Inventor develops anti-malaria wristwatch - Yahoo! News

Inventor develops anti-malaria wristwatch - Yahoo! News: "Gervans Trading"

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African inventor has developed an anti-malaria wristwatch to help combat one of Africa's biggest killers by monitoring the blood of those who wear it and sounding an alarm when the parasite is detected.

Gervan Lubbe said his "Malaria Monitor" wristwatch, due to launch next month, could save lives and keep millions out of hospital by heading off the disease before patients even feel ill.

"It picks up the parasite and destroys it so early that the possibility of dying is absolutely zero and you don't even feel the early cold symptoms," Lubbe told Reuters in a telephone interview this week.

The sturdy digital timepiece pricks the wrist with a tiny needle four times a day and tests the blood for malaria parasites.
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I'm dubious. I've worked with malaria and with microfluidic detectors for pathogenic organisms, and I've not seen anything that small. Malaria is hard to spot, though there are a few tricks you can use. Still, I'd like to see some testing. The website offers no info: http://www.gervans.com/

NEJM -- Bioterrorism -- Preparing to Fight the Next War

NEJM -- Bioterrorism -- Preparing to Fight the Next War: "Furthermore, large-scale industrial processes are not necessary for the development of potent biologic weapons. Increasingly, the means for propagating biologic agents under controlled conditions are being made accessible to anyone. Even our traditional concept of 'weaponization' is misleading: nature provides mechanisms for packaging and preserving many infectious agents that can be manipulated through biologic and genetic engineering — for example, by enhancing the virulence of naturally sporulating organisms. Materials science and nanoscale science — advances in encapsulation technology, for instance — will provide new ways to package such agents. And self-replicating agents that are highly transmissible among humans, such as variola virus and influenza virus, need little or no alteration in order to be disseminated efficiently by terrorists."
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Hmm, did someone get a sneak peak at my current work-in-progress?

Taiwan breeds transgenic, fluorescent, green pig - Yahoo! News

Taiwan breeds transgenic, fluorescent, green pig - Yahoo! News

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan, home to the world's first transgenic glowing fish, has successfully bred fluorescent green pigs that researchers hope will boost the island's stem cell research, a professor said on Thursday.

By injecting fluorescent green protein into embryonic pigs, a research team at the island's leading National Taiwan University managed to breed three male transgenic pigs, said professor Wu Shinn-Chih of the university's Institute and Department of Animal Science and Technology.

"There are partially fluorescent green pigs elsewhere, but ours are the only ones in the world that are green from inside out. Even their hearts and internal organs are green," Wu said on Thursday.
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Hmmm, they're leaving something out. Injecting the protein into the cell wouldn't cause the pigs to be able to express the protein. Maybe they meant the gene for the protein.

See, this is why science writing should be left to the experts.

Report: Face Transplant Patient Goes Out - Yahoo! News

Report: Face Transplant Patient Goes Out - Yahoo! News

PARIS - The woman who received a new nose, chin and mouth in a groundbreaking transplant operation in November has taken strolls in public without drawing stares, her surgeon said in an interview published Wednesday.

The world's first partial face transplant patient is doing well and is focused on the future — the prospect of returning home from the hospital and restarting normal life, Dr. Bernard Devauchelle told Le Courrier Picard, a regional newspaper in northern France. Because of privacy laws, the woman can be identified only as Isabelle.

The 38-year-old divorced mother of two received her new features from a brain-dead donor on Nov. 27. She was mauled by her pet Labrador last year, leaving her with severe injuries that her doctors said made it difficult for her to speak and eat.
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Wow, that's pretty wild that you can transplant a face. It brings up all sorts of questions about what distinguishes one person from another. Increasingly it isn't physical. It's all about the mind (or soul if you hold certain beliefs). That just goes to show all the racicsts out there how wrong they are. Richard Morgan has a book where people's consciousness can be uploaded from one body and downloaded in another. The body is just a "sleeve". Perhaps it will come true one day...

Todd C Edwards Science and Writing: Remote Control Device 'Controls' Humans - Yahoo! News

Todd C Edwards Science and Writing: Remote Control Device 'Controls' Humans - Yahoo! News

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In this one, I joked that I should get my girlfriend an iPod for Christmas since they are hoping to put the human remote control devices in the iPods. They didn't, so I didn't, but she got me one. Hmmm. Suddenly I feel like taking out the trash...

Scientists say magnet therapy is a waste of money - Yahoo! News

Scientists say magnet therapy is a waste of money - Yahoo! News

LONDON (Reuters) - The use of magnetic devices to cure a variety of ills has soared in recent years but there is no evidence they work, according to an editorial in the British Medical Journal.

