Linux creator, stem cell scientist win big technology prize...

US-Finnish software engineer Linus Torvalds, who created the Linux open source operating system, and Japanese stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka on Wednesday won a 1.2-million-euro technology prize in Finland.

"Today, millions use computers, smartphones and digital video recorders that run on Linux. Linus Torvalds's achievements have had a great impact on shared software development, networking and the openness of the web," the Millennium Technology Prize organisers said in a statement.

Yamanaka meanwhile won for "his discovery of a new method to develop induced pluripotent stem cells for medical research," the prize jury said, adding that it was the first time that the award has been split between two scientists.

"Using (Yamanaka's) method to create stem cells, scientists all over the world are making great strides in research in medical drug testing and biotechnology," it said.

"This should one day lead to the successful growth of implant tissues for clinical surgery and combating intractable diseases such as cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer's."

Yamanaka himself vowed in the statement to "continue to work hard to achieve our goals of developing new drugs and medical treatments to intractable diseases by using iPS cell technology."

Finnish President Sauli Niinistoe presented the prize to the two laureates at a ceremony at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki Wednesday.

The two men shared the prize equally, each receiving 600,000 euros ($751,500).

The Millennium Technology Prize, created in 2002 and funded by the Finnish state and the Technology Academy of Finland, is awarded every two years as a "tribute to developers of life-enhancing technological innovations".

It was first awarded in 2004 to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and last time, in 2010, it went to Swiss professor Michael Graetzel for developing a low-cost solar power cell using cheap materials such as dye squeezed from berries.

@yahoonews

biopharmaceutical manufacturing, new stuff!!!

Indian companies like Biocon, Bharat Biotech, Biological E, Serum Institute and Shantha Biotechnics have world-class facilities for biopharmaceutical manufacturing. Earlier there was some reluctance to award contracts to Asian biopharma manufacturers because of concerns of IP and regulatory compliance. But now some of the Asian countries are changing and becoming very competitive in biopharma manufacturing. "Indian firms are expanding and scaling up manufacturing capacities to become global players and the West is increasingly becoming comfortable with the IP, quality, regulatory filings and the infrastructure here," said Gautam Das, COO, Syngene.

Shasun Chemicals, Suven Life Sciences, Strides Arcolabs, Jubilant Organosys, Orchid Pharmaceuticals and many other large Indian companies have started undertaking contract manufacturing of APIs as part of their additional revenue stream. Top MNCs like Pfizer, Merck, GSK, Sanofi Aventis, and Novartis are dependent on Indian companies for many of their APIs and intermediates.

Today Indian pharma companies have upgraded their existing plants or built new plants which are not only GMP compliant but also approved by international drug authorities. Many mid to large-sized ones have achieved GMP approval of highly regulated markets such as the US, Europe, Australia, Latin America and Canada. The most stringent, the USFDA approval is distributed between large and mid size companies.

India triumphs in having maximum number of USFDA approved plants after the US. India has over 80 USFDA approved plants and all comply with WHO GMP. India is expected to have 30 percent more USFDA plants by 2008. The large portion of this increase will be shared by mid size pharma companies. Most of the companies are upgrading and building new facilities as per USFDA standards. Apart from Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh is the next favored state for setting up manufacturing plants. India comes fifth in terms of API manufacturing. It has established itself as low cost and high quality API production country. With product patent regime in its second year and several products expected to go off patent in the next 2-3 years, India is well positioned to capture the outsourcing opportunity.

With India emerging as a cost competitive outsourcing base for global majors, Jubilant Organosys, an integrated pharmaceutical and custom research and manufacturing services company, intends to be the preferred partner for custom research and manufacturing to global leaders in the pharmaceuticals and agrochemicals industry.

Jubilant Organosys recently signed a multi-million dollar long-term agreement with Syngenta for the supply of pyridines. The new contract will begin from early 2008 and it will cover an extension period of up to five years, during which Jubilant will continue supplying the products to Syngenta.

Recently Jubilant expanded its production capacity for pyridines and picolines to 42,000 TPA and this contract with Syngenta would significantly improve the use of the additional capacity. With this multi-year contract and increased capacities, Jubilant emerges as the largest player in pyridines worldwide.

Jubilant Organosys have also acquired US-based Hollister–Stier Laboratories LLC for $122.5 million. This is said to be the largest overseas acquisition in contract manufacturing sector by an Indian company. The acquisition significantly strengthens Jubilant's global CRAMS business via entry into the high barrier injectables segment.

Hollister is an excellent strategic fit for Jubilant, as it augments the company's growth in the CRAMS business globally. This acquisition provides Jubilant with a platform within the fast growing injectables contract manufacturing segment.

