One might wonder if medical science is starting to feel the fear, as Hunter S. Thompson once put it. Disease has long been an adversary of human life; everything from the common cold to exotic diseases that could have given H.P. Lovecraft a rough night's sleep have been worthy opponents. In recent years, however, the no-holds-barred battle royale has turned into a game of four-handed chess due to the appearance of strains of common diseases which have developed immunities to commonly used antibiotics. In a nutshell, if you are instructed by your physician to take all of your prescribed …
It is common knowledge that many forms of cancer have environmental as well as genetic components: for skin cancer, overexposure to sunlight can trigger its development. Lung cancer, of course, is blamed on smoking for lengthy periods of time. However, sometimes the genetic component can express itself without external assistance. Thus, it is worth noting that the genetic mutations which cause these two afflictions have been pinpointed by geneticists at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute of the United Kingdom. The errors are very specific and should be readily detectable with a genetic workup. Something which I find surprising is the …
I know this is kind of late in coming, but real life came first.
The science of botany has, over the years, produced many families of roses: red, white, yellow, orange, pink, and a host of shades and combinations thereof. Only two kinds have yet to be grown in any fashion: blue and black. Which is kind of fitting when you think about it, but I digress.
The number of roses which have not yet been grown has fallen by one. The Suntory company of Japan has done what used to be considered impossible: they've grown blue roses. In nature …
I realize that some of these stories are kind of old, but in my defense I work a lot.
Scientists at the Tokyo University of Science announced earlier this month that they had grown a replacement tooth for an adult lab mouse. While this doesn’t sound like much given that rodent teeth grow continually through the creature’s life, they accomplished this task by engineering mouse cells to grow teeth and transplanting them into the socket of an extracted tooth. The tooth grown was fully functional, and seemed to have all of the nerve connections, structural integrity, and usability …
Biology and medicine have long known that more advanced forms of life emit various forms of energy as they go about their business. Mammals emit heat as a byproduct of their metabolisms, and the electrical activity of the musculature, cardiopulmonary, and central nervous systems may be picked up by sensitive instruments and used for diagnostic purposes. Recently, researchers in Japan have discovered that human bodies also emit light in the visble spectrum, albeit in a fashion that most sensors cannot detect. In fact, most lifeforms emit visible light in some fashion though the mechanism behind it isn’t understood. This …
