The Bionic Man has not arrived, and to our knowledge the military has not equipped any special agents with cyborg implants to boost their optical capabilities in the field. No, the news is both less and more exciting than those fantasy scenarios: people with end-stage age-related macular degeneration (AMD) now have the chance to see again. Surgeons and vision scientists at the University of California Davis Eye Center in Sacramento recently celebrated their first successful procedure with the new technology. The medical duo that performed the operation were Drs. Mark Mannis and Jennifer Li.
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Tags: CA, University of California Davis, Optics, Southwest, California, 2012, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Davis, Sacramento Campus, UCD
One of the ways to measure how well a program or department at a university is doing is to look at their graduate programs. To be able to offer the PhD in a specialized area, you need qualified faculty willing and able to take on teaching and mentoring responsibilities; a strong reputation for excellence in the area; research opportunities (and RA funding) for those doctoral students; and equipment and laboratory facilities, to name just a few factors. So when you see an institution win a major grant to launch a PhD program, you know that's a hot area for research and facilities expansion as well.
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Tags: CA, biomedical research, Photonics, University of California Irvine, Southwest, California, 2012, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Funding, Irvine
UCSF, Mission Bay biomedical research programs are developing and expanding at a rapid rate. Currently, the university has more ongoing biomedical construction projects than anywhere else in the world. Many new research centers and institutes are appearing in spaces that also contain areas for clinical trials and patient care.
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Tags: CA, Southwest, 2012, San Francisco, SFVS, Biotechnology Vendor Showcase, new facilities, UC San Francisco, new Building, bio medical research
Watch out corn, you might just have some competition from the tequila plant in the modern day quest for biofuels. The DOE is funding a new $14.3M multi-lab project to study the CAM pathway in drought tolerant plants like agave, a hearty desert succulent. Dr. John Cushman in the department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Reno is receiving a new $7.6M grant, with a portion going to the University Liverpool in England as collaborators. The rest of the grant, $6.3M, is being divided between the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Newcastle University, and UT Knoxville. The name of this substantial new grant is: Engineering CAM Photosynthetic Machinery into Bioenergy Crops for Biofuels Production in Marginal Environments. Reno's high desert climate is an ideal center for this innovative biofuel research at a time when rainfall is becoming scarce and new solutions are going to have to be found if we plan to adapt to climate change.
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Tags: 2012 Research Funding, University of Nevada, biofuels, UNR, Southwest, 2012, University Research, Funding, Research Funding, Front Line event, NV, new research grants, Reno
(Courtesy of the Center For Nano and Molecular Science, UTA)
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Tags: Bioscience research, Bioresearch, University of Texas, nanotechnology, Southwest, 2012, UTAust, Austin, TX, BioResearch Frontline Event
It seems we can get oil from any number of unlikely substances these days, and a joint biofuel research team from Texas A&M and Cornell is trying to do just that. With a $2M grant from the NSF, researchers are studying how to extract the naturally-produced oil from algae. So next time you look at a green swimming pool, consider that a similar muck just might be able to fuel your car. Algae is an eukaryotic organism that is photosynthetic and generally aquatic, and it comes in a wide variety of forms. It can be a very small single cell organism like B. braunii or a very large multi-cellular organism like kelp. It fact algae is one of the newest and most promising subjects of research in the quest for biofuels.
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Tags: Cornell University, biofuels, Texas A&M University, Texas, Southwest, 2012, Biochemistry, College Station, TAMU, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Energy, TX, BRPF
We've heard about the Golden Fleece Awards (vilifying seemingly-obscure science research) and the Golden Goose Awards (lauding seemingly-obscure science research) more than a little often in this year of threatened federal science budget cuts, but that's more politics than anything else. It certainly isn't half as much fun as the infamous and much-laughed-with Ig Nobel Prizes, given out yearly in honor of improbable research so absurd-sounding we can't help but love it. At this year's awards ceremony, held last Thursday night at Harvard University, 10 unlikely science research projects received their due respect (and a few guffaws) at the hands of genuinely bemused genuine Nobel laureates.
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Tags: CA, 2013, Northeast, Southwest, 2012, BioResearch Product Faire Front Line Event, Boston, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Event, MA, Harvard, science researchers, Harvard Medical School, UCSB, Santa Barbara, Happy scientist, UC Santa Barbara
In a recent round of new funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM), two UC Irvine stem cell research labs and their collaborators at other California universities and private labs have been awarded some $37M, of which approximately $12M will go directly to UCI. The two funded projects involve translational research to develop eventual clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease, in the one study, and retinitis pigmentosa in the other. The new awards bring Irvine's total CIRM funding over the years to $96.25 million, most carried out at the Sue & Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center (right) which opened its cutting-edge facility on campus 2 years ago.
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Tags: CA, Stem cell research, University of California Irvine, Southwest, California, 2012, Neuroscience, BioResearch Product Faire Event, Funding, Irvine, CIRM, UC Irvine
A research team composed of researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder and Yale University recently released a public demonstration of their Map of Life, a database that stores the geographic locations of the world's species. The demonstration version contains about 25,000 different species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and fish to date, but the goal is to have a complete record for every living organism on Earth.
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Tags: University of Colorado, Bioinformatics, Southwest, 2012, animal science, BioResearch Product Faire Event, CO, Boulder, UCO
Did you know you can be considered a "pot-head" without ever touching, let alone smoking, marijuana? When early neuroscientists went looking for the mental hardware that allowed the body to respond to the active ingredient in the cannabis sativa plant (called THC), they found much more than they were bargaining for. They did in fact identify a perfectly-shaped receptor in the brain. Puzzled at why it would exist (surely the human body was not designed with cannabis-intake in mind?), they went on to discover that the body itself makes a cannabis-like substance, called an endocannabinoid, and that it is part of a complex system regulating appetite, pain, pleasure, and immunity. So, technically, your brain is already wired for pot, and your body produces it all by itself.
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Tags: CA, Cannabinoids, University of California Irvine, Southwest, California, 2012, Neuroscience, Biotechnology Vendor Showcase, Irvine, UC Irvine