The company had signed annual contracts worth $60 million. The contracts form part of the company's order book for the calendar year 2007. The contracts have been finalized with some of the leading global life sciences companies in the US and Europe. In addition to these annual contracts, the company as part of its normal business also executes half yearly, quarterly and monthly contracts and spot sales.

The company will also focus on twin strategies of investments in innovation and world-class manufacturing facilities. Currently, Jubilant is in advanced talks with other global life sciences companies and is confident of signing several other contracts for CRAMS over the next few months.

DNA sequencing now made easy and feasible...!!!

Actually when i was planning on gathering the resources for this one, when i was told to go ahead, a friend of mine told me not to, based on my addiction to DNA sequencing and the vast possibilities it can achieve.

Short for deoxyribonucleic acid. The nucleic acid that is the genetic material determining the makeup of all living cells and many viruses. It consists of two long strands of nucleotides linked together in a structure resembling a ladder twisted into a spiral. In eukaryotic cells, the DNA is contained in the nucleus (where it is bound to proteins known as histones) and in mitochondria and chloroplasts. In the presence of the enzyme DNA polymerase and appropriate nucleotides, DNA can replicate itself. DNA also serves as a template for the synthesis of RNA in the presence of RNA polymerase.

recently, we were told that Researchers have devised a nanoscale sensor to electronically read the sequence of a single DNA molecule, a technique that is fast and inexpensive and could make DNA sequencing widely available.

 The technique could lead to affordable personalized medicine, potentially revealing predispositions for afflictions such as cancer, diabetes or addiction. According to the researchers"There is a clear path to a workable, easily produced sequencing platform," said Jens Gundlach, a University of Washington physics professor who leads the research team. "We augmented a protein nanopore we developed for this purpose with a molecular motor that moves a DNA strand through the pore a nucleotide at a time." 

To make it work as a reader, the nanopore was placed in a membrane surrounded by potassium-chloride solution, with a small voltage applied to create an ion current flowing through the nanopore. The electrical signature changes depending on the type of nucleotide traveling through the nanopore. Each type of DNA nucleotide – cytosine, guanine, adenine and thymine – produces a distinctive signature.

The researchers attached a molecular motor, taken from an enzyme associated with replication of a virus, to pull the DNA strand through the nanopore reader. The motor was first used in a similar effort by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, but they used a different pore that could not distinguish the different nucleotide types.

Gundlach is the corresponding author of a paper published online March 25 by Nature Biotechnology that reports a successful demonstration of the new technique using six different strands of DNA. The results corresponded to the already known DNA sequence of the strands, which had readable regions 42 to 53 nucleotides long.

"The motor pulls the strand through the pore at a manageable speed of tens of milliseconds per nucleotide, which is slow enough to be able to read the current signal," Gundlach said.

Gundlach said the nanopore technique also can be used to identify how DNA is modified in a given individual. Such modifications, referred to as epigenetic DNA modifications, take place as chemical reactions within cells and are underlying causes of various conditions.

"Epigenetic modifications are rather important for things like cancer," he said. Being able to provide DNA sequencing that can identify epigenetic changes "is one of the charms of the nanopore sequencing method.
True life story.

 

Female Gene in men can increase sex drive!!! "interesting"

Only God knows how many of you this would interest...

but while i was going through one of the biology journals i came across, the stories and illustrations were interesting and evident.

 Okay, this isn't a blue scene, it is actually true...

some people are already getting excited already, when they heard that this was going to be published...

According to the biology textbooks and journal, Males with an extra girly sex chromosome two (X chromosomes) seemed to have an insatiable appetite for sex, at least in mice.

 for biological sciences, @least the ones in Redeemers University, we are all conversant with the fact that In mammals, gender is determined by sex chromosomes, the X and Y. If you have two X chromosomes, you are a female. If you have one X and one Y, you are a male. (Chromosomes are long strings of DNA that hold many genes; humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, one set inherited from each parent.)

The study was done in mice, not humans sha, but the genes that determine sex are similar in mammals, so the results might be applicable definately, especially in males with Klinefelter’s syndrome(a condition in which human males have an extra X chromosome, While females have an XX chromosomal makeup, and males an X ), who are genetically XXY.

“Whether this is a specific phenomenon to mice, or even to this particular inbred background strain of laboratory mice, is still an open question, but we did find similar results in two different genetic models of mice,” study researcher Paul Bonthuis, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, told LiveScience in an email.

“To know how general the finding is to other mammals one would have to do studies with other mammalian species directly,” he noted.

The researchers studied two special lines of mice.

