One of the age old pains of living with a yard is cutting the grass.  Well, some of you like it because it gives you time to zone out and not interact with people.  But for the most of us, it’s just time we could be using doing something more important like, er, building laser microphones.  Anyway, researchers at the Salk Institute may have come up with one way to keep the grass really green and short.  Ahhh, now I can work on that laser microphone.

Joanne Chory discovered a gene, called BAS-1 (phyB activation-tagged suppressor1), that can be used to inhibit or enhance growth.  “BAS-1 appears to control the level of an important steroid hormone that stimulates growth in plant cells,” said Joanne Chory, professor at the Salk Institute.  Chory and the other researchers keyed in on brassinolide hormones that seemed to regulate plant growth.  “It appears that brassinolide is made through the plant and then growth is controlled by selectively inactivating it,” said Chory. “BAS-1 performs this step in stems, and so switching on BAS-1 will halt stem elongation.”

And so I look forward to a day when my lawn grows no longer than I want it to.  Now that’s control.  But all this monkeying with genetics has some people in an uproar.  This was especially the case when last year a genetically engineered grass was found living in the wild.  The grass was developed for golf courses and is resistant to the herbicide Roundup.  That resistance could spread to other varieties of plants and pose a very real nuisance.  This particular bentgrass was developed by Scotts.  But I’m sure we will be hearing about more “unintended consequences” in the future.

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Last time you looked at your printer, I don’t know if you knew the same technology would some day provide you with a painless way to be injected with medicines. Engineers at HP, using a patented inkjet printing system, have configured a medicinal patch to allow almost any kind of preparation to get into your system without the telltale pain from a syringe. Even better, providing there are more clinical tests (there are), we could see this applicator in only a few years.

The application method is quite ingenious, actually. Pain receptors lie under your skin at the dermal layer, yet drugs only need to break the upper stratum corneum to make it into your bloodstream. By using 150 “microneedles”, the patch penetrates the stratum corneum without making it to the dermal layer, where you would feel the pain from a normal syringe, and simply injects the drugs into the epidermal layer. The chief difference is the size of the needles themselves: Normal syringes have always far bypassed the stratum corneum and disturbed the layers below, but these microneedles just aren’t long enough to do so.

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On top of the painless application of drugs, you could see everything from microchip-controlled dosing to multiple blends of drugs being held on one patch. Hp has already demonstrated with their prototype that it can carry both insulin and glycogen simultaneously (glycogen is the counteracting agent for insulin). A read out from a blood test could send a signal to the chip to pump more insulin, or if too much is detected for a specific sugar level, glycogen would be administered. It also wouldn’t be hard to configure a specific time-of-day or dosage for the administration.

The biggest hurdle has to do with safety. The stratum corneum is the bodies’ shield against viruses and bacteria. The effect of putting 160 tiny holes in it, compared to a single one with a syringe, could increase the chances of infection considerably. As Prof. Brian Berry, Univ. of Bradford, put it: “The manufacturers would have to demonstrate that making lots of small holes in the skin wasn’t letting bacteria and viruses in and causing infection.” HP hasn’t figured out that aspect yet, but you could always mix in an antibiotic covering with the patch, and possibly the same salves that boost regenerative healing on Band-Aid!

Either way, there’s many, many potential uses for these microneedles, and it’ll be exciting to see how the use of this technology pans out.

Pictures courtesy of: HP, BBC UK;

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In case you haven’t heard, Google Docs very recently added presentations to it’s list of offerings. I took Google Presentations for a spin and it’s impressive. The system was responsive. You can do almost any of the basic things you can in Powerpoint. Sure, there aren’t as many bells and whistles, but I don’t use those anyway. And what’s really neat is that you can run through the slideshow online. And you can invite others to view it online as well. That could make for some great cyber meetings. But there was also some bumps as the service rolled out.

It seems there was an issue with emails being exposed on the service. Not exactly what you want happening on a new service. Folks over at the Google blognewschannel put up a demo presentation on their blog. The chat service inside the presentation exposed the users’ email addresses. They have a picture of the approximately 450 email addresses they harvested during it. Thankfully, they aren’t the type of folks to exploit this type of thing. It took Google approximately a day to identify and fix the problem. But they did fix it - which is good. As the previous blog post states, Google should make sure that type of thing doesn’t happen in the future.

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