Cloning: A Giant
Step
by Steve Connor, Thothweb
For the first time, scientists have
created dozens of cloned embryos from adult primates. But what are
the implications of this technical breakthrough for the future of
mankind?
A technical breakthrough has enabled
scientists to create for the first time dozens of cloned embryos
from adult monkeys, raising the prospect of the same procedure being
used to make cloned human embryos.
Attempts to clone human embryos for research have been dogged by
technical problems and controversies over fraudulent research and
questionable ethics. But the new technique promises to revolutionise
the efficiency by which scientists can turn human eggs into cloned
embryos.
It is the first time that scientists have been able to create viable
cloned embryos from an adult primate – in this case a 10-year-old
male rhesus macaque monkey – and they are scheduled to report their
findings later this month...
Click
here for the rest of the story
'Super' Scanner Shows
Key Detail
BBC News
A new scanner has been unveiled which can
produce 3D body images of unprecedented clarity while reducing
radiation by as much as 80%.
The new 256-slice CT machine takes large numbers of X-ray pictures,
and combines them using computer technology to produce the final
detailed images.
It also generates images in a fraction of the time of other
scanners: a full body scan takes less than a minute.
The Philips machine was unveiled at the Radiological Society of
North America.
Because the images are 3D they can be rotated and viewed from
different directions - giving doctors the greatest possible help in
looking for signs of abnormalities or disease...
Click
here for the rest of the story.
I Was a
Neuroscience Guinea Pig: How Scientists Scrambled My Brain
by
Lisa Katayama, Wired
SAN FRANCISCO -- I feel like the
hoodlum Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange: My head is
held steady by a chin strap, while two technicians grease my scalp
with conductive gel and slip on a cap bristling with electrodes.
I'm about to have my brain scrambled -- electrically -- in the name
of medical science. Scientists are going to knock out regions of my
brain while I perform a memory test.
"We're ready to do some zapping!" one of the technicians says
excitedly.
I'm a guinea pig in a brain-scan experiment conceived by
neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, who is testing how memory changes with
age. The "zapping" induces seizures in some subjects and cures
depression in others. I don't know what it will do to me, but I'm
about to find out.
Brain experiments are a dime a dozen these days. But Gazzaley's
experiment is the first to combine three brain-scan technologies in
one study: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
electroencephalography (EEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation
(TMS), which will knock out some of my memory circuits...
Click
here for the rest of the story
Paralysed Man's
Mind is 'Read'
BBC News
Scientists say they may be on the
brink of translating into words the thoughts of a man who can no
longer speak, after a pioneering experiment.
Electrodes have been implanted in the brain of Eric Ramsay, who has
been "locked in" - conscious but paralysed - since a car crash eight
years ago.
These have been recording pulses in areas of the brain involved in
speech.
Now, New Scientist magazine reports, they are to use the signals he
generates to drive speech software.
Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston
University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr.
Ramsay's brain is imagining some 80% of the time...
Click
here for the rest of the story
|
