I admit, I’ve been fairly quiet about the Digital Doctor recently, but something has made me take notice of how close we are to making portable healthcare a reality: Peter Jansen’s Tricorder Project. Dr. Jansen has created handheld devices capable of sensing in different modalities, not unlike their namesake device from the science fiction series. As if that weren’t enough, …Continue Reading
University of Manchester scientists, working with colleagues in Edinburgh and Australia, have provided the first direct biological evidence for a genetic contribution to people’s intelligence. The team studied two types of intelligence in more than 3,500 people from Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Newcastle and Manchester. The paper, by Dr Neil Pendleton and colleagues, found that 40% to 50% of people’s differences in these …Continue Reading
For the past decade, researchers have tried to reprogram the identity of all kinds of cell types. Heart cells are one of the most sought-after cells in regenerative medicine because researchers anticipate that they may help to repair injured hearts by replacing lost tissue. Now, researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania are the first …Continue Reading
The naked mole rat isn’t a particularly handsome devil, but there’s more to life than being pretty–like living ten times longer than other mammals your size, withstanding extremely harsh conditions without breaking a sweat, or beating cancer. The naked mole rat does all of these things without really trying, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that British researchers are sequencing the un-cuddly rodent’s …Continue Reading
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have turned an acoustic phenomenon familiar to those who have visited the Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capitol Building or St. Paul’s Cathedral in London into a high-resolution nanoparticle detector. Using a ring-shaped micro-laser, the sensor can detect and count individual viruses or synthetic and biological nanoparticles with single particle resolution. Read more here
You still can’t use Flash on it, but at least the iPad now allows you to swipe, pinch, and scroll through the entire human genome. A new app from the Center for Biomedical Informatics (CBMi) at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia lets users travel through the entire human genome–all 3 billion base pairs of it.
A targeted snip through DNA’s double helix cantake out a mutated gene that causes hemophilia, curing mice of the disease, a new study found. It’s the first study to use this form of genome editing in a living animal, and it could have implications for genetic treatment of other diseases, notably AIDS. Scientists say the research is a major step …Continue Reading