MIT engineers have outfitted cells with tiny “backpacks” that could allow them to deliver chemotherapy agents, diagnose tumors or become building blocks for tissue engineering. Michael Rubner, director of MIT’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering and senior author of a paper on the work that appeared online in Nano Letters on Nov. 5, said he believes this is the first time anyone has attached such a synthetic patch to a cell.
The polymer backpacks allow researchers to use cells to ferry tiny cargoes and manipulate their movements using magnetic fields. Since each patch covers only a small portion of the cell surface, it does not interfere with the cell’s normal functions or prevent it from interacting with the external environment.
A new study published in the journal of
Minerva Cardioangiologica says that
Pycnogenol, pine bark extract from the French maritime pine tree, reduces jetlag in passengers by nearly 50 percent. The two-part study, consisting of a brain CT scan and a scoring system, showed Pycnogenol lowered symptoms of jetlag such as fatigue, headaches, insomnia and brain edema (swelling) in both healthy individuals and hypertensive patients. Passengers also experienced minimal lower leg edema, a common condition associated with long flights.
Research by the University of Warwick shows how death gave birth to the modern cult of celebrity as the sudden rise in the popularity of obituaries of unusual people in the 1700s provided people with the 18th Century equivalent of a celebrity gossip magazine.
The skeleton of a 12,000 year-old Natufian Shaman has been discovered in northern Israel by archaeologists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The burial is described as being accompanied by "exceptional" grave offerings - including 50 complete tortoise shells, the pelvis of a leopard and a human foot. The shaman burial is thought to be one of the earliest known from the archaeological record and the only shaman grave in the whole region.
A VHF radio interferometer system that was designed by Zhang GuangShu, et al of Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute at Chinese Academy of Sciences was used to observe a cloud-to-ground lightning flash containing 19 strokes , revealing new characteristics of lightning.
The system in this study has five antennas that form an array in orthogonal directions, and an interactive graphic analysis procedure is used to remove the fringe ambiguities. The system error, which comes from frequency conversion, is reduced by phase detection through direct high frequency amplifying. By using the system, the whole progression process in time and space of a lightning flash can be continuously reconstructed at microsecond orders.
Yesterday, following a fifth orbit-raising maneuver, the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft successfully settled into a trajectory that will take it to the Moon. After launch on 22 October, the spacecraft was first injected into an elliptical 7-hr orbit around Earth, between 255 km and 22 860 km above our planet. After five engine firings, Chandrayaan-1 spiralled outwards in increasingly elongated ellipses around Earth, until it reached its lunar transfer orbit on 4 November at 00:26 CET (04:56 Indian standard time).
In the fifth and last orbit-raising maneuver, the spacecraft’s 440 Newton liquid-fuel propelled engine was fired for about two and a half minutes. The lunar transfer orbit’s farthest point from Earth is about 380 000 km.
Transcription factors do a lot of things for us, like make arms and legs in the right places. It turns out they may also make us go bald.
Aristotle figured out pretty early on that human beings are by their nature constantly pulled by two opposing forces: on the one hand their propensity to go after immediate rewards, even though they are often deleterious for them (akrasia, or “weakness of the will”); on the other hand the necessity to work for their long term welfare (eudaemonia, loosely translated as “happiness” but better understood as flourishing).
We all know that high cholesterol is associated with the possibility of diabetes, but what about a connection between triglyceride levels and obesity? It may seem far fetched, but conducting a simple test of bodily triglyceride levels may give beneficial insight to those of who that are more susceptible for becoming obese.
Awww. Isn't this squirrel just so cute? You might think that now, but stare long enough at the beady eye of this Eastern Fox Squirrel (Family Sciuridae : Sciurus niger Linnaeus), and you'll see that it's actually a reproducing nightmare overrunning a campus or orchard near you. In fact, the Eastern Fox Squirrel is reproducing so quickly that researchers at the University of California Davis are putting them on birth control.