In the first, they were able to separate the effects of the X and Y chromosomes from the mouse’s sexual development (which is dependent on one gene on the Y chromosome). This means that even lab mice with odd numbers of sex chromosomes - for instance males with two X’s or females that have a Y - still developed normally; they had normal genitalia and sexual behaviours for their gender.

In another genetically engineered mouse model the researchers linked the X and Y chromosome so this pair could be matched up with an X chromosome, resulting in genetically XXY males.

These two models provided different parts of the puzzle, with the first one revealing developmental differences created by genes on either the X or Y chromosome that aren’t involved in normal development. The second model would reveal how an extra X chromosome affected the male mice.

Sex hormone levels were normal in all of these special lines of mice.

When they studied these mice, they found that the males with two X chromosomes (the XXY males) were about twice as fast to ejaculate and ejaculated nearly twice as often than those with only one. They also mounted females more often and during sex showed more pelvic-thrusting motions.

“We take these findings to mean that not all sex differences in behaviour are due to the differences in the hormone secretions by the ovaries and the testes,” Bonthuis said.

“Our studies indicate that direct genetic differences between XX and XY individuals ... also play a role in causing sex differences in behaviour,” he stated.

These results indicate that there may be an undiscovered gene on the X chromosome that affects sexual behaviours in mice and perhaps in other mammals, the researchers say.

“We do not yet know what gene on the X chromosome is causing this effect on behaviour,” Bonthuis said, but only a small percent of genes are expressed on both X chromosomes (some genes are automatically turned off in one X when two X chromosomes are present).

“It is hard to say for certain what the X factor could be, but we do have some likely candidates,” he asserted.

Human males with two X chromosomes do exist. They have Klinefelter’s syndrome, which happens about once every 500 to 1,000 male births. Symptoms include infertility and decreased testosterone levels, among others. Many males don’t show symptoms.

 

A 1997 report on men with lowered fertility indicated that men with Klinefelter''''s reported having sexual intercourse more than normal XY males. If this holds true, they could be under the influence of the same mysterious X chromosome factor as the mice.

The study was published online and also on my biology textbook too, last month in Hormones and Behavior.

Okay na! Oooosshhhheeee!!!! ‘I Own Mo’Hits and Don Jazzy is My Artiste’interesting!

Our husband has gone mad again....

March 12, 2012, recorded an unusual turn in a very tight and professional friendship as D ’banj claims to own the record label Mo ’Hits and also takes the responsibility of signing the label’s artistes including Don Jazzy.

Although the rift was said to have been on before now, the statement came that day as a shock.

 ahhhhh!!!!! D' banj.... 

“Coming from Africa I’m my own manager, I have my own label called Mo’ Hits with my artists Dr. Sid, Wande Coal, Don Jazzy, D’Prince and K-Switch. I own Mo’ Hits and we’ve won numerous awards by the grace of God.” D’banj tells Ebony Magazine.

The pop star goes on to talk about his entrance into the US market and his signing with Kanye West’s label G.O.O.D. Music during the interview.

D’banj, apart from referring to Don Jazzy as ‘his artiste’, does not mention or credit the producer in any other part of the interview.

His claims during the interview, however, contradict the generally held view that D’banj and Don Jazzy co-own the label, with Don Jazzy acting as President while D’Banj is Vice President.

The pair, who started out about nine years ago when D’banj released his hit single ‘Tongolo’ have made headlines in recent times, with sources saying they are currently on the verge of breaking up, following seemingly irreconcilable differences.

According to D’banj,” Coming from Africa I’m my own manager, I have my own label called Mo’ Hits with my artistes Dr. Sid, Wande Coal, Don Jazzy, D’Prince and K-Switch. I own Mo’ Hits and we’ve won numerous awards by the grace of God’.

“Being with Kanye for the last eight months and me leading a successful label in Africa, I’ve learned a lot and I believe people will see what we’re going to do. I signed with Kanye in June and that same month I won the BET Award for Best International Act.

“My New York concert isn’t done by G.O.O.D. Music, it’s done by Live Nation, meaning I’m already a moving machine. So who’s better to introduce me to the global stage than Kanye West, a crazy genius?” he said.

It remains uncertain whether D’Banj was actually laying claim to fully owning Mo’Hits, attempting to set the records straight, following recent controversies surrounding he and Jazzy, or he was quoted out of context by the interviewer. But, curiously, apart from referring to Don Jazzy as ‘his artiste’, D’banj doesn’t mention or credit the producer in any other part of the interview.

It is generally believed that D’banj and Don Jazzy co-own the label, with Don jazzy acting as President while D’Banj is Vice President. They’re the label’s only known directors.

