless appears to play a key role in the diversity of life. The new paper is one of numerous recent finds in the booming field of RNA research. In the early days of genetic study, RNA was seen basically as a messenger for its cousin, DNA, carrying instructions to direct the manufacture of proteins.

But other kinds of RNA have since been discovered, including some that regulate or turn off certain genes, playing a role in embryonic development and – when things go awry – in diseases such as cancer. Last year’s Nobel Prize in medicine was awarded to scientists who pioneered a related field called RNA interference. And RNA is now thought to be even older than DNA, with some saying it served as the genetic blueprint for the earliest forms of life.

Savanna Chimpanzees Hunt with Tools

Savanna Chimpanzees, Pan troglodytes verus, Hunt with Tools by Jill D. Pruetz and Paco Bertolani:

Broken link removed. See updated post: Chimpanzees Use Spears to Hunt Bush Babies

Although tool use is known to occur in species ranging from naked mole rats to owls, chimpanzees are the most accomplished tool users. The modification and use of tools during hunting, however, is still considered to be a uniquely human trait among primates. Here, we report the first account of habitual tool use during vertebrate hunting by nonhumans. At the Fongoli site in Senegal, we observed ten different chimpanzees use tools to hunt prosimian prey in 22 bouts. This includes immature chimpanzees and females, members of age-sex classes not normally characterized by extensive hunting behavior. Chimpanzees made 26 different tools, and we were able to recover and analyze 12 of these.

Antarctic Robo-sub

Robo-sub takes Antarctic plunge

The submersible, which when not at sea is based at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, is built to withstand enormous pressure and can dive to depths of 6.5km (four miles). It is equipped with a number of instruments, including cameras, sonars, and sample-collectors that are deployed using its mechanical arms. It is tethered to its “mothership” – on this expedition the RSS James Clark Ross – with a 10km (6 miles) cable.

Scientists manoeuvre the ROV from a control room onboard the ship, and can see the data it produces in real-time. Professor Dowdeswell said: “When you are sat there in the control room, surrounded by monitors, you really feel that you are down at the sea bed with the ROV. You have to pinch yourself to remember that you are not.”
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Professor Tyler, like Professor Dowdeswell, deemed the mission a success: “The wealth and diversity of the fauna in this area was incredible. “We knew it would be diverse, but when you think the area we were looking at is totally ice-covered for about six to nine months of the year, this is extremely interesting.”

Biomolecules in Motion

Biomolecules in Motion by Kathleen M. Wong:

Proteins are the parts that make living engines run. They supply cells with energy, build muscle and bone, and catalyze countless other reactions that let the spark of life burn bright. To do their jobs, proteins must curl around substrate molecules, stretch to let their substrates go, travel around cells and assemble into work crews.
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Scientists have long believed that when an enzyme is empty, it gapes open like a hungry alligator, and that after it has caught its substrate, it remains closed until the reaction has been completed. Yang’s single-molecule microscopy studies have turned this notion upside-down. “Even when it has substrate, it doesn’t just bind the substrate tightly and stop moving. It’s still flapping,” he says. This constant motion makes perfect sense, considering how fast enzymes operate; some can process a million substrate molecules per minute. “Like a door, it has to be able to swing even without me going in and out.

Leading Causes of Death

The leading causes of death, Chart showing the odd of death in the USA:

Heart Disease – 20% then Cancer – 14% then Stroke – 4%
also (Motor Vehicle accident – 1% Suicide – 1% Falling – .5% Gun shot – .3%)

CDC’s report on the leading causes of death in the USA in 2004: Heart Disease 27%, Cancer 23%, Strokes 6%, Chronic lower respiratory diseases (emphysema…) 5%, accidents 4.5%, Diabetes 3%, Alzheimer’s 2.7%, Influenza and pneumonia 2.5%… (FYI, homicide is .7% the 16th leading cause, or very close to it)

What are the odds of dying? provides details on deaths due to injuries and includes a sensible disclaimer:

The odds given below are statistical averages over the whole U.S. population and do not necessarily reflect the chances of death for a particular person from a particular external cause. Any individual’s odds of dying from various external causes are affected by the activities in which they participate, where they live and drive, what kind of work they do, and other factors.

Robot Looks for Ivory-billed Woodpecker

Robot watches out for rare bird:

The system uses two video cameras to capture continuous images of the sky that are scrutinised for evidence of bird life by sophisticated software.
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“We have caught some very exciting images of birds.” No pictures of the charismatic red, white and black ivory-billed woodpecker have yet turned up.
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Advanced algorithms analyse each frame, discarding the images it believes does not contain an image of a bird and saving those that it thinks does.

Bionanotechnology Future

Commercialization and Future Developments in Bionanotechnology by Marcel P. Bruchez:

The lack of specifiability of our modules was a key challenge to commercialization. Specification will require detailed basic investigations of the properties and chemistry of nanoparticle materials in biological systems. In addition, we will have to establish analytical tools and quantitative descriptors to detail the distribution of properties present in a population of nanoparticles. This is categorically different from specification for organic molecules and proteins, in which properties can be effectively described by an average. In nanomaterials, performance properties may be dominated by a relatively small population of particles, so averaging cannot always be used.

Interesting paper, from The Bridge, an open-access publication of the National Academy of Engineering. This issue includes papers from the 12th U.S. Frontiers of Engineering including: New Mobility: The Next Generation of Sustainable Urban Transportation and Creating Intelligent Agents in Games.