Posts Under Tech News Category
[TECH NEWS] University of Manchester scientists have produced the world’s most powerful optical microscope, something which could help understand the causes of many viruses and diseases. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the team have created a microscope which shatters the record for the smallest object the eye can see, breaking the theoretical limit of optical microscopes. Previously, the standard… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] The current pace of population aging is without parallel in human history but surprisingly little is known about the human aging process, because lifespans of eight decades or more make it difficult to study. Now, researchers at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies replicated premature aging in the lab, allowing them to study aging-related disease in a dish…. Read more »
Stem cells hold enormous promise in regenerative medicine, thanks to their ability to regenerate diseased or damaged tissues; the problem is obtaining them. Those that are the true source of life, in the first days of embryonic development, are of course the most highly sought after, but the issue of how to obtain these “pluripotent” cells clearly raises insurmountable ethical… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] IBM and Nuance Communications, Inc. on Feb. 17 announced a research agreement to explore, develop and commercialize the Watson computing system’s advanced analytics capabilities [the recent star of “Jeopardy”] in the healthcare industry. The research and technology initiative will combine IBM’s Deep Question Answering (QA), Natural Language Processing, and Machine Learning capabilities with Nuance’s speech recognition and Clinical… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] The famous Arrhenius relationship states that things happen faster as they get hotter. In chemistry, that’s generally true but there’s an important exception: the speed at which proteins fold into their functional shape. It’s easy to think that proteins ought to fold more quickly as they cool down and then unfold more quickly as they heat up. But… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Neurons are complicated, but the basic functional concept is that synapses transmit electrical signals to the dendrites and cell body (input), and axons carry signals away (output). In one of many surprise findings, Northwestern University scientists have discovered that axons can operate in reverse: they can send signals to the cell body, too. It also turns out axons… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] A team led by Charles Lieber, a professor of chemistry at Harvard, and Shamik Das, lead engineer in MITRE’s nanosystems group, has designed and built a reprogrammable circuit out of nanowire transistors. Several tiles wired together would make the first scalable nanowire computer, says Lieber. Such a device could run inside microscopic, implantable biosensors, and ultra-low-power environmental or… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Whether or not you’re fond of Indian, Southeast Asian and Middle Eastern food, stroke researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center think you may become a fan of one of their key spices. The scientists created a new molecule from curcumin, a chemical component of the golden-colored spice turmeric, and found in laboratory experiments that it affects mechanisms that protect… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] Australian clinical researchers have noted an extraordinary and unexpected benefit of osteoporosis treatment – that people taking bisphosphonates are not only surviving well, better than people without osteoporosis, they appear to be gaining an extra five years of life. Associate Professor Jacqueline Center and Professor John Eisman, from Sydney’s Garvan Institute of Medical Research, based their findings on… Read more »
[TECH NEWS] A company is testing whether stem cells from fat could help prevent long-term damage after a heart attack. Too much fat around the waist may be bad for your health, but the stem cells it contains might one day save your life. Starting this month, a new European trial aims to determine whether stem cells harvested from a… Read more »
