1) Refurbished hearts

More than 22 million people have heart failure. Even with the major advances in treatment for heat failure, over 50 percent of these people die within five years or learning of the condition.
Dr. Doris Taylor, the Medtronic-Bakken Chair in Cardiac Repair and the Director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair at the University of Minnesota , is researching another alternative. She researches using stem cells, genes, and devices to create new cardiac and vascular technologies. What Dr. Taylor and her team have been able to do is to strip a rat’s heart of all cells and then to put the living cells from a healthy rat back into it. The new cells divide and can create the tissues needed to reform the heart and, miraculously, the new heart starts beating.
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2) Adult cells to insulin

Ou August 27,2008 Howard Hughes Medical Institute researchers posted the results of a startling new experiment: using mice, they converted adult pancreatic cells into insulin-producing beta cells. Although early in the process, this experiment opens the door for new cures for a variety of illnesses. A diabetic, for example, could have their own cells transformed to help them produce insulin. The study was published on the online journal, Nature.

Douglas A. Melton, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator at Harvard University and co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and postdoctoral fellow Qiao “Joe” Zhou were involved in this study. Mr Melton comments, “What this shows is that you can go directly from one type of adult cell to another, without going back to the beginning.”
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3) Cocaine cravings

Scientists have puzzled over the fact that cravings can intensify the longer a drug user has stopped taking cocaine. A new finding has new hope in developing treatments for cocaine addiction that can reduce the risk of relapse.

The study published in the May 25 issue of the journal Nature, “reveals a novel mechanism for why cocaine craving intensifies after cessation of drug use and suggests a new target for the development of medications to decrease the risk of relapse in abstinent cocaine abusers,” says National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Dr. Nora Volkow.
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4) Early detection of Alzheimers

Amyloid plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients have been a subject of scientific discussion for years. Scientists have thought that either (1) the plaques have caused Alzheimer’s disease or (2) these plaques were generated as the disease progresses. Ganesh M. Shankar, Ph.D., and Dennis J. Selkoe, M.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, in collaboration with several universities and hospitals have shown beta-amyloid protein fragments may damage brain cells. This finding would suggest that beta-amyloid protein fragments play a key role in the start of this irreversible disorder. This studing is published online in Nature Medicine, June 22,2008.
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http://www.medcarehealth.com/alzheimers-disease/2008/06/a-key-to-alzheimers-disease-a-new-finding-on-what-causes-the-initiation-of-the-disease/

5) Microscope on a chip?

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a “microscope on a chip” that is small and can be produced very inexpensively. The Science daily, July 29, 2008 claims that it can be mass-produced at around $10.

Because this device is small, has no lens to break, and can be produced at low cost the potential applications for this new microscope are exciting. You could, for instance, develop a microscope that could fit in a cell phone sized devide. Such a device would, amoung other things, help field workers in undeveloped countries to check for malaria or for hikers to check for microbes.
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