Science Ahead

The mice may never be afraid of cat, making it a lost story soon! yes, if things shape up well at the Tokyo University, the mice will soon shed their sense of cower at the smell or sight of the cat.

In an experiment, the Japanese scientists, through genetic engineering, were able to turn off certain nasal cells successfully, which trigger terror amongst the rodent. The result was striking enough, the mice was no longer afraid of the feline. A rare view, — the genetically changed mice even played with the cat and nested against it! The research team leader Ko Kobayakawa said he chose domesticated cats for his research as they were less likely to pounce.

DNA being created in the test tube is something we have all heard of. Cloning the parent DNA to create a daughter DNA are the terms our brains seemed to have assimilated. However, what we have never heard of is about the new way scientists have found to play with the DNA.

This time though they have taken a considerably riskier and bigger challenge of creating new life forms with the double stranded helix of deoxyribonucleic acid. The DNA is a nucleic acid which contains genetic material determining the characteristics of any living organism. This information is in the encoded form and is weaved in the double helix strand of DNA. These DNA are contained in the Chromosomes which form the cell which is the basic unit of life.

Scientists of Maryland have successfully created a completely artificial piece of chromosome containing all the information required for survival. This chromosome is now being planned to be embedded in a cell where it can manifest all the characteristics that it has been programmed to.

Can light beams be made to curve? Not possibly by obeying the laws of nature, but an optical trick can fool our eyes into believing that light rays can actually be bended. It is believed that light beams while passing through a black hole in which the strong gravitational field has developed by the collapsed mass of the dead star can warp time and space causing any ray of light to be twisted when entering the black hole. This is only a theoretically possible method of bending the light beam. In reality, researchers at the University of Central Florida have used a LCD screen to make the light beam appear twisted to human eye.

The liquid crystal screen through which a beam of half-inch-wide laser rays were made to pass, caused the rays of the laser beam to interfere with each other in such a way that the brightest part of the beam appeared to move in a curved path.

The scientists have, in the past, expressed grave concern over the possibilities of Avian flu outbreaks leading to epidemics. Researches are conducted to determine the cause for this virus getting transferred from birds to humans. Many theories are proposed in this direction; with the latest theory falsifying the previous ones.

Flu viruses come in many strains. Of these, the H5 strain of virus is known to be found only in birds. However, those affected by the Avian flu showed the virus H5N1, a modified form of the H5 virus. This virus, when found in humans, is said to have very high fatality rates. It is known that a virus can attack and infect any individual only when it attaches itself to the receptor cells of the body. It is recently, a team of MIT researchers have come up with spotting a difference between flu viruses, which infect birds and humans.

For long, animal rights activists had been demanding a ban on animal tests by pharmaceutical companies that they consider unethical. More often, the animal specimens are not exact replicas of the human biological features and drugs tested in labs on animal specimens always do not produce the desired result in humans.

However, animal testing might soon become a matter of past if chips developed by Professor Jonathan Dordick of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Douglas Clark of the University of California are accepted by the researchers. The product developed by the duo consists of two glass slides. The first glass slide is called the MetaChip that contains an array of little blots containing human liver enzymes. The DataChip is the other glass slide, which, depending on the test, contains blots of bladder or liver or kidney, heart, skin, or lung cell cultures. When pressed together the two chips show the human body’s reaction to the testing compound.

Stem cell research received a major boost, when scientists announced a major through. The researchers in Massacheusetts led by Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass announced that they have created colonies of human embryonic stem cells without harming the embryos, from which they were derived! The new technique involves removal of a single cell from a newly formed eight-cell embryo and coaxing that cell to divide repeatedly, until it forms a self-replenishing colony of embryonic stem cells.

While the researchers are excited over the new development, as they expect the breakthrough to receive funding from the U.S government, critics are rising question on the embryos’ safety. This can be confirmed only when embryos are implanted again in women’s womb and the resulting babies are found healthy.

We have seen beautiful handicrafts of gold. But can you imagine a real living creature with sparkling gold on the body? Bizarre as it might sound but this is exactly what scientists at Vietnam’s National University’s College of Science have done. They have produced genetically modified seahorses with golden stripes on the body.

The scientists combined light emitting genes of jellyfish with grains of gold and injected the combination into the seahorse egg cells. The outcome was seahorses with sparkling gold on the body.

This is a great achievement in the world of luxury. Now aquariums will flaunt gold seahorses - a new designer item. Soon other creatures will be genetically modified to incorporate gold in their bodies and we will have golden pets and who knows if the craze of designer babies picks up we will have humans born with gold on the body - requirements for gold jewelries might cease after all.

Source & image:trendhunter

The South Korean scientists have made an important discovery for the treatments of human genetic diseases. They cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene to study the genetically disorders in cats. The development will help in cloning an animal with a manipulated gene in future.

Kong I1-Keun and his research team at Gyeongsang National University have used the skin cells of a mother cat to create three cloned cats that glow in the dark when exposed to ultraviolet light.

Using novel voltage-sensitive nanoparticles, researchers from the University of Michigan have found electric fields inside cells as strong as those produced in lightning bolts.

Previously, it has only been possible to measure electric fields across cell membranes, not within the main bulk of cells. But now it’s possible to measure them. Traditional techniques for studying disease at the level of tissues average out differences between cells. Many developments in cancer research over the past few years have been ‘more reactive’, working toward developing diagnostics for catching the disease in its earlier stages and for better predicting to which drugs patients will respond. Voltage-sensitive dyes are not new. For decades, neuroscientists have used them to measure voltages across cell membranes in studies of how nerve cells generate and respond to electrical charges.

Ever wondered how it would be like to stay in a world as shown in the Matrix, a world where the difference between human beings and machines is almost null. It seems like we are heading towards the best science fiction world of our imagination in approximately 21 years. By 2029, we will have machines implanted in our brains to make us more intelligent, as discussed by a panel of technology experts at American Association for the Advancement of Science, Boston.

Ray Kurzweil, a US inventor, says that machines have always been developed to make our life easier and to help us overcome our physical and mental constraints. He predicts machines getting artificially and emotionally intelligent by the predicted year 2029, when a child would require to insert a chip or a nanobot to his brain to understand a sum. This chip will be inserted via our capillaries and stimulate the biological neurons to understand and see things more precisely and act accordingly. The nanobots will adapt themselves to the virtual world through human nervous system.