Science and biotech

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pushing harder than ever for government leaders around the world to increase vaccination investments.

In a keynote address yesterday to the 64th World Health Assembly in Geneva, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates spoke for nearly half an hour to health ministers from 193 countries about the importance of "seeking good health care for every human being."

"I believe we have the opportunity to make a new future in which global health is the cornerstone of global prosperity," he said.

Gates called on the assembly to make this "the Decade of Vaccines," with some basic goals: eradicate polio early in this decade; build a system capable of delivering vaccines to every child; make five or six new vaccines available to all children around the world. With these investments, Gates said, the world "can save 4 million lives by 2015 and 10 million lives by 2020."

Another challenge Gates cited was lowering the cost of antigenic materials, such as pentavalent, pneumococcus, and rotavirus vaccines. The Gates Foundation is working with vaccine manufacturers to cut prices of those inoculations in half by 2016. Lower costs would be beneficial to many countries around the world that are reeling from budget woes. … Read more

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Experts in fields such as regenerative medicine; personalized health; information and data-driven health; and neuromedicine are gathering here this week for several days of discussions about the future of medicine.

Organized under the appropriate rubric of "FutureMed," leaders in these fields, plus nearly 70 paying participants, are taking part in Singularity University's first FutureMed executive program.

For two years, Singularity University (SU)--created by futurist Ray Kurzweil and X Prize CEO Peter Diamandis--has been bringing people together at NASA Ames Research Center here to discuss what are called "exponentially growing" technologies--things … Read more

After being available for several years in Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe, Swedish firm Sectra's digital mammography system has now been approved by the FDA for use in the U.S. (It was also approved for use in Canada in March and in Russia in April.)

The system, called MicroDose, uses technology called photon counting that results in two key changes over traditional mammograms: higher-resolution images at half the radiation exposure.

"Until now, digital mammography systems in the U.S. have managed to reduce the radiation dose slightly below those of film-based systems," Dr. Jesper … Read more

I don't know about you, but I'm rather partial to a nice smell. Somehow, some people just offer a better odor than others, and one reacts to them more positively because of that.

I am heartened, therefore, to get a sniff of research performed at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

According to National Geographic, the Academy was very interested to see just how animal-like we really are. The academy wondered whether we really are sophisticated in our choice of sex partners, or whether we are, indeed, just like the others on Orwell's farm.

Naturally, if they had … Read more

DNA molecules are not merely carriers of information. They are also highly stable and programmable, which is why researchers have been working so feverishly on a design strategy called DNA origami.

And now a team at MIT is developing a program that makes the game playable by more than just a select few.

DNA origami--constructing specific 2D and 3D shapes out of DNA strands--could prove to be a highly effective means of developing nanoscale tools, such as synthetic photocells that perform artificial photosynthesis and highly targeted drugs (think of sending a cancer drug to hunt down a specific tumor).

But it's still young. Paul Rothemund of CalTech first introduced DNA origami in 2006 (thereby making the cover of Nature and delivering a TED Talk showing tiny DNA smiley faces), and William Shih's lab at Harvard Medical School was able to up the game from 2D to 3D a few years later.

The result is that today a small number of brilliant and highly specialized minds are bent over a nanoscale game of origami, playing with various sequences to try to build specific shapes for specific tasks. Imagine a room of highly sophisticated gamers playing with building blocks in a world without Tetris; if they had the game, they'd be able to work faster.… Read more

Most of us don't have to worry about getting a concussion on a daily basis. But plenty do (think hockey and football players, infantrymen, etc.), and without quick diagnosis, can risk long-term brain damage if they go back into the field too soon.

A new screening method developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute could make fast and easy diagnosis, right on the sidelines, far more common. The technique, which examines a person's cognitive and motor skills at the same time, will be presented this week at the SPIE Defense, Security and Sensing conference in Orlando, Fla.

Using a simple radar system--the kind police use to measure the speed of vehicles--the researchers found that they were able to pick up on differences between normal walking patterns and those impaired by alcohol, which has been found to have a similar effect on walking as concussion impairment.

To be clear, this preliminary study is just that, preliminary, with a sample size too small to offer information that is more than anecdotal. But the findings have given the researchers enough data to want to test their approach further.… Read more

Two professors at Binghamton University in New York are using a novel imaging technique to observe the behavior of an enzyme--called tubulin tyrosine ligase, or TTL--as its behavior can suggest whether certain cancer cells might grow more aggressively than others.

Though they are not developing actual therapies, Susan Bane and Susannah Gal say their research could help further personalize targeted cancer therapies.

"Potentially, we could put [a tumor sample] in our labeling system and say, 'Yes, that has a problem with the TTL system, and therefore you should be more aggressive with it,'" says Gal, whose work is funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "Or we could say, 'That's probably OK, so you can treat it with normal chemotherapy.'"

The enzyme TTL involves microtubules, which both help chromosomes line up correctly during cell division and provide part of the scaffolding of a cell's structure. Those microtubules are made of proteins called tubulin; the enzyme carboxypeptidase clips an amino acid called tyrosine off the ends of some of these proteins, and later the enzyme TTL puts that tyrosine back on.

Bane says it's unclear why tyrosine is clipped off only to be reattached, but it's clearly an important part of the cell's cycle: "We do know that if you don't have that enzyme, you'll die."

In some cancer cells, that cycle of removing and reattaching tyrosine is disrupted, with too many tubulins lacking tyrosine altogether. Tumors made of those cells, Bane says, "tend to grow more aggressively."… Read more

One of the annoying things about getting older--and yes, there are more than a few--is how frequently you discover that what you were taught either is now outdated or simply flat wrong. But don't get too down about it. Scientists only now are realizing that they've misunderstood the physics of what keeps bicycles upright.

For as long as anyone can remember, the science behind why a bike remains stable once it reaches a certain speed had to do with wheel rotation and the stability generated by so-called gyroscopic effects. Also, there was the proper distance between the steering … Read more

Almost exactly a year ago, in April 2010, professional motocross rider Randy Childers sustained serious injuries after a crash in the last race of the day at Cowboy Badlands in West Beaumont, Texas.

He suffered broken ribs and a fractured wrist, but most seriously a crushed vertebra in his neck (C3) that required him to be airlifted to Houston, where surgeons inserted an artificial vertebra and fused two others together (C4 and C5) during a marathon operation that lasted 12 hours.

Today, the 24-year-old is the star in a single-patient trial of Rice University's RiceWrist robot, a wearable exoskeleton that mimics the joints from his shoulder to his hand.… Read more