Medicine

Once thought unimaginable, Regenerative Medicine accelerates the healing process to fully restore the health of damaged tissues and organs. These innovative medical therapies are showing great promise over traditional medical treatments. Regenerative medicine has already successfully grown heart valves from human cells. With the use of biomaterials to create a mold, scientists engineer the cells to grow in the form of a heart valve. Once mastered in clinical trials, any transplant patient will be able to receive a heart valve that is essentially their own, making reject a non-issue. Regenerative medicine hopes to one day be able to repair these valves without even having to perform surgery. Read more…

Curing a disease by causing another one seems counter-intuitive, but that's just what scientists at Yale University have done. Specifically, they have modified a virus and injected it into mice with several kinds of inoperable brain cancer. Three days later, the tumors were gone.

Energy

Solar-collecting roads heat buildings in the Netherlands. Solar is a highly efficient way to heat water. Combine it with underground storage, and a year-round system can be created where the system can cover heating requirements in the winter and cooling in the summer. The Dutch company Ooms Avenhorn Hilding BV has taken this concept and moved it a step forward. Read more…

E. Coli can be used to produce energy: For most of us, Escherichia coli (the bacteria commonly known as E. coli) doesn't exactly have the most pleasant connotations, unless, for some strange reason, you really love to follow a meal out with a trip to the emergency room. But … by genetically modifying a strain of e. coli [Thomas Wood]… has discovered a way to make it produce 140 times more hydrogen than it would under ordinary circumstances.

We take good news – no matter how accidental – where ever we can find it. Greenhouse gas emissions by all the Group of Eight industrial nations except Russia fell in 2006 in the broadest dip since the world started trying to slow climate change in 1990, a Reuters survey showed on Friday. This doesn’t mean that we’re in less trouble, but the curve is a bit slower than we’d feared, and change can still be effective. Read more…

Lovely to ponder: