aimless in wonder
But for now we are young, let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see
Neil deGrasse Tyson words to live by.
People are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. Do not hesitate to remind them of this.
You know, politely.
Alex Seifalian’s lab at University College London is helping humans who lose body parts to repair their bodies the way a newt would if it lost its tail – by growing another.
The researchers in his lab, which Seifalian calls “the human body parts store,” create the body parts with synthetic materials and a patient’s stem cells.
The lab builds a scaffold of the needed body part with a porous nanocomposite material, developed and patented by the team, and then puts it in a bioreactor with some of the patient’s bone marrow. The patient’s cells cover the scaffold and fill its many holes so that it essentially becomes the patient’s own.
After it is inserted into the patient, it’s absorbed by the body and replaced by new cells over time.
1. A nose mold made of nanocomposite material seeded with cells in a cell solution.
2. A nose mold.
3. An ear mold made of nanocomposite material.
4. A lab-grown trachea, or windpipe, inside a bioreactor.
5. An artery is tested using a simulated heard and blood flow.
6. Nose and ear molds made of nanocomposite material seeded with cells in a cell solution.
Credit: Seamus Murphy/VII
very cool
Researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can’t breathe anymore. It’s one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.
The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children’s Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minute despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.
The solution has already been successfully tested on animals under critical lung failure. When the doctors injected this liquid into the patient’s veins, it restored oxygen in their blood to near-normal levels, granting them those precious additional minutes of life.
The particles are composed of oxygen gas pocketed in a layer of lipids, a natural molecule that usually stores energy or serves as a component to cell membranes. Lipids can be waxes, some vitamins, monoglycerides, diglycerides, triglycerides, phospholipids, or—as in this case—fats.
These fatty oxygen particles are about two to four micrometers in size. They are suspended in a liquid solution that can be easily carried and used by paramedics, emergency crews and intensive care personnel. This seemingly magic elixir carries “three to four times the oxygen content of our own red blood cells.”
Academic research is behind bars and an online boycott by 8,209 researchers (and counting) is seeking to set it free…well, more free than it has been. The boycott targets Elsevier, the publisher of popular journals like Cell and The Lancet, for its aggressive business practices, but opposition was electrified by Elsevier’s backing of a Congressional bill titled the Research Works Act (RWA). Though lesser known than the other high-profile, privacy-related bills SOPA and PIPA, the act was slated to reverse the Open Access Policy enacted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 that granted the public free access to any article derived from NIH-funded research. Now, only a month after SOPA and PIPA were defeated thanks to the wave of online protests, the boycotting researchers can chalk up their first win: Elsevier has withdrawn its support of the RWA, although the company downplayed the role of the boycott in its decision, and the oversight committee killed it right away.
But the fight for open access is just getting started.
Seem dramatic? Well, here’s a little test. Go to any of the top academic journals in the world and try to read an article. The full article, mind you…not just the abstract or the first few paragraphs. Hit a paywall? Try an article written 20 or 30 years ago in an obscure journal. Just look up something on PubMed then head to JSTOR where a vast archive of journals have been digitized for reference. Denied? Not interested in paying $40 to the publisher to rent the article for a few days or purchase it for hundreds of dollars either? You’ve just logged one of the over 150 million failed attempts per year to access an article on JSTOR. Now consider the fact that the majority of scientific articles in the U.S., for example, has been funded by government-funded agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, NIH, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, NASA, and so on. So while taxpayer money has fueled this research, publishers charge anyone who wants to actually see the results for themselves, including the authors of the articles.
yesyesyes
Where I work on channeling the powers of
Castle GreyskullNeuroskeptic.Not quite nestled in my shiny new fMRI lab, I’m busy developing an experiment and hammering down testing paradigms for a proposal that may well be rejected. But since it’s being sent to an audience that is laser focused on selling papers, after much down-time (read: older, slow publishing PhD students), the newer ones taken in are receiving more than a little pressure to hit the ground running. It’s now more than ever, I find myself looking for articles/posts that may answer questions that I may not be asked when my idea slips through the cracks of approval (just a hunch). So, I’m on the hunt for important lessons from other neuroimaging researchers…like this:
On Prefrontal, for instance, Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Proper Multiple Comparisons Correction, brings up 1 of a hundred things I need to know. Of this, Nskeptic writes:
The “multiple comparisons problem” is simply the fact that if you do a lot of different statistical tests, some of them will, just by chance, give interesting results.
In fMRI, the problem is particularly severe. An MRI scan divides the brain up into cubic units called voxels. There are over 40,000 in a typical scan. Most fMRI analysis treats every voxel independently, and tests to see if each voxel is “activated” by a certain stimulus or task. So that’s at least 40,000 separate comparisons going on - potentially many more, depending upon the details of the experiment. viaWhy will I remember this? Because in their experiment they flopped a dead fish in the fMRI and found activity in its brain:
… “the salmon was shown a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations. The salmon was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.” via
If this can happen with a dead fish, I imagine what is being interpreted when we use complex/live human participants. Simply discussing corrected and uncorrected results seem to solve this to a satisfactory degree and it’s something I should keep in mind in a lab eager to produce.
link from unscrupulousmaneater who said
Interesting read. Found on www.youarenotsosmart.com.
my thoughts:
lol:
“You’ve probably been in one of those relationships where you just knew you didn’t fit with the other person. Something early on attracted you, or a situation brought you together, and then somewhere down the line you realized you had nothing in common at all. You may have tried to keep it together despite your differences, but the research suggests you would be happier if you just parted ways.”
also:
A controversial 2008 study at the University of Pecs in Hungary suggests women gravitate toward men who look like their fathers. If adopted, they prefer they looks of the man who reared them.
The same research showed this “imprinting” evaporated if the relationship between father and daughter was poor.”
and:
“A 2006 study at the University of Liverpool showed over time, couples faces tend to look even more similar than they did when they married thanks to mimicking the same expressions for decades.”
the pictures they utilize in this article are ridiculous. Go see.
Twas truly a very interesting read, especially appreciable for the evolutionary psychology bits.
and as for Chance & me, the research looks good! haha
![inky:
Results of a colo(u)r s(u)rvey by xkcd. There’s a lot of interesting findings; here’s my favo(u)rite:
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women: Dusty Teal, Blush Pink, Dusty Lavender, Butter Yellow, Dusky Rose. […]
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men: Penis, Gay, WTF, Dunno, Baige. I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l1wihebk031qz5urdo1_500.png)
inky:
Results of a colo(u)r s(u)rvey by xkcd. There’s a lot of interesting findings; here’s my favo(u)rite:
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women: Dusty Teal, Blush Pink, Dusty Lavender, Butter Yellow, Dusky Rose. […]
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men: Penis, Gay, WTF, Dunno, Baige. I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”.
“This is the major piece in cancer research that has been missing.”
Arindam Chaudhury, George S. Hussey, Partho S. Ray, Ge Jin, Paul Fox and Philip Howe. TGF-ß-mediated phosphorylation of hnRNP E1 induces EMT via transcript-selective translational induction of Dab2 and ILEI. Nature Cell Biology, February 14, 2010