Science and Health News

Chinese scientists on Sunday said they have successfully developed early-stage mouse embryos in space for the first time on a retrievable microgravity satellite set to return to Earth sometime next week.

First, the cancer was on the bridge of his nose. Surgery took care of that. Then, there was a tumor under his jaw: more surgery, plus eight weeks of radiation. A few months later, a routine scan caught another in his brain. More surgery and radiation. Several months more, and two tumors popped up under the skin of his chest.

University of Tokyo researchers have developed technology to enable creation of electronic skin (e-skin) displays of blood oxygen level, e-skin heart rate sensors for medical, athletic uses, and other applications. To serve as a demo, they’ve created an ultrathin, ultraflexible, protective layer and created an air-stable, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display.

Researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center have announced a new method for detecting DNA mutations in a single cancer cell versus current technology that analyzes millions of cells which they believe could have important applications for cancer diagnosis and treatment. The results are published in the April 18 online issue of Nature Methods.

A new interactive robot, named Jia Jia, was unveiled Friday by the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) in Hefei, capital of east China's Anhui Province. "Jia Jia" looks very much like a real woman. "Hello everyone, I'm Jia Jia. Welcome!" the eye-catching robot said as it greeted the audience at the university's multi-media center.

By Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications Princeton University researchers have found that a family of proteins with important roles in the immune system may be responsible for fine-tuning a person’s motor control as they grow — and for their gradual loss of muscle function as they age. The research potentially reveals a biological cause of weakness and instability in older people, as well as a possible future treatment that would target the proteins specifically.

For the first time, scientists have confirmed the long-standing hypothesis that as people age, they accumulate gene mutations in their mitochondria — cells' energy source. A team led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov, Ph. D., director of the Center for Embryonic Cell and Gene Therapy at Oregon Health & Science University, has discovered that induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, a type of stem cell derived from patients’ skin or blood cells, contain faulty mitochondrial DNA. The study was published today in the journal Cell Stem Cell.

‘Synthetic biology’ is a scientific approach that seeks to answer fundamental questions in biology by reconstruction and modification of the molecules and processes of life. Beyond its well-known role as the carrier of genetic information, DNA (and its close cousin RNA) have shown great promise as a nano-molecular building material: by careful arrangement of the bases A, T, C and G, DNA strands can be programmed to fold into specific 3D shapes. Work by Philipp Holliger’s group in the LMB’s PNAC Division showed that simple self-folding 3D nano-scale objects can be constructed from materials other than DNA and RNA, specifically from a series of ‘synthetic genetic polymers’, also known as xeno nucleic acids (XNAs). XNAs are composed of strings of chemical building blocks that do not occur in nature, and display a much wider range of physicochemical properties than DNA, including much higher biostability. This is the first time such ‘DNA nanotechnology’ designs have been built entirely from unnatural chemical building blocks.