Science & Technology

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a devastating illness that gradually robs sufferers of muscle strength and eventually causes a lethal, full-body paralysis. The only drug available to treat the disease extends life spans by a meager three months on average.

Cancer involves a breakdown of normal cell behavior. Cell reproduction and movement go haywire, causing tumors to grow and spread through the body.

The idea of growing replacement tissue to repair an organ, or to swap it out for an entirely new one, is rapidly transitioning from science fiction to fact.

The body is structured to ensure that any invading organisms have a tough time reaching the brain, an organ obviously critical to survival. Known as the blood-brain barrier, cells that line the brain and spinal cord are tightly packed, making it difficult for anything besides very small molecules to cross from the bloodstream into the central nervous system.

The heart maintains a careful balancing act; too soft and it won’t pump blood, but too hard and it will overtax itself and stop entirely. There is an optimal amount of strain that a beating heart can generate and still beat at its usual rate, once per second.

The University of Pennsylvania, through its Center for Technology Transfer and its UPstart company formation program, has announced a new partnership with IP Group PLC, developer of intellectual property-based businesses. 

Using a video game in which people navigate through a virtual town delivering objects to specific locations, a team of neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania and Freiburg University has discovered how brain cells that encode spatial information form “geotags” for specific memories and are activated immediately before those memories are recalled.

WHO:            Alison Sweeney                     Assistant Professor of Physics

Five faculty members from the University of Pennsylvania have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The blood stem cells that live in bone marrow are at the top of a complex family tree. Such stem cells split and divide down various pathways that ultimately produce red cells, white cells and platelets.