Feb 24
Harvard scientists have created tiny DNA robots that can search and destroy cancer cells. The Week sez: The tiny devices were constructed out of DNA strands and folded into a shape resembling a clamshell. Researchers call it the “DNA origami” method. The devices are pre-programmed to open up in the presence of cancerous cells. Once open, …
Feb 21
Schizophrenia has been linked to genetic variants that are common to everyone. The risk factors may reach a tipping a point that overwhelm our ability to compensate. A new research method found that: . . . 23% of liability for the brain disorder could be traced back to a set of variations, most of which …
Feb 16
Drug Companies (the legal kind) are working to create pills that will monitor how your body responds to the medication, report this to your smartphone then relay that information to your doctor. Like he doesn’t already have enough problems. According to a press release from the American Chemical Society: Sanofi, a pharma company, and AgaMatrix, …
Feb 09
“Are you depressed?” begins every article on this subject. I’m just going to go ahead and assume you are. But don’t kill yourself yet. Scientists from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine have invented a smartphone that’s sure to annoy as well as depress you. A smart phone spots symptoms of depression by harnessing all the sensor …
Dec 12
That smell might be telling you something. In a paper published by The Journal of Sexual Medicine, Russian scientists have discovered that women find the smell of a man infected with gonorrhea to be “putrid.” As if they don’t have enough problems. IBN Live reports: “Our research revealed that infection disease reduces odour attractiveness in humans,” …
Apr 08
Those men in the white coats are attempting to make pills to improve morality. Dr Guy Kahane, deputy director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics and a Wellcome Trust biomedical ethics award winner says: “Science has ignored the question of moral improvement so far, but it is now becoming a big debate. There is already a …
Feb 05
Twitter has helped social change and fueled revolutions. Now it is helping scientists perform an informal census of mental dysfunction. Dr. Waldo Andersnatch from the University of Zurich says: “We have long known how hard it is to find and diagnose the many people suffering from a spectrum of mental disorders. Some of these sufferers are difficult …
Jan 15
Female tears of grief reduce arousal in men. And not just because of the smeared makeup. Apparently, lady tears smell icky. Just a slight whiff turns men off. According to the study’s director, Noam Sobel: “We know that women tend to cry more during menstruation, when it’s not an effective time to conceive.” So ladies, …
Nov 16
pic nicked from here It seems that we’ve found a variety of causes of obesity. Viruses, glands, and big bones. Just about everything is to blame except eating too much and not moving enough. You can add the FTO gene (nicknamed the greediness gene) to this ever-growing list of things that cause people surrounded by an …
Oct 31
pic nicked from here A functioning, mini-human liver has been grown in the lab by researchers at the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. They say these manmade livers are meant to create donor organs, of which there is a shortage, and to test drugs on. Both worthy causes. But I hope …
