Jesse M:
On May 29th, we went to the Deutsches Museum. One part of our guided tour that stood out to me was the medical section. Our tour guide, Alex, discussed with us some interesting things about bones while standing on an interactive display that projected an image of a skeleton on the wall that mimicked his movements. A couple interesting facts are that our femer can support more weight than a person actually carry because when jumping or skipping a step going down stairs, the bones temporarily experience a load greater than the weight applied because of the impact. If they were not that strong, out bones could be broken by those kind of things. I thought it was interesting when he mentioned that astronauts don't experience these kinds of interactions with the floor because of zero gravity and since there bones technically do not need to be that strong anymore, there is a noticeable increase in the amount of calcium in there urine which is how the loss of bone density occurs.
Alex was also telling us about how a certain antibody molecule is made that is used to help slow the progression of Alzheimer's disease. On display there was a model of asprin and a model of the antibody. Since the antibody has around a thousand times more atoms, scientists are not able to artificially create it. Instead, scientists would use the spleen of a mouse to produce B-cells. These B-cells do not survive for long enough to be useful, so they are placed together in a container with a type of cancer cell because cancer cells can continue replicating indefinitely. Some B-cells merge together, some cancer merge together, but the useful thing is when a B-cell and a cancer cell merge together. This is because these hybrid cells have the cancer's ability of indefinite replication and the B-cell's ability of producing antibodies. All the cells are contained in a solution that does not have all the necessary molecules for cell division, so after 3 to 4 weeks all of the leftover cancer cells and B-cells will have died leaving only the hybrid cells behind. Those hybrid cells are then taken and used to produce a specific antibody that, when injected into someone showing symptoms of of Alzheimer's, will slow the progression of the disease.
I was also excited to see the section about robots designed after animals. I think it is a great idea to use what we can learn from nature about what adaptations workout when encountering design challenges. Shown below is a picture of the BionicKangaroo. Its legs and tail are used in the same way a real kangaroo does to jump and maintain balance. It can jump about 15.7 inches high and about 31.5 inches horizontally.
I also really liked our discussion about medicine with our guide Alex as well! The skeleton projection was pretty cool and certainly caught my attention. I too was also fascinated with our discussion about bones and how astronauts shed bone and some muscle while in a lower gravity environment. That would certainly pose interesting challenges for any possibility of long term human space flight or exploration and I would be interested in any possible remedies or solutions that scientists develop to combat this issue.
ReplyDelete-Michael