This Blue Rat May Have the Secret to Avoid Spinal Cord Injuries

via Gizmodo by Jesus Diaz on 7/27/09

It's not a negative. It's not frozen. This rat's skin is blue and its color may be the secret to avoid spinal cord injuries and paralysis, according to a new study by neurologists at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

That secret is Brilliant Blue G dye, a variant of Blue Number One, which is a common and harmless food coloring product. Scientists dropped weights on the rats' backs to break their little spinal cords, injecting the Brilliant Blue G dye in their bodies. The dye turned their skins blue, but within weeks all motor functions returned to normal. The rat could walk, run, jump, have sex, and do whatever it wanted.

According to the study, the dye prevented inflammation of the spinal cord. Not only it is as simple as that, but one of the neurologists�Maiken Nedergaard�says that they can't find "clinical effects on the rat." This is one of the things that they should start trying in humans as soon as possible. Better to look like a smurf than neer walking again.

New Treatment Filters Bacteria From the Bloodstream with an Electromagnet

via Gizmodo by Adam Frucci on 6/22/09

This may sound like something out of Iron Man, but it's very real. Don Ingber has developed a machine that uses an electromagnet to suck sepsis-causing bacteria out of the blood.

In lab tests, Ingber's team mixed donor blood with the fungus Candida albicans, a common cause of sepsis, and added plastic-coated iron-oxide beads, each a hundredth of a hair-width in diameter and covered with antibodies that seek out and attach to the fungus. Next they ran the mixture through the dialysis-like machine, which uses an electromagnet to pull the beads, and any pathogens stuck to them, from blood into a saline solution. The device removes 80 percent of the invaders-enough so that drugs could knock out the rest-in a couple of hours.

He still has to perform testing on animals to make sure it doesn't, you know, kill things, but it all looks quite promising. If it works for this bacteria, he's hoping to jigger the process to pull cancer cells from the body or harvest stem cells.