The market for magnetic bracelets, knee pads and the like may now be worth about one billion dollars a year, but two American scientists argue in the journal on Friday that many people are being fooled as to their therapeutic benefits.

"Money spent on expensive and unproved magnet therapy might be better spent on evidence-based medicine," professors Leonard Finegold and Bruce Flamm wrote.

They said the many studies that purport to show magnets do work are suspect because a magnet's main characteristic -- to be attracted or repelled by metals -- would betray it compared with placebos.

But they said magnet wearers may feel better even if there is no supporting evidence.

"Perhaps subjects with magnetic bracelets subconsciously detected a tiny drag when the bracelets were near ferromagnetic surfaces (which are ubiquitous in modern life), and this distracted or otherwise influenced the perceived pain."
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Hold on, did they say one billion dollers per year? Man, and when I did malaria biomagnetic research, everyone worried that we would be doing damage by putting people in magnetic fields. I may have to add MagnaSpa's to my biotech thriller. Templeton Pierce can sneer derisively at them.

S.Korean panel says stem-cell result fabricated - Yahoo! News

S.Korean panel says stem-cell result fabricated - Yahoo! News: "SEOUL (Reuters) -
South Korea's most famous scientist quit under a cloud on Friday and could face prosecution after investigators said results in a landmark 2005 paper on producing tailored embryonic stem cells were intentionally fabricated."
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That guy's career is pretty much ruined now. Very hard to recover from this sort of thing.

New Scientist Grasshoppers brainwashed into suicide by a worm - News

New Scientist Grasshoppers brainwashed into suicide by a worm - News: "THE trick by which a parasitic worm brainwashes its host into killing itself has been revealed.

The nematomorph hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) develops inside land-dwelling grasshoppers and crickets until the time comes for the worm to transform into an aquatic adult. At that point it somehow persuades the insect to jump into water, allowing the adult worm to swim away.

David Biron and his colleagues at the Institute for Development Research in Montpellier, France, have found the worms produce proteins that mimic some of the grasshoppers' own (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3213). Some of the proteins affect neurotransmitter activity and response to gravity."
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That's a pretty wild trick. Can Biotech Induced Zombieism (BIZ Syndrome) be far off?

Year of disasters speeds drive to pool knowledge - Yahoo! News

"LONDON (Reuters) - From tsunamis and earthquakes to hurricanes and bird flu, the natural disasters of the past year have underlined the urgency of a global project to pool knowledge that could limit the damage.

In Johannesburg in 2002, the World Summit on Sustainable Development highlighted the need for coordinating data on the state of the earth."
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Now, if only they had a clandestine paramilitary force composed of special forces operators from around the world. Then they could enforce the necessary policies "with extreme predjudice".

GenomeWeb Daily News

Team Led By UCSC’s Haussler to Reconstruct Whole Genome of Distant Mammalian Ancestor
By Bernadette Toner, BioInform editor

COLD SPRING HARBOR, NY, Oct. 31 (GenomeWeb News) - It's technically possible to computationally reconstruct the genome of the ancestor of all placental mammals, according to David Haussler of the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is spearheading a collaborative effort to deliver the assembly of such a genome to the research community.

Haussler, a professor of biomolecular engineering at UCSC, said that an effort to "reconstruct the evolutionary history of each base in the human genome" from the time of the so-called Boreoeutherian ancestor, which lived around 75 million years ago, is "the grand challenge of human molecular evolution."
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I see a lab in a remote location. I see scientists creating the ancient DNA sequences. I see artificial wombs. I see a theme park with protobeings living as they must have. I see things running amok. Oh wait, it's been done.

Remote Control Device 'Controls' Humans - Yahoo! News

Remote Control Device 'Controls' Humans - Yahoo! News: "ATSUGI, Japan - We wield remote controls to turn things on and off, make them advance, make them halt. Ground-bound pilots use remotes to fly drone airplanes, soldiers to maneuver battlefield robots.
But manipulating humans?

Prepare to be remotely controlled. I was.

Just imagine being rendered the rough equivalent of a radio-controlled toy car.

Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic. But more sinister applications also come to mind."
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More sinister applications? No joke! I got plenty of yer more sinister applications right here!

"I'm really hopeful Apple Computer will be interested in this technology to offer it in their iPod."

Hmmm, an IPOD for the girlfriend for Christmas this year... ;)

Giant 'corpse flower' blooms in Germany - Yahoo! News

Giant 'corpse flower' blooms in Germany - Yahoo! News: "BERLIN (Reuters) - The world's tallest -- and smelliest -- flower has bloomed, reaching a height of 2.94 meters, 18 centimeters more than the previous record for the species, the Stuttgart botanical garden said on Friday.

