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New Cornell Campus to Cultivate High-Tech Industry in New York City [Slide Show]
For years New York City–based universities have been opening satellite campuses worldwide, whether it is New York University's sites in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv or Columbia University's Global Centers in Beijing and Nairobi. Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa is returning the favor in a big way, partnering with Ithaca, N.Y.–based Cornell University to build a campus on New York City's Roosevelt Island . [More]
Can Too Much Information Harm Patients? [Excerpt]
Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care (Basic Books, 2012), by Eric Topol, a professor of innovative medicine and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute.
[More] Notion in Motion: Wireless Sensors Monitor Brain Waves on the Fly
A fighter pilot heads back to base after a long mission, feeling spent. A warning light flashes on the control panel. Has she noticed? If so, is she focused enough to fix the problem? [More]
Diabetes Mystery: Why Are Type 1 Cases Surging?
When public health officials fret about the soaring incidence of diabetes in the U.S. and worldwide, they are generally referring to type 2 diabetes. About 90 percent of the nearly 350 million people around the world who have diabetes suffer from the type 2 form of the illness, which mostly starts causing problems in the 40s and 50s and is tied to the stress that extra pounds place on the body’s ability to regulate blood glucose. About 25 million people in the U.S. have type 2 diabetes, and another million have type 1 diabetes, which typically strikes in childhood and can be controlled only with daily doses of insulin.
[More] New Target Discovered for Pain Relief
An uncharted trawl through thousands of small molecules involved in the body's metabolism may have uncovered a potential route to treating pain caused by nerve damage.
[More] Scientists Call for 60-Day Suspension of Mutant Flu Research
Reprinted from Nature magazine
[More] Genetically Engineered Stomach Microbe Converts Seaweed into Ethanol
Seaweed may well be an ideal plant to turn into biofuel. It grows in much of the two thirds of the planet that is underwater, so it wouldn't crowd out food crops the way corn for ethanol does. Because it draws its own nutrients and water from the sea, it requires no fertilizer or irrigation. Most importantly for would-be biofuel-makers, it contains no lignin--a strong strand of complex sugars that stiffens plant stalks and poses a big obstacle to turning land-based plants such as switchgrass into biofuel .
[More] Oral Exam
Personal oral hygiene notwithstanding, your mouth is teeming with hundreds of species of microorganisms. Until now, researchers have had a tough time sorting out all these small species--and how they interact. A new multicolor fluorescent-labeling technology is allowing microbiologists to peer into the human mouth’s microscopic jungle and discover new dynamics among several key groups. The findings were presented last December at the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting in Denver.
[More] Scientists Tweak Photosynthesis in Pursuit of a Better Biofuel
For years researchers have been trying to figure out the best ways of making plants produce biofuels. But there is a fundamental problem: photosynthesis, the process by which plants convert sunlight into stored chemical energy, is highly inefficient. Plants turn only 1 to 3 percent of sunlight into carbohydrates. That is one reason why so much land has to be devoted to growing corn for ethanol, among other bad biofuel ideas. And yet plants also have many advantages: they absorb carbon dioxide at low concentrations directly from the atmosphere, and each plant cell can repair itself when damaged.
[More] Anti-GM Groups Attempt to Sully Transgenic Control of Dengue Fever
Genetically engineered mosquitoes developed by British biotech firm Oxitec as an approach to controlling dengue fever have been caught up in controversy since 6,000 of them were deliberately released to an uninhabited forest in Malaysia in a trial in December 2010.
[More] Shape-Shifting: Researchers Change How Monkeys See in 3-D
At the backs of your eyeballs, on the living projector screens called retinas, your corneas display upside-down 2-D images of the world around you. With some complex mental origami , your brain transforms those flat worlds into a beautiful 3-D model of everything you see. In a new study, researchers changed how monkeys perceived 3-D optical illusions by stimulating particular clusters of neurons in their brains. The researchers think the region they tweaked is where 3-D modeling happens. [More]
Craig Venter Explains How Pond Scum Will Save the World
Name: J. Craig Venter [More]
Doomsday Clock Moved 1 Minute Closer to Midnight
In a sign of pessimism about humanity's future , scientists today set the hands of the infamous "Doomsday Clock" forward one minute from two years ago.
[More] The $1,000 Human Genome: Are We There Yet?
The race to the $1,000 genome heated up today as Life Technologies, based in Carlsbad, Calif., announced that it will debut a new sequencing machine this year that will eventually be capable of decoding entire human genomes in a day for less than $1,000. The machine, called the Ion Proton, will be the successor to the Personal Genome Machine made by the company Ion Torrent, a subsidiary of Life Technologies.
[More] Plight of the Condors
The first California condors to enter the wild in five years took a few hesitant hops on a sandstone cliff, craned pinkish necks over the precipice and tentatively tested their nine-foot-plus wings. Since that landmark launch in 1992, wildlife biologists have released nearly 200 condors that were born and raised in captivity, and they’ve prospered. The world population has rebounded from 22 in 1987 to 396 birds, with wild populations concentrated in Baja California, Arizona, and southern and central California. As these giant scavengers move to reoccupy their full seven-million-square-mile range, scientists are using state-of-the-art technology to guide the Pleistocene-period survivors toward full self-sustainability. They are counting on this and other unusual inventions, such as swapping infertile for fertile eggs, to ensure their full recovery.
[More] Baby Monkeys with 6 Genomes Are Scientific First
They look like ordinary baby rhesus macaques , but Hex, Roku and Chimero are the world's first chimeric monkeys, each with cells from the genomes of as many as six rhesus monkeys.
[More] Readers Respond to "Fight the Frazzled Mind"--and More
Older and More Stressed [More]
Gingrich Tops Scientific American 's Geek Guide to the 2012 GOP Candidates
The contenders for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U.S. presidential election may appear to be a fairly uniform group of middle-aged white conservatives, but when it comes to issues of science, technology and overall geek cred, none of these candidates is cut from the same cloth. In fact, Newt Gingrich nudges out Mitt Romney and Ron Paul in Scientific American 's overall ranking, based on the former Congressman's engagement in issues related to energy, the Internet and military weapons, combined with his mastery of top online tools such as Twitter and a healthy appetite for science nonfiction.
[More] The Math behind Screening Tests
It seems like every few months a new study points out the inefficacy of yet another wide-scale cancer screening. In 2009 the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force suggested that many women undergo mammograms later and less frequently than had been recommended before because there seems to be little, if any, extra benefit from annual tests. This same group recently issued an even more pointed statement about the prostate-specific antigen test for prostate cancer: it blights many lives but overall doesn’t save them.
[More] Silky Micro-Needles Could Make Shots Pain-Free
Nobody likes getting shots. But what if you could make the needles so tiny that they broke the skin painlessly? Engineers from Tufts University have created such micro-needles--made from the major protein in silk, fibroin. The work is in the journal Advanced Functional Materials .[Konstantinos Tsioris et al., " Fabrication of Silk Micro-Needles for Controlled-Release Drug Delivery "]
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