Science Market Update

The old days of doors being closed to women in the sciences seem to be at an end, at least if Google has any say in the matter.  With the finale of their 1st annual Science Fair competition on July 11, Google announced the three winners (out of 10,000 young scientists from around the world), and they were all young American women engaged in bioscience research.  The contest allowed projects in any science field, and gender was not a selection category for the winners, though age was. 

      The smartphone is perhaps one of the most widely used pieces of technology in the modern world. The rapid expansion in the computer science fields of these devices, such as Apple's iPhone, is focused upon the phone's abilities to produce smartphone applications, more commonly known as "apps".

In the world of everyday computer technology, we know that the adjective "smart" (as in smartphone) refers to a flexible system that performs a variety of tasks on demand.  My smartphone can be a camera, a calculator, a music player, a video chatting device, or an internet portal.  If it were intuitive, like the car I don't yet own, it would automatically adjust its suspension for varied terrain or steer itself back onto the road if I dozed, without even requiring my input to maintain my comfort and safety.

When the President launched the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) last month, a key component was the National Robotics Initiative (NRI), which will pool the resources of multiple government agencies to support the development of robots designed to augment the work and health of human beings.  These are known as assistive systems, in contrast to the totalitarian robots of science fiction dystopias that threaten to supplant humans. 

      According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 5.8 million Americans suffer from heart failure, with over half a million new cases diagnosed each year. Fatality of this disease is one in five within the first year of diagnosis. Often treated with aggressive medical and device therapy, heart disease has no cure. Symptoms include shortness of breath, exhaustion, and extremity swelling in the ankles, feet, legs, and occasionally the abdomen.

Five years ago the federal government decided that private biomedical research companies were not bringing enough new technology to patients in need, and that it would step up that process by having the NIH fund research at academic medical institutions to bridge the gap between basic science and practical treatment.  Thus the CTSA was born: the Clinical & Translational Science Awards program, a research consortium supporting the translation of science into medicine by accelerating laboratory discoveries.

The University of California, Irvine and French scientists have discovered the switch that causes healthy brain cells to become epileptic.  This breakthrough may help treat and prevent the most common form of epilepsy, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). 

Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder that is characterized by seizures.  Temporal lobe epilepsy is a type of epilepsy where the seizures arise from one or both of the temporal lobes of the brain.  It affects one to two percent of the population and is currently resistant to treatment 30% of the time.

Innovation is described as "the creation or improvement of products, technologies, and ideas", and is the core reason education, the economy, and society progress from simple forms to more sophisticated and complex organisms.

Oregon Health and Science University recently announced that they have accumulated enough funding to fully begin construction of the new life sciences building on Portland's South Waterfront.

         Green architecture is widely endorsed within the fields of residential, commercial businesses, community centers, and educational/research oriented buildings. One particular firm, HDR, Inc, has embraced the challenge of incorporating the needs of the global populations with the necessities of sustaining the environment in which these facilities are to be erected.

            Using computational models, UC Riverside neuroscience researchers Maxim Bazhenov and Giri Krishnan discovered precisely how neurons function during epileptic seizures. With this information, they were able to determine what chemicals could impede the neuron’s misfiring, which could lead to breakthrough discoveries in new antiepileptic drugs. 

LA Times architecture critic and urban culture columnist Christopher Hawthorne brings a different voice to the table in his June 12 Times article when he asks: "doesn't the general freak out over the shutdown suggest, in and of itself, its fundamental folly?"  He wonders if spending $1B on an added freeway lane is really what LA needs to be doing to make the future more...accommodating.
 
Public transit does exist in LA, and improvements, extensions, and rail links are all underway thanks to the Measure R transit initiative sales tax increase approved by voters in 2008, as well as some recent loan money from Washington.  But the real change has to happen in the psyche of Los Angeles County's 9,818,605 citizens.  Yet another LA Times article on the impact of the freeway closure is simply titled: "Caution: lifestyle changes ahead."  It leads with the picture of a happy young couple who planned their wedding this Sunday long before the doomsday forecast.  They will get married all the same.  Because if this is the end of the world as we know it, well, they feel fine.

       A common problem in many urban areas, such as New York City, is the overflow of the city's sewer systems due to storm water runoff. Compared to rural areas, where most of the rainwater can easily percolate raw and uncovered earth to return to groundwater aquifers, cities often encounter the issue of flooding and excess runoff due to an enormous amount of paved areas, leaving little room for the absorption of rain and other runoffs into the ground. This flooding is normally controlled by storm drains and sewage systems.

Since the approval of the President's Universal Heathcare Measure, researchers at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (US Dept. of Health) have been tasked not only with the challenge of clarifying the options of the proposed socialized medicine program, but with marketing health itself.  If healthcare is going to be funded from the public coffer, it follows that the public has a certain responsibility not to abuse that privilege with unhealthy behaviors.  Put another way, good health is the right thing to do.  But how do you convince people of that?  A business and healthcare administration professor at the University of Utah Eccles School of Business, Debra Scammon, concludes in a recent paper in the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing titled "Transforming Consumer Health" that the answer is a strong social marketing campaign.

Do you think of chemical engineers as life scientists?  How about petroleum engineers?  Surely there's nothing biological going on in a tank of gasoline?  Not now perhaps, but millions of years ago that black ooze we call crude oil was alive, in the form of plant and animal matter.  Hurrying the chemical breakdown of living matter into something we can burn in our cars is the challenge for some of today's brightest chemical engineers who work on turning algae into fuel in an efficient, sustainable green chemistry process.

In a speech given at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on June 24, President Obama announced the launch of the $500M Advanced Manufacturing Partnership (AMP) between university research science, government agencies, and industry to increase investment in technologies that create 21st Century manufacturing jobs here in the United States. In addition to Carnegie Mellon, the research institutions involved in the initiative are: the University of Michigan, the University of California-Berkeley, MIT, Stanford, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. 

In a demonstration of just how complicated it can be to do life science research, Scripps Institute of Oceanography at UCSD just announced a major project to catalog and make available to study fish that were caught by scientists 40 or 50 years ago.  It's called the Library of Fishes, and thanks to an NSF award it will soon get to the stage where it can open its doors (and jars) to researchers.

As this new decade begins, a prominent overtone that is in the spotlight of the bright minds of modern architects is sustainable design. The enthusiasm for environmental consideration when designing new buildings is centered in the most vibrant cultural centers: our universities, where some of the worlds’ most vitalizing minds work in tandem to create sustainable designs for future generations’ prosperity and use as well as their own.

A team of Genomics Researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle have recently uncovered several sporadic gene mutations in the protein producing areas of the genome, called the exome, that may be linked to autism spectrum disorders. The scientists used the latest molecular biology techniques as well as parallel sequencing to simultaneously examine the exomes of several children with a certain form of autism.

University of Texas' Health Science Center has received more funding from the San Antonio city council to help complete a $150 million building, scheduled to open October 13.