Pointing out that stem cells, which are present in large numbers in the foetal cell, can give rise to 250 types of specialised cells in the body, Dr.Natarajan said “It is therapeutic cell which can be used to replace tissues/organs and to repair damaged or defective cells.”

He was speaking here on Tuesday at the inauguration of a four-day awareness programme on ‘Stem cell’ organised at Science City, Periyar Science and Technology Campus. Postgraduate students from various streams like biochemistry, microbiology and molecular biology took part in the event.

Foetal stem cells can be transplanted to repair or rejuvenate tissue in a recipient without rejection within the first 12 weeks and they can also be used for cloning using techniques such as somatic cell nucleus transfer, he said.

The theme of the workshop was to expose students to research potential in the emerging field. The four- day event will cover stem cell techniques, harvesting and banking, transplantation mechanisms and field visits.

“The body has its own repair mechanisms and we are just learning to tap into nature’s gift,” said J.G.Kannappan, emeritus professor, Tamilnadu Dr.MGR Medical University. “Our red blood cells are replaced every six weeks. If we can understand nature’s processes, we might be able to find cures for diseases such as diabetes or Alzheimer’s.”

While the field has a lot of potential, “pressing ethical issues need to be addressed while moving forward,” Dr.Kannappan said. Stem cell technology can lead to designer human beings and human tissue might be used for merchandising. Regulations have to come in now before widespread use of the technology takes off, he added.

Source: The Hindu.

Recently, three renowned researchers – one neuroscientist and two nanoscientists – discussed how their once diverging disciplines are now joining to understand how the brain works at its most basic cellular level, and the extraordinary advances this merger seems to promise for fields ranging from computer technology to health.

Source: The Kavli Foundation.

Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer and Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon are in China for what some analysts see as a last-ditch mission to craft U.N. Security Council consensus about cracking down on Iranian uranium enrichment.

Of the five Security Council veto-wielders, China is most resistant to employing sanctions to force Tehran, with whom it has energy, trade and diplomatic ties, to curb the project. Russia, another past naysayer, has been signaling flexibility

“You are living a symbiotic relationship with (China)… based on the amount of American bonds that they hold. They didn’t buy a lot of bonds in (Israeli) shekels,” Barak said in an address to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Source: Reuters.

Source: Wired Danger Room.

Micro helicopters, the kind that fit in the palm of your hand (and sometimes spread holiday cheer) are huge fun — and hugely frustrating. Have you ever tried to get one to hover in place next to another? Impossible! MIT thinks it can do that, not with just two but thousands of the little beggars all hovering in harmony as part of a project called Flyfire. By using LED-equipped drones the project pledges to build free-floating 3D displays, endowing them with enough smarts and positional awareness to organize themselves into an airborne canvas. It sounds deliciously exciting and challenging, yet for some reason the school has decided you aren’t to know about it, pulling its concept video and website offline. We can only imagine there’s a government agency involved here, possibly trying to stem the virulent spread of robo-socialism, but we invite you to leave your own conspiracy theories in comments.

Source: Engadget.

What we need to do is attempt biosphere politics. Governing units are going to change–I think there’s going to be a shift toward continentalization. The EU is a first attempt at organizing a new frame of reference across continents, but it’s a transitional governing form. The Asian Union, African Union and South American Union are in their early stages.

Source: New Scientist.

Enormous satellite dishes make up the search party for extraterrestrial life, but in the event of success, should a welcome party follow? Astronomers and biologists involved in the search for life on other planets are worried about a lack of regulatory and ethical policies to guide them.

“No government has plans” for what to do in the event of the discovery of intelligent extraterrestrial life, says astrophysicist Martin Dominik of the University of St Andrews, UK, who organized a conference at the Royal Society in London that began today.

For now, the only real framework for responding to the discovery of extraterrestrial life is in a document drafted by researchers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI). It advises careful confirmation of the result, a prompt international announcement and refraining from responding immediately, says SETI founder Frank Drake of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

Dominik says the United Nations should have a similar policy in place. “It’s too important for any one country,” says Dominik, who hopes the two-day conference will stimulate the interest of policy makers.

Palaeobiologist Simon Conway Morris of Cambridge University, UK, warned of the possible consequences of detecting extraterrestrial life. He cited examples of convergent evolution in the Earth’s biological history as evidence that there are a limited number of solutions to sensory and social organizational problems. Alien senses could be similar to human senses, he told participants, and social life elsewhere could be as violent as on Earth, where leaf-cutter ants pillage and plunder, and humans wage war. “If the phone rings,” he says, “don’t pick it up.”

Some researchers say there are important policy implications even for the discovery of less complicated life, such as microbes within the Solar System. “While microorganisms on Earth get very low moral regard … on Mars such microbes would be in a different category because they would be the only representatives of life on Mars,” says astrobiologist Christopher McKay, of the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

Nobody has decided whether it would be acceptable to commercialize microbes found in the Solar System, or to what extent they should be protected. McKay says that NASA abides by rules set by the international Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) regarding environmental contamination during the exploration of other moons and planets. An upcoming workshop will continue the discussion of space bioethics, he adds.

Researchers want to avoid the conflict and confusion which surrounded the 1996 claim that a meteorite from Mars, ALH 84001, contained potential evidence of primitive life.1 Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, of the University of Oxford, UK, notes that a poorly handled scientific announcement of this scale would have massive consequences for the reputations and funding of researchers.

There is no UK government policy on the detection or ethics of extraterrestrial life just yet, but the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) did send a representative to today’s meeting. “It’s over the horizon for us,” says POST adviser Sarah Bunn.

Published 25 January by Lucas Laursen in Nature. You can watch the webcast from the talk “The eerie silence: are we alone in the universe?” at the The Royal Society.

Source: NanoWerk.