Christie Rizk is a reporter and editor based in New York. She currently writes for the New York Genome Center, and has worked as a reporter, editor, and producer at Genome Technology magazine, Thomson-Reuters, and The Brooklyn Paper.
alzheimer's
Brain Science Could Be the Next Big Leap
Those who tuned in to President Obama's State of the Union speech in February might have missed a brief mention of a project some say will catalyze an entire new industry devoted to understanding the brain. "Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s," Obama said. "Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race." This brain mapping effort is the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (or BRAIN) Initiative, proposed jointly by the President and researchers. Obama has called it one of this century's "Grand Challenges," akin to mapping the human genome, or sending a man to the moon.
Bio + Life Sciences
How Graphene Could Transform DNA Sequencing and Cancer Research
In 2004, two UK scientists used a piece of Scotch tape to isolate single layers of graphene from a block of graphite, or pencil lead. Ever since, physicists and materials scientists have been trying to take advantage of the nanomaterial’s unique properties to use it in the construction of transistors, capacitors, and solar cells. The UK researchers, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work, which extended well beyond the tape trick of course. In recent years, graphene has come to the attention of biomedical researchers, who think its malleability makes it ideal for biological applications, ranging from disinfecting hospitals to detecting tumors to delivering drugs to sequencing DNA.
Automation
Bio-Robots Swim, Swarm, Change, and Shed Light on Evolution
Talk of robots and robotics research tends to conjure worries about manufacturing and futuristic fantasies about the “singularity.” But new bio-robots are designed instead to help us understand our evolutionary origins, and are providing insights into biology. In a lab on the campus of Vassar College in upstate New York, biology professor John Long and his team are studying robots in a water tank as they fight for evolutionary supremacy. The researchers are using biomimetic autonomous robots to understand how fish-like vertebrates that lived 500 million years ago evolved into the fish of today.
