LED Contact Lenses

Fifty years ago families huddled around a screen in their living room. Today most people walk around with their own personal screen that is small enough to fit in their pocket. The next stage is to cut out the middle step entirely and bring the screen directly into contact with the eye. That is exactly what scientists at University of Washington are currently working on.

Although the research is still in its preliminary stages, the end product could be revolutionary. They intend on fitting minuscule semi-transparent LEDs into contact lenses. When needed, the person wearing the lenses will be able to view images and videos in perfect quality. When the mechanism is turned off, the display will become transparent due to the LEDs grid-pattern arrangement. The user will attach a small pack to their belt, which will wirelessly transmit the electricity and data to the lenses.

Much work still needs to be done before the lenses will display crystal clear images. So far they have successfully inserted red and blue pixels into the lenses, but they are still working on integrating the green pixels. Although its application is new, similar contact lens technology has been used by Swiss company Sensimed to monitor glucose levels in diabetic patients.

GM Mosquito To Stop Dengue

The human death toll caused by disease-carrying mosquitoes has risen. Currently over 2 million of the 700 million people infected by mosquitoes die annually. Scientists have attempted to control these mosquito populations using a range of methods including chemicals, lasers and radiation. Now the results have been released from a new experiment that some have called "birth control for insects", which involves the first ever release of genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild.

Due to the fact that the female mosquitoes are responsible for biting and transmitting diseases like the untreatable dengue fever, scientists considered introducing males sterilized by a genetic mutation as a tool to dramatically decrease the population.

From May to October of this year Oxitec, the Oxford-based research firm, released sterilized male mosquitoes 3 times per week in a 40-acre region of The Cayman Islands. Upon mating with a sterile male, the female would produce no offspring, in turn shrinking the next generation's population. This Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) has been used in the past, but the insects have always been rendered sterile using radiation, rather than by a genetic modification. Using this new method, by August there was an 80% drop in the mosquito population within that region.

Releasing transgenic animals into the wild is cause for concern to many environmentalists who fear that killing off an entire mosquito population could harm dependent species higher on the food chain. Oxitic insists the method is safe and will not have any permanent ecological impact since the sterilizing gene can't be passed on to future generations. The introduction of competitive species has gone awry in the past, like the disaster after Cane Toads were brought to Australia.

Young Zebrafish

French researcher Emmanuel Beaurepaire and colleagues have employed new microscope technology to capture the first 10 cell divisions of a zebrafish in early stages of development (Source). The technique relies on non-linear optical properties of a cell's membrane and microtubules to capture thousands of still images, which are then organized in sequence to resemble a movie.

The video above shows the process of zebrafish development from one cell to the 512-cell stage. The scale bar represents 100 micrometres. The embryo in the video is not labeled with any dyes, however soon enough fluorescent molecular markers will be combined with this approach and allow for more detailed visualization of early development.

Mine Therapy

Historical records indicate an improvement in breathing of miners from Roman and medieval times. In 1843, Dr. Feliks Boczkowski, a Polish physician stationed at a salt mine, noticed that miners there did not suffer from lung diseases. During WWII, Dr. Karl Hermann Spannagel noticed an improvement in his patients after they hid in salt caves to escape heavy bombing. Most recently, in the 1950s it was documented that Polish mine workers rarely suffered from tuberculosis.

Research suggests that salt-permeated air helps dissolve phlegm in the bronchial tubes and kills micro-organisms that cause infections. This greatly helps patients undertaking asthma treatment and so mine therapy is currently being practiced in Slovakia, Poland, and Ukraine.

The photos above (Credit:Kirill Kuletski) shows tunnels, which are 300 meters underground, in the clinic at the Ukranian Solotvyno salt mine. Between three and five thousand people are treated here yearly, and many more have been wait-listed. On average patients spend 24 days at the facility and use a lift to travel down for afternoon or overnight sessions. But salt isn't the only option...

Here we can see four adults enjoying some radon therapy at a mine in Boulder, Montana. The use of radon is also quite an old therapeutic process. In Europe, bathing in hot springs with high radon content goes back over 6000 years. The Japanese have been benefiting from radioactive hot springs for over 800 years in Misasa and Tamagawa. In today's society, more than 75,000 patients looking for a natural arthritis cure pay a visit to radon therapy clinics and underground caverns for radon inhalation and/or bathing. The Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine in Montana offers full therapy for $225, including a 10-day stay at Mine Motel, or just a 60 minute session for $7. They don't discriminate against other species either, according to a testimonial from Irving the Cat, who overcame his thyroid problem after a visit in 2000.

Dirty Phonecall

According to a recent study by Which?, your personal mobile phone might be the filthiest thing you can think of. After hygiene expert Jim Francis swabbed and analyzed 30 phones, 7 of them were considered dirty enough to have warning or high levels of environmental bacteria (TVC). These are not directly harmful, but could form a base and act as a breeding ground for further bacterial invasion. Put bluntly, mobile phones could harbor on average 18 times more living bacteria than a toilet flusher.

One particular phone had such astronomically high levels of harmful bacteria that it could easily give its user an upset stomach. Researchers actually found traces of faecal Coliforms on one device, as well as Enterobacteriaceae, which include bugs like Salmonella. In an effort to jump-start the movement of clean phones, the group suggests washing your hands regularly and occasionally cleaning your phone with a dry alcohol wipe.

Vaccine Patch

A vaccine patch has recently been developed by researchers at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. They hope that this patch will replace the more conventional needle approach. Each patch contains 100 microneedles that are only 0.65mm in length. Depending on the situation, these needles would be packed with a specific vaccine. After penetrating the initial layer of skin, the needles dissolve on contact.

To test the efficacy of the patch, researchers took three groups of mice. One group was given an influenza vaccine via needle, another group via patch, and a control group was given the vaccine-less patch. After three months results suggest that the patch produced a more effective immune response in mice. The groups finding were published in Nature Medicine.

If further efficacy trials are successful, this could have major implications on modern medicine. It would represent the end of an age in which medical training is a requirement to deliver vaccines. Administering vaccinations would become a simple do-it-yourself procedure.

First Oxygen-Free Animal Discovered

It has been common knowledge that only viruses and single-celled microbes can live without oxygen long-term. However, research teams recently discovered 3 new species of multicellular animals that lived normally in the oxygen-free depths of the Mediterranean Sea.

Team leader Roberto Danovaro said in a statement, "Our results indicate that the animals we recovered were alive. Some, in fact, also contained eggs." The animals shown in the image above resemble tiny jellyfish - each measuring less than a millimeter across - and somehow the manage to thrive in the extremely salty seafloor environment. The findings of their research was published in the April 6th issue of BMC Biology.

Humans and most other organisms use structures called mitochondria which uses oxygen to convert nutrients into energy molecules (ATP). These new creatures have modified mitochondria called hydrogenosomes that can produce ATP without using oxygen.

The study also "has strong implications for the search for life in the universe," said Abel Mendez, an astrobiologist at the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo. Perhaps Europa, one of Jupiter's icy moons might have a subsurface ocean of cold, salty, oxygen-free environments, similar to that where these animals were discovered.

Welcome Millkit!

Scientists in Argentina have found ways to make cows produce more milk, through injections of bovine growth hormone produced by genetically modified dairy cows. Also known as rbST, synthetic bovine somatotropin is not a newly developed product used for injection, however this team of scientists claim that their method is cheaper and produces a natural bovine hormone.

The head of research and development at biotechnology firm Bio Sidus, Andres Bercivich, explained that if under normal circumstances a cow produces 20 liters of milk/day, it could produce 25 liters when injected with this hormone. When looking at one cow, it might not seem like much, but convert that statistic to the output levels at huge milk firms, an increase of 25% will equal a huge jump in profits.

The company plans to export the dairy hormone technology to the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, as this product has not yet been approved for sale in Argentina.

Now I will take this opportunity to introduce a new member to Markit Science team: the one and only Millkit

Cloning The Frozen

A team of Japanese geneticists used cells from a dead mouse frozen for 16 years and successfully created healthy clones. They took dead brain and blood cells from the frozen mice, and injected the nuclei from them directly into unfertilized mouse eggs. By extracted inner cell mass from each embryo, they generated embryonic stem cells. Eventually they were able to produce 13 mouse pups. The nuclei from these cells were then transferred into mouse eggs, resulting in the production of healthy pups.

