Have A great Summer!

I will miss you guys next year! Thank you for a wonderful school year. I see you at HHS.

Jaw Bone Grown from Adult Stem Cells

A Columbia scientist has become the first to grow a complex, full-size bone from human adult stem cells.

Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, reports that her team grew a temporomandibular joint (TMJ) from stem cells derived from bone marrow. Her work is reported in the online Early Edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month.

“The TMJ has been widely studied as a tissue-engineering model because it cannot be generated easily, if at all, by current methods,” says Vunjak-Novakovic, whose co-authors include Warren L. Grayson, then a post-doctoral student in her lab and now an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. Around 25 percent of the population suffers from TMJ disorders — including those who suffer from cancer, birth defects, trauma and arthritis — which can cause joint deterioration. Because the TMJ is such a complex structure, it is not easily grafted from other bones in a patient’s body. “The availability of personalized bone grafts engineered from the patient’s own stem cells would revolutionize the way we currently treat these defects,” she says.

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Process in Big-Screen Plasma TVs Can Produce Ultra-Clean Fuel

The process that lights up big-screen plasma TV displays is getting a new life in producing ultra-clean fuels, according to a report presented March 22 at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS). It described a small, low-tech, inexpensive device called a GlidArc reactor that uses electrically-charged clouds of gas called “plasmas” to produce in three steps super-clean fuels from waste materials. One is a diesel fuel that releases 10 times less air pollution than its notoriously sooty, smelly conventional counterpart.

“Low-tech and low cost are the guiding principles behind the GlidArc reactors,” said Albin Czernichowski, Ph.D., who presented the report. “Almost all the parts could be bought at your local hardware or home supply store. We use common Read the story »