Posts Tagged ‘rtp’
RTI broadens energy research with federal greenbacks
Wednesday, July 14, 2010, 8:54 amTechnologies that promise to lower greenhouse gas emissions and demand for U.S. oil imports are becoming more prominent on RTI International’s research smorgasbord, which has featured efforts in a related field, air pollution monitoring, as a reliable staple for the past 30 years.
RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)
One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.
Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.
Gephardt visits Triangle on tour to spur medical innovation
Wednesday, June 30, 2010, 2:12 pmDick Gephardt is traveling across the country to reinvigorate medical innovation and on Wednesday the former Congressman, U.S. House majority leader and two-time Democratic presidential candidate visited North Carolina, a U.S. biotech hot spot.
U.S. Rep. Dick Gephardt
He carried a to-do list with him that he plans to take to Congress and the Obama Administration.
Changing the way the Food and Drug Administration regulates the development of new medicines, making the research and development tax credit for companies permanent and establishing a federal office to spearhead public-private partnerships between universities, the National Institutes of Health and R&D companies were among the suggestions on the list.
“It needs to be the new space program in my view,” Gephardt told about 100 people at the packed Capital City Club in Raleigh. Read more…
Pediatrician takes on rare metabolic diseases
Friday, June 4, 2010, 9:48 am
Dr. Maria Escolar
Dr. Maria Escolar was a 35-year-old pediatrician overseeing a program for doctors in training at Duke University 12 years ago when she saw her first patient with Krabbe disease.
Named after a Danish neurologist who first described it in 1913, Krabbe disease is a rare, genetic disorder that is painful and damages mental and motor skills. Children with the disease show no symptoms at birth, but without treatment they go deaf and blind and usually die by the time they are 3.
“It’s one of the most horrible diseases I’ve ever encountered,” Escolar said. Read more…
RTP researchers help track diseases linked to climate change
Tuesday, April 27, 2010, 8:53 pmDuke University researchers suspect climate change is a reason why a deadly new version of a tropical fungus is spreading in the temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest.
Cryptococcus gattii
In Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and Australia, crytococcus gattii infects eucalyptus trees and bothers people with compromised immune systems, such as HIV/AIDS patients and organ transplant recipients, who inhale its spores. But the strain that was first documented on Vancouver Island, Canada, a decade ago and has now spread to Seattle and Portland causes chest pain, fever, shortness of breath and weight loss in otherwise healthy people and has killed at least six of them.
In February 2007, the first North Carolina case, an otherwise healthy man, was treated at Duke University Medical Center, the Duke researchers reported in PLoS One. In a paper they published a week ago in PLoS Pathogen, the researchers wrote that the cryptococcus gattii strain in the Pacific Northwest was new, much more virulent and favored mammals.
Regenerative medicine: Taking lessons from salamanders
Wednesday, April 21, 2010, 9:30 pmDr. Anthony Atala likes to start his talks with a time-lapse video of a salamander regrowing an injured limb over two weeks. Then, the director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine asks his listeners to imagine humans regenerating limbs, tissue or organs that have been damaged or are missing.
“Salamanders can regenerate. Why can’t we?,” Atala asked during a TEDMed talk last fall.
Dr. Anthony Atala
Actually, we can and we do, he responded Tuesday during a presentation at Research Triangle Park headquarters, where he had traveled from Winston-Salem to talk at the TARDC luncheon. “It’s real,” he said.
The human body replaces bones every 10 years, skin every two weeks and intestinal tissue every six days. Regenerative medicine taps into the body’s ability to regrow tissue, expands on it and speeds it up in the laboratory. Read more…
Duke: How germs influenced the Civil War
Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 11:01 pmNowhere are the medical advances of the past 150 years more obvious than during war. A U.S. soldier who is injured today on the battlefield in Iraq has about a 95 percent chance of survival. In World War II, the chance was 50 percent and during the Civil War it was 19 percent.
But the benefits of modern medicine go well beyond combat surgery.
Dr. Margaret Humphreys
Dr. Margaret Humphreys, a Duke University professor in the history of medicine and a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, issued a reminder Tuesday during a lecture at the N.C. Museum of History in Raleigh that germs bag a bigger punch than bullets.
“It wasn’t until World War I that more soldiers died from wounds than from disease,” Humphreys said during her lecture on the role malaria and yellow fever played during the Civil War. Read more…
If the U.S. falls off the flat earth, so does RTP
Sunday, April 11, 2010, 5:41 pmNeal Lane, a physicist who in the late 1990s was President Clinton’s top science advisor, worries when he looks at federal spending on research and development.
R&D spending as percentage of federal budget, FY 1962-2009
Sure, federal spending on R&D more than tripled in the past 50 years to about $147 billion in fiscal year 2009, as Lane pointed out Saturday in a talk at N.C. State University. But R&D’s share of all federal spending has been shrinking from nearly 12 percent during the height of the Apollo program in the late 1960s to about 5 percent in 2009, according to numbers from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Lane, a professor at Rice University and a senior fellow at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, is particularly concerned about federal funding for research in physics, mathematics and engineering, the disciplines that brought forth computers, the Internet and mobile devices such as the cell phone. Read more…
ScienceOnline2010 – interview with Sabine Vollmer
Tuesday, April 6, 2010, 7:32 pmContinuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years’ interviews as well: 2008 and 2009.
Today, I asked Sabine Vollmer to answer a few questions:
Rebecca Skloot visits RTP area
Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 9:11 pm
Rebecca Skloot
When I found out Rebecca Skloot, author of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” would be back in the Research Triangle area to promote her book, I grabbed the opportunity to talk to her. The result of the conversation was published Monday in the Science & Technology pages of the News & Observer.
Skloot is spending three days in the RTP area. She visited Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh on Monday and N.C. Central University in Durham on Tuesday. She will speak at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy in Durham.
Her previous visits here included ScienceOnline 2009, where she was the keynote speaker, and ScienceOnline 2010, where she was one of the panelists.
RTP Weekahead 3/15
Sunday, March 14, 2010, 3:21 pmEvents taking place the week of March 15 in the Research Triangle area that are open to the public: Read more…