"But in dead cells the cell membrane is broken and the fusion method cannot be used for cloning. In our method, it does not matter whether the donor cells are alive or dead," Wakayama explained.

The technique could eventually lead to the resurrection of extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth, scientists stated in November 2008.

Fastest Muscle

No, that's a mussel! However, the fastest muscles known have been found in the throats of songbirds. Head researcher Coen Elemans and colleagues uncovered that zebra finches and European starlings have the ability to change their tunes at frequencies up to 250 hertz via direct muscle control. That's about 100 times faster than the blink of an eye.

By exposing the vocal muscle fibers to electrical stimulation, scientists clocked how fast the muscles expanded and contracted. Both female and male starlings moved at about 3.2 milliseconds per expansion or contraction. In zebra finches, females moved at 7.1 milliseconds, while males twitched at 3.7.

There are some competitors elsewhere in the natural world. Rattlesnakes come in a close second with the twitching muscles on both sides of their rattler. The muscles in swim bladders of certain fish also move strikingly fast.

"We had no idea muscles could work at these superfast rates," said Daniel Margoliash, a biologist at the University of Chicago. "That they can and do is just amazing."

Pet Cloning

Born in 2005, this Afghan Hound was cloned from adult cells by somatic nuclear cell transfer. An empty donor egg was taken from a mixed-breed bitch, and the DNA was taken from the skin cells of the to-be-cloned dog. The egg cell and DNA were then fused together and cultured to trigger embryo growth. The growing egg was then implanted into a Labrador surrogate mother. That's how Snuppy came to be.

That was in 3 years ago, and since Snuppy is still healthy, a new service is appearing. The South Korean biotech company: RNL Bio, affiliated with the Seoul National University lab, is offering dog owners the chance to clone their pets.

Earlier this year, a woman from California wanted her recently deceased pitbull terrier Booger to be recreated. They charged the woman $150,000 and used tissue extracted from its ear before it died.

Dramatic Drunk

A team of researchers from the University of Aberdeen might have a new technique to clean contaminated ground and waste water. Their secret ingredient? A by-product of whiskey, called DRAM (Device for the Remediation and Attenuation of Multiple pollutants). The Glenfiddich distillery in Speyside has helped researchers through donations.

There are an estimated 330,000 contaminate sites in the UK, mostly in former industrial areas. The UK's annual estimated spend on land remediation or clean up is £1.2 billion. Until now there has been no single solution for treating contaminated groundwater, since different pollutants require different clean up methods that can be costly and take time.

Early test results suggest that DRAM removes pollutants more quickly and more cost effectively than current methods.

Dr. Graeme Paton said "Currently we are using the by-product of Scotland's most famous export but our technology can utilize other by-products from the food and beverage industry."

"The technology that we have developed here at Aberdeen is environmentally friendly, sustainable and has the potential to put Scotland at the forefront for remediation technologies."

Breakthrough In Cancer Research?

The human heart is not only a pump, delivering blood and oxygen to the body, but is also the source of many peptide hormones. The results from a recent study by Dr. David Vesely, professor at the University of South Florida, suggest that these hormones can be used to eliminate cancer in mice.

His research began on cardiac hormones by determining their role in treating congestive heart failure. But, after his wife's death from breast cancer in 2002, he decided to place the hormones into cancer cell cultures. Using prostate, breast, ovarian, and colon cancer cells, Vesely found that the hormones kill up to 97% of all the cancers in cell cultures within 24 hours.

With such impressive results, he took the natural step from a petri dish to an animal model: the mouse. He injected some mice with breast cancer cells and others with pancreatic cancer cells, then waited for the tumors to develop. After one month of hormonal treatment, cancer was eliminated from 80% of the mice injected with human pancreatic cancer and 66% of the mice injected with breast cancer.

None of the mice suffered any side effect. None of the mice died of cancer; all died of old age. The mice received no other form of treatment, such as surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy. After the mice died, researchers found that the cancer had not spread.

"If the hormones act the same way in humans, cancer could become a chronic condition treatable with these hormones," Vesely said. A private biotechnology company is currently raising funding to commence human trials. Vesely will present his research at a symposium April 9 at the Experimental Biology 2008 conference in San Diego.