The Titan Arum, or Amorphophallus Titanum, nicknamed "corpse flower" because of its putrid stench, blooms rarely and briefly."
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I rarely run across science news items that spark ideas for the Zook Terpin series, but this sure qualifies.

I got myself a Roomba. It is sweet. I just hope it doesn't become sentient and kill me in my sleep. That would suck.

Human-like skin gives robots sense of touch -study - Yahoo! News

Human-like skin gives robots sense of touch -study - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A flexible, electronic skin could provide robots, car seats and even carpets the ability to sense pressure and heat, Japanese researchers reported on Monday.

They described a new 'skin' that not only senses both heat and pressure, but that is flexible, cheap and easy to make."
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Ewww, freaky.

Mystery Illness Kills at Least 17 in China - Yahoo! News

Mystery Illness Kills at Least 17 in China - Yahoo! News: "BEIJING - An unidentified illness has killed 17 farmers and sickened 41 others in southwestern China after they butchered sick pigs or sheep, China's official news agency said Sunday.

Those affected had symptoms including high fever, fatigue, nausea and vomiting, and 'became comatose later with bruises under the skin,' Xinhua news agency said.

Over the past four weeks, 58 people from areas around the cities of Ziyang and Neijiang in China's southwestern Sichuan province were hospitalized with such symptoms, Xinhua said."
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Odd...

Japanese robot guards to patrol shops, offices - Yahoo! News

Japanese robot guards to patrol shops, offices - Yahoo! News: "TOKYO (Reuters) - Burglars beware, robot guards are here.

In an idea straight out of science fiction, robots could soon begin patrolling Japanese offices, shopping malls and banks to keep them safe from intruders. Equipped with a camera and sensors, the 'Guardrobo D1,' developed by Japanese security firm Sohgo Security Services Co., is designed to patrol along pre-programmed paths and keep an eye out for signs of trouble."
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And you thought Protedyne was bad...

Nanotech advances need more safety screening-study - Yahoo! News

Nanotech advances need more safety screening-study - Yahoo! News: "NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nanotechnology, an engineering science that holds hope for scores of new products and processes, is not being properly evaluated for human and environmental risks, a study released this week has found.

The rapidly evolving science, which involves scores of start-ups, corporations and universities seeking to engineer materials on a molecular level, carries both actual and perceived environmental, health and safety (EHS) risks.

But without a full and continuing assessment of those risks, the nascent industry expected to employ thousands of people and generate billions of dollars in revenue may be hobbled by public opposition or corporate mishaps, a study by investment house Lux Research concludes."
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Nanotech, lots of good and bad potential there.

'Super' bacteria live on sheets, fingernails: study - Yahoo! News

'Super' bacteria live on sheets, fingernails: study - Yahoo! News: "WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The mutated, drug-resistant 'superbugs' that cause an increasing number of hospital infections and deaths can live for weeks on bed linens, computer keyboard covers and under acrylic fingernails, U.S. researchers reported on Monday."
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Whoa. Probably caused by years of anti-bacterial soap.

Katan Associates Study Shows Long-Awaited Life Sciences Roll-Up Will Continue, as Pharma and Larger Biotechs Hustle to Fill Dwindling Pipelines

Katan Associates Study Shows Long-Awaited Life Sciences Roll-Up Will Continue, as Pharma and Larger Biotechs Hustle to Fill Dwindling Pipelines: "LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 2005--Katan Associates International

Asia and European Union will continue to be fertile breeding ground for M&A transactions

Biotech-driven acquisitions will remain at the forefront of deal activity

'Consolidation will continue among Pharma and Biotech in 2005, whether a true 'roll-up' occurs or not. This activity will be fueled by the need for Pharma to fill the pipeline and the need for Biotech to continue to gain critical mass,' says Seth Yakatan, MBA, Partner, Katan Associates International. 'While the United States has historically been the most active region for deals, Europe and Asia will provide fertile grounds for buyers, given value considerations and a strong lack of mezzanine and secondary capital providers in these markets.'"
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Interesting...

Israeli Companies Suspected of Spying - Yahoo! News

Israeli Companies Suspected of Spying - Yahoo! News: "JERUSALEM - It started out as a family feud. But a small-time computer break-in has erupted into Israel's biggest business scandal in decades, reaching into some of the country's powerful corporate suites and jolting the cozy world of the industrial elite.

Top Israeli blue chip companies, including a high-tech giant that trades in New York, are suspected of using illicit surveillance software to steal information from their rivals and enemies."
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And we were all worried about the Koreans stealing biotech secrets.