About Technology

Monday, April 11, 2005

Wired News: Cells That Go Back in Time

Wired News: Cells That Go Back in Time
Lop off a newt's leg or tail, and it will grow a new one. The creature's cells can regenerate thanks to built-in time machines that revert cells to early versions of themselves in a process called dedifferentiation.

The research is in its infancy, but a 2001 discovery jump-started the field of study. Mark Keating, Christopher McGann and Shannon Odelberg applied a protein extract derived from newts to mouse muscle cells. To their surprise, the protein extract transformed those muscle cells into stem cells in just 48 hours, which means the mouse cells would have the ability to regenerate.

¶ 11:55 AM

My n^th attempt at trying to setup a blog and maintain it regularly. Here I will post my thoughts on topics that I am interested in at any given time..so expect to see topics as diverse as computer science, bio-informatics, linguistics, philosophy etc.

Projects

Webmine is software tool that automatically generates a set of similar terms from a given seed term and identifies most probable category for the set.