Author Archives: jchen93

What’s my title again?

Posted on March 10, 2014 | 2 comments

A new study by Howard J. Federoff and his team of researchers has been released, and they have discovered a new way of identifying people who are at risk of having Alzheimer or other mental brain impairments within three years. This five year study took place at Georgetown University Medical center,  and the study states that their discovery is capable of predicting the presence of the disease with 90% accuracy, by identifying ten specific  lipids (fats) in your blood that are believed to present disease onset.

Alzheimer is a life altering degenerative disease that is one of the more common types of dementia, a loss of cognitive ability, and it is affecting an estimated 40 million people worldwide, with the World Health Organization stating that the number will double every 20 years.  By 2050, the numbers are expected to rise to over 115 million, a staggering number for something with no cure.

But our current way of predicting Alzheimer is not useful in preventing or treating the disease. At this time, Alzheimer is typically diagnosed when the various symptoms of Alzheimer starts showing up, such as memory loss. However, this comes at a time where there is already irreversible damage to the brain, and as there is presently no cure, the damage is already done.  Although there are various drugs presently available to try and combat these effects, they have all failed and Federoff believes this is due to the drugs being used far too late into the disease timeline.

Comparison of a normal brain and one with Alzheimer’s.
Photo by: National Institutes of Health (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

However, this study gives us a cheap and effective basis for diagnosing the disease, so while it only predicts with 90% accuracy, this is an improvement over the previous method of waiting for the first stages of the disease. Howard J. Federoff explained “We consider our results a major step towards the commercialization of a preclinical disease biomarker test that could be useful for large-scale screening to identify at risk individuals”.

Although this method is not clinically ready yet, this study is a step in the right direction of finding an effective way to combat Alzheimer.

Here is a link to the original study:

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nm.3466.html

-Jeffrey Chen

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Posted in Biological sciences, Issues in science, Uncategorized

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Move over, 3D Movies. 3D Printing is the New Trend.

Posted on February 10, 2014 | 3 comments

Do you remember the quote “You wouldn’t download a car”? It was the message that accompanied the dark, serious commercial on piracy. But with the wonders of technology, something like that is actually possible as silly as that sounds. How? 3D printing.

3D printing has been around since the 1980’s but has really started to take off more recently in the 2010’s due to a reduction in price and availability of the 3D printer. Although the 3D printer shares its name with the commonly used 2D computer printer, they are fundamentally quite different as the 3D printer prints out material in layers, one over another. Due to the versatility of the 3D printer, science has been utilizing 3D printers in a wide variety of ways, and this progressive stance has made an impact on many fields.

Regular 3D Printer (Photo by: Eva Wolf, Source: WikimediaCommons)

One example of science’s venture into 3D printer comes in the form of medical science, as 3D printer allows for the creation of things like the human liver. Obviously, the 3D printer doesn’t just magically make a kidney appear out of nowhere, so how does it do it? The San Diego Company, Organovo has been making a great deal of progress on it, and they are doing this by printing out a mass of human cells which can be thought of as the ink. These human cells cluster to form structures, before adding another layer. These layers eventually fuse to form the 3D shape of the organ.  Although that description is a bit simpler than what actually happens, it gives a brief idea of how it is done.

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Another way science has been utilizing 3D printers is in a field like marine-ecology. 3D printers are capable of recreating coral reef that can be placed into damaged marine ecosystems. These artificial coral reefs provide a source of habitat and helps improves the health of marine life there. This is exactly what is happening in the region of the Persian Gulf, an area where overfishing has been negatively impacting the ecosystem there. The use of artificial reef is bringing back balance back into the area.

Coral Reef (Photo by: Nick Hobgood Source: WikimediaCommons)

Those two examples give just a quick glimpse of what 3D printing can do and although it isn’t too widespread at the moment due to the price and the tech of the 3D printer. Over time, as price decreases and tech goes up, 3-D printing will continue to make its mark on science.

– Jeffrey Chen

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Posted in Biological sciences, Issues in science, Science in the news

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Chocolate: Dogs’ secret enemy

Posted on January 20, 2014 | 2 comments

Chocolate being bad for you? How could that be, but it turns out that chocolate can be quite dangerous for you and man’s best friend, the dog. This could be bad news with Valentine Day’s coming up, but exactly how much of a danger is it?

Chocolate (picture taken by: Andre Karwath)
(Source: Wikipedia commons)

 

Chocolate is a very common treat due to their sweet and addicting taste. Chocolates can come in a variety of flavours but typically contains cocoa, produced from cocoa beans. This cocoa contains one ingredient that turns out to be very harmful to dogs yet typically fine to humans.

Researchers have shown that this one substance is the key factor to a chocolate’s potency. An alkaloid known as theobromine is the nemesis of dogs, but why exactly does it turn out to be toxic to your dog when it appears that your dog can eat almost anything? The reason is that Dogs and many other animals metabolize theobromine at a very slow rate.  As theobromine affects the central nervous system as well as the heart muscle, this inability to metabolize or break it down quickly can cause death. Humans are capable or metabolizing theobromine much more readily, thus the toxicity of theobromine doesn’t play as much of a factor, although it can still be dangerous if one engulfs roughly a gigantic amount of chocolate.

Dog at Vet Photo by: Ildar Sagdejev (Source: Wikipedia Commons)

 

The lethal dosage, the amount that someone can digest before it being fatal has been studied by researchers to determine how dangerous chocolate is to dogs. Studies have shown that the LD50, the point at which 50% of the subjects who go over this limit die, of theobromine is roughly 300 milligrams per kilogram. The amount of theobromine in chocolate also varies with type. White chocolate contains very little theobromine, a Kit-Kat contains only 49mg, while dark chocolate such as Scharffen Berger 82% Cacao Extra Dark Chocolate contains 1100 milligrams per bar. So a 20kg dog would be able to consume 6 bars before reaching the LD50 point.  While 6 bars might be a lot for a human, that isn’t much for a dog.

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So as long as you keep chocolate high in theobromine away from your dogs, everything should be fine. Typical levels of chocolate bars do not have exceedingly high levels of theobromine, but it is important to be aware of the dangers on certain days like Valentines and Christmas.

One other interesting tidbit is that theobromine doesn’t actually contain any bromine, isn’t science confusing at times?

-Jeffrey Chen

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Posted in Biological sciences, Uncategorized

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