Guest 1: Dr Andrea O’Connor, Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of Melbourne. Andrea discussed her research into tissue engineering. She is creating new materials for growing tissues for regenerating damaged tissues following trauma or surgery.
Guest 2: Dr Anthony Fernando, Department of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne. Anthony is using mathematics to model and understand how nerve cells colonise the developing gut.
Scientists Give Flies False Memories — By directly manipulating the activity of individual neurons, scientists have given flies memories of a bad experience they never really had, according to a report in the October 16th issue of the journal Cell. (ScienceDaily)
Scientists Remove Amyloid Plaques From Brains Of Live Animals With Alzheimer’s Disease — A breakthrough discovery by scientists from the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL, may lead to a new treatment for Alzheimer’s Disease that actually removes amyloid plaques, considered a hallmark of the disease, from patients’ brains. (ScienceDaily)
The scientific Nobel Prizes for 2009 have been awarded:
- The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine ”for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase”. (more info)
- The Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome”. (more info)
- The Nobel Prize in Physics “for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication” and “for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor”. (more info)
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Direct podcast download: Einstein-A-Go-Go-20091018.mp3
Tags: gut brain, mathematics, modelling, tissue engineering
