Science and Medicine Briefs

MAGIC WAND TO STOP SNORING   Ostracized for too long, snorers will finally have a cure: a wandlike instrument that emits radio-frequency energy and can selectively shrink the soft tissue in the upper

Powell, left, and patient

airway, including palate and nose, that blocks air passages, a Stanford specialist reports. The procedure appears to reduce heavy snoring. The next step will be to cure sleep apnea ­ a disorder in which people temporarily stop breathing while they sleep ­ by shrinking soft tissue in people’s tongues. “We are doing this in a scientific manner, in a stepwise fashion,” said Dr. Nelson Powell, co-director of the Stanford Sleep Disorders and Research Center. The potential market: More than one in seven Americans ­ 40 million ­ suffer from habitual snoring and 2 percent of women and 4 percent of men suffer from apnea syndrome.

GETTING CLOSER TO THE BIONIC MAN    They started looking for better ways to study cell membranes. Next thing they knew, by using computer chip technology they had come up with a breakthrough way to package living cells in individual boxes for study. Borrowing microfabrication techniques from electrical engineering, a group of scientists headed by Steven Boxer, professor of chemistry, created a surface that holds millions of cell-size squares composed of an artificial membrane that closely mimics the surface of living cells. Technically it is called a fluid bilayer membrane because it has two opposed layers of fatty acid molecules or lipids, the basic structure of all living cell membranes. It is also chemically compatible with a silicon chip. The ability to work with independent membranes that are uniform in size and fixed in space makes possible new applications from testing new drugs to screening for diseases such as

Sci & Med Digest (Plain text) Sci & Med Digest (Adobe Acrobat format - 408k)

Previous | Next