The map of the genome is just the rule book; “systems biology” is the ball game.
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Systems Biology
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Skeleton Recharge
Bringing artificial bones to life.
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Nanobiotech Makes the Diagnosis
Electronic components the size of molecules could test for diseases and provide personal DNA profiles on demand.
Gazing at an electrical meter, Yi Cui, a graduate student in the Harvard University lab of chemist Charles Lieber, waits for evidence of a remarkable feat in simple, ultrasensitive diagnostics. His target is prostate cancer. His new tool is a microchip bearing 10 silicon wires, each just 10 nanometers (billionths of a meter) wide. These nanowires have been slathered with biological molecules with an affinity for PSA, a protein all too familiar to men of a certain age as the telltale sign of prostate cancer. If the experiment works according to plan, when the PSA molecules bind to the nanowires, there will be a detectable electrical signal.
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Sweet Spots
Pathogen-specific sugars may be the key to diagnosing disease.
Doctors commonly diagnose infectious diseases by checking patients’ blood for evidence of proteins or genes unique to different bacteria and viruses. Soon, they may be able to look instead for pathogen-specific sugars, thanks to a glass chip developed by biologist Denong Wang at Columbia University’s Genome Center. The technology could ultimately be less cumbersome than DNA-based tests and more accurate than protein-based tests for certain pathogens, allowing physicians to quickly screen for thousands of different infectious diseases at once using a small sample of blood.
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Mind Magnets
Medicine
Alvaro Pascual-Leone holds a figure-eight-shaped paddle to his head and flips a switch. His left arm begins to twitch. He turns off the device-quelling its pulsing magnetic field, which was inducing an electrical current inside his brain-and his arm relaxes. But Pascual-Leone, a neuroscientist at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, is interested in more than muscle twitches; he believes that magnetic stimulation provides the last, best hope for treating patients with severe depression. This fall, researchers will begin large-scale human trials of the technology to see if he is right.
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The State of Biomedicine
Medical treatment will be tailored to your genetic profile.
Your dirt-biking expedition has ended painfully-a few ribs broken in a tumble on the trail-and the emergency-room doctor has sent you home with a bottle of codeine. It should be enough to tide you over until the bones heal, unless you’re one of the 20 million Americans who have a mutated form of an enzyme called cyp2d6, which normally converts codeine into the morphine that soothes pain. If you are, the enzyme won’t work, and the pills won’t even take the edge off. Worse yet, neither you nor your physician will know that until you take the drug.
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Polymer Memory
Computer memory could soon earn the ultimate commercial validation: the cheap plastic knock-off.
While microchip makers continue to wring more and more from silicon, the most dramatic improvements in the electronics industry could come from an entirely different material: plastic. Labs around the world are working on integrated circuits, displays for handheld devices and even solar cells that rely on electrically conducting polymers-not silicon-for cheap and flexible electronic components. Now two of the world’s leading chip makers are racing to develop new stock for this plastic microelectronic arsenal: polymer memory.
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Precision Brain Scans
High-tech imaging takes the guesswork out of diagnosis.
The main skill in diagnosing neurological disorders such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s disease: educated guesswork. Indeed, today’s doctors rely primarily on interviews, physical examination and laboratory tests to detect these complex neurological diseases; the problem is that symptoms can vary dramatically from one patient to the next, making diagnosis tricky and subjective. But by combining new databases with improved medical-imaging techniques able to resolve telltale anatomical features a millimeter in size or less, researchers are starting to make the invisible visible, potentially enabling them to offer patients earlier and more accurate diagnoses.
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Nanotech Goes Mainstream
The new NanoMechanical Technology Laboratory brings a burgeoning field closer to the real world.
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Molecular Bloodhounds
Artificial antibodies could sniff out viruses and toxins
Antibodies, the body’s own biosensors, recognize and bind to foreign molecules with astonishing precision. Antibodies are incorporated in many medical diagnostic tests, but researchers have long hoped for ways to make cheap and long-lasting artificial antibodies-synthetic molecules which, when added to a patient’s blood sample, would detect and latch onto specific disease markers just as effectively as natural antibodies. New work on polymer structures that mimic the binding action of natural antibodies may be bringing scientists a step closer to that goal.
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Nano Biomaterials
Part biological, part not: blended nanomaterials have surprising properties.
Detergent manufacturers have long used enzymes in their formulations for fighting really tough dirt. Jonathan Dordick, a chemical engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, is taking the battle against dirt a step further, using nanotechnology to design a self-cleaning plastic in which the enzyme molecules are an integral part of the material. When the plastic comes into contact with bacteria or other pathogens, the enzymes attack the microbes and destroy their ability to bind to its surface.
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PicoPeta Simputers
A simple handheld to bridge India’s digital divide.
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Sphere Software
Keeping workplace information safe.
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Lithography Unmasked
Hardware: Researchers pursue a cheaper way of designing and fabricating computer chips.
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Electronic Medical Records
Medicine: New rules mean doctors must go digital.
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New Hubs for Nano
Nanotech
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Scrutinizing Human Research
Medicine
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Recognizing the Enemy
Creating a central database of photos to identify terrorists through face recognition is a bureaucratic nightmare.
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Bar-Coding Life
Biotech: Tiny tags to decode disease.
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Systems Biology
The map of the genome is just the rule book; “systems biology” is the ball game.
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