Some 40 years after the release of the classic science fiction movie Fantastic Voyage, researchers in the NanoRobotics Laboratory of École Polytechnique de Montréal’s Department of Computer Engineering and Institute of Biomedical Engineering have achieved a major technological breakthrough in the field of medical robotics. They have succeeded for the first time in guiding, in vivo and via computer control, a microdevice inside an artery, at a speed of 10 centimetres a second.

USC College computational biologist Peter Calabrese has developed a new model to simulate the evolution of so-called recombination hotspots in the genome.

Published March 5 in the early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the mathematical model and its associated software bring much-needed rigor to evolutionary investigations of how natural selection acts on individual genes, said Calabrese, a research assistant professor of biological sciences.

People who develop dementia or Alzheimer's disease experience brain structure changes years before any signs of memory loss begin, according to a study published in the April 17, 2007, issue of Neurology®, the scientific journal of the American Academy of Neurology. Researchers say these findings may help identify people at risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI), which leads to Alzheimer's disease.

Coffee is pretty much old hat anymore. Sure people like it, and drink it all the time, even though it is acidic and it's bad for you (thanks Ray Kurzwiel, you're the man). Coffee makes people more alert, induces mild eurphoria, and even tastes good sometimes. But the reality is, ( and I have this knowledge because I live on campus and I know what generally goes on here), college kids are taking smart drugs more and more all the time. The most well known example is adderall, which is a highly addictive and somewhat dangerous drug if not used with caution. Nonetheless we still gave it to our kids all the time. Not surpisingly they shared it with their friends.

From now, I plan to write a report every week about the news, announcements, important essays and interesting stories of the project. I would like to give you a clear overview of Wikipedia. I hope you’re going to enjoy the first edition.

What to start with if not this brand new wonderful project: Planet Wikimedia. It’s a blog agregator which collects all the Wikipedia related posts and blogs to make it easier to follow the changes. You can request for inclusion here. This process leads to a peer-reviewed list of feeds. (They’ve added my blog’s wikipedia tag to the list, so this post is also going to show up there.)

The way people search for and find chemistry information is always in flux.

Right now, Open Access is a hot topic (e.g. Open Source Archivangelism post) and it is interesting to see how those seeking OA sources are connecting with those who choose to share information in that way.

THE PUZZLE OF ENRICHMENT 

The mice were up late last night, as they should be. I could hear the squeaky, cheaply made Chinese running wheel going on and on and on and on.

The running wheel is, along with the equally ubiquitous mouse house and paper tube, among the most common of the modern lab's attempts to "enrich" the mouse environment. The purpose of such is to draw the mouse's attention away from the bars of the cage and into the the center of the cage.

In theory, if you could define all the factors that go into making a decision and could define exactly how important is each of these factors, and could define how these factors interact, you could make an equation that precisely solves any decision. Of course, to be perfect, this equation would have to be tweaked and amended to include the variables that are relevant to each person making the decision, and the framework of the equation would have to reflect their personal value systems, etc.

What a pain in the neck!

It's much easier (and funnier!) just to wink at the problem and shoot to mimic common sense as closely as possible with a minimum of variables. So that's what I try to do with these equations: match common sense, and hopefully provide a laugh.

On the latest episode of my podcast, Books and Ideas , I talk with Lee M Silver about his recent book,Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life. We discuss the confrontation of Faith and Biotechnology. His book is an in depth anaylsis of some of the key issues such as embryonic stem cell research and genetic engineering (including the genetic modification of crops).

As interest in the rising number of newly characterized microbial genomes mounts, powerful computational tools become critical for the management and analysis of these data to enable strategies for such challenges as harvesting the potential of carbon-neutral bioenergy sources and coping with global climate change.

The Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) data management system developed by the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) addresses this challenge with the release of version 2.1. Released on the two-year anniversary of its launch, the content of IMG 2.1 is updated with new microbial genomes from National Center for Biotechnology Information’s (NCBI) Reference Sequence collection (RefSeq) latest release, Version 21.