English for Biological Reader- 01

nhưbđã nói, là các thuật ngữ chuyên môn SH ngày càng nhiều, mà mình không đọc nhiều, đôi lúc sẽ thấy ngỡ ngàng. Vì vậy, môt chút E for biological reader thiết nghi cũng không là phung phí. (tui không xài chữ student, mac dù tui cũng đang la student, vì có nhiều người đã hết thời student, e sẽ không chịu) Tui hổng phải là dan E lại càng không phải là E teacher, nên chẳng có mong dai dỗ ai, chẳng qua là tui có điều kiện đọc các tạp chí khoa học uy tín của thế giới, nên mong muốn tha một ít về để mọi người cùng hưởng thụ.

bài này đang trên tờ Nature Biotechnology , mời mọi người vào "chọc chọc" vài cái cho vui. Đây chỉ mới là dạng News thôi, chứ chưa đi sâu vô chuyên môn đâu, đừng có lo.

Cứ dịch thoải mái, rồi sẽ cùng chỉnh sửa
(http://www.nature.com/nsu/030224/030224-7.html)

Cells inspire spacecraft
NASA seeks inspiration from under microscope.
27 February 2003
JONATHAN KNIGHT

This article is from the News section of the journal Nature.


Cells inspire 'biobugs' that scour spaceships.
© GettyImages



The space-shuttle programme may be on hold, but NASA researchers are still dreaming of the future. Ten days after the Columbia broke apart on re-entry, scientists gathered at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to discuss the development of futuristic spacecraft modelled on living cells.

The day-long event, held on 10 February, inaugurated the Institute for Cell Mimetic Space Exploration, which is funded mainly by a ten-year, US$30-million grant from NASA. The agency hopes that the institute's 15 principal investigators, housed at UCLA and several other southwestern universities, will come up with biology-inspired devices that could facilitate space travel 30 years from now.

It's an open-ended goal, admits Harry Partridge, an administrator at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "Instead of asking what do we need and how do we get there, this asks what is possible and what we can do with what we come up with," he says.

Most of the research groups are exploring basic cellular processes that might later be scaled up. Biomedical engineer Carlo Montemagno's group at UCLA, for example, is developing microscopic sacks of biological reagents - which the group calls 'biobugs' - that propel themselves, amoeba-like, across a substrate. The sacks will include growing filaments of actin, which normally make up the skeletons of living cells. According to Montemagno's theory, the biobags will move at several micrometres per minute by extending an actin filament and pulling themselves along it.

Montemagno says that the goal is to endow the biobugs with the ability to sniff out and move towards specific substances, in much the same way that nerve tips grow towards chemical signals in the body. Biobugs could be dispatched en masse to search a spaceship for chemical or biological contamination, Montemagno suggests.

Other groups are copying different systems from the book of life, such as networks that gather sunlight, transmit information through chemical signals and repair structural damage.

The inaugural event was planned before the Columbia disaster, and NASA administrators decided to hold it as scheduled. "In the spirit of exploration, things must go on," says the director of the institute Chih-Ming Ho, an aerospace engineer at UCLA.


© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2003