Mending the Heart Problems will become Easy!!

A heart disease remains the single biggest killer today. Rapid advances in stem cell research in recent years offer new hope for heart patients as they have the potential of generating different types of heart tissues.

A number of heart cell therapy trails are being conducted in USA, Germany, UK Korea and Brazil with stem cells, usually derived from the bone marrow of the patient themselves. Chien and co-workers at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston have found evidence regarding how stems cells may be converted into different types of heart tissues from a pool of multipotent cells.

Stems cells may thus offer a way to treat failing heart in the future.

Genome Sequencing !!

The first human genome to be fully sequenced cost about 60 million US dollars and was completed in May 2006, although the rough draft was announced in 2003after 13 years of effort.

Due to spectacular advances in sequencing technologies, the sequencing of the entire genome of James Watson was accomplished last year in just 2 months at a cost of one million Us dollars.

Purpose of Sequencing
Machines are under development which may be able to do it in days for under a thousand a dollars. A simpler form of genetic analysis which can cost only a few hundred dollars provides information about point mutation in person's DNA which are linked to Traits and susceptibility to diseases. This may allow us to take precautionary measures before the disease actually occurs.

Preventing Brain Damage !!

Brain damage that can result from a stroke or heart attack can leave a patient permanently disabled.

Scientist have been grappling with the problem through timely administration of drugs or surgical interventions.

Interestingly it has been discovered that slowly cooling the brain by two to four degrees centigrade (at a rate of one degree per hour) can slow down or possibly prevent the process of brain damage. This is achieved by flow of cold air, use of a cold helmet or administration of a cold spray of perfluorocarbon droplets through the nose.

This process appears to be better than trying to cool the whole body as that can lead to infections and pneumonia.

Invisible Universe !!

We can see about only four percent of our universe. About 74 percent of it is accounted for by a mysterious force called "dark energy", while another 22 percent is composed of an invisible matter, termed as "dark matter". It is a big puzzle in cosmology and particle physic, to determine what this missing mass composed of.

In 2005, Astronomers at Cardiff University have discovered a galaxy some 50 million light years away which appears to be made up entirely of invisible dark matter.

About 96 percent of our universe is therefore not composed of "normal" visible matter but of invisible dark matter and dark energy. We know very little about these strange and mysterious forces around us. This is therefore a huge unsolved mystery.

Gaint Ice Chunks !!

In February 2002, 20 pound chunks of ice fell from clear blue skies in Madrid, Spain and crashed through the roof of an industrial ware house. More than 50 such events have been reported in different parts of the world in the last seven years.

According to the astrobiologist, Jesus Martinez-Frias at the centre for astrobiology in Madrid. Climate experts have been predicting extreme weather events such as powerful hurricanes or droughts but no one ever thought that huge chunks of ice could appear suddenly from clear skies, shattering wind shields and destroying roofs of houses and buildings.

Such monster ice chunks called "megacryometeros" can weight up to 200 pounds. They are believe to be formed in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) due to atmospheric turbulence. This results in repeated coating of the ice-crystals as they are thrown in the turbulence and progressively grow into monster sizes.

This is thought to be the direct result of climate change which has resulted in increased humidity and turbulence in the troposphere.

Improvements in Performance of Heart !!

When a heart is weakened, its ability to deliver oxygen containing blood may be compromised.

An exciting approach that is being investigated to tackle such conditions is to somehow induce the blood to deliver a greater amount of the oxygen that it is carrying. The Nobel Laureate Professor Jean Marie Lehn at the University of Strasbourg, France took mice with damaged hearts and by using a particular chemical compound (myo-inositol trispyro phosphate, ITPP) the blood in these mice was induced to release more oxygen.
Normally hemoglobin can release only about 25 percent of the oxygen, but this chemical results a dramatic improvement in the physical performance of the mice. If the compound was taken dissolved in water, the exercise levels in mice were boosted 35 percent while if given by injection there was 60 percent rise. The substance hold promise for its eventual use in medicine.
In future this chemical will did a lot for our hearts.

Carnivorous Robots Invented !!

A new invention took place in the world of robotics. James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau at the Royal College of Art London have designed a number of domestic robots that will lure and eat up flies and other small moving insects. They will also benefit from the process by deriving energy from the swallowed insects.
This is because they are powered by an internal microbial fuel cell installed within the robots which run by this process.

The idea of using vermin as fuel was first proposed by a UK based company, Bristol Robotics Lab, who had developed the first fly-powered robot in 2004, an proposed that similar marine robots could be developed which could survive on plankton.

A self-watering Desert Plant !!

The desert Rhubarb (Rheum palaestinum) found in the Negev desert in Israel has leaves which can reach one meter in diameter, whereas other desert plants have small and spiky leaves. Israel scientists have discovered that it had unique self-watering mechanism that allows this to happen. They claim that this is the first example of self-irrigation in the plant ever found. The waxy leaves of the plant have deep and wide channels resembling a mountainous range that allows the droplets of water to be captured and then guided so that they fall on the soil near the roots of the plant.

Even in light rain, the water that fell near the roots was ten times more than that fell in other areas near the plant, due to this built in harvesting mechanism.

In Future we will see the Buried peoples under the Collapsed Building !!

Professor Justin Wark and colleagues at the department of Physics in Oxford University have made an interesting discovery. When aluminium was bombarded briefly with powerful soft x-rays lasers, a core electron in every atom of its crystalline structure seems to be displaced, and it becomes completely transparent.

In another related development, scientists working at Imperial College London and University of Neuchatel (Switzerland) have shown that it is possible to have lasers pass through solid objects. They prepared some nano-crystals and when laser was passed through them the nano-crystals become transparent.

This discovery may lead to our ability to see through solid subjects, such as people buried below a collapsed building, and do away with the need of X-ray in medicine.