Faster than the speed of light?
Do you want to know what scientists really think about neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light? A must for this week is to check out the Nature News Podcast. You can also find out how to measure happiness, how food puts flies in the mood for love, as well as how to improve clinical trials and get more drugs to market:
Immunity and the world’s most expensive drug
This week, in the first of a two part installment, Kausik Datta has been explaining to his readers what Dendritic cells are, and their role in supporting the immune system:
Dendritic Cells (DCs) are important members of the mammalian immune system. Working at the interface of innate and adaptive immune response, DCs are primarily antigen-presenting cells (APCs). DCs are derived from certain hematopoietic (bone-marrow derived) progenitors of either lymphoid or myeloid lineage, giving rise, respectively, to plasmacytoid DCs (pDCs) and myeloid DCs (mDCs) that localize to mucosal epithelium (inner lining of nose, lungs, the GI tract; also, the langerhans cells of the skin), as well as to peripheral blood.
You can find out more about their functions in his summary post and check out his second instalment here.
The Spoonful of Medicine blog has revealed that sufferers of a rare blood disorder called atypical hemolytic-uremic syndrome (aHUS), can expect to shell out more than $400,000 per year for the price of the antibody drug which can treat the disease. The drug, Alexion’s Soliris (eculizumab), has just received regulatory approval in the US to treat the clotting disease and a final decision from European regulators is expected within two months:
The drug doesn’t come cheap, though. Currently priced at $409,500 per year, Soliris is the world’s most expensive medication, according to Forbes. And even though the drug is approved for only two rare conditions, it has proven quite profitable: Soliris pulled in $541 million in 2010, and sales are reportedly up by close to 50% so far this year.
Find out more about a aHUS, a life-threatening genetic disease, in the post, as well as more information on Soliris.
Music and motivation
Blogger Eric-Wubbo Lameijer reveals in his latest post that being motivated helps learning – a lot more than you’d think. He dissects a study by Gary McPherson et al. who looked at primary school children taking up music lessons, trying to predict how fast they’d learn to master their instrument. Their aim was to discover why key factors caused some students to be more successful than others:
That one thing was motivation, as measured by the question “How long do you expect to play this instrument? Through this year? Through primary school? Through high school? All your life?” These answers were subdivided into three categories, short-term commitment, medium-term commitment and long-term commitment. Next to that, McPherson measured how much each child practiced every week: low (20 minutes a week), medium (45 minutes a week) and high (90 minutes a week) [EWL: I’m not certain whether Coyle has reported these measures accurately, as future top pianists, for example, started out at between 60 minutes and 90 minutes a day, even at age 5] Anyway, the above graph shows the measured relationship between musical progress, on a performance scale, motivation, and average weekly practice.
You can find out more about this theory in his post.
Engineering Genetic Codes
Scitable’s blogger, Eric Sawyer, divulges that one of the main goals geneticists are working towards is to engineer the genetic code so that it can incorporate non-standard amino acids (like the fluorescent amino acid pictured below) into proteins:
Cells only use 20 amino acids, all left-handed, whereas chemists can synthesize a much broader suite in the lab. In order to incorporate non-standard amino acids into proteins, you have to incorporate it into the organism’s genetic code by assigning it a codon. If we work within the existing (degenerate) genetic code, the only choice is to pick a codon to assign doubly since all 64 combinations are already assigned. Even with this limitation it’s possible to incorporate non-standard amino acids into the genetic code.
Find out why this goal is so important and consider its future applications in Eric’s post.
Lindau Videos
Each year, young researchers from all over the world meet with Nobel prize-winners on the idyllic island of Lindau to discuss the big questions in science. The 2011 meeting focused on the world’s greatest health challenges and how to tackle them, with the Nature Video team on hand to capture the conversations on camera. To watch these special moments, you can read our summary post, can also check out Nature Job’s latest update and also peruse the official Lindau blog. Let us know what you think about this week’s video: Bench or bedside? with Ferid Murad:
Congratulations
In May we announced the details of our new recognition system for Nature Network bloggers and have been providing 3-month online subscriptions to Nature for regular bloggers. Congratulations to the bloggers who have qualified this month:
For those bloggers who have yet to qualify, don’t be disheartened as there’s always next month. Keep up the great blogging! Further details can be found in our blog post, Saying thanks to our bloggers.
Finally a solution!
So if Viktor Poor’s last brain teaser got you in a scientific muddle, check out his graphical cartoon, which explains how to solve it.
Keep an eye on Viktor’s blog for his next teaser!