Category Archives: Life Science

Bacteria Power Tiny Motor

Wheel of Life: Bacteria provide horsepower for tiny motor by Peter Weiss:

To make the motors, Hiratsuka’s team, led by Taro Q.P. Uyeda of the National Institute for Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, borrowed fabrication techniques from the microelectronics industry.

The machinery of each motor consists of two parts: a ring-shaped groove etched into a silicon surface, and a star-shaped, six-armed rotor fabricated from silicon dioxide that’s placed on top of the circular groove. Tabs beneath the rotor arms fit loosely into the groove.

To prepare the bacterial-propulsion units, the team used a strain of the fast-crawling bacterium Mycoplasma mobile that was genetically engineered to crawl only on a carpet of certain proteins, including one called fetuin. The researchers laid down fetuin within the circular groove and coated the rotor with a protein called streptavidin.

How Bacteria Nearly Destroyed All Life

How Bacteria Nearly Destroyed All Life by Alan Bellows:

About two and one-half billion years ago…
Once the oceans’ supply of iron was exhausted, oxygen began to seep from the sea into the air. With very little competition for resources, cyanobacteria continued to proliferate and pollute. The free oxygen they produced reacted with the air, gradually breaking down the methane which kept the Earth’s atmosphere warm and accommodating. It took at least a hundred thousand years– a short duration in geological terms– but the Earth was eventually stripped of her methane, and with it her ability to store the heat from the sun. Temperatures fell well below freezing worldwide, and a thick layer of ice began to encase the oxygen-saturated planet.

Continue reading →

The Inner Life of a Cell – Animation

The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created for Harvard biology students… illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli.

The online video is beautiful, see – Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell. Update: Unfortunately the webcast links on that page are not working but you can see a longer version than was available via: Inner Life of a Cell – Full Version.
Continue reading →

‘Virtually untreatable’ TB found

‘Virtually untreatable’ TB found:

TB presently causes about 1.7 million deaths a year worldwide, but researchers are worried about the emergence of strains that are resistant to drugs.

Drug resistance is caused by poor TB control, through taking the wrong types of drugs for the incorrect duration.

Multi-drug resistant TB (MDR TB), which describes strains of TB that are resistant to at least two of the main first-line TB drugs, is already a growing concern.

Globally, the WHO estimates there are about 425,000 cases of MDR TB a year, mostly occurring in the former Soviet Union, China and India.

Most Dinosaurs Remain Undiscovered

Dinosaurs remain to be discovered (bozos broke link so I deleted it – poor usability)

Peter Dodson of the University of Pennsylvania and Steve Wang of Swarthmore College estimate that 71 percent of all dinosaur genera — groups of dinosaur species — have yet to be discovered.

“It’s a safe bet that a child born today could expect a very fruitful career in dinosaur paleontology,” Dodson said in a statement.
…
The estimates are based on the rates of discovery — about 10 to 20 annually — and the recent increase in finds of fossils in China, Mongolia and South America.

Vast Majority of Dinosaurs Still to Be Found, Scientists Say, National Geographic:

The pair predicts that scientists will eventually discover 1,844 dinosaur genera in total—at least 1,300 more than the 527 recognized today from remains other than isolated teeth.

What’s more, the duo believes that 75 percent of these dinos will be discovered within the next 60 to 100 years and 90 percent within 100 to 140 years, based on an analysis of historical discovery patterns.

Open Course Ware from Japan

Soccer Robots from Osaka University

A number of Japanese Universities are creating open courseware, in cooperation with MIT’s OpenCourseWare initiative (which has spawned the OCW Consortium).

Osaka University OpenCourseWare offers courses in English including: Theory in Materials Science | Fluid-Solid Multiphase Flow

Kyoto University OpenCourseWare aims to:

share information in consideration of the fact that sixty percent of visitors to MIT’s OCW project come from Asia. We will make active use of Japanese in building OpenCourseWare, to recruit talented students from all over Asia as well as to promote the Kyoto University education, with Kyoto’s culture and traditions, to the world at large.

Many of the courses are available in Japanese, some are available in English, including: Applied Pharmacology

Tokyo Tech OpenCourseWare courses include: Advanced Signal Processing – Guided Wave Circuit Theory and Mixed Signal systems and Integrated Circuits.

The Nagoya University OpenCourseWare brings free courseware to the Internet. Currently several courses are available in English including, Basics of Bioagricultural Sciences. They aim to post 25 courses initially.
Continue reading →

Oliver Sacks podcast

Oliver Sacks is a neurologist and author of interesting and entertaining books including: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales. He is most known for explaining the remarkable case histories of extreme brain trauma, and how those instances allow us to learn about the brain.

Listen to webcast of his interview on NPR’s Science Friday. More blog posts on science and engineering podcasts

The Fully Immersive Mind of Oliver Sacks, Wired
Another Science Friday interview with Oliver Sacks from 1997.

Engineered Immune Cells Shrink Tumors

Tumors Shrunk by Engineered Immune Cells, Scientists Say by Stefan Lovgren, on an extermintal treatment with 17 patients so far:

“This is the first example of an effective gene therapy that works in cancer patients,” said Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and leader of the research team.

The therapy has so far been applied only to melanoma patients. But the researchers are optimistic that their treatment can be used for many other types of cancer.

The team has already engineered similar immune cells for more common tumors, such as breast, lung, and liver cancers.
…
His team focused on T (thymus) cells, a type of specialized immune cell that can learn to recognize and attack specific “foreign” objects, such as the cancer cells that make up tumors.

In the new study, researchers created tumor-fighting cells by harvesting normal T cells from melanoma patients and genetically engineering these cells to carry receptor proteins on their surfaces that recognize cancer markers.

Excercize and Learning

Increasingly, researchers are finding that brain activity and brain development are enhanced by physical exercise. It now appears that exercise can help kids learn at school.

Listen to the podcast from NPR today
Exercise Improves Learning and Memory, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 1999.

Proton Treatment Could Replace x-ray

MIT proton treatment could replace x-ray use in radiation therapy:

Scientists at MIT, collaborating with an industrial team, are creating a proton-shooting system that could revolutionize radiation therapy for cancer. The goal is to get the system installed at major hospitals to supplement, or even replace, the conventional radiation therapy now based on x-rays.

The fundamental idea is to harness the cell-killing power of protons — the naked nuclei of hydrogen atoms — to knock off cancer cells before the cells kill the patient. Worldwide, the use of radiation treatment now depends mostly on beams of x-rays, which do kill cancer cells but can also harm many normal cells that are in the way.