The United States went to war in Iraq expecting to destroy an active weapons of mass destruction program. Instead, it found only remnants of chemical arms built in close collaboration with the West.
Manu Prakash - An Assistant Professor of bio engineering at Stanford University, who made a fold-able microscope which he is calling it as "Foldscope". In the words of this IIT Kanpur student, the world need it and every coming generation child should carry a pocket microscope and those children should know what actually they are dealing with "microscopically".
What do the latest studies into our sexual orientation reveal?
Are there dangers in framing sexuality through the lens of genetics? On the podcast this week we talk to Dr Alan R Sanders, a psychiatrist at North Shore University Health System Research Institute in Chicago who has been carrying out large scale research with 400 pairs of homosexual brothers to look for the genetic contribution to sexual orientation in men.
"Antibiotic drugs save lives. But we simply use them too much — and often for non-lifesaving purposes, like treating the flu and even raising cheaper chickens. The result, says researcher Ramanan Laxminarayan, is that the drugs will stop working for everyone, as the bacteria they target grow more and more resistant. He calls on all of us (patients and doctors alike) to think of antibiotics — and their ongoing effectiveness — as a finite resource, and to think twice before we tap into it. It’s a sobering look at how global medical trends can strike home."
The first patient to ever be treated with an antibiotic was a policeman in Oxford. On his day off from work,he was scratched by a rose thorn while working in the garden. That small scratch became infected. Over the next few days, his head was swollen with abscesses, and in fact his eye was so infected that they had to take it out, and by February of 1941, this poor man was on the verge of dying. He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and fortunately for him, a small team of doctors led by a Dr. Howard Florey had managed to synthesize a very small amount of penicillin, a drug that had been discovered 12 years before by Alexander Fleming but had never actually been used to treat a human, and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work, if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient, but Florey and his team figured if they had to use it, they might as well use it on someone who was going to die anyway.
Read the full interactive script here.....
Is the War on Drugs doing more harm than good? In a bold talk, drug policy reformist Ethan Nadelmann makes an impassioned plea to end the "backward, heartless, disastrous" movement to stamp out the drug trade. He gives two big reasons we should focus on intelligent regulation instead.
"So here's what I say to teenagers. First, don't do drugs. Second, don't do drugs. Third, if you do do drugs, there's some things I want you to know, because my bottom line as your parent is, come home safely at the end of the night and grow up and lead a healthy and good adulthood. That's my drug education mantra: Safety first."Read the full interactive script here....
Reblogged from Global Post
In Europe and US, the news about #EbolaOutBreak is spreading faster than the virus itself.
Commentators on cable news are the worst offenders, stoking fears with paranoid soothsaying and inventing apocalyptic future scenarios that may scare the bejeezus out of viewers (thereby attracting more viewers) but have only the most tenuous connection to reality.
Were this just crazy bar-speak it would be harmless. But forcing issues like flight bans and border closures into the Ebola conversation might well make things worse. More importantly, the hysteria about Ebola in America distracts from the very real and present tragedy afflicting thousands of people in West Africa.
In a bid to calm the discussion down and root it in reality, GlobalPost humbly debunks a few Ebola myths. We suggest you switch off the television and read this instead.
Myth No. 1: Ebola is ALL OVER AFRICA!
Ebola is spreading in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, three neighboring countries in West Africa. There were cases of the hemorragic disease in Nigeria and Senegal, but those potential outbreaks appear to have been stopped by fast action. In both cases the virus was carried by a visitor from one of the three affected countries. There was a separate outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but it too has been contained. Africa is very, very big and there are zero cases of Ebola in nearly 50 of its countries — so stopping flights to Kenya (yes, we’re looking at you, Korean Air) or canceling holidays in South Africa is pointless and will only pile widespread economic damage on top of the human tragedy. See what the World Health Organization has to say about it.
Myth No. 2: Soon Ebola will be spreading uncontrollably across the US, and the world, turning Earth into a scene from "Zombieland." The only answer is to stop all flights and build really high walls.
Ebola is undeniably scary. Previous outbreaks have had a kill rate as high as 90 percent and its mode of dispatch is singularly unpleasant. But in the current West Africa outbreak only abouthalf of infected people have so far died rather than survived, according to WHO figures (though the outbreak is set to worsen). Of those who do fall ill a small proportion — around one-fifth — suffer the signature symptom of uncontrolled bleeding. Nor is Ebola actually that easy to catch. You have to have contact with the bodily fluids of someone who is not only carrying the virus but is also showing the symptoms. This is why community carers and health workers dealing with Ebola patients are more prone to catching it. Ebola is not airborne, and the WHO doesn't recommend restricting air travel to control it.
Myth No. 3: Ebola is unstoppable
Actually, Ebola is very stoppable, as long as there is an effective medical infrastructure in place. The reason Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are struggling with the virus is that generations of predatory and corrupt rule, conflict and poor development have rendered healthcare (and other government institutions) moribund. When — not if — Ebola makes another appearance in the US or Europe, its spread will be quickly stopped as it was in Nigeria and Senegal, which both managed to isolate and contain Ebola when it crossed their borders.
Myth No. 4: There is a cure for Ebola but it’s being kept secret
There’s no cure for Ebola, at least not yet. Experimental drugs used on some medical workers who contracted the virus have had mixed results and are only available in very small quantities. Vaccine tests are also underway, but for now there is no shot or pill that can cure Ebola. Staying hydrated and creating the conditions to allow the body’s immune system to fight back offers patients the best chance of survival.
Myth No. 5: Ebola is “the ISIS of biological agents
This — along with much of the more breathless Ebola commentary — is nonsense. But CNN gave major play to the comparison made by former Homeland Security chief medical officer Alexander Garza, who argued in The New York Times that the response to Ebola "should mirror antiterrorism efforts." Teju Cole captured the absurdity of the analogy in his recent New Yorker article, a scathing and incisive piece of satire written in response to a thoroughly bonkers TV discussion. "Is Ebola the ISIS of biological agents? Is Ebola the Boko Haram ofAIDS? Is Ebola the al-Shabaab of dengue fever?" Cole wrote. "At first there was, understandably, the suspicion that Ebola was the Hitler of apartheid, but now it has become abundantly clear that Ebola is actually the George W. Bush of being forced to listen to someone’s podcast. Folks, this thing is serious."
If you really want to help fight Ebola, give to one of the organizations fighting Ebola. You can donate right now here.
Along with a crew of technologists and scientists, Jorge Soto is developing a simple, noninvasive, open-source test that looks for early signs of multiple forms of cancer. Onstage at TED Global 2014, he demonstrates a working prototype of the mobile platform for the first time.
In the above TED talk Jorge Soto tells about the importance of early detection of cancer.
He also says "One out of three people sitting in this audience will be diagnosed with some type of cancer, and one out of four will die because of it."
"We have 21st-century medical treatments and drugs to treat cancer, but we still have 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis, if any."
- Today, most of us have to wait for symptoms to indicate that something is wrong. Today, the majority of people still don't have access to early cancer detection methods, even though we know that catching cancer early is basically the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against it. We know that we can change this in our lifetime, and that is why my team and I have decided to begin this journey, this journey to try to make cancer detection at the early stages and monitoring the appropriate response at the molecular level easier, cheaper, smarter and more accessible than ever before.
Jorge Soto and their team who are from countries like Chile, Panama, Mexico and Greece, based on their scientific discoveries, they believed that early cancer detection will be done by testing blood sample. But there is no current reliable technique available for this. So, they find a method which detects the molecules, those freely move in blood sample called Micro RNA. So, their method basically depend upon testing the micro RNA.
Click here....The Role of micro RNA in Cancer:
- To explain what microRNAs are and their important role in cancer, we need to start with proteins, because when cancer is present in our body, protein modification is observed in all cancerous cells. As you might know, proteins are large biological molecules that perform different functions within our body, like catalyzing metabolic reactions or responding to stimuli or replicating DNA, but before a protein is expressed or produced, relevant parts of its genetic code present in the DNA are copied into the messenger RNA, so this messenger RNA has instructions on how to build a specific protein, and potentially it can build hundreds of proteins, but the one that tells them when to build them and how many to build are microRNAs.
- So microRNAs are small molecules that regulate gene expression. Unlike DNA, which is mainly fixed, microRNAs can vary depending on internal and environmental conditions at any given time, telling us which genes are actively expressed at that particular moment. And that is what makes microRNAs such a promising biomarker for cancer, because as you know, cancer is a disease of altered gene expression. It is the uncontrolled regulation of genes. Another important thing to consider is that no two cancers are the same, but at the microRNA level, there are patterns. Several scientific studies have shown that abnormal microRNA expression levels varies and creates a unique, specific pattern for each type of cancer, even at the early stages, reflecting the progression of the disease, and whether it's responding to medication or in remission, making microRNAs a perfect, highly sensitive biomarker.
- However, the problem with microRNAs is that we cannot use existing DNA-based technology to detect them in a reliable way, because they are very short sequences of nucleotides, much smaller than DNA.And also, all microRNAs are very similar to each other, with just tiny differences. So imagine trying to differentiate two molecules, extremely similar, extremely small.
Beauty is everywhere....in Chemistry too...watch here....
Beautiful Chemical Reactions from L2 Molecule on Vimeo.
