Nanowires for cancer detection

An Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur alumnus says that bottom-up manufacturing may hold the key to designing tiny medical devices that have the capability of testing multiple molecules like viruses and cancer markers.

“Diagnostic chips can be made more useful by assembling, at predetermined locations on the chip, large numbers of nanowires pre-treated off chip. Using this new bottom-up method, our group has demonstrated that thousands of single wires can be successfully aligned and anchored to form tiny diving board resonator arrays,” said Rustom B Bhiladvala, who is an assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University.

The researchers point out that, though the traditional top-down process, which begins with silicon and carves nanoresonator devices from the material, works well and produces many devices that are nearly identical, it has several limitations. They says that the addition of chemical probes or other changes in the existing materials have to be done after the devices are fabricated on the chips.

In contrast, the research team says that the bottom-up method, though not producing identical devices, is more flexible.

The researchers say that in bottom-up fabrication, nanowires are manufactured off chips by using any inorganic or organic material that will produce nanowires.

‘Mood influences choices’

People are more likely to give things a favourable evaluation when they’re happy and a negative evaluation when they’re sad. A new study has found how mood influences our choices among items.

A team of international researchers has carried out the study and found that consumers in a good mood are likely than the unhappy customers to choose the first item they see, especially if all the choices are more or less the same.

According to lead researcher Cheng Qiu of University of Hong Kong, “It is surprising that little research has been done to examine how affect influences comparisons and choices”.

“Our research fills this gap by demonstrating a systematic influence of mood on choice, which contrasts with the general assumption that mood is unlikely to influence choice.”

TV determines sleep

It’s television and not sun that determines our sleep schedule, says a new research.

With spring approaching the United States of America, the nation is readying itself for losing an hour of sleep with the arrival of Daylight Saving Time. This is a ‘shock’ not only to those who value their sleep, but also to all levels of the economy, from the individual to the world.

In an article in Journal of Labour Economics, authors Daniel S Hamermesh, Caitlin Knowles Myers, and Mark L Pocock look at the brief fight between American’s natural timing cues-the circadian rhythms determined by the sun-and the man-made cues brought on within the last century, mainly by the creation of time zones and the television broadcast schedule.

Introspection simple in kids

A study from Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis has shown that a brain network linked to introspection - such as forming the self-image or understanding the motivations of others — happens to be less intricate and well-connected in children as compared to adults.

Damien A Fair, a postgraduate student who led the study, compared functional connectivity in 13 brain
regions linked to the default network in children ages seven to nine and adults ages 21 to 31.

“The difference between children and adults is profound. In a graph depicting the strength of connections between the brain regions we studied, children’s minds have just a few connections between some regions, while the adult brains have a web-like mesh of many different interconnecting links involving all the regions,” Fair says.

Analysing saliva proteins

Spitting into a cup or licking a diagnostic test strip could soon be an alternative to having your blood drawn at the laboratory.

Researchers in the US have developed a new method to separate and analyse all proteins found in human saliva, which they claim could be used to screen for oral cancer and other disorders in the cavity.

According to the researchers, human saliva contains an abundance of proteins and the newly developed technique, called three-step peptide fractionation, will facilitate in looking at all these proteins.

“The mortality rate for oral cancer has hardly declined over the past 30 years. This technique, providing the first
description of using whole cells to identify the vast array of human and bacterial proteins in saliva, may help identify new markers for oral cancer progression,” lead researcher Timothy Griffin said.