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POPS'Scar Eating' Enzyme Aids Spine Repair
Other teams have shown that delivering an enzyme from bacteria that digests scar tissue may help. "The problem has been this enzyme is really sensitive and degrades very fast," says Bellamkonda. He says the enzyme, chondroitinase ABC (chABC), is heat sensitive and must be repeatedly injected or infused into the body to work. Hollow straws Bellamkonda's team found a way to overcome both of those issues. They mixed the enzyme with a sugar called trehalose that made it stable at internal body temperature. And instead of injecting the enzyme into the spinal cord, they put it into tiny hollow straws just twice the length of a single cell. They inject these at the injury site in a special gel that keeps the straws in place. Bellamkonda's team tested the system in rats and found the enzyme prevented scar tissue formation for up to six weeks. "The goal is that at the time the surgeon is removing the offending (vertebrae) bone after the injury you would inject this gel to si
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POPSOur Stone Age Ancestors Wore Garish Coloured Clothes He added: 'We were looking to find when the cave was occupied, what was the nature of the occupation by those early hunter-gatherers, where did they go hunting and gathering food, what kind of stone tools they used, what types of bone and antler tools they made and how they used them, whether they made beads and pendants for body decoration, and so on. 'This was a wonderful surprise, to discover these ancient flax fibres at the end of this excavation project.' The researchers also found remains of animal hair, skin beetles and moths.
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POPSTooth Grown from Stem Cells If the technique can be used in humans, dentures may eventually be obsolete. The tooth shown in the picture also had a green fluorescent gene so it could be seen easily.
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POPSLingerie de Nuit Lingerie de nuit en pur coton confectionnée dans les ateliers de David Nieper, l'élégance, la qualité et le charme anglais.
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POPSThe brain and us... Now that we know a basis that affects, we can start relating to it. So i welcome these discoveries not as finite, but as a beginning...
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POPSRevealing the complexity behind things we take for granted..astonishing forms "Viewed at extreme magnifications of 1,000 times or more, the natural world acquires a surreal beauty, rich with astonishing forms and spectacular patterns. A new book, Nano Nature, gives us a rare glimpse into this bizarre 'nano' world. Using a scanning electron microscope (SEM), which can view objects at extreme magnification, Nano Nature explores this hidden world, revealing the complexity behind things we take for granted - a butterfly wing, a polar bear's hair or a fruit fly's eye. The images are produced in monochrome and then hand tinted to enrich their detail.'
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POPSPalin and the fruit fly or just plain ignorance
One might have thought that Sarah Palin would take a more active interest in one aspect of scientific research. Palin's youngest son has Down's syndrome, a genetic disorder caused by the presence of an extra chromosome 21. Although a geneticist by training, I am certainly no expert on the pathogenesis of this condition, nor the significance of Drosophila research into Down's syndrome. So, I typed "drosophila trisomy 21" into PubMed, the scholarly biomedical equivalent of Google. There were 109 results, the most recent published just the day before Palin's gaffe. The concluding sentence of that study — about the genetic cues that steer nerve fibres around during the growth of the fruit fly — suggests that the paper will "have implications for the pathogenesis of Down's syndrome". These two are drops in the ocean of fruit fly research that have clinical relevance. Down's syndrome, Alzheimer's disease, autism, diabetes, ageing research, cancers of all types
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