Science is cool – See the Bloodlamp

 

So – science is geeky. We all know it and embrace it. Sometimes you can use geeky scientific knowledge to make cool objects.

The bloodlamp by Dutch designer Mike Thompson is a glass ball filled with Luminol. It reacts upon binding blood to fluoresce – hence giving off light.

Pic c/o the NS pic of the day - http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn15018-pick-of-the-pictures

It was designed to make the person think about how precious energy is and how much they really need light.

anyway – how’s that for a random post of the day.

Important questions to ponder

Why must one walk up a rampfrom the footpath to get to “lower ground” in my complex?

Why was there one supra, one mitsu Evo X, one GTI, one skyline GTR, 2 HSV coupes a WRX STi, a civc type R (rally prepped) and 2 highly modified nissan patrols in my apartment carpark at midday? Why spend lots of money on a car then leave it parked in the garage all week long.

Why does the name “Craven Cottage” sound so cool?

Why did the butcher let me down? (Worst lamb shanks ever for diner tonight, I swear the sheep must have been 20 yr old reject stock).

Merlo or Di Bella?

Why does the microscope work fine when your cells don’t express the protein properly, but screws up when you get good clean expression?

Enough questions for now anyway…..

On another note, I’m going to cross post my ResearchGate Blog posts from their to hear aswell. Starting with this one on Gene therapy to restore color blindness.

A recent Nature letters paper by Mancuso et al details the use of a recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) in gene delivery to restore the function of photo-pigments in squirrel monkeys. The male monkeys, red-green color-blind from birth, obtained the ability to process red-green color information via the delivery of the L-opsin gene into the retina. 

While this research opens the door for further hope of gene therapy involved in human eye conditions, including blindness, it also raises some interesting questions. It was previously thought that the brain of adult monkeys would be too "hard-wired" to gain a beneficial effect from the restoration of deficient pathways. The recent paper proves that gene therapy can be utilized in "middle aged" monkeys, and is not solely an avenue to be pursued during early development. This adds a lot of significance to work already begun in human patients, to restore an enzyme involved in a type of hereditary blindness.

Original Article:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature08401.html

Gene therapy for red–green colour blindness in adult primates

Katherine Mancuso¹, William W. Hauswirth², Qiuhong Li², Thomas B. Connor³, James A. Kuchenbecker¹, Matthew C. Mauck³, Jay Neitz¹ & Maureen Neitz¹

ResearchGate providing free access to journals.

This is a pretty awesome loophole potentially allowing free access to journals people would not normally have available.

ResearchGATE launches SelfArchiving
Repository
Scientific Online Network ResearchGATE blazes a new route into the world of Open
Access
Boston, September 15th 2009. The last few weeks have been big here at ResearchGATE
(www.researchgate.net), the world's largest online scientific platform. We have only been online
since May last year, but already have 140,000 members. Recently, we introduced our
international Job Board for Science and Higher Education. But today is set to be even bigger, as
we are launching our SelfArchiving
Repository. This will make full‐text articles available to the
public, for free – the first application of its kind worldwide!
Currently, there is no way for researchers to access millions of publications in their full version
online. ResearchGATE is now changing this by enabling users to upload their published research
directly to their profile pages (a system called the “green route” to Open Access). Our
publication index, containing metadata for 35 million publications, will be automatically
matched with the SHERPA RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) data set of journal and
publisher’s selfarchiving
agreements. As a result, authors will know which versions of their
articles they can legally upload. Since nine out of ten journals allow selfarchiving,
this project
could give thousands of researchers immediate access to articles that are not yet freely available.
Our SelfArchiving
Repository does not infringe on copyrights because each profile page within
ResearchGATE is legally considered the personal website of the user (and the majority of journal
publishers allow articles to be openly accessible on personal homepages). Therefore, each user
can upload his or her published articles in compliance with selfarchiving
regulations . Our
publication index makes every publication identifiable and is searchable. Since each profile is
networked to the larger platform, the uploaded resources will form an enormous pool of
research for our members. Of course, it’s free of charge, like the all the other resources at
ResearchGATE.
To learn more about ResearchGATE and its many features, visit www.researchgate.net and sign
up for a free profile. Also, feel free to contact our team at press@researchgate.net.
To learn more about SelfArchiving,
visit www.self‐archiving.me