Scientific Discoveries

Scientific discoveries this week: 9/2/13

Singapore
A research team recently developed a method for tracking cells through the use of fluorescent organic tracers which provide researchers with a non-invasive tool to track biological processes for long periods of time. The team created probes composed of a small number of molecules that aggregate. This aggregation means that the probes have more detectable fluorescence and less leakage than single-molecule probes. Furthermore, rather than the current “blink” this team’s tracers show steady fluorescence and do not contain heavy metals or ions that could pose a risk for living things.

Scientific discoveries this week: 4/29/13

Orlando, Florida
Researchers from the University of Central Florida demonstrated that species can evolve over generations regardless of whether they have to compete for food, habitat, or other factors. They used a computer model to mimic how organisms evolve and their results indicated that competition is not necessary for evolution to take place. According to Kenneth Stanley, a professor with the research team, evolvable organisms separate themselves from other less evolvable organisms over time simply by becoming more diverse. Their results do not correspond with commonly held beliefs and indicate that the traditional selective and adaptive explanations for increasing evolvability deserve more scrutiny.

Scientific discoveries this week: 4/22/13

San Francisco, California
Scientists from UC San Francisco discovered that muscle repair requires the action of two types of cells known for causing inflammation and forming fat. The finding found that a immune cell called the eosinophil carries out muscle repair by clearing out cellular debris from damaged tissue and teaming up with a type of cell that can make fat to instead trigger muscle regrowth. The eosinophils move to the site of the injury and collaborate with a progenitor cell–an immature cell similar to stem cells to form new muscle fibers.The progenitor cells are well known for their role in making fat which occurs when the body experiences prolonged immobility. Eosinophils are known for fighting bacteria and parasites, like other immune cells, but they are more often thought of for their role in allergic reactions and other inflammatory reactions. The researchers are trying to determine if eosinophils and the progenitor cells are universally employed in injuries sites as a way to get rid of debris and rebuilding muscle without triggering anaphylactic shock.

Scientific discoveries this week: 4/15/13

Honolulu, Hawaii – The Hawaii State Board of Land and Natural Resources has approved the building of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. The telescope will be the largest in the world. The telescope is expected to be able to see 13 billion light years in the astronomical past and also to view extrasolar planets. The project is expected to cost more than $1 billion.

Scientific discoveries this week: 4/8/13

London, England
By growing and analyzing stem cells from patients’ blood, scientists were able to shed light on a common bleeding disorder. They discovered the cause of the disease in individual patients that can enable doctors to prescribe more effective treatments according to the defects identified in the patients’ cells.
Researchers at the National Heart and Lung Institute, at the Imperial College London focused on von Willebrand disease (vWD) which is estimated to affect 1 in 100 people and can cause excessive possibly life-threatening bleeding.

Not-so-scientific discoveries this week

Transylvania, Romania
For many years, the scientific community believed that vampirism was a hoax. Last week a group of biochemists and biological engineers working under Dr. Rupert Dracula uncovered the secret of vampirism. Dracula is the descendent of the famous Count Dracula and seeks to carry on his powerful legacy through his vampire work. The group started by analyzing the remains of Count Dracula and the various people he bit throughout his long and industrious career, hoping to find a genetic indicator that would lead them to the cause of the Count’s mysterious abilities. After many years of study, they discovered that the Count possessed the unearthly ability to physically alter his victim’s DNA.

Scientific discoveries this week: 3/25/13

South Bend, Indiana
In 2011, researchers from the United States Department of Agriculture found a crabapple tree that had been infested by a fruit fly they could not identify. Many feared that the fruit fly was the invasive apple maggot fly, known as Rhagoletis pomonella. If this was the case, it could trigger a quarantine process affecting three counties in the state of Washington. The larvae were sent to a team of researchers from Notre Dame that identified the fly as Rhagoletis indifferens, which is not known to infest apples.

Scientific discoveries this week: 3/18/13

Berkeley, California
Researchers from UC Berkeley have developed a new experiment that simulates conditions in deep space. The experiment revealed that the complex building blocks of life may have been created on icy interplanetary dust and then carried to earth by a comet or meteor. They showed that conditions in space can create complex dipeptides, or linked pairs of amino acids, the building blocks of life.

Scientific discoveries this week: 3/4/13

Munich, Germany
According to a new study from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU), a protein called TDP-43 causes muscle wasting and stunted nerve cells leading to dementia. The finding supports the idea that this protein plays a big role in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). ALS is an incurable neurological disease which manifests first by muscle wasting. Both limbs and respiratory muscles are affected leading to impaired mobility and breathing problems. Patients usually die with a few years after symptoms emerge but in rare cases such as Stephen Hawking, patients can live with the disease for a long time.

Scientific discoveries this week: 2/25/13

Johns Hopkins
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that a protein known for turning on genes to help them survive low oxygen conditions also slows down the copying of DNA strands. This effectively shuts down the growth of new cells. Their discovery has wide-ranging implication due to DNA replication and new cell growth being key factors in diseases such as cancer. The protein HIF-1α can switch hundreds of genes on or off in response to low oxygen conditions. HIF-1α can also stop new cells from forming. The researchers looked at how the protein affects DNA replication by comparing cells in low-oxygen conditions to cells kept under normal conditions. The cells in the low oxygen conditions stopped dividing, but had as much DNA replication systems as the normal cells. The difference was that the nondividing cells were being affected by HIF-1α which was binding to a protein and preventing the replication process from occurring.