Because I continually run across interesting inventions and discoveries that I cannot give my full attention to I thought I would create a weekly summary of items that have caught my eye. I’ll publish these headlines every Friday and hope, you,  my readers find them as interesti

Synthetic Genetic Polymers Capable of Heredity and Evolution is the title of a journal article appearing in the April 2012 issue of  Science. The researchers reported the findings of a project in which they created synthetic DNA, called XNA. The X stands for “Xeno,” a term

Of all the topics I have written about to-date, this one strikes closest to home. My daughter was born with congenital heart disease 27 years ago. At the time the odds in favour of her survival to adulthood were low but she made it. Today, children born with her form of congenital hea

Not too many people realize that many forms of diabetes are caused by our immune system going haywire. Normally, the immune system is our first line of defence against invasive bacterium. But what happens when our system cannot tell friend from foe? In this blog we identify some of th

Some Basic Facts About Cancer When the genes in normal (somatic) cells mutate cell behaviour may change over time leading to cancer. Mutations are a normal part of the life of a cell. That’s because when cells divide they replicate their DNA but imperfectly. In a previous blog w

In our last blog we introduced telomeres, the genetic information that slowly vanishes from chromosomes each time cells divide. Researchers who study aging see a correlation between those vanishing telomeres and growing older. But I am getting ahead of myself. Before we can talk about

In a controlled setting like a hospital doctors and other medical staff work with all the tools needed to save a patient. That is not necessarily the case in the field at a rescue site where victims found may require immediate intervention. Think about scenarios where surgical interve

In earlier blogs we have looked at the evolution of robots and artificial intelligence. In this blog we’ll tackle the subject from the perspective of advances in biomedicine. Why are we humans developing robots for biomedical use? Because robots when properly designed are master