December: Microbots and Mutants

Okay, so the title is a bit of a lie. Again. But scientists did manage to grow eyes on the side of tadpoles' heads. Which pretty much makes them mutants. Why did they do this to the poor baby frogs? Well, it revealed an entirely new form of control over the formation of organs in the body. By altering voltage gradients, they were able to produce eyes in parts of the body that would never normally have eyes. While this may not have any clinical applications, it is an interesting find in the world of embryology.

Nanorobots were also new to the world in December. These are small (<1mm) machines that can be steered using magnets to the right place in the giant 3D maze of the circulatory system to detect disease and deliver the drugs needed. They have been in the pipeline since 2007, but development started in December last year.

In other science: 2 earth size exoplanets and 1 hospitable exoplanet in the Kepler system (Kepler-20e, 20f, and 22b respectively); engineers at MIT make a camera with 1 trillion frames per second, fast enough to capture light travelling across surfaces, and a potential vaccine for HIV goes into production.

The Science of 2011

It's a new year, this is a new blog (sort of), and science advances into the future. But before we storm off into the great unknown, armed with only our large hadron colliders and a few stethoscopes, over the next 12 days I'm going to be looking back over the last year to see what we, as a species, accomplished:

January: clairvoyance and cancer detection
The first month of the year brought us one step closer to combating two of the world's biggest killers: cancer and HIV.


Scientists in Boston discovered a method of sampling blood to discover whether there are any metastatic cancers in the body quickly and relatively painlessly, and joined up with Johnson & Johnson to  bring it to the market. The "liquid biopsy" would help doctors assess the effectiveness of treatments given to patients without having to wait for CT scans, allowing them to change how they're treating the patient in time to save them.


Later in the month, T-cells were found to be able to be made resistant to HIV by inserting a gene from E.Coli that produces an enzyme, mazF, into T-cells. MazF kills cells by breaking down mRNA, which is necessary for reproduction. In order to stop the enzyme simply killing the T-cells, the team used a gene that only produced the enzyme when stimulated by the HIV virus, so that as soon as the cells were infected, they 'killed' their infectors. Which is pretty cool. 


In other science: according to research, people react to erotic stimuli before they actually happen in a study investigating ESP, and there is evidence that there were colossal volcanic eruptions about 250 million years ago that would explain the latest Permain extinction (killing 95% of sea life and 70% of land based life).