There’s been a lot of talk about wearable electronics, specifically e-textiles, but nothing seems to have entered the marketplace. Scaling up your lab discoveries for industrial production can be quite problematic. From an October 10, 2019 news item on ScienceDaily, Producing functional fabrics that perform all the functions we want, while retaining the characteristics of fabric we’re accustomed to is no easy task.Two groups of researchers at Drexel University — one, who is leading the…

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Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) does not and never has made much sense to me. I understand each word individually it’s just that I’ve never thought they made much sense strung together that way. It’s taken years but I’ve finally found out what the words (when strung together that way) mean and the origins for the phrase. Hint: it’s all about the phages. Apparently, it all started with yogurt as Cynthia Graber and…

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A February 4, 2020 news item on Nanowerk announces research that makes it possible for kidneys to remove nanoparticles after they’ve been used in therapeutic remedies (Note: A link has been removed), In the past decade nanomedicine has contributed to better detection and treatment of cancer. Nanoparticles are several 100 times smaller than the smallest grain of sand and can therefore easily travel in the blood stream to reach the tumor.However, they are still too…

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Understanding the concept of zero—I still remember climbing that mountain, so to speak. It took the teacher quite a while to convince me that representing ‘nothing’ as a zero was worthwhile. In fact, it took the combined efforts of both my parents and the teacher to convince me to use zeroes as I was prepared to go without. The battle is long since over and I have learned to embrace zero. I don’t think bees…

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I’ve never seen an educational institution use a somewhat vulgar slang term such as ‘puke’ before. Especially not in a news release. You’ll find that elsewhere online ‘puke’ has been replaced, in the headline, with the more socially acceptable ‘vomit’. Since I wanted to catch this historic moment amid concerns that the original version of the news release will disappear, I’m including the entire news release as i saw it on EurekAlert.com (from an October…

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In the world of video games such as the Deus Ex series eye augmentations are standard,now it seems that fantasy could become reality according to the latest American Chemical Society (ACS) meeting held in Fall 2019. From an August 27, 2019 news item on Nanowerk, Movies featuring heroes with superpowers, such as flight, X-ray vision or extraordinary strength, are all the rage. But while these popular characters are mere flights of fancy, scientists have used…

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A January 23, 2020 news item on Nanowerk features a number of new books. Here are summaries of a couple of them from the news item (Note: Links have been removed), …The main goal of “Nanotechnology in Skin, Soft Tissue, and Bone Infections” is to deal with the role of nanobiotechnology in skin, soft tissue and bone infections since it is difficult to treat the infections due to the development of resistance in them against…

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I may be mistaken but the implication seems to be that Charles M. Lieber’s lies (he was charged today, January 28, 2020 ) are the ‘tip of the iceberg’ of a very large problem. Ellen Barry’s January 28, 2020 article for the New York Times outlines at least part of what the US government is doing to discover and ultimately discourage the theft of biomedical research from US laboratories. …Dr. Lieber, a leader in the…

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