Qatar takes center stage this week with highlights on its first professional astronomer as well as the youngest Arab doctor to graduate from its own branch of Weil Cornell Medical College.
Khaled Al Suabi, whose team discovered three Jupiter-like exoplanets since 2010, was awarded a US$5 million grant by the Qatar National Research Fund to expand his planet hunting scheme. The money will help establish observations stations in the Canary Islands, New Mexico and Iran, and he expects his team will discover around 50 more planets in the next five to six years. Read more about his story here.
Iqbal El-Assad, a 20 year old Palestinian who grew up in Lebanon, is the youngest medical doctor to graduate from Weil Cornell College in Qatar. In a Q&A, El-Assad reveals an inspiring story of a prodigy with ambition fueled in part by her childhood visits to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Read her story here.
On the medical front, a discovery in Mauritius is helping scientists sidestep some of the ethical hurdles of studying hepatitis B (HBV), a virus that continues to defy current therapies, killing half a million people each year.
The discovery — naturally occurring HBV infection among wild macaques living in Mauritius Island — provides a suitable animal model to study the disease, since using other animal models would require deliberately infecting simians. Investigating the disease among these macaques will be highly valuable in studying new immunotherapeutic approaches against HBV. Read more here.
Also, an inherited muscle disease — facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD) — that affects the face, shoulder and upper arms has been found to be related to the shortening of telomeres — the protective tips of chromosomes.
The shortening of telomeres was demonstrated to affect DUX4, a gene related to FSHD. The researchers found over ten times more DUX4 protein in FSHD patients, with shorter telomere length correlating with greater production of DUX4. More details here.
Finally, optical resonators, in which solar cells and light-emitting diodes store energy, are ripe for a much needed upgrade. A research team has built a prototype optical resonator with an irregular shape that encourages light rays to bounce around chaotically, with no single frequency being preferentially stored.
In theory, such a set up would allow at least six times the amount of energy to be stored if these resonators were made with less symmetric geometries, as they currently are. Read more about this here.
Beyond the hood
The most exciting development this week is a scientific first that brings stem cell therapies a step closer to fulfilling their promise: namely, regenerating and replacing damaged tissues and alleviating numerous diseases.
A new study shows how the cloning technique that led to Dolly the sheep can be used to turn human skin into embryonic stem cells, which can then be manipulated to form any tissue in the body.
The researchers, led by Oregon Health & Science University’s Shoukhrat Mitalipov, started with a donated human egg cell. After removing its nucleus, they inserted skin cells from another human subject. Using a combination of chemical cues and electrical pulses, they then induced the egg cell to grow and divide into an embryo without being fertilized by a sperm, thereby solving a technical challenge that has been confounding scientists for over a decade.
This embryo — which can only grow into a clump of stem cells, and not a baby — can then be harvested and used to treat a multitude of ailments suffered by the skin cell donor. As the cells are made of the skin cell donor’s own genes, there is no risk of rejection, a common problem with other stem cell techniques.