Cholera, a disease that is assuming serious proportions in hurricane-ravaged Haiti. Cholera strikes so fast it is sometimes called the lightening disease. Without rehydration therapy, or antibiotics for severe cases, cholera can kill in a matter of hours. The disease causes acute diarrhea that can lead to severe dehydration. Blood group O individuals have a greater risk of infection with cholera and develop the most severe and life threatening forms of this illness.

Harvard University has developed an animation that would take their cellular biology students on a journey through the microscopic world of a cell. Amazing.

Fifty years ago, if a group of scientists were asked to define the key to life, the great majority would point to metabolism; how we obtain energy from food. However, adding all the required molecular components and stirring it up will not produce an organism. A more modern view of molecular biology is concerned with organization in time and space. How doe the molecules of life arrange themselves throughout the cell’s compartments, how do they move around, and communicate so as to synchronize their actions? We can ask this question because we can now inspect the working cell at a molecular level and take snapshots of its molecules doing their business.

R ead of a fantastic new initiative on The Edge website that proposes to study cancer by involving physical scientists (in this case informatics titan Danny Hillis) in collaboration with biomedical investigators. The leaders of the National Cancer Institute are very keenly aware of how little progress has actually been made in the treatment of […]