Charles Daney

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Many trace the origins of nanomedicine to a talk Richard Feynman gave at Caltech in 1959—There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. During the lecture, Feynman proposed the idea of chemical manipulation at the atomic level and suggested that patients might one day “swallow the surgeon” in the form of tiny machines. Some 50 years later, researchers are still working to realize these dreams, but Feynman would no doubt be impressed by the list of nanomedicine applications being developed today. Nanomaterials have made their way into drug-delivery systems and diagnostics, and are quickly becoming essential basic research tools. Tags: nanotechnology nanobiotechnology - Charles Daney

A journalist once asked the behavioral psychologist Donald Hebb whether a person’s genes or environment mattered most to the development of personality. Hebb replied that the question was akin to asking which feature of a rectangle—length or width—made the most important contribution to its area. ... When the human genome was sequenced in 2001, the hope was that all such questions would be answered. In the intervening decade, it has become apparent that there are many more questions than before. Tags: genetics behavior - Charles Daney

The Atacama large milllimetre/submillimetre array (Alma) in Chile is the largest, most complex telescope ever built. Alma's purpose is to study processes occurring a few hundred million years after the formation of the Universe when the first stars began to shine. Its work should help explain why the cosmos looks the way it does today. Tags: astronomy - Charles Daney

Work in the past few months has highlighted several potential roadblocks. Reprogramming can be inefficient and induce mutations; the reprogrammed cells cannot develop into some cell types; and those they can generate are not always a good model for disease. New issues are emerging apace: work published last week shows that, in a particular strain of mice, iPS cells cause immune reactions when they are transplanted. Tags: stem cells - Charles Daney

Discoveries in recent years suggest that nature knows a few tricks that physicists don't: coherent quantum processes may well be ubiquitous in the natural world. Known or suspected examples range from the ability of birds to navigate using Earth's magnetic field to the inner workings of photosynthesis — the process by which plants and bacteria turn sunlight, carbon dioxide and water into organic matter, and arguably the most important biochemical reaction on Earth. Tags: biology quantum mechanics - Charles Daney

How did we acquire our beautiful brains? How did the savage struggle for survival produce such an extraordinary object? This is a difficult question to answer, not least because brains do not fossilise. Thanks to the latest technologies, though, we can now trace the brain's evolution in unprecedented detail, from a time before the very first nerve cells right up to the age of cave art and cubism. Tags: neuroscience evolution - Charles Daney

Far from being humble messengers, RNAs of all shapes and sizes are now seen to be powerful players in how genomes operate. In fact, gene regulation has turned out to be a surprisingly complex process governed by various types of regulatory DNA, which may lie deep in the wilderness of supposed “junk.” Far from being humble messengers, RNAs of all shapes and sizes are actually powerful players in how genomes operate. Tags: rna gene regulation - Charles Daney

Planet hunters have found extrasolar planets by watching for the subtle wobble in a star's position as a planet's gravity tugs it back and forth. They've noted the almost imperceptible dimming of a star's light as a planet passes between it and Earth. They've seen a distant star twinkle, first brightly and then faintly, as a nearer star, and then its planet drift by. But a new way to find planets may be the most ingenious yet. Tags: extrasolar planets - Charles Daney