As we keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, more of it is dissolving in the oceans, leading to drastic changes in the water's chemistry. Triona McGrath researches this process, known as ocean acidification, and in this talk she takes us for a dive into an oceanographer's world. Learn more about how the "evil twin of climate change" is impacting the ocean — and the life that depends on it.

Interactive Script:

Trolina McGrath: How Pollution Changing the Ocean's Chemistry

Podcast:

X-Ray Crystallography might seem like an obscure, even unheard of field of research; however structural analysis has played a part in almost every major scientific field since its discovery 100 years ago by William Henry, and William Lawrence Bragg.

In this Friday Evening Discourse at the Royal Institution, Professor Stephen Curry charts the discovery and development of this extraordinary technique, starting with a simple explanation of diffraction, moving through the integral work of the Braggs, and ending with the cutting edge uses that X-Ray Crystallography has found in the modern world.

This film is part of the Crystallography Collection: a series of short films produced by the Ri Channel, with the support of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), celebrating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of X-Ray Crystallography by the Braggs: http://richannel.org/collections/2013/crystallography

Video Talk:

Penicillin changed everything. Infections that had previously killed were suddenly quickly curable. Yet as Maryn McKenna shares in this sobering talk, we've squandered the advantages afforded us by that and later antibiotics. Drug-resistant bacteria mean we're entering a post-antibiotic world — and it won't be pretty. There are, however, things we can do ... if we start right now.

Photo: Bryce Vickmark

Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia     
20th Heinz Award for Technology,the Economy and Employment

Dr. Sangeeta Bhatia, bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is recognized for her seminal work in tissue engineering and disease detection, including the cultivation of functional liver cells outside the human body.

As a graduate student at MIT, Dr. Bhatia was assigned the task of cultivating living liver cells in a petri dish, an endeavor that had been attempted for many years. A visit to a microfabrication facility — where students laid circuits out on silicon chips — inspired her to see if the same technology could be used to “print” tiny liver cells on plastic. The result was the first “microliver,” a miniature model organ now widely used to test drug reactions efficiently and predictively.

Dr. Bhatia’s team has also made singular strides in developing simple, affordable cancer screening tools. One uses tiny particles or nanoparticles to create biomarkers for cancer in urine samples on paper strips; the other is a “cancer-detecting yogurt,” containing engineered probiotic bacteria.

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".

Forget stitches — there's a better way to close wounds. In this talk, TED Fellow Joe Landolina talks about his invention — a medical gel that can instantly stop traumatic bleeding without the need to apply pressure.

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....

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.

See the full interactive transcript here.....

Dear Friends, OSDD Principal Investigator Dr.S.V.Eswaran,Head, Chemistry Department and Dean, Academics, St.Stephen's College, University of Delhi, Delhi visited OSDD open lab at MCC. And please listen to his presentation "Heterocycles and Molecular Medicine"

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An interesting new book on Spectroscopy was on posted one of google groups I have joined on Modern Spectroscopy, authored by J. Michael Hollas form University of Reading, 4 th Edition of Wiley& Co publishings.

--> The contents of the book includes new spectroscopic techniques like Lasers and Laser spectroscopy. It also contains the brief introduction of existing spectroscopic techniques and also the new spectroscopic techniques to identify the structrues and purity of the compounds.
Well, an intersting book to Download, Kudos to Anthony Melvin Castro (Type his name in Google Search and count how many results arrived), the principal Scientist of Glenmark Pharma, Mumbai.

Download this Book