Modern humans left Africa over 60,000 years ago in a migration that many believe was responsible for nearly all of the human population that exist outside Africa today. Now, researchers have revealed that men and women weren’t equal partners in that exodus. By tracing variations in the X chromosome and in the non-sex chromosomes,
Full Post: Ancient African exodus mostly involved men
The battlefield of the future may react differently to combat injuries, providing instant treatment to wounded soldiers even before a medic reaches their side.
Impossible? Not if researchers at universities on opposite sides of the country succeed in creating a “field hospital on a chip” - a system worn by every soldier that would detect an injury and automatically administer the right medication. Survival of battlefield wounds often depends on the level of treatment within the first 30 minutes.
Evgeny Katz of Clarkson University in Potsdam, N.Y., and Joseph Wang of the University of California, San Diego, will share a four-year, $1.6 million grant from the Office of Naval Research to create the high-tech field hospital.
The automated sense-and-treat system will continuously monitor a soldier’s sweat, tears or blood for biomarkers that signal common battlefield injuries such as trauma, shock, brain injury or fatigue and then automatically administer the proper medication.
Katz will lead a team of researchers who are working on creating enzymes that can measure the biomarkers and provide the logic necessary to make a limited set of diagnoses based on several biological variables.
“We have already designed bioelectrodes and biofuel cells responding to multiple biochemical signals in a logic way,” says Katz, co-principal investigator on the project. “In the future we could expect implantable devices controlled by physiological signals and responding to the needs of an organism, notably a human.”
Katz, who joined the Clarkson faculty two years ago from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, holds the Milton Kerker Endowed Chair of Colloid Science at Clarkson. His current research is a continuation of work begun before joining the Clarkson faculty.
Wang, principal investigator on the project, will head a nanoengineering team in San Diego that will build a minimally invasive system for the soldier’s body to process the biomarker information, develop a diagnosis and begin administering the proper medications.
“Since the majority of battlefield deaths occur within the first 30 minutes after injury, rapid diagnosis and treatment are crucial for enhancing the survival rate of injured soldiers,” says Wang.
Wang and Katz hope that the resulting enzyme-logic sense-and-treat system will revolutionize the monitoring and treatment of injured soldiers and will lead to dramatic improvements in their survival rate.
http://www.clarkson.edu/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Related Posts:
Medical acupuncture, which is acupuncture performed by a licensed physician trained at a conventional medical school, is being used increasingly for pain control. Richard Niemtzow, MD, PhD, MPH, Editor-in-Chief of Medical Acupuncture, a peer-reviewed journal (www.liebertpub.com/acu) and the official journal of the American Academy of Medical Acupuncture, is at the forefront of these efforts
Full Post: Battlefield acupuncture
A team of researchers from Wayne State University, in collaboration with Basrah Medical College in Basrah, Iraq, released a study published in The New Iraqi Journal of Medicine today on war-related mental health disorders among Iraqis ten years after the Gulf War. Bengt B. Arnetz, Ph.D., professor of Family Medicine and Public Health Sciences in
Full Post: First study on war-related mental health disorders among Iraqis ten years after the Gulf War
Clarkson University Center for Advanced Materials Processing Professor Igor Sokolov and graduate student Ravi M. Gaikwad have discovered a new method of protecting teeth from cavities by ultrafine polishing with silica nanoparticles. The researchers adopted polishing technology used in the semiconductor industry (chemical mechanical planarization) to polish the surface of human teeth down to nanoscale
Full Post: Ultrafine polishing with silica nanoparticles protects teeth
A new study funded by U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reports that foreign-born workers reported a lower rate of non-fatal work-related injuries than U.S.-born workers, based on data collected from the National Health Interview Survey from 1997 to 2005. The study, conducted by researchers in the Center for Injury Research and Policy
Full Post: Foreign-born workers report lower rate of non-fatal work-related injuries than U.S.-born workers
Acute kidney injury (AKI) - which is often caused by trauma, illness, or surgery - predisposes elderly individuals to the most serious form of chronic kidney disease (CKD), known as end stage renal disease (ESRD), according to a study appearing in the January 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Society Nephrology (JASN). The
Full Post: Acute kidney injury predisposes elderly to serious kidney disease --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
