For Some Women, Genes May Influence Pressure to Be Thin
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Genetics may make some women more vulnerable to the pressure of being thin, a study led by Michigan State University researchers has found. (more…)
Blog
Obama, Romney supporters: R-E-S-P-E-C-T (just a little bit)
ANN ARBOR— It’s a common refrain during the political season—Republicans and Democrats talk past one another. They claim they live in different universes or come from different species, with little hope for extending empathy across the political aisle.
But University of Michigan researcher Yesim Orhun and her colleague Oleg Urminsky of the University of Chicago say that there exists a greater respect for one another’s views than is generally assumed. (more…)
Dwarf Species of Fanged Dinosaur Emerges from Southern Africa
A new species of plant-eating dinosaur with tiny, 1-inch-long jaws has come to light in South African rocks dating to the early dinosaur era, some 200 million years ago. (more…)
Sticky Paper Offers Cheap, Easy Solution for Paper-Based Diagnostics
A current focus in global health research is to make medical tests that are not just cheap, but virtually free. One such strategy is to start with paper – one of humanity’s oldest technologies – and build a device like a home-based pregnancy test that might work for malaria, diabetes or other diseases.
A University of Washington bioengineer recently developed a way to make regular paper stick to medically interesting molecules. The work produced a chemical trick to make paper-based diagnostics using plain paper, the kind found at office supply stores around the world. (more…)
Questions for Rashid Zia: Brown to Lead Multi-University Quantum Metamaterials Research
Through a new Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) awarded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Brown will lead an effort to study new optical materials and their interactions with light at the quantum scale. The initiative, which includes six other top universities, will receive $4.5 million over three years, with a possible two-year extension.
Harnessing the power of light at the quantum scale could clear the way for superfast optical microprocessors, high-capacity optical memory, securely encrypted communication, and untold other technologies. But before any of these potential applications sees the light of day, substantial obstacles must be overcome — not the least of which is the fact that the wavelength of light is larger than quantum-scale objects, limiting the range of possible light-matter interactions. (more…)
Three Easy Ways to Solve USB Troubles
One of the things that made digital technology evolving is the fact that the quality of videos and images are continuously improving through the years. With this, you need to have the best space to accommodate such changes. People all over the world can’t get stuck with a small space on their computer and for this reason, external memory for backup was made. Floppy discs are already a thing of the past. Now, flash drives and other compact but efficient devices have replaced these things. (more…)
Duplex-sequencing Method Could Lead to Better Cancer Detection and Treatment
During an ice climbing trip to the Canadian Rockies last Christmas, two young researchers from the University of Washington, Drs. Michael Schmitt and Jesse Salk, talked about a simple but powerful idea to get better results when looking at cancer cells. If they could reduce the error rate in DNA sequencing, then researchers could better pinpoint which cells are mutating. (more…)
Latest JBEI Startup to Speed Up Biotech Industry
TeselaGen’s DNA construction technology makes genetic engineering cheaper and faster.
Sequencing, splicing and expressing DNA may seem to be the quintessence of cutting-edge science—indeed DNA manipulation has revolutionized fields such as biofuels, chemicals and medicine. But in fact, the actual process can still be tedious and labor-intensive, something Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist Nathan Hillson learned the hard way.
After struggling for two days to design a protocol to put together a genetic circuit with 10 pieces of DNA—using a spreadsheet as his primary tool—he was dismayed to discover that an outside company could have done the whole thing, including parts and labor, for lower cost than him ordering the oligonucleotides himself. “I learned two things: one, I never wanted to go through that process again, and two, it’s extremely important to do the cost-effectiveness calculation,” said Hillson, a biochemist who also directs the synthetic biology program at the Berkeley Lab-led Joint BioEnergy Institute (JBEI). “So that was the genesis of the j5 software. This is the perfect thing to teach a computer to do.” (more…)