Archive for January, 2007

With ongoing conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and recently in Somalia, the men and women of our armed forces continue to be in harm’s way. From first-responder care in the battlefield, to rapid evacuation to advanced care hospitals, and finally to rehabilitation centers in the United States, the medical care injured soldiers receive is top-notch.

The most challenging of aspect of combat injuries and trauma injuries in general is getting the patient from the battlefield or car accident to an advanced care hospital. This transit time is often called the “Golden Hour”. While studies of trauma medicine show there is nothing significant about the 60 minute window, the point is that time is an essential to surviving a traumatic injury.

Unfortunately, rapid transit sometimes isn’t enough to help heavily-bleeding wounds from bullets and shrapnel from I.E.Ds. (improvised explosive devices). New advances in bandage technology are going a long way to preventing heavy blood loss and saving the lives of soldiers who otherwise might die on the evacuation helicopter or even before the helicopter arrives.

After the 9/11 attacks, FDA testing was fast-tracked for bandages containing fibrinogen and thrombin, two proteins necessary to cause blood coagulation (clotting). [1] Fibrin is the stuff that makes up the scabs that protect the underlying skin while it regenerates.

So, how does blood clot?
I’ll spare you the complex details as the whole process involves a complex cascade of 28 components, but the general outline is this: Upon injury, platelet cell in the nearby bloodstream immediately start to stick together and do their best to form a plug at the site of blood loss. This process of sticking together, primary haemostasis (some Latin for you: haemo – blood, stasis – stop), is caused by the platelet being activated by injured collagen, a protein component of skin. Secondary haemostasis works to reenforce the platelet plug by forming fibrin strands that crosslink to form a very protective shield over injured tissues. [2]

In serious injuries, the blood flow overwhelms the speed of the clotting cascade (i.e. platelet cells get flushed into the cloth gauze being applied to injury) and it’s difficult/impossible for the body to form cross-linking fibrin to stop the bleeding. What these high-tech bandages do is accelerate the sophisticated coagulation cascade because they contain some of last steps of the cascade (fibrinogen and thrombin) and help stop bleeding as soon as possible. This allows the combat medic to do more in the field and save lives.

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While fibrin bandages are a great advancement for our armed forces, there are many other ways we all can do to support those who have, currently are, or will be deployed.

Looking for ways to help?
The Department of Defense runs a website listing numerous charities helping soldiers and their families, called America Supports You

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “High-Tech Bandages”, U.S. Army Medicine website
2. “Coagulation”, Wikipeida entry

For the first article of this science blog, I thought I would go back to beginning of my interest in science: Jurassic Park. Awesome book. Awesome movie. Awesome soundtrack. In fact, I’m currently listening to the soundtrack by John Williams as I write this. I can even faintly remember my 5th grade crush and I talking about it because she was also reading it for a book report.

Other than the foundation for my 5th grade love affair, Jurassic Park was and still is a fascinating science fiction book. Dinosaurs are very much part of our culture and they capture the imaginations of children and adults worldwide (like myself, in case if you haven’t figured that out).

So, is Jurassic Park possible? In theory, cloning an dinosaur is possible, but in practice it’s next to impossible with today’s technology and understanding of dinosaur embryology. When researching this article, I naturally hit up Wikipedia and sure enough, I found an article called “Biological issues in Jurassic Park” [2] A good portion of this article talks about idea of extracting dinosaur DNA (for more info DNA, see the Wikipedia entry) from mosquitoes fossilized in amber. The theory behind this concept of Jurassic Park was first discussed by George O. Poinar in the 1980s and involved the theory that a 65 to 230 million year old mosquito bit a dinosaur, ingested the blood cells, and ended up embedded in amber which is fossilized tree sap. [1 & 2] A very clever idea and it sounds good on paper and ancient DNA has been extracted this way. [3] However, no dinosaur DNA has been found using this method.

Even if an amber miner were to hit the jackpot, the quality of DNA yielded wouldn’t be sufficient to grow a dinosaur. The book acknowledged this fact and talked about how frog DNA was used to fill the gaps in the genetic code. Once again, this sounds good on paper but knowing how merge two species of DNA is next to impossible without knowing the original dinosaur DNA sequence. While dinosaur and frog DNA are relatively similar, slight differences in crucial genes like homeobox genes that regulate which parts of DNA are activated for a specific task (they essentially tell a developing dinosaur grow a leg here and here, etc.) would be gigantic hurdle to hatching a healthy infant dinosaur.

