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.

October: Millions of people, malaria, and maybe cloning?

October 18th was a bad day for Malaria, which means it was a great day for the rest of the world. On the same day that WHO announced a worldwide drop by 20% of deaths from malaria, signalling the downfall of one of the world's biggest killers, a malaria vaccine was reported to be successful. In the trial, including 15,000 children, the participants had about half the risk of getting the disease as those without the vaccine. Malaria kills 655,000 people per year, and the work towards eradicating it is a long and arduous task, so good news such as this is always welcome. By the time I will (hopefully) be training to be a medic, it is estimated that another 8-10 countries will have rid themselves of it; hopefully it will follow the same path as polio - a disease which had had no new cases in India, one of the previous hotspots, for 9 months by October 2011.

Stem cells again featured in the headlines for October, this time for their production. Dolly the sheep made somatic cell nuclear transfer famous when she was the first mammal to be cloned in the late 90's; this method had been used since then to try and clone humans so that embryonic stem cells might be made without actual fertilisation of an egg by a sperm cell. However, the embryos produced in this method, which involves taking the nucleus out of an egg and inserting the genetic material of an adult cell (not a sex cell) in order to gain a genetically identical replica of the original adult, did not divide further than 6-12 cells. In order to bypass this method, a team in New York tried a new method: the genetic material of the adult would still be inserted, but this time without first enucleating the egg. This allowed the cell to develop into a blastocyst, where the embryonic stem cells are formed. However, because there was the nucleus of both the adult cell (containing 2 'sets' of chromosomes) and the nucleus of the egg (containing 1 'set' of chromosomes), there was then three of each chromosome. Which, sadly, means that the technique is not quite ready for use in medicine, as it doesn't yet produce cells with only the genes of the donor, and there may be problems with the chromosome numbers. Definitely a technique to watch in the future, as the use of stem cells edges closer towards the mainstream.

In other science: 7 billion people are living on the planet, according to the UN, the dwarf planet Eris is apparently just as big as Pluto, and a study suggests that exercise is just as good as drugs at preventing migranes.

February: Frankenrats and Flu Vaccines

In a (scary) breakthrough, a ring-shaped brain made out of rat neurons was created in Pittsburgh, in an attempt to study how neural networks manage to store and transmit data as well as they do. Not only did this circle of cells on a protein disc grow to form a network, it was able to store memories - when the brain was subjected to an electric impulse, it mimicked the impulse for another 12 seconds after it had gone. 12 seconds may not sound like a long time to remember something, but for a group of 40-60 neurons in a petri dish, that's impressive.


Closer to home, Dr. Sarah Gilbert of Oxford University led a successful trial of a potentially universal flu vaccine. Instead of making the body produce more of the correct antibody, like most vaccines, her idea was to stimulate the production and activation of T-cells (which destroy infected cells). In the small study that she did, the vaccinated volunteers had more T-cells, and more that were "primed and ready to kill", as she put it. Not a woman to bump into in a dark lab at night. If this can be replicated, it could spell the end for costly, lengthy developments of new vaccines for the seasonal flu each year.


In other science: on my birthday, it was discovered that there are 500 000 000 planets in the milky way alone that are in the 'Goldilocks zone' - not too hot, not too cold, where life could potentially exist. Maybe I'll be treating aliens by the time I graduate!