Life Science

New Zealand News – Technology – Computer modelling future of medicine Perhaps here’s a partial answer to Mike’s earlier post. Keep in mind the guy quoted is selling life science services for Sun Micro, but it’s an interesting vision about how computing companies see lowering the cost of drug development with awesome computing power. IBM and Hewlett-Packard also are developing ...

A quick way to keep up with emerging science is EurekAlert. Each day the site lists breaking news in science in synopsis form. A quick 10 minutes keeps you on top. It also contains links for further information.

This isn’t the sort of thing that grabs headlines, but I think this is really important news. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore Lab (about 20 miles east of here) and from other countries have developed techniques to look at single molecules of protein folding up. This is a breakthrough in being able to get the details of how proteins fold–and mis-fold–a ...

In the latest issue of Nature there is an article about a class of molecules that seems to extend the lifespan of yeast by down-regulating the p53 gene (a tumor suppressor) and blunting the trigger of apoptosis. (Whoopie for yeast!) It’s action mimics the life extending process that occurs with caloric restriction. The good news is that these chemicals occur ...