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JULY 19, 2004
Edited by Catherine Arnst Smart Sportswear Takes The Field A new, high-tech sports jersey could be useful for protecting players. The shirt, designed by David Evans, a student at Britain's Northumbria University, is fitted with lightweight sensors to monitor the heart and with silicon-gel strips to measure fluid loss. The readings are sent by radio transmitter to a laptop on the bench, alerting the coach if a player is seriously fatigued or dehydrated. In addition, the shirt can be rigged to monitor body temperature continuously. The sensors are permanently attached to the shirt and durable enough to be machine-washed. Evans says he is hoping to recruit an athletic-gear manufacturer to mass-produce the shirt. By Adeline Bonnet and Jasper Perkins Fill 'Er Up -- With Straw And Yeast In the fairy tale, Rumpel-stiltskin could spin straw into gold. Now, a Canadian biotech company is using genetically modified yeast to improve the transformation of straw into ethanol. Yeast has long been used to break down glucose in corn and ferment it into ethyl alcohol, which is then added to gasoline and sold as a motor fuel. But straw, corn stalks, and other crop leftovers contain xylose as well as glucose -- and natural yeast can break down only one sugar at a time. Nancy Ho, a molecular biologist at the Purdue University Laboratory of Renewable Resources Engineering, found that by adding three genes to yeast, the organism can convert both sugars simultaneously into ethanol. The new process boosts ethanol yields by 30% to 40%. Purdue has licensed the yeast to Iogen in Ottawa. By Michael Arndt   A Protein That Keeps Mice In Slim City Some svelte mice in Michigan may hold the key to treating obesity in people. These genetically engineered mice can eat as much high-fat food as they want -- and still be only half as hefty as ordinary mice, even those on a low-fat diet. Researchers at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor had discovered four years ago that a protein called Wnt10b, one of a family of proteins regulating embryo develop-ment, can repress fat-cell growth in tissue cultures. To determine its effect in animals, a team led by Dr. Ormond A. MacDougald developed mice with 50 times the amount of Wnt10b found in normal mice. The engineered animals had only half the usual fat cells, and they could eat as much as they wanted of a high-fat diet without gaining weight. There were side effects: The skinny mice were much more susceptible to cold, and their skin was twice as thick as normal. At the same time, Wnt10b shows therapeutic promise in preventing bone loss. MacDougald says drug companies are targeting that potential. "If such a drug could also block the formation of new fat cells, that could be very appealing," he says. Of Hot Plates And Hearing Aids -- Miniature hot plates developed by Boston MicroSystems are smaller than the width of a human hair and have the capacity to reach temperatures of more than 2,000F. These tiny stoves can completely heat up or cool down in less than two milliseconds, and they use only a small fraction of a watt of electricity. That's much less energy than it takes to power a lightbulb. Researchers are interested in using the heaters to grow carbon nanotubes, a key building block in nanotechnology. The company is also evaluating the hot plates for use in a gas sensor technology, still in development, which would monitor air pollutants. -- A new hearing aid uses artificial intelligence to mimic the brain's ability to detect speech while filtering out distracting sounds. This split-second aural discernment is lost to many people suffering hearing impairment. There are already digital hearing aids with microprocessors that predict how a human should hear the many different sounds in any particular environment. Oticon, a Danish hearing-aid maker, says its Syncro device goes a step further, constantly scanning the environment for voices and other sounds. Its tiny processor then makes millions of calculations per second to determine instantly the best speech-to-noise ratio. By Sarah R. Shapiro
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