Medical

This is my last posting for the next few days. I will be taking my office apart so that we can move to our new apartment downtown next Tuesday. I will be unplugged and disconnected except by tablet. Expect me to be back in the saddle before the end of next week probably in time to pro

This week’s roundup of stories include:   Mystery remains around honeybee deaths; Researchers discover hypothalamus key to slowing aging and cognitive decline; New 3D-printed ear combines biology and electronics; After 105 years first Tunguska meteorite fragments discovered

Last week I finished reading Al Gore’s latest tome, a follow up to his well publicized “An Inconvenient Truth,” probably his most significant contribution to the global climate change debate, although I would think “debate” is an over statement at this st

What technology and science stories caught my eye this week? Several in biomedicine. And two involving 3D printing, one for making liver, the other for mass customized manufacturing. A forecast of changes to climate zones as our atmosphere continues to heat. And a new commercial rocke

Every year the MIT Technology Review picks the ten technologies that represent significant breakthroughs.  Past years have included crowdfunding in 2012, gestural interfaces to computers in 2011, engineered stem cells in 2010 and low cost DNA sequencing in 2009, just to name a few. Wh

As we get older our ability to replace damaged cells weakens. For blood cells the trigger seems to be age-induced changes that occur in hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that makes us less capable of fighting of diseases like leukemia. Just like somatic and embryonic stem cells can rege

It may seem counter intuitive but RoWheels has reinvented the way you use a wheelchair by using a rowing motion to move forward. The inventor is Salim Nasser, a mechanical engineer at NASA in Florida. Salim, who suffered paralysis from an accident a number of years ago, studied wheelc

How life first originated on Earth is always an interesting subject. A structural biologist and his team of researchers at Florida State University College of Medicine have identified 10 amino acids that existed on our planet for 4 billion years. These amino acids exhibit foldable beh

A company in Canada, D-Wave Systems, is making some of the big industry players sit up and take notice. Back in November of last year I wrote about D-Wave’s Vesuvius 512-qubit processor and how early adopters were purchasing the technology to do complex problem solving.  One of