Medical Buckyballs

Secret’s in the stuffing – Researchers fill ‘buckyballs’ with metals in hopes they’ll have medical applications

Virginia Tech has been stuffing hollow buckyballs, or fullerenes, with metals in hopes they could someday be used as contrast agents for imaging or tracing cancer cells.

Nobel laureate and co-discoverer Harold Kroto of Florida State University, who worked out the structural rule that the buckyegg violates, learned of Virginia Tech’s pursuit of buckyballs for pharmaceutical and medical applications during a visit to Blacksburg this month.

“It’s very exciting,” he said, joking that he’d been about ready to give back his Nobel because no one had found humanitarian uses for buckyballs until now.

The buckyegg is the latest from Virginia Tech, where in 1999 Harry Dorn and a team of chemists created the first buckyballs made with a shell of 80 carbon atoms and three metal atoms stuffed inside.

How Many Engineers?

Brian Hollar comments on the comments of MIT President, Charles Vest in Wither the Engineers?:

I fully agree with all of this. Some of the best counsel I got when I was co-oping at DuPont during my junior year of college was when one of the other engineers told me: “Every engineer is good at math. What will set you apart is your ability to communicate — both written and spoken.” This has indeed been absolutely true in my own career.
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My guess is that there are a roughly optimal number of Americans entering the engineering profession to meet industry demand. Unfortunately, that number is not as high as deans of engineering schools or university presidents would like it to be.

A good read. I believe there is a difference between equilibrium for the individuals who choose to be engineers (or something else) and the equilibrium that is best for the economy of the country. The many advantages that having a strong engineering workforce is a huge part of why China, Singapore, Korea, India, USA, China, Mexico and many others are investing in that area.

This is how I want those investing in our economy to think: if we want a strong economy with good jobs we need to invest in a strong engineering workforce, a supporting legal system and effective capital markets. All of us living in America benefit from this now.

Energy Efficiency of Digestion

Why is Fecal Matter Brown?

The complex digestion process ensures that almost no useful energy goes unused. The average bowel movement is three parts water to one part solid matter. Bacteria make up 30 percent of the solid stuff. The same goes for indigestible foods like cellulose and extra fiber. The remaining 40 percent contains various inorganic wastes, fats and used-up body substances like red blood cells

Scientists Examine 100 Trillion Microbes in Human Feces:

Aiding the large intestine in this task are trillions of microbes that reside in the gut, where they help digest foods we would otherwise have to avoid. In this way the bugs contribute to our overall health.

Some of these tiny settlers are with us from birth, imparted from our mothers, while others gradually colonize our bodies as we grow. This microbial community is as diverse as any found in Earth’s seas or soils, numbering up to 100 trillion individuals and representing more than 1,000 different species.

Virus may be eating your brain

Forgetful? Virus may be eating your brain

Viruses that cause a range of ills from the common cold to polio may be able to infect the brain and cause steady damage, a team at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota reports.

“Our study suggests that virus-induced memory loss could accumulate over the lifetime of an individual and eventually lead to clinical cognitive memory deficits,” says Dr Charles Howe, who reports the findings in the latest issue of the journal Neurobiology of Disease.

The viruses are called picornaviruses and infect more than 1 billion people worldwide each year.

They include the virus that causes polio, as well as colds and diarrhoea. People contract an average of two or three such infections a year.

Related: Viruses as Nanomachines (webcast) (excellent, John) – What Are Viruses? – More info on Picornaviruses from Tulane – Microbes

SMART Fellowships

The Science, Mathematics, And Research for Transformation Defense Scholarship for Service Program (SMART) is administrated by ASEE. As I have stated before – while I work for ASEE this blog is my own and is not associated with ASEE.

Program highlights include:

Starting salary/stipend ranging from $22,500 for undergraduates to $38,000 for doctoral students
Full tuition and related education fees and a book allowance of $1,000
Paid summer internships
Career opportunities after graduation

Read more about the program and apply online – the deadline is 5 February 2007. Article on the SMART program from ASEE’s magazine: PRISM.

The deadline from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship is as early as tomorrow for some applications and as late as November 13th for others.

Bacteria in Food Increasingly Dangerous

Food-borne bacteria evolving, becoming more dangerous by Elizabeth Weise:

The evolution of ultra-dangerous versions of common food pathogens with which humans have coexisted for millennia. E. coli lives in the guts of most mammals. Almost all forms are harmless; some are actually necessary for health. It wasn’t until the 1970s that a deadly version — O157:H7 — emerged that causes kidney damage and death.

Two forms of the salmonella bacteria,Salmonella typhimurium and Salmonella newport, have evolved to resist most of the antibiotics that doctors are comfortable giving to children, says Patricia Griffin, who studies food-borne and diarrheal illnesses at the CDC.

Both are most common in cattle and other farm animals but are also turning up in fresh produce.

MRSA Vaccine Shows Promise

Superbug vaccine ‘shows promise’

A vaccine to guard against hospital superbug MRSA is a step closer, according to scientists. US researchers have developed a vaccine that protected mice from four potentially deadly strains of MRSA.
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The team looked for a vaccine using a technique called “reverse vaccinology”, which builds on recent genetics advances.

It involved sifting through the genome of Staphylococcus aureus to hunt for proteins on the microbe that might spark the body’s immune system into action, producing protection against the bacteria.

The team identified four proteins that prompted a strong immune response, making them good targets for vaccines.

More information on MRSA is available from the United States Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Satellite Tracker from NASA

Cool satelite tracker from NASA that uses Java (if you don’t have Java you can see some other links they provide but they really are not that great). You can use your mouse to spin the globe around and see satellites. You can also select specific satellites and see their orbits. A nice fun quick visit.

Diversity In Engineering – Canada

Via Celebrating Engineering in the Globe and Mail – the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers: What can diversity bring to engineering (pdf format):

Strategies to encourage more women to take up engineering are being adapted to reach out to other under-represented groups. Making engineering more inviting to a diverse pool of future practitioners holds tremendous promise for a profession dedicated to the public interest.
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There is no doubt a renewed emphasis on diversity reflects–some would suggest belatedly–the changing demographic of engineering in Canada, and especially Ontario. While female engineers still represent only about 10 per cent of membership in most Canadian jurisdictions, there has been significant growth in membership from international engineering graduates, particularly in larger urban centres. In some ways, this indicates how the evolving demographic of engineering practitioners is coming to reflect the changing Canadian population.

Educating Scientists and Engineers

Business Week has an articles discussing what business would like to see from graduates, Biotech’s Beef:

The problem is a disconnect between what universities are teaching and what biotech wants. “The focus of academia is getting basic and theoretical knowledge in place,”
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There are several weaknesses. First, recent grads lack the technical knowledge to carry out applied research in areas that straddle engineering, math, and computers. Second, job candidates have little awareness of what the Food & Drug Administration is looking for when it considers whether or not to approve a drug. Recent grads simply aren’t familiar with issues such as quality control and regulatory affairs.

This general idea is not new. But, as always (and probably more so if the nature of what is needed is changing faster today than in the past) the changing environment does require universities (and students, at least those that want to work in industry) to adapt.

But with H-1B quotas filling up earlier every year, Invitrogen has chosen to do more drug development in Japan, China, and India. It may also open facilities in Korea and Singapore, says Rodney Moses, Invitrogen’s vice-president of talent acquisition. Compensation in China and India is lower than in the U.S., but that’s not what motivates the move offshore, says Moses. “If the talent is located in Singapore, it’s just easier for us to go there.”

U.S. colleges take the problem seriously. State university systems in California, Wisconsin, and elsewhere are adding more industry-oriented classes.