New Water Resistant Fabric

Scientists at UC Davis have developed a fabric that wicks water away from skin in the same way skin condenses sweat into droplets that individually dry off.  This fabric is different from cotton in that, although cotton wicks moisture away, it can still get soaked and heavy.  Check out the science daily article about it:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130520163634.htm

 

More About the V-Chip

Since a lot of you all seemed pretty interested in the technology I talked about in my group’s presentation, I thought I’d share a little more information about it.  Here’s the link to the original paper, and an article with a neat video about how it works.  This stuff is still pretty new, as the paper describing its development came out in November, but the future of this technology is really exciting!

http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v3/n12/full/ncomms2292.html

http://www.medgadget.com/2012/12/v-chip-for-fast-point-of-care-diagnostics-from-a-drop-of-blood-video.html
(feel free to do some googling on this too, but be sure you search “multiplexed volumetric bar-chart chip” instead of “V-chip”, because that’s also a parental control TV monitoring device..)

One Less Shot for HPV Prevention

Gardasil, the vaccine for human papilloma virus (HPV), is generally given to pre-adolescent girls in three doses over a period of six months.  Researchers have recently found that 2 doses, not 3, might actually be sufficient for HPV prevention.  I received this vaccine shortly after it came out when I was in high school, and let me tell you, this shot HURT.  Needles don’t generally bother me that much, but this vaccine affected my arm muscles somehow where I was in pain and hardly able to move my upper arm for several hours after each dose, and I know many of my friends who received the vaccine also had the same reaction.  So, I would have been pretty glad to have only had two of these shots as opposed to three.  However, the implications of this research extend far beyond the first world problem of wanting the full use of my arm, pain-free.  These vaccines are relatively expensive, and this prevents many girls, especially globally, from receiving this protection from HPV.  Lowering the required doses from 3 to 2 could make this vaccine more accessible and therefore protect more people.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130430105720.htm

Accelerated Vaccine Production

Influenza virus is highly variable and changes quickly from year to year, thus the need for a new flu vaccine to be created with each flu season.  These vaccines are generally not able to be manufactured until the flu outbreak has affected many people.  Scientists have come up with a way to produce vaccines much more quickly and earlier through directly synthesizing the genes for hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N), glycoproteins on the surface of influenza that trigger host immune response, and incorporating them into vaccines.  This can be done as soon as the sequence data for the season’s version of H and N is available.  Although most strains of the flu are only deadly in the young, elderly, or immune-compromised, getting vaccines to these people earlier could be a great help.

Unfortunately I don’t have access to the full paper (annoying), but here is an small article about the research and the abstract that I thought was worth sharing!

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6134/797.summary

http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/5/185/185ra68

 

More New Clinical Tech: Second Skin Heart Monitor!

It’s probably clear from my group’s presentation today that I’m pretty interested in technologies that could benefit clinical medicine. Engineers at Standford have created an advanced pulse monitor that is small and flexible enough to be worn regularly to monitor regular heart rates of patients with cardiovascular diseases.  The device can also detect stiff arteries and other risk factors for heart attack.  In the future, researchers hope that this device will be readily implemented in hospitals and doctor’s offices to help detect serious heart problems before they become deadly.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130516105702.htm

 

Gut Microbes May Help Fight Obesity

Akkermansia muciniphila is a bacteria commonly found in the intestines of mammals.  It has been found that people within a healthy weight range tend to have a higher population of akkermansia muciniphila in their guts than overweight or obese people.  This led some researchers to ask the question if adding akkermansia muciniphila as a probiotic into the diets of obese people could reduce their body fat.  Researchers at Wageningen University tested this in mice, and found that obese mice treated with akkermansia muciniphila had a decrease in body fat without changing their diets.  This research could be very helpful clinically with people who are obese and at risk for many related disease but have trouble losing weight!

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/05/130515113744.htm 

Lessons From Dr. Bob

I really enjoyed Dr. Bob’s lecture yesterday.  It was neat to hear about scientists that I hadn’t heard of, and be refreshed on experiments I was familiar with.  The critical mass experiments with the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project definitely blew me away.  However, I think the best part of the class might’ve been some funny quotes and facial expressions…

Dr. Bob (trying to get us to say “use microscopes”): What do biologists do that chemists never do?
Kayarash: Have fun?

Dr. Bob’s moral of the day after talking about unintended discoveries in science:  “So it’s like someone saying oh my gosh, the pen fell off the table, I wonder if there’s a little genie causing the pen to fall off the table, so I’m going to spend the next 10 years looking for the genie”

Thoughts from the Barnstable Brown Obesity and Diabetes Research Day

While perusing the poster section at the University of Kentucky’s Barnstable Brown Obesity and Diabetes Research Day, I found several that piqued my interest, including some about type and strength of motivation in relation to weight loss success, the inner workings of autoimmunity in diabetes, and regulating glucose during pregnancy to prevent gestational diabetes.  This last one was of particular interest to me because of my general interest in women’s health, so I looked into gestational diabetes a little further this evening after the event.

Gestational diabetes affects around 18% of all pregnancies, and occurs in women who did not have type I or type II diabetes before pregnancy.  Many women who develop gestational diabetes are also more likely to develop type II diabetes after their pregnancy.  The biggest risk factors for developing gestational diabetes are being overweight or obese, having a history of gestational diabetes or pre-diabetes  and having a family history of diabetes.  While the exact cause of the disease is still unknown, researchers believe that the placenta hormones shut down the mother’s ability to process insulin.  Therefore, glucose will build up in the mothers bloodstream, which then in turns builds up in the baby’s bloodstream as well.  This can be dangerous for the baby, causing it to store too much fat and be too large which can lead to delivery complications, and also pose a higher risk for obesity and type II diabetes for the baby later in life.

The poster that I saw today that spurred this interest in gestational diabetes was on a study done by Stephanie J. Frank from UK’s College of Agriculture’s Human Nutrition department, and Lindsay J. Carter and Kevin J. Pearson from UK’s College of Medicine Graduate Center for Nutritional Sciences.  Their study looked at how diet and exercise affected body composition and glucose regulation in pregnant mice.  They included this adorable cartoon to signify an exercising pregnant mouse and a sedentary pregnant mouse that I wanted to share:

They set up an experiment where mice were divided into groups of standard diet with exercise, sedentary standard diet, high fat diet with exercise, and sedentary high fat diet and had their body composition and blood glucose measured before and during pregnancy.  They found that gestational exercise positively influenced body composition regardless of diet, and that high fat diets led to increased blood glucose regardless of exercise.  These findings were interesting to me because they showed that exercise and diet affected the health of these mice in different ways in that exercise without a healthy diet wasn’t enough to improve blood glucose and a healthy diet without exercise wasn’t enough to improve body composition.  These findings also further suggest that pregnant women need to be conscious of healthy eating and exercise in order to better the health of their baby.

In Honor of Mother’s Day…

let’s give a shout out to some awesome animal moms out there!

http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1987961,00.html

New Tech Keeps Organs Alive Before Transplants

In 2006, a heart was successfully kept alive, beating with oxygen flow, before being used in a transplant, through the use of a new technology called the TransMedics Organ Care System.  Now, this technology is evolving to be able to sustain the “life” in other organs before transplants.  Two years ago, the technology was developed for use in lung transplants.  Now, many transplants have utilized this technology in Europe, but it has not yet been approved for public use in the U.S.  Although it seems there are still a few kinks to work out, and it needs to be developed for even more organs, the future of such technology for organ transplants is very promising!

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/25/health/live-organ-transplants/index.html?hpt=he_bn7