3D display technology

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Our Genome Changes Over Lifetime

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have found that epigenetic marks on DNA-chemical marks other than the DNA sequence-do indeed change over a person's lifetime, and that the degree of change is similar among family members. The team suggests that overall genome health is heritable and that epigenetic changes occurring over one's lifetime may explain why disease susceptibility increases with age.

"We're beginning to see that epigenetics stands at the center of modern medicine because epigenetic changes, unlike DNA sequence which is the same in every cell, can occur as a result of dietary and other environmental exposure," says Andrew P. Feinberg, M.D., M.P.H, a professor of molecular biology and genetics and director of the Epigenetics Center at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. "Epigenetics might very well play a role in diseases like diabetes, autism and cancer."

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Baby to be born free of breast cancer after embryo screening

A woman has conceived Britain’s first baby guaranteed to be free from hereditary breast cancer.

Doctors screened out from the woman’s embryos an inherited gene that would have left the baby with a greater than 50% chance of developing the cancer.

The woman decided to have her embryos screened because her husband had tested positive for the gene and his sister, mother, grandmother and cousin have all had the cancer.

The couple produced 11 embryos, of which five were found to be free from the gene. Two of these were implanted in the woman’s womb and she is now 14 weeks pregnant.

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Building Giant 'Nanoassemblies' That Sense Their Environment

Researchers in Texas are reporting the design, construction, and assembly of nano-size building blocks into the first giant structures that can sense and respond to changes in environmental conditions.

The study, scheduled for the July 9 issue of ACS's Nano Letters, a monthly journal, terms those structures "giant" because they are about the size of a grain of rice — millions of times larger than anything in the submicroscopic realm of the nanoworld.

In the new study, Pulickel M. Ajayan and colleagues point out that such structures are a step toward the development of futuristic nanomachines with practical applications in delivering medicines to patients, labs-on-a-chip, and other products. Until now, scientists have had difficulty in using nanomaterials to build more complex, multifunctional objects needed for those applications.

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Definition: Proteome

The proteome is the entire complement of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism. More specifically, it is the expressed proteins at a given time point under defined conditions. The term is a blend of proteins and genome.

It was coined by Marc Wilkins first in 1994 in the symposium: "2D Electrophoresis: from protein maps to genomes" in Siena, Italy, and was subsequently published in 1995 (1), which was part of his PhD thesis. Wilkins used it to describe the entire complement of proteins expressed by a genome, cell, tissue or organism.

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Calculation predicts death row executions

Which inmates on death row will eventually be executed? Many never make the final journey from prison cell to execution chamber - but nobody really understands who will be spared. Until now. A new computer system can predict which death row prisoners will live and which will be killed - with chilling accuracy. And its dispassionate analysis has confirmed suspicions that the people most likely to be executed are those who have had the least schooling, rather than those who have committed the most heinous crimes.

So how were those 53 chosen? "We couldn't see any clear patterns in the data," says computer scientist Stamos Karamouzis, who has been investigating this question with criminologist Dee Wood Harper at Loyola University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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How a 730-Ton Ball Kept the Second Tallest Building From Falling During the Chinese Earthquake

The recent Sichuan Earthquake in China was so intense, tremors were felt all the way over in the tallest completed building in the world—the Taipei 101 building in Taiwan—a whole eight minutes after the quake originated. What's interesting about the 101 is that it has a gigantic suspended tuned mass damper, or hanging ball, which takes up four stories and works like this to prevent the building from falling over and tragically crushing office workers. This 730 ton sphere looks intimidating when still, but wait until you see it in motion during the earthquake.

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Martian Soil Could Grow Asparagus

The Mars Phoenix Lander may deserve a Nobel Prize by the time it’s through. Just a week after the robot explorer took the first pictures of water ice on the on Mars, NASA scientists have a new announcement: The Phoenix has analyzed a scoop of soil, and found that the Martian dirt has the necessary ingredients to support plant life. Researchers say the soil they tested is slightly alkaline, not harshly acidic as feared, and that it contains the mineral nutrients potassium, magnesium, and sodium.

Full story HERE.

'Dynamic Tower'

Math Could Help Cure Leukemia

University of Maryland associate professor of mathematics Doron Levy, Stanford Medical School physician and associate professor of medicine (hematology) Peter P. Lee, and Dr. Peter S. Kim, École Supérieure d'Électricité (Gif-sur-Yvette, France) describe their success in creating a mathematical model which predicts that anti-leukemia immune response in CML patients using the drug imatinib can be stimulated in a way that might provide a cure for the disease.

"By combining novel biological data and mathematical modeling, we found rules for designing adaptive treatments for each specific patient," said Levy, of the University of Maryland Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling. "Give me a thousand patients and, with this mathematical model, I can give you a thousand different customized treatment plans."

Full story HERE.