However, the bar was lowered a great deal with the publication of a March 2005 article in the journal Science. To the great astonishment of all, actual soft tissue of a Tyrannosaurus rex was found deep inside the thigh bone! This was a huge breakthrough because it was always assumed there was no way dinosaur soft tissue could escape the process of fossilization after 65 million years. Using a new technique to remove mineralized bone, researchers led by Mary H. Schweitzer of North Carolina State University discovered blood vessels, bones cells, and even blood cells with possible intact nuclei! (nuclei or nucleus are the portion of cells that holds DNA) While it highlly doubtful they will find the entire T.Rex genome (the term that describes the entire DNA sequence of an organism), the chances of finding valuable DNA fragments are “promising”. This process of DNA extraction will be long and difficult (story is almost 2 years old and I haven’t heard anything), but I will keep my ear to ground and do some more through searching for new developments. Even if this particular thigh bone doesn’t yield anything, this development means other bones will contain soft tissue. This particular T. Rex skeleton was well-preserved….that means they are other dinosaur skeletons that are even more preserved yet to be found, so and so forth. [4]

If finding the complete T. Rex genome wasn’t hard enough, the next step would present challenges that science can’t just handle at this moment. All embryos need extra hormones at precise levels and times to grow properly. It’s doubtful that the pregnancy hormones of currently living relatives like birds and crocodiles would be able to recognize the dinosaur DNA and act upon a dinosaur embryo, so the most likely route would be a synthetic egg. This technology currently exists, but the hormones would have to devised from the dinosaur genome. Without an real-life dinosaur mother and egg to study, this will be a daunting task and will require much experimenting with dinosaur DNA (once a complete genome is sequenced, of course).

In summary, from all the reading I did on this subject I think that one day in the very distant future something like Jurassic Park could be possible. When I say the very distant future, I’m talking like 500 years from now when we have hopefully figured out how to sustain food, water, energy, and first-rate medical care for all of humanity while sustaining a balance with the environment. After all, as little-kid-on-Christmas-morning exciting going to the real Jurassic Park would be, we have more important challenges to solve for now before the scientific community puts more weight behind this kind of research.

Stay tuned for more updates on this story and dinosaurs in general.

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Posted by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew

Sources:
1. “Biological issues in Jurassic Park”, Wikipedia entry
2. “Dinosaur DNA”
3. Cano RJ, Poinar H, Poinar Jr GO. 1992a. Isolation and partial characterisation of DNA from the bee Problebeia dominicana (Apidae:Hymenoptera) in 25-40 million year old amber. Med Sci Res 20:249-251
4. “Soft Tissues Recovered from Ancient Dinosaur” by Christopher Joyce, NPR broadcast

Welcome to the brand new Blogtown Press blog, Atoms to Zebras.

Atoms to Zebras is all about scouring the science community for science news, interviews, and cutting edge scientific breakthough reporting. My goal is bring you all the fun and interesting parts of science class without the homework and exams.

The glue that holds the scientific community together is peer review. Every single journal article that is published is examined by other scientists who make sure that the results and conclusions are factual. In fact, the entire field of science is essentially one big team trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe. In that spirit, please let me and the other readers know what you think by posting a comment or e-mailing me at timroth1618 [at] gmail.com

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for reading! This blog is written by Tim Roth, author of the political blog Think Anew and Act Anew. I’ll try to post as much as I can, but I highly suggest that you subscribe to the RSS Feed to get easy notification of when new articles are posted.

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Atoms to Zebras is all about scouring the science community for science news, interviews, and cutting edge scientific breakthough reporting. My goal is bring you all the fun and interesting parts of science class without the homework and exams.

The glue that holds the scientific community together is peer review. Every single journal article that is published is examined by other scientists who make sure that the results and conclusions are factual. In fact, the entire field of science is essentially one big team trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe. In that spirit, please let me and the other readers know what you think by posting a comment or e-mailing me at timroth1618 [at] gmail.com

Thanks for reading!

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