The pair, who started out about nine years ago when D’banj released his single ‘Tongolo’ have made headlines in recent times. Sources say they’re currently on the verge of breaking up, following seemingly irreconcilable differences

 bitting the fingers that fed you ba?

im just saying oooo....

pls you guyz should resolve o.

Future Of Farming!!! in the house?(biological sciences).

Vertical farming is a growing 
 trend. It’s a system that lets farmers produce crops and livestock indoors. Proponents say they’re saving buildings, creating jobs and helping the environment.






really, it ain't funny o....
people are making it in this area now because as @ march 1st 2012, indoor farming had more outcome compared to its obvious rival(outdoor farming).

John bought a building to build a vertical farm. Most produce had to even travel to get to stores, an average of 1,500 miles(can you imagine?), and produce loses many nutrients and flavor during the trip.

Vertical farms reduce the distance and time, which means healthier food, less pollution in the air, and less wasting of our natural resources. Aquaponics is a combination of aqua culture (growing fish in tanks) with hydroponics (growing plants in water). The crops get nutrients from fish waste and the water continuously circulates providing oxygen to the tilapia and plants.

One of the instances i heard of in Nigeria, was quite interesting(i won't mind starting mine), actually one of the largest i have ever heard of, the farm is housed in a four-story warehouse, which allows them to produce more than 4 times the volume of a normal hydroponic farm, and many more times when compared to the typical soil based farm. Being a self-contained dirt less farm limits exposure to diseases, insects and weed infestations. This allows us to raise produce and fish without pesticides or herbicides. Consequentially, there is no fertilizer runoff into local lakes and streams. Lighting and temperatures are controlled for optimum growing year round, regardless of what Mother Nature is doing outside. The high energy consumption and short life span of traditional grow lights is substituted with fluorescent light combinations of red and blue based[soft and bright]tubes,bringing the consumption of electricity over all[considered here is the complete elimination of the electrical necessity's...TVs,Ranges,Refrigerators,etc,for habitation]to a comparable level if habitation had been installed.

 No lies, the tomatoes above are products of indoor farming(freshest....)

So If you still think this sounds a bit far-fetched or crazy, you may want to think again. Bloomberg Business Week just named vertical farming one of the top 20 businesses of the future!

 for more information you can contact;

The biological sciences department,

REDEEMERS UNIVERSITY Mowe, Ogun State,

Nigeria.

i also have rooms for small scales too...

Flavour and Tiwa Savage Share A Kiss In ‘Oyi’ Video...

Beautiful remix from the king of high life music Flavour a.k.a Flavour N'abania featuring the lovely Tiwa Savage. The duo had a strong connection in this video making it really interesting, this collaboration is on point as Tiwa Savage's undeniable vocal had a touch to this love song. Tongues will wag over that kiss, a lot of women out there would definitely wish to have that kiss. I bet that kiss got rid of the cold (Oyi) ...(the cold bad ooo....) 

 

sex symbols in the Nigerian music scene already sha, whether they have intentionally created their brand that way or not, that's another discussion for another day. Both acts are at the top of their game; knocking down shows with stunning performances and becoming fan favorites in such short time.

fine pepz...

goin down......

M.I has broken hearts ooo!!! ‘I have Not Left Chocolate City’

them haters ooo!

Following reports that rave rapper M.I Abaga had concluded plans to officially launch his record imprint, Loopy Records, rumors began flying that he had left Chocolate City record label.

However, the award winning rapper recently debunked the rumors through his handle on popular social networking site twitter.

public Service Announcement: I am not leaving Chocolate City. I am very much a Choc Boy Still and will be for a very long time amen, He stated.

Also Chocolate City label exec, Audu Maikori denying the reports in a statement to the media, had stated that the rumors are the handwork of idle people.

As far as I'm concerned MI is still with the label. It is just that people always want to find something to say whenever they are idle. MI was in my house last night (February 22, 2012). Maybe it's because he has an agreement with us to sign some artiste that is why they are taking it the other way. We have no problem with him as far as I'm concerned.’

M.I, real name Jude Abaga, is regarded by many as the continents finest and most commercially successful rap artiste. He is signed to Chocolate City records which recently appointed Hakeem Bello-Osagie as its chairman. The label also has award winning artistes such as Ice Prince Zamani, Jesse Jagz, as well BrymO and newly signed female acts rapper Pryse and R&B singer Tonii under its stables.

M.I will officially launch his label on Saturday, March 3, 2012 where he will unveil his signings: rapper Loose Kaynon, R&B singer Ruby and rock band Thread stone.