A carbon nanotube-coated "smart yarn" that conducts electricity could be woven into soft fabrics that detect blood and monitor health, engineers at the University of Michigan have demonstrated.

"Currently, smart textiles are made primarily of metallic or optical fibers. They're fragile. They're not comfortable. Metal fibers also corrode. There are problems with washing such electronic textiles. We have found a much simpler way---an elegant way---by combining two fibers, one natural and one created by nanotechnology," said Nicholas Kotov, a professor in the departments of Chemical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering.

The Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey, Spencer Wells
Random House, 2002

Spencer Wells, in his short, accessible book designed to accompany a similarly titled documentary film, describes the deep history of humans as it has been inscribed in Y chromosomes. This history has only recently become decipherable through modern genetic tools, and the results have settled some centuries-old controversies about how humans in different parts of the world have become so diverse. The biggest surprise is that our differences are recent: the dramatic differences that distinguish Kenyans, Swedes, Han Chinese, and Polynesians all arose less than 50,000 years ago.

I’m used to some American media outlets shamelessly feeding crap to the public. Think Fox so-called News, for instance. But the Los Angeles Times? That’s supposed to be one of the most highly respectable papers in the country, on par with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune or the Boston Globe. Well, once again I was wrong. David Klinghoffer published an opinion piecein the LA Times that argued that belief in the paranormal is not just, well, normal, but actually good for you.

This week I participated in a Social Media Day at NIST. During my talk I provided an overview of our current work in using Web2.0 tools for doing Open Notebook Science in fields related to chemical synthesis and drug discovery.

During my talks I generally try to place our work in context and give the audience a sense of where I see science evolving. I often start with the increasingly important role of openness and at some point follow up with this slide showing the shift of scientific communication from human-to-human to machine-to-machine.

So says an article in the Sunday Telegraph, following the death of Oliver Postgate, creator and writer of some of Britain’s most popular children’s television programmes, namely Pingwings, Pogles’ Wood, Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, Clangers and Bagpuss, of which the last was voted in a 1999 poll to be the most popular children’s television programme of all time.

The immune system's battle against invading bacteria reaches its peak activity at night and is lowest during the day, according to Stanford researchers who based it on experiments with Drosophila melanogaster and reveal that the specific immune response known as phagocytosis oscillates with the body's circadian rhythm. They presented their findings at the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) 48th Annual Meeting, Dec. 13-17, 2008 in San Francisco. "These results suggest that immunity is stronger at night, consistent with the hypothesis that circadian proteins upregulate restorative functions such as specific immune responses during sleep, when animals are not engaged in metabolically costly activities," explains Mimi Shirasu-Hiza of Stanford University.

The first demonstration that a single adult stem cell can self-renew in a mammal was reported at the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) 48th Annual Meeting, Dec. 13-17, 2008 in San Francisco.   The transplanted adult stem cell and its differentiated descendants restored lost function to mice with hind limb muscle tissue damage.

Determining the mechanisms that shape biological membranes has long been a tricky business. Like a factory assembly line, eukaryotic cells are organized into membrane-bound, functional compartments called organelles. For instance, the nucleus is the repository of genetic information and houses the machinery that creates the messenger RNA transcripts, which direct the synthesis of new protein. Secreted proteins are synthesized in a second organelle, the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), which are exported to the cell surface by a third organelle, the Golgi complex. All membrane bound organelles are characterized by dynamic changes in membrane structure that are closely coupled to the function of these compartments.

A possible new therapeutic target for pancreatic cancer, the most lethal form of human cancer, has been identified in the proteins whose DNA recipe comes from the gene named "Seven-In-Absentia," according to researchers at the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) 48th Annual Meeting, Dec. 13-17, 2008 in San Francisco. In their studies with Drosophila melanogaster at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine in Minnesota, scientists found a link between the "Seven-In-Absentia" or SINA gene and the aggressive cellular transformation, oncogenesis and metastasis that characterize pancreatic cancer. Scientists already knew that a mutation in the K-RAS gene underlies the abnormal, excessive cell growth of pancreatic cancer.