A geek at the peak, in a world at the peak
Using some cool trickery with silicon nanopillars and an electron microscope, scientists in Italy managed to photograph and actual strand of DNA, including the closeup image below where you can start to make out the double helix structure. Impressive work!
You can read more about it in The Atlantic.
Nice, short video explaining the science behind having to pee more when you drink coffee and/or alcohol (inhibition of ADH release from the pituitary gland).
Researchers in Sweden have developed a genetically engineered virus that they believe may be able to fight some forms of cancer. While that sounds great, they ran into a reality check when they looked at doing clinical trials…what they need to do to truly test this virus is going to cost one heck of a lot of money, and finding backers for that is not easy. So, they’ve turned to the internet for help, hoping to raise around three million dollars to allow them to tackle the first phase of the clinical trials. If that test is successful, the hope is that it would spur enough interest from big companies to foot the bill for continuation and completion of testing. You can read more about it here, or check out the video below.
The NYTimes has an interesting article in the opinion section suggesting that Alzheimer’s could be a form of diet-induced diabetes (‘type 3 diabetes’, they call it). It’s far from definitive at this point, but what IS clear is that eating sugars and carbs has more downsides than upsides. Really no upsides, actually, just downsides! But that’s a subject I’ll be covering more in this blog in the coming weeks and months.
In the meantime, you can read more over at the New York Times.
Scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have managed to vastly decrease the time required to analyze DNA samples, by accelerating the process whereby samples are amplified for analysis. This is expected to lead to a 5-10 minute DNA test cycle, which is a huge improvement over the hours or days it takes now.
So how will this affect you? The example in the article at phys.org says it best, so I’ll just quote it here:
Picture this: You’ve brought your sick child to the doctor’s office. After checking her pulse and blood pressure, he takes a nasal or throat swab and inserts it into a mysterious black box. Before the doctor finishes his examination, the black box beeps, indicating that the pathogen that’s making your child sick has been identified.
(via Phys.org)
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