Posts Tagged ‘technology’
Friday, June 13th, 2008
Scientists search the whole genome for clues to common diseases
By Regina Nuzzo
Science News
Vol.173 #19 / Feature
June 21st, 2008
Old-fashioned gene hunting wasn’t terribly efficient. Geneticists typically pursued one gene at a time, armed only with guesses—usually wrong—about which chunks of genetic code might be linked to human disease.
Geneticists managed to bag a few trophies anyway—genes for Huntington’s chorea and cystic fibrosis, for example—mostly in rare diseases caused by a problem in a single, high-powered gene. Unfortunately, most of the more common diseases, such as type II diabetes, are instead controlled by a whole crowd of gene variants, each playing a small and often subtle role in the path to disease.
Tags: genetics, Science, Science News, statistics, technology
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Sunday, February 10th, 2008
Dr. Stuart Meloy stumbled upon an alternative — and pleasurable — use for an electrode stimulation device that treats pain.
By Regina Nuzzo
Special to The Times
Los Angeles Times — Health Section
February 11, 2008
Dr. Stuart Meloy never set out to study orgasms. It was an accident.
He was in the operating room one day in 1998, implanting electrodes into a patient’s spine to treat her chronic leg pain. (The electrodes are connected to a device that fires impulses to the brain to block pain signals.) But when he turned on the power, “the patient suddenly let out something between a shriek and moan,” says Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in North Carolina.
Asked what was wrong, she replied, “You’ll have to teach my husband how to do that.”
Tags: Health, LA Times, men, orgasm, Science, sex, technology, women
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Sunday, November 18th, 2007
Using Algorithms To Tackle Alzheimer’s Disease
by Regina Nuzzo, PhD
Biomedical Computation Review
Fall 2007
Feature Story
In 1906, at a small medical meeting in Tubingen, Germany, physician Alois Alzheimer gave a now-famous presentation about a puzzling patient. At age 51, Auguste D.’s memory was failing rapidly. Confused and helpless, she was growing inarticulate and fearful of her family, Alzheimer reported. Auguste died four years later.
During the autopsy Alzheimer found dramatic shrinkage in Auguste’s brain, with cells that were already dead and dying at the time of her death — plus two kinds of microscopic deposits that Alzheimer had never seen before. He summed it up in his presentation abstract: “All in all, we are faced obviously with a peculiar disease process.”
Tags: Alzheimer's, Biomedical Computation, computation, genetics, imaging, Science, simulation, technology
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Sunday, April 15th, 2007
by Regina Nuzzo, Ph.D.
Biomedical Computation Review
Winter/Spring 2007
News Bytes
Text-mining tools such as iHOP (Information Hyperlinked Over Proteins) are doing for biological literature what hyperlinks and search engines do for the Internet: organizing interconnected information in a fast, intuitive, searchable manner. And in January 2007, the service started to provide daily updates–extending the information network by about 2,000 new papers every day.
With genes and proteins acting as hyperlinks between sentences and abstracts, a large part of the PubMed knowledge base becomes a giant, navigable information network, says Robert Hoffmann, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow at Sloan-Kettering Institute who started the iHOP project while a researcher at the Protein Design Group at the National Center for Biotechnology (CNB) in Madrid, Spain. “The new version provides current information on even more genes and chemical compounds, covering 1,500 organisms ranging from human and chimpanzee to yeast and HIV,” Hoffman says. He and his colleagues also extended iHOP’s results to include drug interactions, and they’ve provided new ways to interact with the data–such as displaying “breaking news” found in papers from the past two years.
Tags: Biomedical Computation, computation, PubMed, Science, technology
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Monday, December 11th, 2006
An experimental ‘hybrid’ device may give many with partial hearing loss the extra boost they need.
By Regina Nuzzo
Special to The Times
Los Angeles Times — Health Section
December 11, 2006
JEANNE YEOMAN had been dealing with her hearing loss for a couple of decades, but listening still exhausted her. And technology wasn’t really helping her patience. She remembers driving down the road one day and coming close to just hurling her hearing aids out the window.
“Hearing aids made everything louder, not clearer,” she says. “I didn’t need amplification. I needed clarification.”
Yeoman wasn’t deaf. So she was surprised to learn she was an ideal candidate for an experimental type of cochlear implant. Unlike hearing aids, cochlear implants communicate directly with the brain by converting sounds into electrical impulses and shooting them along the auditory nerve. Until now these devices have been used only for profoundly deaf people. But this new “hybrid” cochlear implant was designed specifically for partial hearing loss –so that users could enjoy both their own natural hearing plus bionic hearing for sounds where they need an extra boost.
Tags: cochlear implants, Health, hearing loss, LA Times, Science, technology
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Sunday, November 12th, 2006
Head lice — yuck — have developed a creeping resistance to common insecticides. Maybe it’s time for a new tack.
By Regina Nuzzo
Special to The Times
Los Angeles Times — Health Section
November 13, 2006
IN the war against head lice, we face an enemy that is fast and plentiful, with nimble armies that can evolve and outwit standard weaponry. Will we ever take the lead in this scalp-biting, nit-picking arms race?
Last month, experts from around the world gathered in Buenos Aires to swap battle tactics at the Third International Congress on Phthiraptera, the group of 3,000 species of wingless parasitic insects that includes Pediculus capitis, bane of parents and school nurses across the land.
Researchers reported needed progress in the fight. Some are turning to new classes of insecticides for which head lice have yet to develop resistance. Others are eschewing the poison and getting creative: tricking lice into thinking they’re drowning; moisturizing the blighters until they leak water; or blasting hot air until the insects are desiccated hulls.
Tags: bugs, Health, LA Times, Science, technology
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Saturday, November 4th, 2006
by Regina Nuzzo, PhD
Biomedical Computation Review
Fall 2006
News Bytes
Peek inside the skull of a couch potato watching reruns on TV and you’ll see non-stop patterns of blood flow throughout the brain. If you learn to pick out which activity patterns match up with, say, a good belly laugh, then you might be on your way to reading the viewer’s internal experiences. Recently, experts from a variety of fields competed to glean subjective perceptions like humor from functional MRIs of TV viewers. They were surprisingly successful.
“Our goal is to know how the brain represents information,” says Walter Schneider, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and principal investigator of the Experience Based Cognition group, which sponsored the competition. “In theory, if we can understand the information in the activity of somebody’s brain, then we can understand what they perceived.”
Tags: Biomedical Computation, computation, imaging, mind-reading, neuroscience, Science, technology
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Saturday, November 4th, 2006
by Regina Nuzzo, Ph.D.
Biomedical Computation Review
Fall 2006
News Bytes
Neurons are tough cells to study. There are a staggering number of them in most animals, and they are constantly talking with one another. One way to look at groups of neurons in real-time is to take a slice of brain, stimulate it electrically, and measure responses across the slice. Now a new tool may give researchers more neuronal data in the span of a few milliseconds than ever before.
A team headed by Peter Fromherz, PhD, a director at Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich, has developed a computer chip that can measure the activity of thousands of neurons at a time. “We can get a movie of a complete electroactivity map in space and time, with a resolution of eight micrometers,” Fromherz says. The work was published in the September 2006 issue of the Journal of Neurophysiology.
Tags: Biomedical Computation, neuroscience, Science, technology
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Geneticists managed to bag a few trophies anyway—genes for Huntington’s chorea and cystic fibrosis, for example—mostly in rare diseases caused by a problem in a single, high-powered gene. Unfortunately, most of the more common diseases, such as type II diabetes, are instead controlled by a whole crowd of gene variants, each playing a small and often subtle role in the path to disease.