Professor Ram Sasisekharan and research scientist Kannan Tharakaraman have found that a strain of H1N1 influenza in India is more virulent than health authorities have indicated, writes Rishi Lyengar of Time. “They found mutations in the Indian strains in a protein called hemagglutinin, which binds with receptors on the human body’s respiratory cells,” Lyengar writes.
Laura Santhanam writes for the PBS NewsHour that MIT researchers have found that a strain of swine flu in India is more dangerous than originally thought. The researchers found that “a mutation in the new H1N1 strain allows this form of swine flu to attack an infected person’s respiratory cells more virulently.”
Prof. Robert Langer speaks with Chris Baraniuk of New Scientist about winning the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and his career in biotechnology. “It’s going to be the entrepreneurs, the new professors, the young people who are willing to think outside the box and not necessarily go down a conventional path,” says Langer of the future of medicine.
Professor Robert Langer has won the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for his pioneering work with medical technologies, reports David Shukman for BBC News. Shukman notes that “as many as two billion people have in some way been touched by technologies devised and developed by him and his teams.”
Prof. Robert Langer has been awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, writes Financial Times reporter Clive Cookson. Lord Broers, chair of the QE Prize judges, explains that Langer was honored for his “immense contribution to healthcare and to numerous other fields.”
Karen Hopkin of Scientific American writes about a new method developed by MIT researchers for increasing the size of tissue samples to allow for better observation. Thus far, the researchers have used the new technique to “peer into the brains of mice, fruit flies and zebrafish,” Hopkin explains.
Using a polymer found in diapers that swells on contact with water, Prof. Ed Boyden and his colleagues have developed a method for enlarging tissue samples to allow for better 3-D imaging, writes Jessica Hamzelou for New Scientist. The team can enlarge samples to more than four times their original size, Hamzelou reports.
John Markoff writes for The New York Times about a new technique for observing minuscule features in biological samples developed by Prof. Ed Boyden and his colleagues. The researchers “were able to increase the physical size of cultured cells and tissue by as much as five times while still preserving their structure,” Markoff explains.
Rebecca Jacobson of the PBS NewsHour reports that MIT researchers have developed a new technique to enlarge tissue samples, allowing scientists to create high-resolution images of specimens. Prof. Ed Boyden explains that “now you can see tiny structures with your own eyes.”
Carolyn Johnson of The Boston Globe writes that MIT researchers have developed a new way to enlarge microscopic lab samples to allow for more-detailed imaging of brain cells. The new technique “may offer an inexpensive way for people to examine fine cellular structures at a detailed level using off-the-shelf ingredients.”
A team of MIT researchers has devised a new method for obtaining super-high resolution images from lab microscopes, writes Malcolm Ritter for the AP. The researchers found that by permeating a tissue sample with a specialized version of sodium polyacrylate they were able to enlarge the sample, making them easier to image.
Led by Professor Eric Alm, a team of researchers plans to analyze sewage in Cambridge to screen for data on disease and drug use, reports Michael Fitzgerald for The Boston Globe. “Sewage is really an unexploited source of rich information about human activities,” says Alm.
“There’s an enormous richness of information by looking in the water that’s indicative of what’s going in a city in a real-time fashion,” says Prof. Eric Alm in an interview with Wudan Yan of The Daily Beast of his idea to examine public health by tracking the transmission of pathogens in sewers.
WBUR’s Deborah Becker and Lynn Jolicoeur report on the new MIT-MGH partnership aimed at developing better tools to treat disease. Prof. Arup Chakraborty hopes the collaboration will allow researchers to take risks. “Safe ideas are often not the transformative ones,” he says.
Brendan Borrell writes for Scientific American about how MIT researchers have engineered the DNA of E.coli to detect and record environmental information. “Building gene circuits requires not only computation and logic, but a way to store that information,” says Prof. Timothy Lu. “DNA provides a very stable form of memory and will allow us to do more complex computing tasks.”